Grave Mistake

Chapter 4: Routine

i

The room was empty and smelt of rats with perhaps an undertone of long-vanished fodder. There was a tumbledown fireplace in one corner and in another a litter of objects that looked as if they had lain there for a century: empty tins, a sack that had rotted, letting out a trickle of cement, a bricklayer’s trowel, rusted and handleless, a heap of empty manure bags. The only window was shuttered. Claude was a dim figure.

He said: “I was looking for Bruce. The gardener. I’m afraid I don’t know—?”

The manner was almost convincing, almost easy, almost that of a son of the house. Alleyn thought the voice was probably pitched a little above its normal level but it sounded quite natural. For somebody who had been caught red-eared in the act of eavesdropping, Claude displayed considerable aplomb.

Alleyn shut the door behind him. Bruce Gardener, already plying his long-handled shovel, didn’t look up.

“And I was hoping to see you,” said Alleyn. “Mr. Carter, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. You have the advantage of me.”

“Superintendent Alleyn.”

After a considerable pause, Claude said: “Oh. What can I do for you, Superintendent?”

As soon as Alleyn told him he seemed to relax. He answered all the questions readily: yes, he had spoken to Miss Preston and Prue Foster but had not been allowed to visit his stepmother. He had gone for a stroll in the grounds, had missed the return bus and had walked into the village and picked up a later one there.

“A completely wasted afternoon,” he complained. “And I must say I wasn’t wildly enthusiastic about the reception I got. Particularly in the light of what happened. After all, she was my stepmother.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“When? I don’t know when. Three — four years ago.”

“Before you went to Australia?”

He shot a sidelong look at Alleyn. “That’s right,” he said and after a pause: “You seem to be very well informed of my movements, Superintendent.”

“I know you returned as a member of the ship’s complement in the Poseidon.”

After a much longer pause, Claude said, “Oh, yes?”

“Shall we move outside and get a little more light and air on the subject?” Alleyn suggested.

Claude opened a door that gave directly on the yard. As they walked into the sunshine a clock in the stable turret told eleven very sweetly. The open front of the lean-to faced the yard. Bruce, shovelling vigorously, was in full view, an exemplar of ostentatious nonintervention. Claude stared resentfully at his stern and walked to the far end of the yard. Alleyn followed him.

“How long,” he asked cheerfully, “had you been in that dark and rather smelly apartment?”

“How long? I don’t know. No time at all really. Why?”

“I don’t want to waste my breath and your time repeating myself, if you’ve already heard about the Will. And I think you must have heard it because, as I came up, the adjoining door in there was dragged shut.”

Claude gave a rather shrill titter. “You are quick, aren’t you?” he said. He lowered his voice. “As I said,” he confided, “I was looking for that gardener-man in there. As a matter of fact I thought he might be in the other room and then when you came in and began talking it was jolly awkward. I didn’t want to intrude so I–I mean I — you know — it’s difficult to explain—”

“You’re making a brave shot at it, though, aren’t you? Your sense of delicacy prompted you to remove into the next room, shut that same openwork door and remain close by it throughout our conversation. Is that it?”

“Not at all. You haven’t understood.”

“You’d seen us arrive in a police car, perhaps, and you left the house in a hurry for the rose-garden and thence proceeded round the left wing to the stables?”

“I don’t know,” said Claude with a strange air of frightened effrontery, “why you’re taking this line with me, Superintendent, but I must say I resent it.”

“Yes, I thought you might be a bit put out by our appearance. Because of an irregularity in your departure from the Poseidon.”

Claude began feverishly to maintain that there had been some mistake and the police had had to climb down and he was thinking of lodging a complaint only it didn’t seem worth while.

Alleyn let him talk himself to a standstill and then said his visit had nothing to do with any of this and that he only wanted to be told if Claude did in fact know of a recent Will made by Mrs. Foster shortly before her death.

An elaborate shuffling process set in, hampered, it seemed, by the proximity of the ever-industrious Bruce. By means of furtive little nods and becks Claude indicated the desirability of a remove. Alleyn disregarded these hints and continued on a loudish, cheerful note.

“It’s a perfectly simple question,” he said. “Nothing private about it. Have you, in fact, known of such a Will?”

Claude made slight jabs with his forefinger, in the direction of Bruce’s rear elevation.

“As it happens, yes,” he mouthed.

“You have? Do you mind telling me how it came to your knowledge?”

“It’s — I — it just so happened—”

“What did?”

“I mean to say—”

“Havers!” Bruce suddenly roared out. He became upright and faced them. “What ails you, man?” he demanded. “Can you no’ give a straight answer when you’re speired a straight question? Oot wi’ it, for pity’s sake. Tell him and ha‘ done. There’s nothing wrong wi’ the facts o’ the matter.”

“Yes, well, all right, all right,” said the wretched Claude and added with a faint show of grandeur: “And you may as well keep a civil tongue in your head.”

Bruce spat on his hands and returned to his shovelling.

“Well, Mr. Carter?” Alleyn asked.

By painful degrees it emerged that Claude had happened to be present when Bruce came into the house with the Will and had happened to see him hand it over to Mrs. Jim and had happened to notice what it was on account of the word “Will” being written in large letters on the envelope.

“And had happened,” Bruce said without turning round but with a thwack of his shovel on the heap of earth he had raised, “to inquire with unco perrrsistence as to the cirrrcumstances.”

“Look here, Gardener, I’ve had about as much of you as I can take,” said Claude with a woeful show of spirit.

“You can tak’ me or leave me, Mr. Carter, and my preference would be for the latter procedure.”

“Do you know the terms of the Will?” Alleyn cut in.

“No, I don’t. I’m not interested. Whatever they are they don’t affect me.”

“How do you mean?”

“My father provided for me. With a trust fund or whatever it’s called. Syb couldn’t touch that and she’s not bloody likely to have added to it,” said Claude with a little spurt of venom.

Upon this note Alleyn left them and returned deviously, by way of a brick-walled vegetable garden, to Fox. He noticed two newly made asparagus beds and a multitude of enormous cabbages and wondered where on earth they all went and who consumed them. Fox, patient as ever, awaited him in the car.

“Nothing to report,” Fox said. “I took a walk round but no signs of anyone.”

