“Chip-chip,” he said, giving me a wink.

“And now, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said, “if you wouldn’t mind giving Dr. Darby a call …”

“Um,” Dr. Darby said, fishing with two fingers for a crystal mint in the paper bag he always carried in his waistcoat pocket.

“Let’s get you to the hospital where I can have a decent look at you. X-rays, and all that. I’ll take you myself, since I’m going that way anyway.”

McNulty was now getting up painfully from a chair at the kitchen table, his arm and hand in a sling, bandaged from shoulder to knuckles.

“I can manage,” he growled, as many hands reached out to help him.

“Put your arm round my shoulder,” Dr. Darby told him. “The good people here will understand there’s nothing in it.”

Crammed together in a corner of the kitchen, the men from the film studio laughed loudly at this, as if the doctor had made a capital joke.

I watched as McNulty and Dr. Darby moved cautiously through to the foyer.

“Now we’re for it,” one of the men grumbled when they had gone. “How’re we to get on without Pat?”

“It’ll be Latshaw, then, won’t it?” said another.

“I suppose.”

“God help us, then,” said the first, and he actually spat on the kitchen floor.

Until that moment, I hadn’t noticed how cold I was. I gave a belated shiver, which didn’t escape the notice of Mrs. Mullet as she came bustling in from the pantry.

“Upstairs with you, dear, and into an ’ot bath. The Colonel’ll be fair cobbled to come ’ome and find you been out gallivantin’ in the snow nearly naked, so to speak. ’E’ll ’ave Dogger’s and my ’eads on a meat platter. Now off you go.”

• FOUR •

AT THE BOTTOM OF the stairs, I was taken with a sudden but brilliant idea.

Even in summer, taking a bath in the east wing was like a major military campaign. Dogger would have to lug buckets of water from either the kitchen or the west wing to fill the tin hipbath in my bedroom, which would afterwards have to be bailed out, and the bathwater disposed of by dumping it down a WC in the west wing or one of the sinks in my laboratory. Either way, the whole thing was a pain in the porpoise.