Rutledge shook his head. “No, no, I want to hear. You knew these people, after all. And you saw the bodies.”

Relieved that the gaunt man from London wasn’t pushing to have his own way, willy-nilly, Dawlish nodded. “Well, then, I accepted what I saw for what it seemed. There was no reason to do otherwise, and you can’t make up a case for murder when there’s no cause, no evidence to base it on. So the family was notified, they came and buried their brother and sister. It was as simple as that. But then they were clearing out the house to ready it for the market-and it’s a handsome house, they’ll sell it easy, even out here in the middle of nowhere. There was money made on the war, and a lot of it wants to be respectable money now.” There was no bitterness in the quiet voice, and only a hint of irony that those who had done the fighting weren’t the ones who had made their fortunes from it.

“The house might bring in enough to kill for?” “Possibly, though it’ll require a good deal of work to bring it up to being a showplace again. They’ll have to consider that in setting the price. And whatever they do get, it has to be split among the surviving family. It took more than a fortnight to clear out the house-just of personal belongings and the like. They’d all stayed to do that, except Mr. Cormac, who’d had to return to the City part of the time but was back that last weekend. At any rate, that last day when they were leaving, Mr. Stephen, the youngest, went head over heels down the stairs and broke his neck. But there was no one who could have been responsible for that, as far as we can tell. They were all outside at the time; he called out the window and said he was on his way down.