Dorothy smiled blissfully.

‘And now he’s fled to evade capture,’ she said, as the free end of the wool inched its way over her knuckles. ‘It all fits together!’

She contemplated the panel of knitting for a moment before sliding it off the needle and starting to unravel it.

‘Why hasn’t Lady Belinda gone with him, though?’ she remarked. ‘After all, they must have been in it together.’

‘She’ll join him later, once the hunt for George Channing has been called off. Then they can settle down in the villa he’s purchased in Antibes and savour the happiness denied them for so long.’

Dorothy rapidly unpicked the knitting she had been working on. Small knots in several places showed where the yarn had previously been broken.

‘Until the police come to arrest them, of course,’ she said. ‘After all, they can’t be allowed to get away with it, can they?’

Rosemary shook her head gravely.

‘That would never do, Dot.’

Another spasm passed across Dorothy’s face.

‘I’ll just pop upstairs and fetch my medicine,’ she said.

Rosemary looked at her with an expression of concern.

‘Is it bad?’

Dorothy shook her head.

‘It’s just there. It’s always there.’

‘Let me go,’ Rosemary offered.

Dorothy waved her away.

‘I need to go to the lav anyway, and you can’t very well do that for me!’

Rosemary watched her frail, diminutive figure recede across the lounge, passing each of the other residents in turn. By the empty fireplace, Weatherby sat slumped over the newspaper whose pages were yellow and brittle with age. Mrs Hargreaves lay on the sofa turning over a pack of battered postcards showing views of Bognor, Hove and Bournemouth, the written messages so blurred that they were no longer decipherable. The elderly couple were still poring over the jigsaw cannibalised from the surviving pieces of what had originally been several separate puzzles.