“Did you go up to the office?” he asked her.

“Yes, of course,” she said. He was silent, turning the hat brim slowly in his fingers. She smiled with one side of her mouth. “I was in France for all of the war, Inspector,” she said. “It is not the first dead body I have seen.”

Ingrid Bergman-that was it, that was who she sounded like. She was watching him, and under her scrutiny he lowered his eyes. Was that what her husband was to her now, a dead body? What a queer person she is, he thought, even for a Frenchwoman.

Suddenly Maguire spoke, surprising himself as much as them, it appeared. “He got me to clean the gun,” he said. The three of them looked at him. “He gave it to me yesterday and asked me to clean it.” He returned their looks, each one’s in turn. “I never thought,” he said in a tone of wonderment. “I never thought.”

There was nothing to be said to this and the others went back to being as they had been, as if he had not spoken.

“Who else was in the house?” Hackett asked of Mrs. Jewell.

“No one, I think,” she said. “Sarah-Mr. Maguire’s wife and our housekeeper here-was at Mass and then to visit her mother. Mr. Maguire himself, as he says, was out on the gallops. And I was still on my way here, in the Land Rover.”

“There’s no other staff? Yard hands, stable girls”-he did not know the technical titles-“anyone like that?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Jewell said. “But it is Sunday.”

“Ah, right, so it is.” That tractor, the needling sound of it, distant though it was, was giving him a pain in the head. “Perhaps your husband was counting on that, on the place being deserted?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps. Who can say, now?” She clasped her hands lightly together at her breast. “You should understand, Inspector…” She faltered. “Forgive me, I-?”