“Will you take some tea, Inspector?” Mrs. Jewell inquired. Tall, slender, with intense dark eyes, she stood by the sink with a cigarette in her fingers, cool and preternaturally calm, in a dress of dove-gray silk and narrow patent-leather shoes with stiletto heels. Her very black hair was tied back, and she wore no jewelry. Some tall, stately bird, a heron, say, would have looked less incongruous than she did in the midst of these homely surroundings.

“No, thank you, ma’am,” Hackett said. Jenkins made a sound and Hackett half turned in his direction, lifting a hand. “This, by the way, is Detective Sergeant Jenkins.” Whenever he said the young man’s name he had to bite his lip in order not to grin. Jenkins: for some reason it made him think of a picture he had seen somewhere when he was a child of a donkey wearing a hat with holes in it for the big furry ears to stick up through. And indeed Jenkins’s own ears were remarkably large, and were even pointed a little at the tops. He had a long, very pale face and an Adam’s apple that seemed to be attached to the end of an elastic string. Though eager and always obliging, he was a hapless specimen. Many are the things, Hackett told himself, that are sent to try us.

“Tell me, ma’am,” he said carefully, “were you here when-when it happened?”

Mrs. Jewell arched an eyebrow. “When did it happen?”

“We won’t know for sure till the pathologist arrives, but my fellows think maybe four or five hours ago.”

“Then no. I got here at”-she glanced at a clock on the wall above the stove-“three, half past three, something like that.”

Hackett nodded. He liked her accent. She did not sound French, more like that Swedish woman in the pictures, what was she called? “Can you think of a reason why your husband…?”