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to interview the gardener, also taking with them all my new ‘Little Nipper’ mouse traps. And in due course it is confirmed that the bottle of red squill is indeed the culprit – or rather, the gardener is, the dear old Suffolk treasure who without telling anyone blithely put down bait laced with a banned rodenticide around a house with a six-year-old child in it. There remains the conundrum of how a poisoned mouse wound up in one of my traps. It is assumed that because squill doesn’t act instantly the luckless rodent was able to move on for a second course of excellent cheddar cheese before falling victim to an old-fashioned spring. Thus the amount of this highly emetic substance actually ingested by Crendlesham Hall’s luckless diners was very small, and fatal only to a very old man with a dicky heart. The police do not return, and things slowly revert to normal, at least on the surface. It is acknowledged that I am not directly to blame for the disaster, the gardener is fired, and in due course we all dutifully troop over to a draughty church to see Sir Douglas’s mortal remains buried beneath six feet of earth but with, we are implausibly assured by a robed comedian, the lively expectation of his eventual resurrection. The grieving Spud is plainly unreconciled to the idea that I am not guilty of his aged partner’s death. He is but distantly civil, while I do my best to express sincere regrets without implying the least degree of responsibility, like a Japanese politician when obliged to comment on the War in the Pacific. For me the most distressing part of the proceedings is being unable to wear my Zaccarelli suit. The jacket is saved but the trousers are ruined. In my urgent efforts to bring Crendlesham Hall back to normal on that fateful night I forgot I was wearing them as I knelt and scrubbed and disinfected. One cannot kneel on patches of wine-tinged vomit in linen and merino mixture without irreparable damage, as I later discovered.
    For Jennifer and Max the whole episode has been somethingof a social disaster in that news of a fatality at your dinner party inevitably gets around. For a while there is even some loose talk of the costermonger suing. This is mere rumour and, being friends, all the guests amiably agree to write it off as just one of those unfortunate things. Nevertheless I can’t help feeling a line of sorts has been drawn beneath my welcome at Crendlesham Hall. It simply makes still clearer a conclusion I myself have already reached: that it is high time for Samper to move on.
    I do, however, have a valedictory conversation with Marta, with whom I haven’t otherwise had a chance to swap news. She is a little pale but otherwise seems undamaged. There is stout stuff in these Voynovians. I suppose after occupation by the Soviets everything else must seem minor by contrast. In my usual guarded fashion I’m genuinely pleased to see her, although apprehensive of what new indignity I am about to suffer at her hands. I am still touched by the memory of her bedraggled state last night, her Iron Curtain finery plastered by vomit to her ample body. It gave me no pleasure to see my old neighbour so miserably reduced, poor thing.
    Yet as usual Marta manages to wither my sympathy with an artless piece of news. By one of those brutal little ironies I seem to attract, it turns out she is herself engaged in writing an opera! She is over in the UK to see her librettist, Sue Donimus, whose name makes me groan with vexation. She is a literary prizewinner who feels the world is clamouring to hear coma-inducing details of her private life, such as exactly how much she recently spent having her teeth straightened. A bullish creature in tartan trews, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature mainly because the panel was too intimidated by her to turn her down. She is most famously the author of an unusually disgusting flagellation novel, Heavily Tanned Men , a book widely seen as stylish and