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ringing him but he never answered his mobile phone. And d’you know what happened when she tried his landline?’
    ‘It was Bedaux who answered?’
    Lord Collingwood shot Major Payne a glance full of surprised admiration. Payne might have suddenly produced a rabbit from his coffee cup.
    ‘What a clever chap you are! Yes! Each time she phoned it was Bedaux she got, and each time he said the same thing in his stuffiest voice, “Mr Eresby is out.” The stage butler, you know. Well, Joan’s jolly determined. She had a key to the house but when she went round, she discovered the lock had been changed. She rang the front-door bell but got no response. She said she stood outside the front door for ages. At one point she glanced up and she saw Bedaux standing at a first-floor window, gazing down at her. She said he had a little smile on his lips. Not a nice smile. Well, it confirmed what she’d suspected all along – that Bedaux was behind it. That it was Bedaux who was pulling the strings.’
    ‘What happened next?’
    ‘Well, she started to follow Charlie and Olga whenever she got the chance, once all the way to the Royal Albert Hall. “Stalked” them, I believe is the technical term? A confrontation or what-have-you took place at the Albert Hall, in the first interval of whatever it was they’d been watching. Joanie made a frightful scene. She said she couldn’t help herself. She told Olga she’d kill her. Charlie threatened to call the police. Well, Joanie phoned me as soon as she got back home that evening, that’s when I heard the whole sorry tale. She wasn’t crying or anything. She sounded icily calm. She said she intended to kill Olga Klimt. Now, isn’t that extraordinary?’
    ‘People who publicly declare they are going to kill someone, rarely do it.’ Payne raised his coffee cup to his lips.
    ‘Joanie is an odd girl. She’s unlike most people,’ Lord Collingwood said thoughtfully. ‘I got to know her quite well. She used to be my secretary, did I say? Bright as a button. Determined. She is convinced Bedaux and Olga Klimt are acting in cahoots and that they are out to get Charlie’s money or some such thing. She holds Bedaux responsible for having engineered the whole thing – for corrupting Charlie, or rather for detecting his weakness for sluts and satisfying it.’
    ‘She thinks it was Bedaux who pushed Olga into Charlie’s arms?’
    ‘She’s convinced of it. She referred to Bedaux as “no more than a glorified pimp” and she regards Charlie as his innocent victim. Well, when we talked that night, she still believed she had a chance with Charlie. She begged me to have a word with him, which I did – against my better judgement. I managed to speak to him on the phone the following day.’
    ‘What did you say?’
    ‘I told Charlie I had received information from an impeccable source, to the effect that his man and the Lithuanian siren were in some kind of transgressional partnership. I said he might actually be in danger.’
    ‘What did he say?’
    ‘He sneered. He said that my impeccable informant had been talking through his hat. Bedaux had nothing to do with Olga. Bedaux strongly disapproved of his affair with Olga . Then he said he had every intention of marrying Olga and neither I nor his mother could do anything about it, so there.’
    ‘He intends to marry her? Does Lady Collingwood know about it?’
    ‘No, of course not. My mother is eighty-eight and her health is a delicate balance between cautious living and complexmedication – oh, you mean Deirdre? Ha, ha. That’s terribly funny. I did mention it to her, yes. Ha, ha. Deirdre wasn’t at all perturbed.’ Lord Collingwood took a sip of coffee. ‘Far from it. She said Charlie was a big boy now and perfectly capable of making decisions for himself. She said she would rather set off for Valhalla in a flaming longship than interfere in the lives of her children.’
    ‘I didn’t know Deirdre had other children.’
    ‘She