She walked over to it and put her foot on the first step. `Darling,' she called out, 'I think you'd better come down. Some gentlemen are here to see us. Oh, and do put something on!'
The soldier and the policemen stood awkwardly in front of the hearth and waited.
I'll make some tea,' said Ariadne brightly.
I'd rather you stayed here, ma'am,' said Arrow.
`No, Captain, I think tea would be a good idea.' She turned and disappeared through a door in the far corner of the room. As the door closed behind her, Tigger ran across the floor and up the staircase. Arrow made as if to follow it, but stopped with his foot on the bottom step.
He called up into the attic. 'As the lady said… would you come down, please, Sir Stewart.'
Upstairs, a few seconds later, a door creaked. Slowly, and with as much dignity as he could maintain, Sir Stewart Morelli descended, his face a strange mixture of outrage and apprehension. He wore cavalry-twill trousers with a check Viyella shirt, but he was barefoot.
`How did you know?' Donaldson asked the soldier, incredulously.
It was something Ariadne said, the first time we saw her. She mentioned my Army background, before I came to this job. She said that Maurice had told her, but he couldn't have. Nor could Colin Davey, even. In Whitehall, access to my file is restricted to Morelli and the Chief of Staff, and that old bugger doesn't gossip.'
`You never expected to find Richards here, did you?'
`Well, I couldn't be certain, but when I saw that flash car outside, I knew for sure it wouldn't be him. This house was all the vicar left his son.'
Morelli had reached the foot of the staircase. 'Arrow,' he barked, with a show of bluster.
'What the hell is all this about? What are you doing here?'
I'm sorry, Permanent Secretary,' said the soldier brusquely, `but those are my lines. I'm assisting these officers in a murder investigation, and we find you right in the middle of it.
Like it or not, we'll have to ask you about your relationship with Ms Tucker… no, goddammit!' he snapped. 'With Mrs Noble.'
Morelli looked at Donaldson and Mcllhenney. 'Very well,' lie said. ‘But I must ask the police to leave.'
`You're in no position to do that, sir.'
Donaldson put a hand on Arrow's shoulder. 'Adam, in the circumstances, we don't mind.
We'll wait in the car.'
The little man looked up at him. 'Okay, but not in the car. I want you handy. Wait in the kitchen. I'm sure Ariadne'll give you tea.'
The detectives left by the door under the stairs. Arrow and Morelli faced each other across the room. They were silent for some time, as the soldier stared out the civil servant.
`How long, Sir Stewart?' he asked at last.
Around a year,' came a voice from the doorway. Ariadne re-entered, carrying a laden tray. Automatically, Arrow stepped across and took it from her, placing it on a low table before the fire. She began to fill the three cups.
`We met at a Ministry evening I attended with Maurice,' she said as she poured. 'It was just one of those things. I had come to the end of my tether with Little Mo, as I called him.
He was a lovely, intense chap… indeed, that was what drew me to him in the first place.. but in the context of a marriage his intensity turned to possessiveness and pretty soon, as I told you, to paranoia.'
`So you gave the poor little bugger something to be paranoid about.'
She smiled coldly, taking a fireside seat facing her lover. 'I suppose you could put it that way.'
The look in his eyes stopped her smile stone dead. 'I just did,' he said. He turned to the Permanent Secretary, who had taken another seat by the fireside and was warming his bare feet.
`So, Sir Stewart, let me get this right. You two were having it off, before Maurice was given the Private Office job.'
I don't like your turn of phrase, Arrow,' the man snapped.
`Tough. It suits the circumstances. Let me take it a little further. You two were having it off, but poor paranoid Maurice was giving Her Ladyship grief, making things difficult. So you came up with a wheeze. You'd give him the Private Office post, so that he would be away from home with the Secretary of State for long periods of time, leaving the field clear for you two to indulge in whatever it is you indulge in. All of us could see that the poor little bugger was never fit for the job, yet you shoved him into it, with promises of joy thereafter, and left him at the mercy of that shit Colin Davey.'
He glanced back towards the woman. 'If you'd reached the end of your patience with Maurice, why didn't you just leave him and set up home together?'
She peered at him coolly and smiled again. 'Because Lady Morelli would have been most upset. Because the Bar Council would have taken a dim view. Because neither of our careers could have stood the scandal,' she said.
`Get used to all those ideas now,' the little man growled.
Arrow,' said Morelli, 'before we go any further, how did you trace us here?'
`Through young Richards, who owns this love-nest. We saw him with Ariadne, and then we heard her make arrangements with him for the weekend. My policemen friends thought we were going to find him here.'
`You tapped my telephone?' the woman blurted out indignantly.
`Too bloody right we tapped your telephone. You're an adulteress, and your husband's just been killed by a device planted in a Red Box to which you had access all of the night before it exploded. I reckon you'd rather appear for the prosecution than for the defence in those circumstances.'
She stared at him, and went very pale.
Now, Stephen William Richards: where the 'ell does he fit in?'
`Your vetting procedures should be more thorough,' she said defiantly. 'Stephen is Maurice's half-brother. Their mother divorced her first husband, married Stephen's dad, had him, then died, all in short order. Maurice's dad, who was a really nice man, helped him through school and college, out of the goodness of his heart, because apart from this cottage, the Reverend Richards didn't have a bean.'
Arrow shook his head. 'And after all that generosity, the lad repays Maurice by helping you to cuckold him with Sir Knight, 'ere!'
`No, it wasn't like that. Stephen is devoted to me. He saw how unhappy I was with Maurice, so he helped us.'
`What was Plan B?' the soldier asked suddenly.
If Stephen couldn't get up to town to give me the key personally, whoever got here first could pick up the spare from his cleaning lady Mary, on the check-out in the supermarket where she works at weekends. We've never had to do that before.'
`Why didn't he give you the key at Methuselah's?'
She looked at him in surprise. 'My, you have been nosy, because he didn't have it with him, silly. He only came up to see me that day because he was devastated about Maurice, and wanted my shoulder to cry on. I asked him to come back up with the key, but he was trapped on base by an inspection.'
I know that. I arranged it,' said Arrow. He looked across at her, in her chair. He could see that she was trying to keep her composure, but her hands were working unconsciously and nervously in her lap, and the lapel of her satin robe had slipped down, exposing most of her left breast.
`That's all very fine, Ariadne,' he said, 'but here's the prosecution case. Richards betrayed his brother because he'd do anything to have that black mark taken off his record, the one that Morelli put there, personally, after he and Davey crucified him for his indiscretions. A clean sheet and early promotion. That's what's in it for him. That's the object of his heart's desire, as you put it. That's how you two forced him to let you use his cottage, and his bed.'
His eyes flashed across to the Permanent Secretary. 'Isn't right, Sir Stewart? And DON'T think of lying to me!'
`Yes' Slowly Morelli nodded, looking down at his bare feet now reddened with scorch-marks from the fire.