“The gardener’s growing mushrooms in the stables and the stepson’s growing butterflies in the stomach,” said Alleyn and described the scene.

“Miss Preston,” he said, “finds Bruce’s Scots a bit hard to take.”

“Phoney?”

“She didn’t say that. More, ‘laid on with a trowel.’ She might have said with a long-handled shovel if she’d seen him this morning. But — I don’t know. I’m no expert on dialects, Scots or otherwise, but it seemed to me he uses it more in the manner of someone who has lived with the genuine article long enough to acquire and display it inconsistently and inaccurately. His last job was in Scotland. He may think it adds to his charm or pawkiness or whatever.”

“What about the stepson?”

“Oh, quite awful, poor devil. Capable of anything if he had the guts to carry it through.”

“We move on?”

“We do. Hark forrard, hard forrard away to Greengages and the point marked X if there is one. Shall I drive and you follow the map?”

“Fair enough, if you say so, Mr. Alleyn. What do I look for?”

“Turn right after Maidstone and follow the road to the village of Greendale. Hence ‘Greengages,’ no doubt”

“Colicky sort of name for a hospital.”

“It’s not a hospital.”

“Colicky sort of a name for whatever it is.”

“There’s no suggestion that the lady in question died of that, at least.”

“Seeing I’ve only just come in could we re-cap on the way? What’ve we got for info?”

“We’ve got the lady who is dead. She was in affluent circumstances, stinking rich, in fact, and probably in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease but unaware of it, and we’ve got the medical incumbent of an expensive establishment that is neither hospital nor nursing home but a hotel that caters for well-to-do invalids, whose patient the lady was, and who did not spot the disease. We’ve got a local doctor called Field-Innis and a police pathologist who did. We’ve got the lady’s daughter who on the afternoon of her mother’s death announced her engagement to a rich young man who did not meet with the lady’s approval. We’ve got the rich young man’s millionaire papa who coveted the lady’s house, failed to buy it but will now live in it when his son marries the daughter.”

“Hold on,” said Fox, after a pause. “O.K. I’m with you.”

“We’ve got an elderly Scottish gardener, possible pseudoish, to whom the lady has left twenty-five thousand deflated quid in a recent Will. The rest of her fortune is divided between her daughter if she marries a peer called Swingletree and the medical incumbent who didn’t diagnose Parkinson’s disease. If the daughter doesn’t marry Swingletree the incument gets the lot.”

“That would be Dr. Schramm?”

“Certainly. The rest of the cast is made up of the lady’s stepson by her first marriage who is the archetype of all remittance-men and has a police record. Finally we have a nice woman of considerable ability called Verity Preston.”

“That’s the lot?”

“Give and take a trained nurse and a splendid lady called Mrs. Jim who obliges in Upper Quintern, that’s the lot.”

“What’s the score where we come in? Exactly, I mean?”

“The circumstances are the score really, Br’er Fox. The Will and the mise-en-scène. The inquest was really adjourned because everybody says the lady was such an unlikely subject for suicide and had no motive. An extended autopsy seemed to be advisable. Sir James Curtis performed it. The undelicious results of Dr. Schramm’s stomach pump had been preserved and Sir James confirms that they disclosed a quantity of the barbiturate found in the remaining tablets on the bedside table and in the throat and at the back of the tongue. The assumption had been that she stuffed down enough of the things to become so far doped as to prevent her swallowing the last lot she put in her mouth.”

“Plausible?”

“Dr. Schramm thought so. Sir James won’t swallow it but says she would have — if you’ll excuse a joke in bad taste, Br’er Fox. He points out that there’s a delay of anything up to twenty minutes before the barbiturate in question, which is soluble in alcohol, starts to work and it’s hard to imagine her waiting until she was too far under to swallow before putting the final lot in her mouth.”

“So what do we wonder about?”

“Whether somebody else put them there. By the way, Sir James looked for traces of cyanide.”

“Why?” Mr. Fox asked economically.

“There’d been a smell of almonds in the room and in the contents of the stomach but it turned out that she used sweet almond oil in one of those glass-slipper things they put over lamp bulbs and that she’d wolfed quantities of marzipan petits-fours from La Marquise de Sevigné in Paris. The half-empty box was on her bedside table along with the vanity box and other litter.”

“Like — the empty bottle of Scotch?”

“And the overturned glass. Exactly.”

Anybody know how much there’d been in the bottle? That day, for instance?”

“Apparently not. She kept it in a cupboard above the hand-basin. One gathers it lasted her a good long time.”

“What about dabs?”

“The local chaps had a go before calling us in. Bailey and Thompson are coming down to give the full treatment.”

“Funny sort of set-up though, isnt it?” Fox mused.

“The funniest bit is yet to come. Cast your mind back, however reluctantly, to the contents of the stomach as examined by Doctors Field-Innis and Schramm.”

“Oodles of barbiturate?”

“According to Schramm. But according to Sir James an appreciable amount but not enough, necessarily, to have caused death. You know how guarded he can be. Even allowing for what he calls ‘a certain degree of excretion’ he would not take it as a matter of course that death would follow. He could find nothing to suggest any kind of susceptibility or allergy that might explain why it did.”

“So now we begin to wonder about the beneficiaries in the recent and eccentric Will?”

“That’s it. And who provided her with the printed form. Young Mr. Rattisbon allowed me to see it. It looks shop-new: fresh creases, sharp corners and edges.”

“And all in order?”

“He’s afraid so. Outrageous though the terms may be. I gather, by the way, that Miss Prunella Foster would sooner trip down the aisle with a gorilla than with the Lord Swingletree.”

“So her share goes to this Dr. Schramm?”

“In addition to the princely dollop he would get in any case.”

“It scarcely seems decent,” said Fox primly.

“You should hear the Rattisbons, père et fils, on the subject.”

“It’s twenty to one,” Fox said wistfully as they entered a village. “There’s a nice-looking little pub ahead.”

“So there is. Tell me your thoughts.”

“They seem to dwell upon Scotch eggs, cheese and pickle sandwiches and a pint of mild-and-bitter.”

“So be it,” said Alleyn and pulled in.

ii

Prunella Foster arrived from London at Quintern Place on her way to lunch with her fiancé and his father at Mardling. At Quintern Mrs. Jim informed her of Alleyn’s visit earlier in the morning. As a raconteuse, Mrs. Jim was strong on facts and short on atmosphere. She gave a list of events in order of occurrence, answered Prunella’s questions with the greatest possible economy and expressed no opinion of any sort whatsoever. Prunella was flustered.

