Enter Pale Death by Barbara Cleverly Page B

fighting for his life. Giving as good as he got and going down snarling.”
    Joe laughed. “Well, imagine the potency of Tommy’s desperate situation and engaging characteristics wrapped in the allure of a very pretty girl and you appreciate my situation. No!” He caught himself in an easy throw-away response and applied a correction. “I’m being ungracious and unfair. In a strange way, Dorcas anchored me. I’ve been pretty footloose ever since the war and never been the sort who sent home postcards. Until she declared herself as the one person in my life who expected to have them. She was right. She’s always been the first one I think of when I fetch up in a strange place. Would Dorcas like it here, is what I ask myself. I shall send her a card tomorrow morning. Who do you send the first postcard to, Hunnyton, when you’re away?” he asked lightly.
    Joe looked with curiosity at the clear blue Saxon eyes squinting at him over the rim of his glass. Eyes that missed nothing but gave little away. So—the man had a dog called Tommy. Joe realised that he knew very little else of Hunnyton’s circumstances. “How are you fixed?” he persisted. “Have you a wife? A fiancée? Sweetheart?”
    “None of those. I have a landlady.”
    “Oh, dear. I’m sorry.”
    “Why? You shouldn’t be. She’s the best cook in Cambridge. But you’ve sussed me out! I’m totally unqualified to offer marital advice. Though that’s not going to stop me. I think you’d do best to take it slowly. Make a new beginning. Probably you don’t need to hear this, especially from a stranger. But from where I stand, I’d say—treat it as though she’s just a few weeks ago come drifting into your life as a fresh possibility. Assume you know nothing about her yet.”
    The old-fashioned look the superintendent gave Joe told him that this was a politely veiled warning. Joe had no doubt that areas of Dorcas’s life were unknown territory for him and it was perfectly possible that this man had greater knowledge of some of them through his investigations. An uncomfortable situation. Joe had never been content to stick a plaster over a festering wound. He decided to hand Hunnyton a scalpel and brace himself for the ensuing unpleasantness.
    He took a breath and asked, “Are you able to tell me what the girl I love was doing on the guest list at Melsett the night Lady Truelove died? The list I’m sure you’ve noted in the file you sent down?”
    “It’s a puzzle. Where she fitted in … A lady turning up by herself like that—it’s always a bit of a bother for the servants. It unsettles them. It was an evenly balanced party, you’ll have noticed.”
    “Yes. A dozen sat down to dinner in all. Small house party. Not down for the shooting I take it?”
    “No. Game bird shooting season well over by then. But there was some shooting planned. They were hoping to take a few deer—more of a cull than for sport I’d say—and there’s always a few hare and rabbits. The men like to tramp about the place with a gun over their arm. It pleases them to think the meat on their plate for dinner is their contribution. The dogs enjoy the stirabout, too. But this was rather more one of those political power groups, I’d have thought. The ones that seem to convene when their host is up for promotion of some sort.”
    Joe caught the bitterness in the tone and wondered whether Hunnyton was showing his hand at last.
    “At least six—three married couples—could be judged to have political interests, the men being MPs of differing persuasions, in fact,” Joe recalled. “That’s one thing that impresses me about James Truelove—he’s open-minded, with friends and influencewith all parties. That’s not easy to achieve. Then there was the inevitable newspaper magnate and his wife. And Sir James and Lady Truelove …” Joe hesitated.
    “Leaving the last two—whom I won’t describe as a couple. They were put to sit next to each other I understand