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were married. Marriage invalidates a will. Did you know that, Pop?’
    He nodded.
    ‘I can understand divorce would but I can’t see why marriage.’ She turned her legs, toasting them.
    ‘You’ll get scorch marks,’ said Dora. ‘That won’t look very nice on the beach in Bermuda.’
    Sheila took no notice. ‘And what’s more, he was going to cut the daughter out altogether. Apparently, that one sight of her was enough.’
    Dora, won uneasily on to the side of the gossips, said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep calling her the daughter. Doesn’t she have a name?’
    ‘Natalie Arno. Mrs Arno, she’s a widow. The American student died some time during those nineteen years. Dinah was awfully reticent about her, but she did say Camargue intended to make a new will, and since he said this just after he’d seen Natalie I put two and two together. And there’s another thing, Natalie only got in touch with her father after his engagement to Dinah was announced. The engagement was in the Telegraph on 10 December, and on the 12th he got a letter from Natalie telling him she was back and could she come and see him? She wanted a reconciliation. It was obvious she was scared stiff of the marriage and wanted to stop it.’
    ‘And your reticent friend told you all this?’
    ‘She got it out of her, Dora. I can understand. She’s a chip off the old block, as you so indignantly pointed out.’ He turned once more to Sheila. ‘Did she try to stop it?’
    ‘Dinah wouldn’t say. I think she hates discussing Natalie. She talked much more about Camargue. She really loved him. In a funny sort of daughterly, worshipping, protective sort of way, but she did love him. She likes to talk about how wonderful he was and how they met and all that. She’s a teacher at the Kathleen Camargue School and he came over last Founder’s Day and they met and they just loved each other, she said, from that moment.’
    The somewhat cynical expressions on the two middle-aged faces made her give an embarrassed laugh. She seemed to take her mother’s warning to heart at last, for she got up and moved away from the fire to sit on the sofa where she scrutinized her smooth, pale golden legs. ‘At any rate, Pop darling, it’s an ill wind, as you might say, because now the house is bound to be sold. I’d love to get a look at it, wouldn’t you? Why wasn’t I at school with Natalie?’
    ‘You were born too late,’ said her father. ‘And there must be simpler ways of getting into Sterries.’
    There were.
    ‘You?’ said Burden first thing the next morning. ‘What do you want to go up there for? It’s only a common-or-garden burglary, one of our every day occurrences, I’m sorry to say. Martin can handle it.’
    Wexford hadn’t taken his overcoat off. ‘I want to see the place. Don’t you feel any curiosity to see the home of our former most distinguished citizen?’
    Burden seemed more concerned with dignity and protocol. ‘It’s beneath you and me, I should think.’ He sniffed. ‘And when you hear the details you’ll feel the same. The facts are that a Mrs Arno – she’s the late Sir Manuel’s daughter – phoned up about half an hour ago to say the house had been broken into during the night. There’s a pane of glass been cut out of a window downstairs and a bit of a mess made and some silver taken. Cutlery, nothing special, and some money from Mrs Arno’s handbag. She thinks she saw the car the burglar used and she’s got the registration number.’
    ‘I like these open-and-shut cases,’ said Wexford. ‘I find them restful.’
    The fingerprint man (Detective Constable Morgan) had already left for Sterries. Wexford’s car only just managed to get up Ploughman’s Lane, which was glacier-like in spite of gritting. He had been a determined burglar, Burden remarked, to get his car up and down there in the night.
    The top of the hill presented an alpine scene, with dark-green and gold and grey conifers rising sturdily from the