“And he was a policeman, Mrs. Jim.?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Do you mean there was any doubt about it?”

“Not to say doubt. It’s on his card.”

“Well — what?”

Cornered, Mrs. Jim said Alleyn had seemed a bit on the posh side for it. “More after the style of one of your friends, like,” she offered and added that he had a nice way with him.

Prunella got her once more to rehearse the items of the visit, which she did with accuracy.

“So he asked about—?” Prunella cast her eyes and jerked her head in the direction, vaguely, of that part of the house generally frequented by Claude Carter.

“That’s right,” Mrs. Jim conceded. She and Prunella understood each other pretty well on the subject of Claude.

“But it was only to remark he’d noticed him dodging up and down in the rose-garden. He went out, after, to the stables. The gentleman did.”

“To find Bruce?”

“That’s right. Mr. Claude too, I reckon.”

“Oh?”

“Mr. Claude come in after the gentleman had gone and went into the dining-room.”

This, Prunella recognized, was an euphemism for “helped himself to a drink.”

“Where is he now?” she asked.

Mrs. Jim said she’d no idea. They’d come to an arrangement about his meals, it emerged. She prepared a hot luncheon for one o’clock and laid the table in the small morning-room. She then beat an enormous gong and left for home. When she returned to Quintern in two days’ time she would find the disjecta membra of this meal, together with those of any subsequent snacks, unpleasantly congealed upon the table.

“How difficult everything is,” Prunella muttered. “Thank you, Mrs. Jim. I’m going to Mardling for lunch. We’re making plans about Quintern: you know, arranging for Mr. Gideon’s father to have his own quarters with us. He’s selling Mardling, I think. After all that he’d done to it! Imagine! And keeping the house in London for his headquarters.”

“Is that right, Miss?” said Mrs. Jim and Prunella knew by the wooden tone she employed that she was deeply stimulated. “We’ll be hearing wedding-bells one of these days, then?” she speculated.

“Well — not yet, of course.”

“No,” Mrs. Jim agreed. “That wouldn’t be the thing. Not just yet.”

“I’d really rather not having a ‘wedding,’ Mrs. Jim. I’d rather be just married early in the morning in Upper Quintern with hardly anyone there. But he — Gideon — wants it the other way so I suppose my aunt — Auntie Boo—” she whispered her way into inaudibility and her eyes filled with tears. She looked helplessly at Mrs. Jim and thought how much she liked her. For the first time since her mother died it occurred to Prunella that, apart, of course, from Gideon, she was very much alone in the world. She had never been deeply involved with her mother and had indeed found her deviousness and vanities irritating when not positively comical and even that degree of tolerance had been shaken by the preposterous terms of this wretched Will. And yet now, abruptly, when she realized that Sybil was not and never would be there to be laughed at or argued with: that where she had been there was — nothing, a flood of desolation poured over Prunella and she broke down and cried with her face in Mrs. Jim’s cardigan, which smelt of floor polish.

Mrs. Jim said: “Never mind, then. It’s been a right shock and all. We know that.”

“I’m so sorry,” Prunella sobbed. I’m awfully sorry.”

“You have your cry out, then.”

This invitation had the opposite result to what had been intended. Prunella blew her nose and pulled herself together. She returned shakily to her wedding arrangements. “Somebody will have to give me away,” she said.

“As long as it’s not that Mr. Claude,” said Mrs. Jim loudly.

“God forbid. I wondered — I don’t know — can one be given away by a woman? I could ask the Vicar.”

“Was you thinking of Miss Verity?”

“She is my godmother. Yes, I was.”

“Couldn’t do better,” said Mrs. Jim.

“I must be off,” said Prunella, who did not want to run into Claude. “You don’t happen to know where those old plans of Quintern are? Mr. Markos wants to have a look at them. They’re in a sort of portfolio thing.”

“Library. Cupboard near the door. Bottom shelf.”

“How clever of you, Mrs. Jim.”

“Your mother had them out to show Bruce. Before she went to that place. She left them out and he”—the movement of the head they both used to indicate Claude—“was handling them and leaving them all over the place so I put them away.”

“Good for you. Mrs. Jim — tell me. Does he — well — does he sort of peer and prowl? Do you know what I mean? Sort of?”

“Not my place to comment,” said Mrs. Jim, “but as you’ve brought it up: yes, he do. I can tell by the way things have been interfered with — shifted like.”

“Oh dear.”

“Yes. Specially them plans. He seemed to fancy them, particular. I seen him looking at that one of the grounds through the magnifying glass in the study. He’s a proper nosey parker if you ask me and don’t mind my mentioning it,” said Mrs. Jim rapidly. She brought herself up with a jerk. “Will I fetch them then? Put out your washing,” said Mrs. Jim as an afterthought.

“Bless you. I’ll just collect some things from my room.”

Prunella ran up a lovely flight of stairs and across a first floor landing to her bedroom: a muslin and primrose affair with long windows opening over terraces, rose-gardens and uncluttered lawns that declined to a ha-ha, meadows, hay-fields, spinnies and the tower of St. Crispin’s-in-Quintern. A blue haze veiled the more distant valleys and hills and turned the chimneys of a paper-making town into minarets. Prunella was glad that after she had married she would still live in this house.

She bathed her eyes, repacked her suitcase and prepared to leave. On the landing she ran into Claude.

There was no reason why he should not be on the landing or that she should have been aware that he had arrived there but there was something intrinsically furtive about Claude that gave her a sensation of stealth.

He said: “Oh, hullo, Prue, I saw your car.”

“Hullo, Claude. Yes. I just looked in to pick up some things.”

“Not staying, then?”

“No.”

“I hope I’m not keeping you away,” he said and looked at his feet and smiled.

“Of course not. I’m mostly in London, these days.”

He stole a glance at her left hand.

“Congratulations are in order, I see.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“When’s it to be?”

She said it hadn’t been decided and began to move toward the stairs.

“Er—” said Claude, “I was wondering—”

“Whether I’m to be handed the push.”

Prunella made a panic decision to treat this as a joke.

“Oh,” she said jauntily, “you’ll be given plenty of notice.”

