I shrugged my shoulders. “It is surely of no consequence, Mrs. Ackroyd,” I said. “Since you are not concealing anything, any remarks he may have made do not apply to you.”

Mrs. Ackroyd went off at a tangent, after her usual fashion.

“Servants are so tiresome,” she said. “They gossip, and talk amongst themselves. And then it gets round⁠—and all the time there’s probably nothing in it at all.”

“Have the servants been talking?” I asked. “What about?”

Mrs. Ackroyd cast a very shrewd glance at me. It quite threw me off my balance.