Torquil pushed the fat Labrador away from the biscuits and it ambled away into a corner, where it flopped down for a doze. Fizzy sat down between her husband and Izzy on the sofa.

“I don’t know whether Kinvara’s intending to come back,” said Izzy. “We might as well get started.”

Strike asked whether the family had heard any more about the progress of the police investigation. There was a tiny pause, during which the distant shrieks of children echoed across the overgrown lawn.

“We don’t know much more than I’ve already told you,” said Izzy, “though I think we all get the sense—don’t we?” she appealed to the other family members, “that the police think it’s suicide. On the other hand, they clearly feel they have to investigate thoroughly—”

“That’s because of who he was, Izz,” Torquil interrupted. “Minister of the Crown, obviously they’re going to look into it more deeply than they would for the bloke in the street. You should know, Cormoran,” he said portentously, adjusting his substantial weight on the sofa, “sorry, gels, but I’m going to say it—personally, I think it was suicide.

“I understand, of course I do, that that’s a hard thought to bear, and don’t think I’m not happy you’ve been brought in!” he assured Strike. “If it puts the gels’ minds at rest, that’s all to the good. But the, ah, male contingent of the family—eh, Raff?—think there’s nothing more to it than, well, m’father-in-law felt he couldn’t go on. Happens. Not in his right mind, clearly. Eh, Raff?” repeated Torquil.

Raphael did not seem to relish the implicit order. Ignoring his brother-in-law, he addressed Strike directly.

“My father was acting strangely in the last couple of weeks. I didn’t understand why, at the time. Nobody had told me he was being blackm—”

“We’re not going into that,” said Torquil quickly. “We agreed. Family decision.”

Izzy said anxiously:

“Cormoran, I know you wanted to know what Papa was being blackmailed about—”

“Jasper broke no law,” said Torquil firmly, “and that’s the end of it. I’m sure you’re discreet,” he said to Strike, “but these things get out, they always do. We don’t want the papers crawling all over us again. We’re agreed, aren’t we?” he demanded of his wife.

“I suppose so,” said Fizzy, who seemed conflicted. “No, of course we don’t want it all over the papers, but Jimmy Knight had good reason to wish Papa harm, Torks, and I think it’s important Cormoran knows that, at least. You know he was here, in Woolstone, this week?”

“No,” said Torquil, “I didn’t.”

“Yah, Mrs. Ankill saw him,” said Fizzy. “He asked her whether she’d seen his brother.”

“Poor little Billy,” said Izzy vaguely. “He wasn’t right. Well, you wouldn’t be, would you, if you were brought up by Jack o’Kent? Papa was out with the dogs one night years ago,” she told Strike and Robin, “and he saw Jack kicking Billy, literally kicking him, all around their garden. The boy was naked. When he saw Papa, Jack o’Kent stopped, of course.”

The idea that this incident should have been reported to either police or social work seemed not to have occurred to Izzy, or indeed her father. It was as though Jack o’Kent and his son were wild creatures in the wood, behaving, regrettably, as such animals naturally behaved.

“I think the less said about Jack o’Kent,” said Torquil, “the better. And you say Jimmy had reason to wish your father harm, Fizz, but what he really wanted was money, and killing your father certainly wasn’t going—”

“He was angry with Papa, though,” said Fizzy determinedly. “Maybe, when he realized Papa wasn’t going to pay up, he saw red. He was a holy terror when he was a teenager,” she told Strike. “Got into far-left politics early. He used to be down in the local pub with the Butcher brothers, telling everybody that Tories should be hung, drawn and quartered, trying to sell people the Socialist Worker…”

Fizzy glanced sideways at her younger sister, who rather determinedly, Strike thought, ignored her.

“He was trouble, always trouble,” Fizzy said. “The girls liked him, but—”

The drawing room door opened and, to the rest of the family’s evident surprise, Kinvara strode in, flushed and agitated. After a little difficulty extricating himself from his sagging armchair, Strike succeeded in standing up and held out a hand.

“Cormoran Strike. How do you do?”

Kinvara looked as though she would have liked to ignore his friendly overture, but shook the offered hand with bad grace. Torquil pulled up another chair beside the ottoman, and Fizzy poured an extra cup of tea.

“Horses all right, Kinvara?” Torquil asked heartily.

“Well, Mystic’s taken another chunk out of Romano,” she said with a nasty glance at Robin, “so I’ve had to call the vet again. He gets upset every time somebody comes up the drive too fast, otherwise he’s absolutely fine.”

“I don’t know why you’ve put the stallions in together, Kinvara,” said Fizzy.

“It’s a myth that they don’t get along,” Kinvara snapped back. “Bachelor herds are perfectly common in the wild. There was a study in Switzerland that proved they can coexist peacefully once they’ve established the hierarchy among themselves.”

She spoke in dogmatic, almost fanatic, tones.

“We were just telling Cormoran about Jimmy Knight,” Fizzy told Kinvara.

“I thought you didn’t want to go into—?”

“Not the blackmail,” said Torquil hastily, “but what a horror he was when he was younger.”

“Oh,” said Kinvara, “I see.”

“Your stepdaughter’s worried that he may have had something to do with your husband’s death,” said Strike, watching her for a reaction.

“I know,” said Kinvara, with apparent indifference, her eyes following Raphael, who had just walked away from the grate to fetch a pack of Marlboro Lights that lay beside a table lamp. “I never knew Jimmy Knight. The first time I ever laid eyes on him was when he turned up at the house a year ago to speak to Jasper. There’s an ashtray beneath that magazine, Raphael.”

Her stepson lit his cigarette and returned, carrying the ashtray, which he placed on a table beside Robin, before resuming his position in front of the empty fireplace.

“That was the start of it,” Kinvara continued. “The blackmail. Jasper wasn’t actually there that night, so Jimmy talked to me. Jasper was furious when he came home and I told him.”

Strike waited. He suspected that he wasn’t the only one in the room who thought Kinvara might break the family vow of omerta and blurt out what Jimmy had come to say. She refrained, however, so Strike drew out his notebook.

“Would you mind if I run through a few routine questions? I doubt there’ll be anything you haven’t already been asked by the police. Just a couple of points I’d like clarified, if you don’t mind.

“How many keys are there, to the house in Ebury Street?”