“Too kind. Are you going to live here?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. After we’ve made some changes. You’ll get fair warning, I promise.”

“Syb said I could be here, you know.”

“I know what she said, Claude. You’re welcome to stay until the workmen come in.”

“Too kind,” he repeated, this time with an open sneer. “By the way you don’t mind my asking, do you? I would like to know when the funeral is to be.”

Prunella felt as if winter had come into the house and closed about her heart. She managed to say: “I don’t — we won’t know until after the inquest. Mr. Rattisbon is going to arrange everything. You’ll be let know, Claude. I promise.”

“Are you going to this new inquest?”

“I expect so. I mean: yes. Yes, I am.”

“So am I. Not that it affects me, of course.”

“I really must go. I’m running late.”

“I never wrote to you. About Syb.”

“There was no need. Goodbye.”

“Shall I carry your case down?”

“No thanks. Really. It’s quite light Thank you very much, though.”

“I see you’ve got the old plans out. Of Quintern.”

“Goodbye,” Prunella said desperately and made a business of getting herself downstairs.

She had reached the ground floor when his voice floated down to her. “Hi!”

She wanted to bolt but made herself stop and look up to the first landing. His face and hands hung over the balustrade.

“I suppose you realize we’ve had a visit from the police,” said Claude. He kept his voice down and articulated pedantically.

“Yes, of course.”

One of the dangling hands moved to up the mouth.

“They seem to be mightily interested in your mother’s horticultural favourite,” Claude mouthed. “I wonder why.”

The teeth glinted in the moon-face.

Prunella bolted. She got herself, the immense portfolio and her baggage through the front door and into her car and drove, much too fast, to Mardling.

“Honestly,” she said ten minutes later to Gideon and his father. “I almost feel we should get in an exorciser when Claude goes. I wonder, if the Vicar’s any good on the bell, book and candle lay.”

“You enchanting child,” said Mr. Markos in his florid way and raised his glass to her. “Is this unseemly person really upsetting you? Should Gideon and I advance upon him with threatening gestures? Can’t he be dispensed with?”

“I must say,” Gideon chimed in, “I really do think it’s a bit much he should set himself up at Quintern. After all, darling, he’s got no business there, has he? I mean no real family ties or anything. Face it.”

“I suppose not,” she agreed. “But my mama did feel she ought not to wash her hands of him completely, awful though he undoubtedly is. You see, she was very much in love with his father.”

“Which doesn’t, if one looks at it quite cold-bloodedly, give his son the right to impose upon her daughter,” said Mr. Markos.

Prunella had noticed that this was a favourite phrase—“quite cold-bloodedly”—and was rather glad that Gideon had not inherited it. But she liked her father-in-law-to-be and became relaxed and expansive in the atmosphere (anything, she reflected, but “cold-blooded”) that he created around himself and Gideon. She felt that she could say what she chose to him without being conscious of the difference in their ages and that she amused and pleased him.

They sat out of doors on swinging seats under canopies. Mr. Markos had decided that it was a day for preprandial champagne: “a sparkling, venturesome morning,” he called it. Prunella, who had skipped breakfast and was unused to such extravagance, rapidly expanded. She downed her drink and accepted another. The horrors, and lately there really had been moments of horror, slipped into the background. She became perfectly audible and began to feel that this was the life for her and was meant for her and she for it, that she blossomed in the company of the exotic Markoses, the one so delightfully mondain, the other so enchantingly in love with her. Eddies of relief, floating on champagne, lapped over her and if they were vaguely disturbed by little undertows of guilt (for after all, she had a social conscience, that, however reprehensively, seemed merely to add to her exhilaration. She took a vigorous pull at her champagne and Mr. Markos refilled her glass.

“Darling,” said Gideon, “what have you got in that monstrous compendium or whatever it is, in your car?”

“A surprise,” cried Prunella, waving her hand. “Not for you, love. For Pil.” She raised her glass to Mr. Markos and drank to him.

“For whom?” asked the Markoses in unison.

“For my papa-in-law-to-be. I’ve been too shy to know what to- call you,” said Prunella. “Not for a moment, that you are a Pill. Far from it. Pillicock sat on Pillicock-hill,” she sang before she could stop herself. She realized she had shaken her curls at Nikolas, like one of Dickens’s more awful little heroines, and was momentarily ashamed of herself.

“You shall call me whatever you like,” said Mr. Markos and kissed her hand. Another Dickens reference swam incontinently into Prunella’s dizzy ken: “Todgers were going it.” For a second or two she slid aside from herself and saw herself “going it” like mad in a swinging chair under a canopy and having her hand kissed. She was extravagantly pleased with life.

“Shall I fetch it?” Gideon asked.

“Fetch what?” Prunella shouted recklessly.

“Whatever you’ve brought for your papa-in-law-to-be.”

“Oh, that. Yes, darling, do and I think perhaps no more champagne.”

Gideon burst out laughing. “And I think perhaps you may be right,” he said and kissed the top of her head. He went to her car and took out the portfolio.

Prunella said to Mr. Markos, “I’m tightish. How awful.”

“Are you? Eat some olives. Stuff down lots of those cheese things. You’re not really very tight.”

“Promise? All right, I will,” said Prunella and was as good as her word. A car came up the avenue.

“Here is Miss Verity Preston,” said Mr. Markos. “Did we tell you she was lunching?”

“No!” she exclaimed and blew out a little shower of cheese straw. “How too frightful, she’s my godmother.”

“Don’t you like her?”

“I adore her. But she won’t like to see me flown with fizz so early in the day. Or ever. And as a matter of fact it’s not my form at all, by and large,” said Prunella, swallowing most of an enormous mouthful of cheese straw and helping herself to more. “I’m a sober girl.”

“You’re a divine girl. I doubt if Gideon deserves you.”

“You’re absolutely right. The cheese straws and olives are doing the trick. I shan’t go on about being drunk. People who do that are such a bore, always, don’t you feel? And anyway I’m rapidly becoming sober.” As if to prove it she had begun to whisper again.

The Markoses went to meet Verity. Prunella thought of following them but compromised by getting up from her swinging seat, which she did in a quickly controlled flounder.

“Godma V,” she said. And when they were close enough to each other she hung herself about Verity’s neck and was glad to do so.

