This seemed to require a response that neither man could find the words to form, and in the awkward silence it was left to Francoise d’Aubigny to speak again. “I seem,” she said, “to have been offering tea to people for hours. Dr. Quirke, what will you take?” She lifted her glass from where it had been standing on a low table. “Dannie and I, as you see, felt in need of something stronger than tea. Shall I ask Sarah to bring you something-a whiskey, perhaps?” She turned to Hackett, the corner of her lip twitching. “Although I suppose you are ‘on duty,’ Inspector.”

“That’s right, ma’am,” Hackett stolidly said.

Quirke too declined her offer, and she lifted a hand to her forehead in a gesture that even Isabel Galloway would have thought a trifle overdone. “How strange all this is,” she said, “and yet familiar, like something one might read in the newspaper.”

“Was it yourself that called the Guards?” Hackett asked. “They told me it was a woman but that she wouldn’t give her name.”

For a moment Mrs. Jewell seemed confused, then nodded. “Yes, yes, I placed the call,” she said. She glanced from the detective to Quirke and back again. “It seems so long ago.”

There was silence in the room, save for the faint sibilant sounds the billowing curtains made. Then Dannie Jewell stood up from the sofa. “I’ll have to go,” she said. “Francoise, will you be all right?”

Hackett turned to her. “Maybe you’d hang on a minute, Miss Jewell,” he said, smiling his most avuncular smile.

The young woman frowned. “Why?”

“Ah, it’s just I’m trying to get an idea of the-of the sequence of events, you know, and I’m interested to talk to anyone that was here earlier today.”

“I wasn’t here,” she said, almost indignantly. “I mean, not when it-not when-”

“But you’re in your riding gear, I see,” he said. He was still smiling.

Now it was her turn to look confused. “Yes, I was riding. I keep a horse here. We went out early-”