At luncheon they were waited upon by Blore, to whom Hilary had referred as his chief steward, and by Nigel, the second houseman.

Blore was a baldish man of about sixty with a loud voice, big hands and downcast eyes. He performed his duties composedly as, indeed, did his assistant, but there was something watchful and at the same time colourless in their general behaviour. They didn’t shuffle, but one almost expected them to do so. One felt that it was necessary to remark that their manner was not furtive. How far these impressions were to be attributed to hindsight and how far to immediate observation, Troy was unable to determine, but she reflected that after all it was a tricky business adapting oneself to a domestic staff entirely composed of murderers. Blore, a headwaiter at the time, had murdered his wife’s lover, a handsome young busboy. Because of extenuating circumstances the death sentence, Hilary told her, had been commuted into a lifer which exemplary behaviour had reduced to eight years. “He is the most harmless of creatures,” Hilary had said. “The busboy called him a cuckold and spat in his face at a moment when he happened to be carving a wing-rib. He merely lashed out.”

Mervyn, the head houseman, once a signwriter, had, it emerged, been guilty of killing a burglar with a booby-trap. “Really,” Hilary said, “it was going much too far to gaol him. He hadn’t meant to destroy anyone, you know, only to give an intruder pause if one should venture to break in. But he entirely misjudged the potential of an old-fashioned flat-iron balanced on a door top. Mervyn became understandably warped by confinement and behaved so incontinently that he was transferred to the Vale.”