“Hullo, young party,” said Verity, surprised by this effusion and not knowing what to do about it. Prunella sat down abruptly and inaccurately on the swinging chair.

The Markoses, father and son, stood one on each side of her smiling at Verity, who thought that her godchild looked like a briar rose between a couple of succulent exotics. “They will absorb her,” Verity thought, “into their own world and one doesn’t know what that may be. Was Syb by any chance right? And ought I to take a hand? What about her Aunt Boo?” Boo was Syb’s flighty sister. “I’d better talk to Prue and I suppose write to Boo, who ought to have come back and taken some responsibility instead of sending vague cables from Acapulco.” She realized that Nikolas Markos was talking to her.

“—hope you approve of champagne at this hour.”

“Lovely,” Verity said hastily, “but demoralizing.”

“That’s what I found, Godma V,” whispered Prunella, lurching about in her swinging chair.

“For Heaven’s sake,” thought Verity, “the child’s tipsy.”

But when Mr. Markos had opened the portfolio, tenderly drawn out its contents and laid them on the garden table, which he dusted with his handkerchief, Prunella had so far recovered as to give a fairly informed comment on them.

“They’re the original plans, I think. The house was built for my I don’t know how many times great-grandfather. You can see the date is 1780. He was called Lord Rupert Passcoigne. My mama was the last Passcoigne of that family and inherited Quintern from her father. I hope I’ve got it right. The plans are rather pretty, aren’t they, with the coat-of-arms and all the trimmings and nonsense?”

“My dear child,” said Mr. Markos, pouring over them, “they’re exquisite. It’s — I really can’t tell you how excited I am to see them.”

“There are some more underneath.‘’

“We mustn’t keep them too long in this strong light. Gideon, put this one back in the portfolio. Carefully. Gently. No, let me do it”

He looked up at Verity. “Have you seen them?” he asked. “Come and look. Share my gloat, do.”

Verity had seen them, as it happened, many years ago when Sybil had first married her second husband, but she joined the party round the table. Mr. Markos had arrived at a plan for the gardens at Quintern and dwelt on it with greedy curiosity.

“But this has never been carried out,” he said. “Has it? I mean, nicest possible daughter-in-law-to-be, the gardens today bear little resemblance in concept to this exquisite schema. Why?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Prunella. “Perhaps they ran out of cash or something. I rather think Mummy and Bruce were cooking up a grand idea about carrying out some of the scheme but decided we couldn’t afford it. If only they hadn’t lost the Black Alexander they could have done it.”

“Yes indeed,” said Verity.

Mr. Markos looked up quickly. “The Black Alexander!” he said. “What can you mean? You can’t mean—”

“Oh, yes, of course. You’re a collector.”

“I am indeed. Tell me.”

She told him and when she had done so he was unusually quiet for several seconds.

“But how immensely rewarding it would be—” he began at last and then pulled himself up. “Let us put the plans away,” he said. “They arouse insatiable desires. I’m sure you understand, don’t you Miss Preston? I’ve allowed myself to build — not castles in Spain but gardens in Kent, which is much more reprehensible. Haven’t I?”

How very intelligent, Verity thought, finding his black eyes focused on hers, this Mr. Markos is. He seems to be making all sorts of assumptions and I seem to be liking it.

“I don’t remember that I saw the garden plan before,” she said. “It would have been a perfect marriage, wouldn’t it?”

“Ah. And you have used the perfect phrase for it.”

“Would you like to keep the plans here,” asked Prunella, “to have another gloat?”

He thanked her exuberantly and luncheon having been announced, they went indoors.

Since that first dinner-party, which now seemed quite a long time ago, and the visit to Greengages on the day of Sybil’s death, Verity had not seen much of the Markoses. She had been twice asked to Mardling for cocktail parties and on each occasion had been unable to go and one evening Markos Senior had paid an unheralded visit to Keys House, having spotted her, as he explained, in her garden and acted on that spur of the moment. They had got on well, having tastes in common and he showing a pretty acute appreciation of the contemporary theatre. Verity had been quite surprised to see the time when he finally took his stylish leave of her. The next thing that she had heard of him was that he had “gone abroad,” a piece of information conveyed by village telegraph through Mrs. Jim. And “abroad,” as far as Verity knew, he had remained until this present reappearance.

They had their coffee in the library, now completely finished. Verity wondered what would happen to all the books if, as Mrs. Jim had reported, Mr. Markos really intended to sell Mardling. This was by no means the sterile, unhandled assembly made by a monied person more interested in interior decoration than the written word.

As soon as she came in she saw above the fireplace the painting called Several Pleasures by Troy.

“So you did hang it there,” she said. “How well it looks.”

“Doesn’t it?” Mr. Markos agreed. “I dote on it. Who would think it was painted by a policeman’s Missus.”

Verity said: “Well, I can’t see why not. Although I suppose you’d say a rather exceptional policeman.”

“So you know him?”

“I’ve met him, yes.”

“I see. So have I. I met him when I bought the picture. I should have thought him an exotic in the Force but perhaps the higher you go at the Yard the rarer the atmosphere.”

“He visited me this morning.”

Prunella said: “You don’t tell me!”

“But I do,” said Verity.

“And me. According to Mrs. Jim,” said Prue.

Gideon said: “Would it be about the egregious Claude?”

“No,” said Verity. “It wouldn’t. Not so far as I was concerned. Not specifically, anyway. It seemed to be—” she hesitated, “—as much about this new Will as anything.”

And in the silence that followed the little party in the library quietly collapsed. Prunella began to look scared and Gideon put his arm around her.

Mr. Markos had moved in front of his fireplace. Verity thought she saw a change in him: the subtle change that comes over men when something has led a conversation into their professional field: a guarded attentiveness.

Prunella said: “I’ve been pushing things off. I’ve been pretending to myself nothing is really very much the matter. It’s not true. Is it?” she insisted, appealing to Verity.

“Perhaps not quite, darling.” Verity said and for a moment it seemed to her that she and Prunella were, in some inexplicable way, united against the two men.

iii

It was half past two when Alleyn and Fox arrived at Greengages. The afternoon being clement some of the guests were taking their postprandial ease in the garden. Others, presumably, had retired to their rooms. Alleyn gave his professional card in at the desk and asked if they might have a word with Dr. Schramm.

