What would have happened if they had called the police immediately after? That would have been the logical thing to do, wouldn’t it? Corinne had said they would do it the following day – but what if they had done it that same night? (Antonia couldn’t resist what-if questions.) Well, the police would have searched the grounds and they’d have managed to catch Eleanor Merchant without much difficulty. What then? Well, then there’d have been no murders.

No murders… Was it really as simple as that? What would have happened next? Antonia tapped her teeth with her pen. That poor girl’s misery would have continued and intensified and, sooner or later, she would have run away with the man she loved. Or would another murder attempt have been made before that?

It was the afternoon of 5th April and they were still at Chalfont. Antonia was sitting at the oak desk in what had once been Lord Grylls’s study. Her eyes passed absently over the ancient tobacco jar with a picture of a grouse in languid flight, the fleur-de-lis paperweight, the several outdated copies of Punch, the stamp albums bound in red vellum, The History of Quadrupeds and a book with the tantalizing title, Making Friends With a Badger. She glanced out of the window at the magnolia tree covered in unfurled buds, at the iron-grey sky above, then across at the yew-hedged garden, misty and dreamlike in the drizzle…

Looking down at her diary, Antonia started turning over the pages, going back. The funny thing was that she hadn’t read what she had written – not from start to finish. She was curious about the manner in which she had recorded the sequence of events leading up to the murders. She went back four days, to the first day of the month.

April Fool’s Day.

That was when it had all started… They had had no idea at the time how appropriate the date would turn out to be.