Beyond a piecemeal domain, still in the hands of landscape-gardeners, the moors were erected against a leaden sky. Their margins seemed to flow together under some kind of impersonal design. They bore their scrubby mantling with indifference and were, or so Troy thought, unnervingly detached. Between two dark curves the road to the prison briefly appeared. A light sleet was blown across the landscape.

“Well,” she thought, “it lacks only the Hound of the Baskervilles and I wouldn’t put it past him to set that up if it occurs to him to do so.”

Immediately beneath her window lurched the wreckage of a conservatory that at some time had extended along the outer face of the east wing. Hilary had explained that it was soon to be demolished: at the moment it was an eyesore. The tops of seedling firs poked through shattered glass. Anonymous accumulations had silted up the interior. In one part the roof had completely fallen in. Hilary said that when next she visited Halberds she would look down upon lawns and a vista through cypress trees leading to a fountain with stone dolphins. Troy wondered just how successful these improvements would be in reducing the authority of those ominous hills.

Between the garden-to-be and the moor, on a ploughed slope, a scarecrow, that outlandish, commedia-dell’arte-like survival, swivelled and gesticulated in the December wind.

A man came into view down below, wheeling a barrow and tilting his head against the wind. He wore a sou’wester and an oilskin cape.

Troy thought, “That’s Vincent. That’s the gardener-chauffeur. And what was it about Vincent? Arsenic? Yes. And I suppose this must all be true. Or must it?”

The scarecrow rocked madly on its base and a wisp or two of straw flew away in the sleety wind.

Troy had only been at Halberds for five days but already she accepted its cockeyed grandeur. After her arrival to paint his commissioned portrait, Hilary had thrown out one or two airy hints as to the bizarre nature of his staff. At first she had thought that he was going in for a not very funny kind of leg-pulling but she soon discovered her mistake.