The receptionist stared briefly at Alleyn and hard at Mr. Fox. She tightened her mouth, said she would see, appeared to relax slightly and left them.

“Know us when she sees us again,” said Fox placidly. He put on his spectacles and, tilting back his head, contemplated an emaciated water-colour of Canterbury Cathedral. “Airy-fairy,” he said. “Not my notion of the place at all,” and moved to a view of the Grand Canal.

The receptionist returned with an impeccably dressed man who had Alleyn’s card in his hand and said he was the manager of the hotel. “I hope,” he added, “that we’re not in for any further disruption.” Alleyn cheerfully assured him that he hoped so too and repeated that he would like to have a word or two with Dr. Schramm. The manager retired to an inner office.

Alleyn said to the receptionist: “May I bother you for a moment? Of course you’re fussed we’re here to ask tedious questions and generally make nuisances of ourselves about the death of Mrs. Foster.”

“You said it,” she returned, “not me.” But she touched her hair and she didn’t sound altogether antagonistic.

“It’s only a sort of tidying-up job. But I wonder if you remember anything about flowers that her gardener left at the desk for her.”

“I wasn’t at the desk at the time.”

“Alas!”

“Pardon? Oh, yes. Well, as a matter of fact I do happen to remember. The girl on duty mentioned that the electrical repairs man had taken them up when I was off for a minute or two.”

“When would that be?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“Is the repairs man a regular visitor?”

“Not that I know. He wasn’t called in from the desk, that I can tell you.”

“Could you by any merciful chance find out when, where and why he was here?”

“Well, I must say!”

“It would be very kind indeed. Really.”

She said she would see what she could do and retired into her office. Alleyn heard the whirr of a telephone dial. After a considerable interlude a highly starched nurse of opulent proportions appeared.

Dr. Schramm will see you now,” she said in a clinical voice. Only the copies of Punch, Alleyn felt, were missing.

The nurse rustled them down a passage to a door bearing the legend: “Dr. Basil Schramm, M.B. Hours 3–5 p.m. and by appointment.”

She ushered them into a little waiting-room and there, sure enough, were the copies of Punch and The Tatler. She knocked at an inner door, opened it and motioned them to go in.

Dr. Schramm swivelled round in his desk chair and rose to greet them.

A police officer of experience and sensibility may come to recognize mannerisms common to certain persons with whom he has to deal. If he is wise he will never place too much reliance on this simplification. When, for instance, he is asked by the curious layman if the police can identify certain criminal types by looking at them, he will probably say no. Perhaps he will qualify this denial by adding that he does find that certain characteristics tend to crop up — shabby stigmata — in sexual offenders. He is not referring to raincoats or to sidelong lurking but to a look in the eyes and about the mouth, a look he is unable to define.

To Alleyn it seemed that there were traits held in common by men who, in Victorian times, were called lady-killers: a display, covert or open, of sexual vainglory that sometimes, not always, made less heavily endowed acquaintances want, they scarcely knew why, to kick the possessors.

If ever he had recognized this element he did so now in Dr. Basil Schramm. It declared itself in the brief, perfectly correct but experienced glance that he gave his nurse. It was latent in the co-ordinated ease with which he rose to his feet and extended his hand, in the boldish glance of his widely separated eyes and in the folds that joined his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. Dr. Schramm was not unlike a better-looking version of King Charles II.

As a postscript to these observations Alleyn thought that Dr. Schramm looked like a heavy, if controlled, drinker.

The nurse left them.

“I’m so sorry to keep you waiting,” said Dr. Schramm. “Do sit down.” He glanced at Alleyn’s card and then at him. “Should I say Superintendent or Mr. or just plain Alleyn?”

“It couldn’t matter less,” said Alleyn. “This is Inspector Fox.”

“Sit, sit, sit, do.”

They sat.

“Well, now, what’s the trouble?” asked Dr. Schramm. “Don’t tell me its more about this unhappy business of Mrs. Foster?”

“I’m afraid I do tell you. It’s just that, as I’m sure you realize, we have to tidy up rather exhaustively.”

“Oh, yes. That — of course.”

“The local Force has asked us to come in on the case. I’m sorry but this does entail a tramp over ground that I daresay you feel has already been explored ad nauseam.”

“Well—” He raised his immaculately kept hands and let them fall. “Needs must,” he said and laughed.

“That’s about it,” Alleyn agreed. “I believe her room has been kept as it was at the time of her death? Locked up and sealed.”

“Certainly. Your local people asked for it. To be frank it’s inconvenient but never mind.”

“Won’t be long now,” said Alleyn cheerfully.

“I’m glad to hear it. I’ll take you up to her room.”

“If I could have a word before we go.”

“Oh? Yes, of course.”

“I really wanted to ask you if you were at all, however slightly, uneasy about Mrs. Foster’s general health and spirits?”

Schramm started to make an instantly controlled gesture. “I’ve stated repeatedly: to her solicitors, to the coroner and to the police that Mrs. Foster was in improved health and in good spirits when I last saw her before I went up to London.”

“And when you returned she was dead.”

“Precisely.”

“You didn’t know, did you, that she had Parkinson’s disease?”

“That is by no means certain.”

“Dr. Field-Innis thought so.”

“And is, of course, entitled to his opinion. In any case it is not a positive diagnosis. As I understand it, Dr. Field-Innis merely considers it a possibility.”

“So does Sir James Curtis.”

“Very possibly. As it happens I have no professional experience of Parkinson’s disease and am perfectly ready to bow to their opinion. Of course, if Mrs. Foster had been given any inkling—”

“Dr. Field-Innis is emphatic that she had not—”

“—there would certainly have been cause for anxiety, depression—”

“Did she strike you as being anxious or depressed?”

“No.”

“On the contrary?”

“On the contrary. Quite. She was—”

“Yes?”

“In particularly good form,” said Dr. Schramm.

“And yet you are persuaded it was suicide?”

An ornate little clock on Dr. Schramm’s desk ticked through some fifteen seconds before he spoke. He raised his clasped hands to his pursed lips and stared over them at Alleyn. Mr. Fox, disregarded, coughed slightly.

With a definitive gesture — abrupt and incisive, Dr. Schramm clapped his palms down on the desk and leant back in his chair.

