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By Root 551 0

Benedict was very . . . untrusting. He believed that his business rivals were out to destroy him. He was convinced that they would attack him, or poison his food if they could. There were guards all around the house to prevent anyone getting in or setting fire to the place, and he took one with him whenever he left the house. All the doors and windows were locked and barred, and the only person he trusted to cook and serve his food was me.’ She made a slight sighing sound. ‘It was like a prison sometimes, and yet I was happy there. I’d been working for him for a long time, and he knew that I would never do anything to hurt him. Besides, he put it in his will that if he died of natural causes then I was to inherit five hundred pounds. The same was true for the butler, the maids, the gardener and all the guards he employed as well.’ She sniffed. ‘He knew that nobody could pay any of us to hurt him, or to let them into the house.’ She sniffed. ‘Not that the money was the reason why I wouldn’t have done anything.’

‘So you prepared his food – by yourself – and you took it to him? Alone?’

‘That’s right,’ she confirmed. ‘And I collected all the raw ingredients myself. Bought all the herbs and vegetables and milk from the market, and picked the meat from the butchers’ slabs. And I baked all his bread myself too.’

‘So if the meat or the vegetables were poisoned, then anyone in the area buying them would have died as well – and nobody did.’

‘That’s exactly the case, sir, and that’s why I’m in here now, facing the gallows.’

Sherlock checked his watch. Time was ticking away. Bryce Scobell was only a few hours from meeting Gahan Macfarlane. ‘And are the marketplace and the butchers’ shops the only places you got the raw ingredients?’

‘Yes.’ She caught herself, hesitating. ‘Except for the occasional rabbit. The gardener catches them in traps. He’d bring them to me, still warm, and I’d gut and skin them. Sir Benedict loved a bit of rabbit in cream-and-mustard sauce – ordered it a couple of times a week, he did.’ She sniffed, on the verge of tears again. ‘That was what they reckoned killed him. They fed a dog with the remains of his dinner, and the dog died as well.’

‘Interesting. His last meal was rabbit in cream-and-mustard sauce?’

She nodded.

‘And you prepared it all yourself?’

‘That’s right. I bought the cream in the market, along with the mustard seeds. The gardener provided the rabbit himself. It was still warm, so I knew it had only just been killed.’

Sherlock racked his brains for something else to ask. Nothing sprang to mind. He looked at the woman as she sat there on the hard metal bench, her face tearful, grief-stricken, and yet hopeful. She was depending on him to prove her innocent, just as Amyus and Virginia Crowe, Matty Arnatt and Rufus Stone were depending on him. He couldn’t let them down, but he couldn’t see how Aggie Macfarlane could be anything else but guilty. If what she had told him was true, then Sherlock couldn’t see any way that the meal could have been poisoned. Yet if Aggie Macfarlane was guilty, wouldn’t she have given him a story that provided some chance that the food might have been poisoned by someone else? She was likely to be convicted and hanged because of her own honesty.

‘I need to see the house,’ he said lamely, ‘to look at the scene of . . . of the crime. If I find anything out, I’ll let you know.’

He left her there, in the cell, staring after him with newly kindled hope in her eyes.

He told Dunlow and Brough that he wanted to visit Sir Benedict Ventham’s manor house next. They raised their eyebrows, but they set off without a word.

The journey took another twenty minutes. Sherlock checked his watch at least five times, counting the minutes and the seconds.

They turned off the road and into a driveway that curved up to a large, forbidding house. Instead of stopping at the front, the carriage kept going, past the house and down a side road to the back.

‘Servants’ entrance,’ Dunlow explained.

They got out of the carriage, and with Dunlow in the lead and Brough bringing up the rear