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or LaChatte, ” he said, “change it.”

    She’d intended to replace Uncle Bob’s password with Morris .

    “Ronald, I know better than that.”

    She walked Ronald to his car, in part to assure the police that she had survived her encounter with this suspicious-looking character—not that the police seemed to care—and in part to see whether they were leaving soon. The investigators of a murder couldn’t exactly be called guests. Even so, it seemed to Felicity that they were overstaying their welcome. When she invited people to dinner, she expected them to finish dessert, converse a bit over coffee, and go home so that she could go to sleep. Like after-dinner lingerers, the police, she feared, might continue to hang around well past her bedtime. How many photographs were really necessary? How long could it possibly take to gather trace evidence and to dust for fingerprints in one small vestibule? As it turned out, the police were, in fact, about to depart for the evening but would return in the morning to search the neighborhood by daylight. To Felicity’s disappointment, Dave Valentine had left without saying good-bye to her, cautioning her to lock up carefully, or otherwise expressing any concern for her or her safety. Having studied hundreds, perhaps thousands, of accounts of police procedure in English villages, she knew better than to expect a policeman to be stationed protectively in her kitchen all night; such special treatment was inevitably reserved for the aristocracy and for friends and relatives of the chief constable. Consequently, she was surprised to learn that a cruiser would remain in Newton Park. She didn’t actually feel threatened: If the murderer had wanted to kill her, she’d be dead by now, wouldn’t she? Still, she appreciated what she took to be the show of attention.

    Comforted by a sense of being looked after, she returned to her house, went to bed, fell asleep after only two pages of the new P. D. James, and dreamed neither of London and Dalgleish nor of vestibules and gray men but of the Highland Games and Dave Valentine, who wore his kilt and tossed the caber.

TEN

    One male had come and gone. Another had arrived and, with him, the odor of food, both wet and dry. Still, Edith remained under the bed. Better safe than satiated. When the feathers and bell appeared, Edith was hip to the ploy, but prey drive triumphed, and Edith was nabbed. Now, under this new bed, she licks her paws as if she were smoothing ruffled feathers, as, in a sense, she is.

ELEVEN

    Felicity allowed nothing to come between her and her commitment to regular grooming. At nine o’clock on Tuesday morning, she kept her appointment with Naomi, to whom she related the entire story of the small gray man and the large gray cat, including her tumble down the front steps; her rage at the perfidy of Mr. Wang; her rescue of the cat; her medicinal consumption of Uncle Bob’s single malt scotch; her embarrassment at the reek of fish; and her memory of the caber tossing at the Highland Games and of the kilted Dave Valentine’s oaklike legs. “Scots are famous for having knobby knees,” she told Naomi, “but his aren’t. They’re all muscle.”

    In telling the story to Naomi, Felicity was aware of whipping off a rough draft that would be revised and edited before the police gave her permission to present it to newspaper, television, and radio reporters, her fellow mystery writers, and others in a position to distribute it to the mass market. Dave Valentine’s knees would suffer deletion, and the nameless little man would move from the background to the foreground. It now seemed to Felicity that in responding to Valentine’s questions, she had senselessly limited herself to a dreary recitation of facts and had underemphasized her observations of the body. In mystery writing, it was an old saw that no one cared about the corpse. The same couldn’t be true of the police, could it? If so, why had there been no urgent