“I had hoped,” he said, “that it wouldn’t come to this.”

Alleyn waited.

“I have already told you she was in particularly good form. That was an understatement. She gave me every reason to believe she was happier than she had been for many years.”

He got to his feet, looked fixedly at Alleyn and said loudly: “She had become engaged to be married.”

The lines from nostril to mouth tightened into a smile of sorts.

“I had gone up to London,” he said, “to buy the ring.”

iv

“I knew, of course, that it would probably have to come out,” said Dr. Schramm, “but I hoped to avoid that. She was so very anxious that we should keep our engagement secret for the time being. The thought of making a sort of — well, a posthumous announcement at the inquest — was indescribably distasteful. One knew how the press would set about it and the people in this place — I loathed the whole thought of it.”

He took one or two steps about the room. He moved with short strides, holding his shoulders rigid like a soldier. “I don’t offer this as an excuse. The thing has been a — an unspeakable shock to me. I can’t believe it was suicide. Not when I remember — Not unless something that I can’t even guess at happened between the time when I said goodbye to her and my return.”

“You checked with the staff, of course?”

“Of course. She had dinner in bed and watched television. She was perfectly well. No doubt you’ve seen the report of the inquest and know all this. The waiter collected her tray round about eight-thirty. She was in her bathroom and he heard her singing to herself. After that — nothing. Nothing, until I came back. And found her.”

“That must have been a terrible shock.”

Schramm made a brief sound that usually indicates a sort of contempt. “You may say so,” he said. And then, suddenly: “Why have you been called in? What’s it mean? Look here, do you people suspect foul play?”

“Hasn’t the idea occurred to you?” Alleyn asked.

“The idea has. Of course it has. Suicide being inconceivable, the idea occurred. But that’s inconceivable, too. The circumstances. The evidence. Everything. She had no enemies. Who would want to do it? It’s—” He broke off. A look of — what? Sulkiness? Derision? — appeared. It was as if he sneered at himself.

“It was meant to be a secret,” he said.

“Are you wondering if Mrs. Foster did after all confide in somebody about your engagement?”

He stared at Alleyn. “That’s right,” he said. “And then: there were visitors that afternoon, as of course you know.”

“Her daughter and the daughter’s fiancé and Miss Preston.”

“And the gardener.”

“Didn’t he leave his flowers with the receptionist and go away without seeing Mrs. Foster?” Alleyn asked.

“That’s what he says, certainly.”

“It’s what your receptionist says too, Dr. Schramm.”

“Yes. Very well, then. Nothing in that line of thinking. In any case the whole idea is unbelievable. Or ought to be.”

“I gather you don’t much fancy the gardener?”

“A complete humbug, in my opinion. I tried to warn her. Out to get all he could from her. And he has,” said Dr. Schramm.

“Including the right to stay on at Quintern?”

“By God, he wouldn’t have lasted there for long if things had gone differently. I’d have seen to that. And he knew it.”

“You think, then, that he knew about the engagement?”

“I think, poor darling, she’d said something that gave him the idea. As a matter of fact, I ran into him going up to her room one afternoon without asking at the desk. I tore a strip off him and he came back at me with a bloody impertinent sneer. To the effect that I wasn’t yet in a position to — to order her private affairs. I’m afraid I lost my temper and told him that when I was he’d be the first to know it.”

Mr. Fox, using a technique that Alleyn was in the habit of alluding to as his disappearing act, had contrived to make his large person unobservable. He had moved as far away from Alleyn as possible and to a chair behind Dr. Schramm. Here he palmed a notebook and his palm was vast. He used a stub of pencil and kept his work on his knee and his eyes respectfully on nothing in particular.

Alleyn and Fox made a point of not looking at each other but at this juncture he felt sure Fox contemplated him, probably with that air of bland approval that generally meant they were both thinking the same thing.

Alleyn said: “Are you still considering motive, Dr. Schramm?”

Schramm gave a short meaningless laugh. His manner, unexpected in a doctor, seemed to imply that nothing under discussion was of importance. Alleyn wondered if he treated his patients to this sort of display. “I don’t want to put ideas in your head,” Schramm said, “but to be quite, quite frank that did occur to me. Motive.”

“I’m resistant to ideas,” said Alleyn. “could you explain?”

“It’s probably a lot of bumph but it does seem to me that our engagement wouldn’t have been madly popular in certain quarters. Gardener, for one. And her family, to make no bones about it.”

“Are you thinking of Mrs. Foster’s stepson?”

“You said it. I didn’t.”

“Motive?”

“I know of no motive but I do know he sponged on her and pestered her and has a pretty disgraceful record. She was very much upset at the thought of his turning up here and I gave orders that if he did he must not be allowed to see her. Or speak to her on the telephone. I tell you this,” Dr. Schramm said, “as a fact. I don’t for a moment pretend that it has any particular significance.”

“But I think you have something more than this in mind, haven’t you?”

“If I have, I wouldn’t want too much weight to be given to it.”

“I shall not give too much weight to it, I hope.”

Dr. Schramm thumbed up the ends of his moustache. “It’s just that it does occur to me that he might have expectations. I’ve no knowledge of any such thing. None.”

“You know, do you, that Carter was on the premises that afternoon?”

“I do not!” he said sharply. “Where did you get that from?”

“From Miss Verity Preston,” said Alleyn.

Again the shadow of a smile: not quite a sneer, not entirely complacent.

“Verity Preston?” he said. “Oh, yes? She and Syb were old friends.”

“He arrived in the same bus as Bruce Gardener. I gather he was ordered off seeing Mrs. Foster.”

“I should bloody well hope so,” said Dr. Schramm. “Who by?”

“By Prunella Foster.”

“Good for her.”

“Tell me,” said Alleyn, “speaking as a medical man, and supposing, however preposterously, that there was foul play, how would you think it could be accomplished?”

“There you are again! Nothing to indicate it! Everything points to the suicide I can’t believe in. Everything. Unless,” he said sharply, “something else has been found.”

“Nothing, as I understand it.”

“Well then—!” He made a dismissive, rather ineloquent, gesture.

“Dr. Schramm, there’s one aspect of her death I wanted to ask you about. Knowing, now, the special relationship between you I am very sorry to have to put this to you: it can’t be anything but distressing to go over the circumstances again.”

