'I shouldn't think so.' Ivo sounded amused.

Sir George said, 'Extraordinary arrangement, a butler who can't be trusted with the keys. Still, I suppose he has other uses. Devoted to Gorringe obviously.'

Ivo asked:

'What happened to him; your friend I mean?'

'Fell in his own swimming pool and drowned. The shallow end. Drunk at the time, of course.'

It seemed a long time before Ambrose and Simon reappeared. Cordelia was struck with the boy's pallor. Surely coping with a drunken man couldn't have been so horrifying an experience. Ambrose said:

'We've put him to bed. Let's hope he stays there. I must apologize for the performance. I've never known Munter to behave before in such a spectacular way. Will someone please pass the fruit bowl?'

After dinner they gathered in the drawing-room. Mrs Munter had not appeared and they poured their own coffee from the glass percolator on the sideboard. Ambrose opened the french windows and one by one, as if drawn by the sea, they walked out on the terrace. The moon was full, silvering a wide swathe to the horizon and a few high stars pin-pricked the blue-black of the night sky. The tide was running strongly. They could hear it slapping against the stones of the quay and the distant whisper of the spent waves hissing on the shingle beach. The only other sound was the muted footfalls of their walking feet. Here in this peace, thought Cordelia, it would be easy to believe that nothing mattered, not death, nor life, nor human violence, nor any pain. The mental picture of that splodge of battered flesh and congealed blood which had been Clarissa's face, scored as she thought forever on her mind, became unreal, something she had imagined in a different dimension of time. The disorientation was so strong that she had to fight against it, to tell herself why she was here and what it was she had to do. She came out of her trance to hear Ambrose's voice.

He was speaking to Simon. 'You may as well play if you want to. I don't suppose a half hour of music would offend anyone's susceptibilities. There must be something appropriate between a music-hall medley and the "Dead March" from Saul'

Without replying, Simon went over to the piano. Cordelia followed him into the drawing-room and watched while he sat, head bowed, silently contemplating the keys. Then, suddenly hunching his shoulders, he brought down his hands and began playing with quiet intensity and she recognized the slow movement of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. Ambrose called from the terrace:

'Trite but appropriate.'

He played well. The notes sang into the silent air. Cordelia thought it interesting that he should play so much better with Clarissa dead than he had when she was alive. When he had finished the movement she asked: 'What's going to happen, about your music I mean?'

'Sir George has told me not to worry, that I can stay on at Melhurst for a final year and then go to the Royal College or the Academy if I can get in.'

'When did he tell you this?'

'When he came to my room after Clarissa was found.'

That was a remarkably quick decision, thought Cordelia, given the circumstances. She would have expected Sir George to have had other things on his mind just then than Simon's career. The boy must have guessed her thoughts.

He looked up and said quickly:

'I asked him what would happen to me now and he said that I wasn't to worry, that nothing would change, that I could go back to school and then on to the Royal College. I was frightened and shocked and I think he was trying to reassure me.'

But not so shocked that he hadn't thought first of himself. She told herself that the criticism was unworthy and tried to put it out of her mind. It had, after all, been a natural childish reaction to tragedy. What will happen to me? How will this affect my life? Wasn't that what everyone wanted to know? He had at least been honest in asking it aloud. She said:

'I'm glad, if that's what you want.'

'I want it. I don't think she did. I'm not sure I ought to do something she wouldn't have approved of.'

'You can't live your life on that basis. You have to make your own decisions. She couldn't make them for you even when she was alive. It's silly to expect her to make them now that she's dead.'

'But it's her money.'.

'I suppose it will be Sir George's money now. If it doesn't worry him I don't see why it need worry you.'

Watching the avid eyes desperately gazing into hers Cordelia felt that she was failing him, that he was looking to her for sympathy, for some reassurance that he could take what he wanted from life and take it without guilt. But wasn't that what everyone craved? Part of her wanted to respond to his need; but part of her was tempted to say: You've taken so much. Why jib at taking this? She said:

'I suppose if you want to salve your conscience about the money more than you want to be a professional pianist, then you'd better give up now.'

His voice was suddenly humble.

'I'm not all that good, you know. She knew that. She wasn't a musician, but she knew. Clarissa could smell failure.'

'Oh well, that's a different issue, whether you're good enough or not. I think you play very well, but I can't really judge. I don't suppose that Clarissa could either. But the people at the colleges of music can. If they think you're worth accepting, then they must think you have at least a chance of making a career in music. After all, they know what the competition's like.'

He looked quickly round the room and then said, his voice low:

'Do you mind if I talk to you? There are three things I must ask you.'

'We are talking.'

'But not here. Somewhere private.'

'This is private. The others don't seem likely to come in. Is it going to take long?'

'I want you to tell me what happened to her, how she looked when you found her. I didn't see her, and I keep lying awake and imagining. If I knew it wouldn't be so awful. Nothing is as awful as the things I imagine.'

'Didn't the police tell you? Or Sir George?'

'No one told me. I did ask Ambrose but he wouldn't say.'

And the police would, of course, have had their own reasons for keeping silent about the details of the murder. But they had interviewed him by now. She didn't see that it mattered any more whether he knew or not. And she could understand the horror of those nightly imaginings. But there was no way in which she could make the brutal truth sound gentle. She said:

'Her face was battered in.'

He was silent. He didn't ask how or with what. She said: 'She was lying quite peacefully on the bed, almost as if she were asleep. I'm sure she didn't suffer. If it were done by someone she knew, someone she trusted, she probably didn't even have time to feel afraid.'

'Could you recognize her face at all?'

'No.'

'The police asked me if I'd taken anything from a display cabinet, a marble hand. Does that mean they think it was the weapon?'

'Yes.'

It was too late now to wish that she'd kept quiet. She said: 'It was found by the bed. It was… it looked as if it had been used…'

He whispered, 'Thank you,' but so quietly that she had difficulty in hearing him. After a moment she said: 'You said there were three things.'

He looked up eagerly as if glad that his mood had been broken. 'Yes, it's Tolly. On Friday when I went swimming while the rest of you toured the castle she waited for me on the shore. She wanted to persuade me to leave Clarissa and live with her. She said that I could go straight away and that she had r room in her flat I could have until I'd found myself a job. She said that Clarissa might die.'

'Did she say how or why?'

'No. Only that Clarissa thought she was going to die and that people who thought that often did die.' He looked straight at her. 'And next day, Clarissa did die. And I don't know whether I ought to tell the police what happened, about waiting for me, what she said.'