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then somebody would launch a conversational boat out on to the pond, as it were, only for it to be engulfed in the surrounding quiet. Then the policemen came and we all had to wait until they had questioned everybody before we could leave. Willoughby is saying he’ll never set foot in the Long Gallery again. He’s even talking of selling the Hall.’
    Powerscourt felt that Georgina Nash would be better away from this place with its awful memories. ‘You have been most kind, Mrs Nash, and most helpful. If you’d like to take a turn about the garden I’ll join you very shortly. By the way, you wouldn’t by any chance have one of those seating plans left, would you? It might be helpful.’
    She smiled. ‘I put one aside for you, Lord Powerscourt. I shall have it with me when we meet in the garden.’
    Powerscourt strolled slowly up the room. He noticed that you could see very clearly what was happening in the garden, and wondered if the same was true the other way round. He stared regretfully at the splendid ceiling, knowing that under normal circumstances he would have spent far longer examining it. One thing in particular interested him. Was the route he had just taken via the Grand Staircase the only way in? At the far end of the Long Gallery, the opposite end to the Great Halland the double staircase, was a door which opened out on to a set of steps that led down into the garden. An enterprising murderer might have come in this way and hidden himself away until he could be lost in the crowds. And as he followed what must have been the last journey of Randolph Colville through the Peter the Great room and into the state bedroom on the corner of the Hall, he found another set of stairs leading out on to the gardens on the other side of the house from the fountain. Here was another way in or out for any wedding guest who happened to be a murderer.
    Two things had worried Powerscourt about this case from the start. He found that his brain seemed to come up with new answers when he least expected it. The first related to the silence of Cosmo Colville. The second, and the one that assailed him now, had to do with the gun. The prosecution, Charles Augustus Pugh had been adamant on this point, were sure that they could prove that it was Randolph Colville’s own gun. Powerscourt’s initial reaction was that they might be putting two and two and two together and making six. Pugh himself was moderately hopeful that he could open some doubts in the jury’s mind in cross-examination, but he couldn’t be sure. Suppose, Powerscourt’s brain suggested to him, as he stood on the bottom steps of the staircase leading from the state bedroom with a couple of pigeons waddling across the grass in front of him, suppose it really was Randolph’s gun. Why had he brought it? Did he intend to murder somebody at the wedding? Was he bringing it in self-defence? Defence of whose self, of his own, or of some member of his family’s?
    He made some detailed drawings in a small black notebook and headed round the house for a final chat with Mrs Colville. She handed him a seating plan, with the writing carried out in one of the most beautiful hands Powerscourt had ever seen.
    ‘It’s Ursula, Emily’s sister, who does the handwriting, she’s very artistic. Willougby thinks she could be famous one day.’ Mrs Nash looked much more comfortable in her garden than she had in her house. ‘I tell you one thing that might behelpful, Lord Powerscourt,’ she said. ‘I think that young policeman had a seating plan, or maybe it should be a standing plan, for where everybody was when the gun went off. He and his men took very careful statements from everybody here about exactly where they were at the time.’
    ‘The policeman’s name, I think you said, was Inspector Cooper. You don’t know where I could find him?’
    ‘He told us he could be found at Fakenham, but that he moved about a lot. Let me tell you something about Inspector Cooper, Lord