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said Joe Short politely.
    Janet, joining them, said, ‘Will you be staying here?’
    The young man looked round at the Edwardian amplitude of the Almstone Towers. ‘What? Not on my salary. I’m only a lowly mining engineer, you know.’ He grinned. ‘Actually I’ve booked myself in at the Bellingham in Market Street. Granny said she’d heard it was all right.’
    Janet nodded, relieved that he’d found himself somewhere to stay, and thus that she had been saved the worry of whether she should have offered him hospitality. ‘You should be very comfortable there.’
    She turned as Mrs Linda Luxton, the matron of the nursing home, approached her and when she looked back Joe Short had gone.

Chapter Three
    â€˜Ah, there you are, Sloan. I wanted to see you. Come in and sit down.’ Police Superintendent Leeyes waved at a chair in his office. ‘Something very funny’s cropped up at the Berebury Nursing Home. That upper-crust one down the road in St Clement’s Row.’
    â€˜I know the place,’ said Sloan cautiously. ‘The Earl of Ornum’s eccentric aunt’s in there. Lady Alice. I met her when they had an outbreak of food poisoning there once.’ It hadn’t been food poisoning but murder, though this didn’t seem the moment to remind his superior officer of this.
    â€˜Said to be top of the shop as such places go,’ said Leeyes. ‘Expensive.’
    â€˜I’m sure, sir.’ Detective Inspector Sloan – known as Christopher Dennis to his family and ‘Seedy’ to his friends and colleagues at Berebury Police Station – was head of the tiny Criminal Investigation Department of ‘F’ Division of the Calleshire County Constabulary and thus ultimately responsible for looking into most matters illegal in the eastern half of the county. Such crime as cropped up in the superintendent’s manor was therefore usually handed over to the inspector to solve as speedily as possible. ‘Has Lady Alice been up to something, then?’ he asked warily. He devoutly hoped not. Tangling with her ladyship, as he knew from hard experience, could be very time-consuming.
    â€˜No, no, nothing like that, and nothing really to get your teeth into either as yet,’ said the superintendent, ‘but you never know.’
    Sloan thought about saying something about great oaks from little acorns growing but decided against it. Instead he waited in silence.
    â€˜We’ve just had a report of a breaking and entering there,’ said Leeyes.
    Inspector Sloan did not find this very cheering. The superintendent only used the royal ‘we’ when he wanted to share the responsibility for something difficult with someone else.
    â€˜Just that?’ he asked, since simple housebreaking didn’t usually attract his superior’s professional attention – not in the first instance, anyway. Or, come to that, usually his own attention either. He wondered if the presence of the earl’s aunt explained the superintendent’s interest.
    â€˜Not quite, Sloan. Constable Simpson, who attended in the first instance, reported that he wasn’t happy about it being just a simple burglary, especially as, as far as the staff there can see, nothing has been taken.’ The superintendent flipped over a flimsy message sheet on his desk in front of him and added sententiously, ‘But you never can tell.’
    â€˜No, sir.’ This was very true. Mental inventories always let people down and it was sometimes months after a burglary before the owner realised something really valuable was missing.
    â€˜There are, however, grounds for believing that an intruder might have been in at least one resident’s room there.’
    â€˜I see, sir.’ That was puzzling. Nursing homes were seldom the subject of acquisitive crime, although the old did tend to take their most valued possessions with them there,