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noon,” Royston said. They heard the chime of the clock, made tolerable and even pleasant by distance. “It’s quarter-past now.”
    “What’s the time of death?” Carmichael asked.
    “It’ll be easier to say when Green’s had a proper look at him,” Yately said. “At the moment, with all that stuff on him, it’s very hard to tell.”
    “The blood?” Royston asked.
    “Ah, fooled you, did it? It almost fooled me as well. Look more closely. That’s not blood, not real blood anyway.”
    Carmichael strode across the room and stood over the corpse, not touching him at all but Page 16

    inspecting him closely. The deceased appeared to be a tall middle-aged man, clearly well cared for. He was clean-shaven and his face was very flushed. A choleric temperament, Carmichael would have said, if the man had been alive. His eyes were open, staring upwards and bulging with what appeared to be alarm.
    He was wearing an old-fashioned nightshirt made of heavy linen. His chest was smeared all over with the red substance, and in the center above his heart was a dagger, pinning a square of navy blue cloth on which was embroidered a six-pointed yellow star. The red substance smeared all over his chest was not blood, but it wasn’t paint either. Carmichael sniffed at it, trying to separate the scent from the usual excretory smell of a recent corpse. He knew it was familiar but couldn’t quite place it. There was no real blood around the wound, suggesting that it must have been made after he had been dead for some time.
    Interesting.
    “It’s lipstick,” Royston said in amazement. “Not the kind in a tube, the kind you paint on.”
    “Any suggestion for cause of death, Inspector?” Yately asked.
    “Clearly strangulation,” Carmichael said in a bored tone. He didn’t want to play this kind of game.
    “Yes,” Yately said, sounding disappointed. “Shall we let Green get on and do his thing?”
    “Here?” Carmichael asked, surprised.
    “No, not here. There’s nothing really I can do. I’ll take him back to Winchester for a proper workup,”
    Green said.
    “Is this exactly how he was found?” Carmichael asked.
    “We’ve looked at him the way you just did, and Green tested his arms and legs for rigor, but we’ve not moved him at all,” Yately said. “I can’t answer for before we got here.”
    “Who found the body anyway? His wife?”
    Yately turned pages in his notebook. “His wife was in church, apparently. The body was found by his brother-in-law coming in to see if he was getting up for breakfast.”
    “Not his servant?” Carmichael was surprised.
    “It seems he didn’t bring a personal servant down with him.”
    “Every time, or just this time?” Carmichael asked.
    Yately shrugged. “I didn’t ask. In any case, Mr. Normanby knew he didn’t have a valet to wake him so he popped in on his way past.”
    “The wife didn’t sleep in here?” Carmichael asked. It was a formal question. There wasn’t room.
    This was a dressing room, with only the one narrow bed. There was barely space for one man to sleep in here, and Carmichael was surprised that Thirkie had done so.
    “In the connecting room,” Yately said. “Sir James apparently came to bed later than Lady Thirkie and considerately slept in here rather than disturb her.”
    “Who do you have this information from?” Carmichael asked.
    “The brother-in-law, Normanby. He’s the only one I’ve interviewed. He apparently accompanied Sir
    James upstairs and said good night at about one a.m. They had been playing billiards, he said.”
    “Do you think he did it?”
    “Did it?” Yately looked startled. “Mr. Normanby? He’s an MP.” There, Carmichael thought, in that attitude, lay the reason why the country needed Scotland Yard and could not rely on the local forces.
    They were good enough with ordinary criminals—with the criminal class if you like—but their ingrained and perfectly natural respect for those above them made them completely