I wished I hadn't lashed out at Ferdinand. My idea of detection from the inside wasn't going to be a riotous success if I let my own feelings get in the way so easily. I might think the family unjust, they might think me conniving: OK, I told myself, accept all that and forget it. I'd had to put up with their various resentments for much of my life and it was high time I developed immunity.

Easier said than done, of course.

Superintendent Yale had had enough of the reporters. The family had by this time divided into two larger clumps, Vivien's and Alicia's, with Joyce and I hovering between them, belonging to neither. The superintendent went from group to group asking that everyone should adjourn to the police station. "As you are all here," he was saying, "we may as well take your statements straight away, to save you being bothered later."

"Statements?" Gervase said, eyebrows rising.

"Your movements yesterday and last night, sir."

"Good God," Gervase said. "You don't think any of us would have done this, do you?"

"That's what we have to find out."

"It's preposterous!"

None of the others said anything, not even Joyce.

The superintendent conferred with a uniformed colleague who was busy stationing his men round the house so that the ever- increasing, spectators shouldn't get too close. The word must have spread, I thought. The free peepshow was attracting the next villages, if not Twyford itself.

Much of the family, including Malcolm, Joyce and myself, packed into the three police cars standing in the front drive, and Gervase, Ferdinand and Serena set off on foot to go back to the transport they had come in.

"I wouldn't put it past Alicia," Joyce said darkly to the superintendent as we drove past them towards the gate, "to have incited that brood of hers to blow up Quantum."

"Do you have any grounds for that statement, Mrs Pembroke?"

"Statement? It's an opinion. She's a bitch." In the front passenger seat, Yale's shoulders rose and fell in a sigh.

The road outside was still congested with cars, with still more people coming on foot. Yale's driver stopped beside Joyce's car, which she'd left in the centre of the road in her haste, and helped to clear room for her to turn in. With her following, we came next to the hired car Malcolm and I had arrived in, but as it was hopelessly shut in on three sides by other locked vehicles, we left it there and went on in the police car.

In his large modern police station with its bullet-proofed glass enquiry desk, the superintendent ushered us through riot-proofed doors to his office and detailed a policewoman to take Joyce off for some tea. Joyce went protestingly, and Yale with another sigh sat us down in his bare-looking Scandinavian-type place of business.

He looked at us broodingly from behind a large desk. He looked at his nails. He cleared his throat. Finally he said to Malcolm, "All right. You don't have to say it. I do not believe you would blow up your house just to make me believe that someone is trying to kill you." There was a long pause.

"That being so," he said, as we both sat without speaking, "we must take the attack in the garage more seriously."

He was having a hard time, I thought. He ran a finger and thumb down his large black moustache and waited for comments from us that still didn't come.

He cleared his throat again. "We will redouble our efforts to find Mrs Moira Pembroke's killer."

Malcolm finally stirred, brought out his cigar case, put a cigar in his mouth and patted his pockets to find matches. There was a plastic notice on Yale's desk saying NO SMOKING. Malcolm, his glance resting on it momentarily, lit the match and sucked the flame into the tobacco. Yale decided on no protest and produced a glass ashtray from a lower drawer in his desk.

"I would be dead twice over," Malcolm said, "if it weren't for Ian."

He told Yale about the car roaring straight at us at Newmarket.

"Why didn't you report this, sir?" Yale said, frowning.

"Why do you think?"

Yale groomed his moustache and didn't answer.

Malcolm nodded. "I was tired of being disbelieved."

"And… er… last night?" Yale asked.

Malcolm told him about our day at Cheltenham, and about Quantum's inner doors. "I wanted to sleep in my own bed. I was tired. Ian absolutely wouldn't have it, and drove us to London."

Yale looked at me steadily. "Did you have a premonition?"

"No, I don't think so." I hadn't felt a shiv eras I had in my flat. Perhaps the premonition in the flat had been for the house. "I was just… frightened," I said.

Malcolm glanced at me with interest.

Yale said, "What of?"

"Not of bombs," I said. "I never considered that. Frightened there was someone in the house. I couldn't have slept there, that's all." I paused. "I saw the way the car drove at my father at Newmarket – it hit my leg, after all – and I believed him, of course, about being attacked and gassed in the garage. I knew he wouldn't have murdered Moira, or have had her murdered by anyone else. I believe absolutely in his extreme danger. We've been moving around, letting no one know where to find us, until this week."

"My fault," Malcolm said gloomily. "I insisted on coming back here. Ian didn't want to."

"When the doors were moved," I said, "it was time to go."

Yale thought it over without comment for a while and then said, "When you were in the house looking round, did you see anything unusual except for the doors?"

"No, nothing."

"Nothing where it shouldn't be? Or absent from where it should have been?"

I thought back to that breathless heart-thumping search. Whoever had moved the doors must at least have looked into the office and the sitting-room. I hadn't bothered with the position of any of the other doors except closing the one from the kitchen to the hall. Someone could have looked into all the rooms in the house, for all I knew. "No," I said in the end. "Nothing else seemed out of place."

Yale sighed again. He sighed a lot, it seemed to me. "If you think of anything later, let me know."

"Yes, all right."

"The time-frame we're looking at,"he said, "is between about three- forty p.m., when the gardener went home taking the dogs, and ten- thirty p.m., when you returned from Cheltenham." He pursed his lips. "If you hadn't stayed out to dinner, what time would you have been home?"

"We meant to stay out to dinner," Malcolm said. "That's why Arthur had the dogs."

"Yes, but if…"

"About six-thirty," I said. "if we'd gone straight home after the last race."

"We had a drink at the racecourse after the last race," Malcolm said. "I had scotch, Ian had some sort of fizzy gut-rot." He tapped ash into the ashtray. He was enjoying having Yale believe him at last, and seemed to be feeling expansive.

"Ian thinks," he said, "that I was probably knocked out just outside the kitchen door that day, and that I was carried from there straight into the garage, not dragged, and that it was someone the dogs knew, as they didn't bark. They were jumping up and down by the kitchen door, I can remember that, as they do if someone they know has come. But they do that anyway when it's time for their walk, and I didn't give it a thought." He inhaled a lot of smoke and let it out into the superintendent's erstwhile clean air. "Oh yes, and about the fingerprints…" He repeated what I'd said about firemen's lifts.

Yale looked at me neutrally and polished his moustache. He was difficult to read, I thought, chiefly because he didn't want to be read. All policemen, I supposed, raised barriers and, like doctors and lawyers, tended not to trust what they were told, which could be bitterly infuriating to the truthful.

He must have been forty or forty-five, I supposed, and had to be competent to have reached that rank. He looked as if he habitually had too little exercise and too many sandwiches, and gave no impression of wallowing in his own power. Perhaps now he'd dropped his over-smart suspicions of Malcolm, he could actually solve his case, though I'd heard the vast majority of criminals were in jail because of having been informed on, not detected. I did very much want him to succeed. I wished he could spontaneously bring himself to share what he was thinking, but I supposed he'd been trained not to. He kept his counsel anyway on that occasion, and I kept mine, and perhaps it was a pity. A policewoman came in and said, looking harassed, that she didn't know where to put the Pembroke family.