There had been only the slightest hesitation on his and Antonia’s part when Lady Grylls had suggested that they spend the last leg of their honeymoon at Chalfont Park. After the faded glitter of Monte Carlo and Cap Ferrat – which hadn’t been as louche as they’d expected – Shropshire was just what they needed.

Chalfont Park was a moderately large house and in average working order, seventeenth-century in origin, eighteenth-century in atmosphere, gently Gothicized at the turn of the nineteenth by a Grylls who, one imagined, had got bored with the Palladian decorum around him, or found it too overpowering. After visiting the house in the thawing slush of 2nd March 1942 James Lees-Milne had described it in his diary as ‘pleasantly unstuffy – something tongue-in-cheek about it – not really suitable for the National Trust, due to the various alterations’.

Major Payne looked round the spacious drawing room with its shabby chintz sofas and chairs, occasional tables, 1930s cocktail cabinets and pictures in gilded frames on the walls, a Moorish Riff knife with an ornate handle and a long slender blade casually lying on the blood-red speckled marble mantelpiece, its point pressed against one of the two photographs of Corinne Coreille, his aunt’s French god-daughter. Payne smiled. It did seem the perfect setting for some old-fashioned detective drama. He knew Antonia didn’t like him saying things like that, so he didn’t.

‘Back to l’affaire CC,’ he went on. ’Why aren’t the police involved?’

‘Good question. They should be, shouldn’t they^? Well, when I asked Corinne, she got worked up.