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the official retirement age when his job would have ended anyway, he had come to terms with life. He had also come to terms with Doreen. Hesaw now that this was no hyperbolic description of some incident she had witnessed.
    ‘Come on, let’s go in and we’ll talk about it.’ He took her arm and lowered her into a kitchen chair, then plugged in the kettle. It was cool inside, the sun not having moved far enough from the east to be visible from the windows.
    ‘I couldn’t keep it from you, Cyril. We’ve never had any secrets in the past. It’s just the thought that someone there did it, that’s what gets me. To think I may have served them food.’ Doreen shook her head. ‘What’ll we do if Mr Milton doesn’t want to keep the place and the new people decide they don’t want me?’
    ‘Oh, Dor, it doesn’t matter. Really it doesn’t.’ He put an arm around her shoulder and kissed the top of her head. ‘We’ll cope.’ But he had a rough idea of what she was going through, he had been through it himself. And on top of that was the thought that someone they knew might be capable of murder.

4
    Inspector Pearce knew it would be foolish to assume someone who had attended the party was Gabrielle Milton’s killer, although it seemed most likely. There was the possibility that the party, with guests and cars arriving randomly, had been used to disguise the arrival of someone else whose presence would have been noticed at any other time by curious, nosy or suspicious neighbours. Cornish himself, Jack Pearce was aware that strangers were summed up and not accepted until they had proved themselves to be not wanting.
    The hardest part of the job was having to treat people he knew as suspects. Of those present at the Miltons’ on Saturday night he knew only Dr Phillips and his wife personally. Barry Rowe he had met two years previously when his printing premises had been broken into. A case, he recalled, which had never been solved.
    It would be up to his counterparts in the Met to make inquiries into Mrs Milton’s London connections. She had not lived in Cornwall for long enough to rule them out. Meanwhile he had to concentrate on the guests and those with whom she had come into contact locally. And in seven months they numbered quite a lot. There had been builders and decorators, electricians and plumbers, delivery men and tradesmen, each of whom had helped turn the house from a draughty, expensive place to run into the luxurious residence it now was.
    The expression ‘house-to-house inquiries’ seemed ludicrous in that the Miltons had very few neighbours, but someone had killed her and someone, somewhere, may have noticed something unusual. He sent the men at his disposal to find out.
     
    Eileen Penrose was still recovering from her ordeal when someone from CID came to interview her husband. She had been uncooperative during her initial interview, claiming she had been too busy serving drinks and looking after the guests to notice anything that had happened during the evening. Asked where she had been when Mr Milton had decided everyone had better have another drink she had replied, ‘Where do you think I was? Everyone needs to use the bathroom at some point.’ But not upstairs, she had insisted, the facilities there were en suite with the bedrooms. There was a downstairs cloakroom for guests and staff. She had not lied but there were things she had omitted from her statement.
    As far as Eileen Penrose was concerned, she would shed no tears over the death of someone she considered to be a rival.
    ‘He’s out,’ she said sharply when the detective constable knocked on the door. ‘And I’ve only just got in myself.’
    It was now possible for the police to be more open in their questioning, having ascertained that Gabrielle Milton’s only relations were all present at the party and no one else needed informing of her death.
    Eileen narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms over her scrawny chest, partly to