“Exactly,” said Pettigrew. “He was quite open about it-he could afford to be. He was paying a charitable call on his kinsman by marriage whom everybody knew to be dying of an incurable disease. What more natural than that in the course of his call he should give the sufferer a glass of water-and who was to know that there was anything in it besides water?”

“What was in it?” Hester asked.

Mallett supplied the answer. “So far as my enquiries go,” he said, “Joliffe on Saturday morning went to the chemist and bought a bottle of calomel-perfectly harmless to the ordinary man, but fatal to a patient in the last stages of kidney disease-or so the doctor tells me. Calomel, of course, contains mercury, and if that is what he used, the mercury could be traced in Gilbert’s body easily enough. Parkinson will tell me when the pathologist makes his report, but I think that explains why Joliffe ran away.”

“And he had only to leave things alone for nine months for everything to turn out as he desired,” said Eleanor. “What was his expression? ‘The irony of the situation’!”

At the end of their stay at Sunbeam Cottage, Eleanor and Frank made an early start on their way home. As they drove across Bolter’s Tussock the morning mists were just clearing in prospect of a fine day. Opposite the place where Jack Gorman’s body had lain Eleanor stopped the car and they walked out together on to the moor. A tall stag, his antlers still in velvet, rose from his couch in the heather and trotted quietly away. A curlew called unseen from the clouds close above their heads. The Ling Water babbled its quiet song from the valley below. It was entirely peaceful. The ghosts were gone from Bolter’s Tussock.