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silentlywhen she came up against expert opinion. It unnerved them.
    She could speak with authority on the Crown Jewels (and had even humbled the guards in the Tower of London); on Richard the Third (holding to the theory that it was Edward who had done in the Princes); on haut couture (Remy Martinelli); on haute cuisine (cuisine minuet); on antique silver (neffs); on American football (Phil Simms, although she had to keep going back to find out what team he played for). And then there were what she called her trivial pursuits — a collection of arcane facts and Demorney theories that she could always trot out for those not interested in Richard the Third. There was the foolproof way of making lemon curd, which endeared her to her husbands’ mothers. There was her one paragraph of knowledge about Henry Fielding and the Bow Street Runners that she liked to toss in Constable Pluck’s direction. And she had once convinced a compulsive gambler that he cure his habit by attending Sotheby’s auctions. It had worked. Unfortunately, he had then become a bore with whom she had nothing in common, being a compulsive gambler herself.
    Her adopted name was the product of her pursuits. Leafing through Murder Must Advertise, she had read a few chapters dealing with the Dian de Momerie character, a woman she became so fond of she had actually read whole chapters of the book. She had time, after all, to do this. She wasn’t wasting it writing books like Dorothy L. Sayers. De Momerie was beautiful, drug-addicted, sharklike, and decadent. Diane had promptly adopted the name with a slight change.
    And the Sayers character was without conscience.
    If one could be said to lack something in abundance, Diane Demorney’s lack of conscience was scandalous.
    At least, she hoped so.

Five

    “R ECOVERED COMPLETELY , Alice,” said Lavinia Vine in answer to Miss Alice Broadstairs. The question was in regard to the health, not of Lavinia, but of her Blue Moon rosebush, which had been drooping by Lavinia’s door for days. “But isn’t that black spot I see?”
    Miss Alice Broadstairs, games mistress of Sidbury School for Girls, looked shocked. “Not on my tea roses, I assure you!” In her huge sunhat, she resumed her snipping.
    “I mean there and there,” said Lavinia smugly, pointing at a coral tea rose with the small antique spyglass she always carried in her pocket when she went for her walk past Miss Broadstairs’s gate.
     • • • 
    Miss Broadstairs and Miss Vine had ridden every metaphorical horse in an attempt to beat each other to the ribbon, medal, and cup at the Sidbury flower show. In odd years, Miss Broadstairs won, in even, Lavinia Vine. And of course at the flower show each year they had gritted their teeth and shaken hands (both sun-brown and dry and with a trickle of liver spots) harder and harder across the years until Melrose was sure he had heard the sound of small bones breaking.
     • • • 
    Having sighted Miss Broadstairs and Miss Vine, Melrose Plant was telling Richard Jury all of this as they walked slowly down Shoe Lane, the last little path curling off from the green and the duck pond. They were enjoying the sublimity of a fine spring morning, drenched in the scent of hundreds of roses — tea, musk, perpetual; bedding, climbing, hedging; claret, crimson, lavender, coral, yellow; climbers cascading down brick walls and climbing up them; floribunda hedging the walk.
    The dogs and cats they had passed were all sprawled in various states of drunken delight, the effect of the roses, the sun, the glittering air, as if Melrose’s old dog Mindy were back there at Ardry End, beaming out signals to sleep, sleep, sleep . Miss Crisp’s Jack Russell, which usually took its naps on a weathered chair outside her secondhand furniture shop, had struck out on its own from the High Street, looking for action round the duck pond. But it was now collapsed by the small stone pillar atop which sat Miss Broadstair’s oafish