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only way out left to him.” Da Silva’s lip curled. “He was not the sort of man to say publish and be damned, but nor was he altogether weak. He told me about the blackmail before he jumped from Beachy Head.”
    Curtis blinked. “Why you?”
    “He was a…friend.” Curtis thought he could guess what that meant. “And he told me that the compromising situation that ruined him occurred at Peakholme. What he did in this house was used to destroy him. He mentioned other names too, other guests, amongst whom there has been at least one other suicide. Two dead men, and they may only be the tip of a very sordid iceberg.”
    “But how would that happen? People are indiscreet at country houses all the time.” He knew of houses where a bell was rung to give guests ten minutes to return to their own marital beds before morning tea was brought in. That wasn’t his idea of entertainment, but it suited a great many people, and it was generally accepted, but never mentioned.
    “There are different levels of indiscretion, of course.”
    “I suppose you mean queers.” Curtis didn’t like this sly, allusive way of speaking, mostly because he wasn’t sure he could follow it. “You still can’t blackmail a man to his death with gossip.”
    Da Silva gave him a curling smile. “Did you inspect your room closely?”
    “How do you mean?”
    “Anything strike you as odd about it, at all?”
    “No. Why should it?” Curtis found Da Silva’s tilted eyebrow an irritant.
    “Not the layout?”
    Curtis opened his mouth to respond, and stopped. It seemed absurd to complain about the rather awkward arrangement of the rooms, set in pairs and widely spaced along a long corridor. It was a modern house; they did things in modern ways. He was not going to argue about any such trivialities, anyway. “What are you getting at?”
    “In your bedroom, there’s a large mirror, hanging on the wall opposite the bed. The wall which backs onto a service area.”
    “And? Just a moment. Have you been in my bedroom?”
    “My room is on the other side of the corridor from you. A mirror image of yours. Should you care to visit me, you’ll observe that the large mirror in my room is also opposite the bed, also backing onto a service area.” He gave Curtis a meaningful look.
    Curtis said, with dawning incredulity, “Are you suggesting that’s a two-way mirror?”
    “There’s one in every guest room, I suspect. If you lift the mirror in my room off the wall, first removing the screws that keep it in place, you can see a good-sized aperture through to a narrow dead-end passage that connects to the service corridor at the far end.”
    “You are bloody joking.”
    “No. If you can think of a reason to knock a hole in the wall and then put a mirror over it, except to put a camera behind the mirror, I’ll be fascinated. Come to that, I can’t imagine what else those hidden corridors were built for in the first place.”
    “Well…electricity—something to do with the heating…”
    “It’s possible. The most charitable interpretation is that they were adapted once our host realised the potential for blackmail, rather than built with it in mind. Either way, Armstrong is in this to the neck. Armstrong and his delightful house, so far from London, with such well-chosen guests and, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, some very attractive and attentive servants. The young blond who showed me to my room was particularly charming.”
    Curtis struggled for words. “Orchestrated, planned extortion?”
    “Quite.”
    “Why?”
    “Money.” Da Silva spoke as though it were obvious.
    “But Armstrong’s rich!”
    “Have you any idea how much this place cost to build? The folly, the redwood trees imported from Canada, the electrical wiring, the heating devices? The glass bulbs in the light fittings are especially manufactured for this house, in vast quantity. They have their own custom telephone exchange, and an electrical generator that runs off