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had been discussed, you see, but he wasn’t keen on the surgery.’
    ‘When was it discussed? Can you remember?’
    ‘I couldn’t be certain; I think about six months before his death. Dr Carroll could tell you.’
    ‘It wasn’t raised again as his condition worsened?’
    ‘Not that I’m aware of. He went downhill very rapidly at the end, you see.’ Then her well-groomed hands suddenly clasped each other until the fingers shone white, and she said, ‘Is that when—?’
    Lambert let the unspoken horror hang between them for a moment, assessing the genuineness of her reaction, before he said, ‘Yes. It seems that Mr Craven was poisoned systematically over a period of weeks or months, rather than with one fatal administration.’ The formal jargon of the statement, which he had intended to mitigate its harshness, seemed to accentuate it. The listener, having to work out what the words meant in plain English, became more involved. It seemed a black parody of the subtle comedian who makes his audience work for their humour. He made a mental note of the technique he had applied unwittingly, so that he might use it deliberately on other occasions. It was no sin for a man to labour at his vocation, after all.
    Margaret Lewis’s face had turned quite grey. As usual in those with fair colouring, swiftly changing emotions were plainly revealed in the face. When she managed to speak, at the second attempt, it was only to say unhelpfully, ‘It’s a shock, you see.’
    Lambert said with a sympathetic smile, ‘It must be, of course.’ Secretly, he wondered as he studied her reaction whether the shock was in the discovery that Craven had died like this or in the realisation that the police now knew so much about a death that had almost escaped them. ‘No doubt it helps to explain why the death was recorded as being a natural one at the time. That, of course, is exactly what the killer planned when he or she operated in this way.’
    There was the kind of reaction he was expecting on his slightly stressed ‘or she’: a sudden flash of those wary blue eyes as they were raised to his, a shaft of something that might have been fear in them before they fell again. But that would be as natural in the innocent as the guilty. Or those who shared guilt: it occurred to him suddenly that if there were an accessory involved in this crime, as seemed more than usually likely, the housekeeper would be the most useful one to have.
    He decided to press on towards the others who must have surrounded Edmund Craven in his last days, while this woman who must have known them all was still shaken. ‘What Sergeant Hook and I are anxious to do at this stage, Mrs Lewis, is to compile a list of the people who were in regular contact with Mr Craven over the last months of his life.’
    ‘A list of suspects, you mean?’ It came from her like an accusation, but he had no intention of defending himself.
    ‘If you like, yes. If you look at it another way, it is the first step in protecting the innocent. We often find ourselves proceeding by eliminating innocent people from the suspicion of a crime. I don’t think I need to remind you that it is your duty to give us all the help you can in this respect: it would be most unwise to withhold information which we shall extract from other people in due course.’
    Bert Hook, eyes committed firmly to the blank sheet in front of him, thought his chief was being unusually hard and formal with a woman who had given no sign of resisting their inquiries. Perhaps it was the perverse reaction to an attractive woman he thought to have seen in him before.
    The housekeeper said dully, ‘All of us had a motive, I suppose. You’ll no doubt be interested in those.’
    Lambert was suddenly at his most urbane and reassuring. ‘They will perhaps emerge in due course. For the moment, I am more concerned with the simple facts of who had access to the deceased in the period before his death. It’s no use pinning a huge