“Christ Almighty!” he burst out, “do you suppose I don’t ‘go over’ them day in, day out? What d’you think I’m made of!” He raised his hand. “I’m sorry!” he said. “You’re doing your job. What is it you want to ask?”

“It’s about the partly dissolved tablets found in the throat and on the tongue. Do you find any inconsistency there? I gather the tablets take some twenty minutes to dissolve in water but are readily soluble in alcohol. It was supposed, wasn’t it, that the reason they were not swallowed was because she became unconscious after putting them in her mouth. But — I suspect this is muddled thinking — would the tablets she had already taken have had time to induce insensibility? And anyway she couldn’t have been insensible when she put these last ones in her mouth. I don’t seem able to sort it out.”

Dr. Schramm put his hand to his forehead, frowned and moved his head slowly from side to side.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Touch of migraine. Yes. The tablets. She took them with Scotch, you know. As you say, they dissolve readily in alcohol.”

“Then wouldn’t you think these would have dissolved in her mouth?”

“I would think that she didn’t take any more Scotch with them. Obviously, or she would have swallowed them.”

“You mean that she was conscious enough to put these four in her mouth but not conscious enough to drink or to swallow them? Yes,” said Alleyn. “I see.”

“Well,” Dr. Schramm said loudly, “what else? What do you suppose?”

“I? I don’t go in for supposing: we’re not allowed. Oh, by the way, do you know if Mrs. Foster had made a Will — recently, I mean?”

“Of that,” said Dr. Schramm, “I have no idea.” And after a brief pause: “Is there anything else?”

“Do you know if there are members of the staff here called G. M. Johnson and Marleena Briggs?”

“I have not the faintest idea. I have nothing to do with the management of the hotel.”

“Of course you haven’t. Stupid of me. I’ll ask elsewhere. If it’s convenient could we look at the room?”

“I’ll take you up.” He pressed a buzzer on his desk.

“Please don’t bother. Tell me the number and we’ll find our way.”

“No, no. Wouldn’t dream of it.”

These protestations were interrupted by the entrance of the nurse. She stood inside the door, her important bosom, garnished with its professional badge, well to the fore. A handsome, slightly florid lady, specifically plentiful.

“Oh, Sister,” said Dr. Schramm, “would you be very kind and hold the fort? I’m just going to show our visitors upstairs. I’m expecting that call from New York.”

“Certainly,” she said woodenly.

Alleyn said: “You must be Sister Jackson, mustn’t you? I’m very glad to see you. Would you be very kind and give us a moment or two?”

She looked fixedly at Dr. Schramm, who said grudgingly: “Chief Superintendent Alleyn.”

“And Inspector Fox,” said Alleyn. “Perhaps, as Dr. Schramm expects his long distance call, it won’t be troubling you too much to ask you to show us the way to Mrs. Foster’s room?”

She still looked at Dr. Schramm, who began: “No, that’s all right, I’ll—” when the telephone rang. Sister Jackson made a half-move as if to answer it but he picked up the receiver.

“Yes. Yes. Speaking. Yes, I accept the call.”

Alleyn said: “Shall we?” to Sister Jackson and opened the door.

Schramm nodded to her and with the suggestion of a bridle she led the way back to the hall.

“Do we take the lift?” Alleyn asked. ‘I’d be very much obliged if you would come. There are one or two points about the room that I don’t quite get from the reports. We’ve been asked by the local Force to take a look at the general picture. A formality, really, but the powers-that-be are always rather fussy in these sorts of cases.”

“Oh yes?” said Sister Jackson.

In the lift it became apparent that she used scent.

For all her handsome looks, she was a pretty tough lady, Alleyn thought. Black, sharp eyes and a small hard mouth, set at the corners. It wouldn’t be long before she settled into the battle-axe form.

The room, Number 20, was on the second floor at the end of a passage and at a corner of the building. The Quintern police had put a regulation seal on the door and had handed the key over to Alleyn. They had also taken the precaution of slipping an inconspicuous morsel of wool between door and jamb. Sister Jackson looked on in silence while Mr. Fox, who wore gloves, dealt with these obstructions.

The room was dark, the closed window curtains admitting only a sliver or two of daylight. It smelt thickly of material, carpet, stale scent, dust and of something indefinable and extremely unpleasant. Sister Jackson gave out a short hiss of distaste. Fox switched on the lights. He and Alleyn moved into the centre of the room. Sister Jackson remained by the door.

The room had an air of suspended animation. The bed was unmade. Its occupant might have just left it to go into the bathroom. One of the pillows and the lower sheet were stained as if something had been spilt on them. Another pillow lay, face-down, at the foot of the bed. The bottle of Scotch, glass and tablets were all missing and were no doubt still in the custody of the local police, but an unwrapped parcel, obviously a book, together with a vanity box and the half-empty box of marzipan confections lay on the table alongside a lamp. Alleyn peered down the top of a rose-coloured shade and saw the glass slipper in place over the bulb. He took it off and examined it. There was no oil left but it retained a faint reek of sweet almonds. He put it aside.

The dressing-table carried, together with an array of bottles and pots, three framed photographs, all of which he had seen that morning on and in Sybil Foster’s desk at Quintern: her pretty daughter, her second husband; the regimental group with her handsome young first husband prominent among the officers. This was a less faded print and Alleyn looked closely at it, marvelling that such an Adonis could have sired the undelicious Claude. He peered at an enormous corporal in the back row who squinted amicably back at him. Alleyn managed to make out the man’s badge: antlers enclosed by something — what? — a heather wreath? Wasn’t there some nickname? “The Spikes”? That was it. “The Duke of Montrose’s” nicknamed “The Spikes.” Alleyn wondered how soon after this photograph was taken Maurice Carter had died. Claude would have been a child of three or four, he supposed, and remembered Verity Preston’s story of the lost Black Alexander stamp. What the hell is it, he thought, still contemplating the large corporal, that’s nagging on the edge of my memory.

He went into the bathroom. A large bunch of dead lilies lay in the hand-basin. A dirty greenish stain showed where water had drained away. A new and offensive smell rose from the basin. “ ‘Lilies that fester,’ ” he reminded himself, “ ‘smell far worse than weeds.’ ”

He returned to the bedroom and found Fox, placid in attendance, and Sister Jackson looking resentful.

“And this,” Alleyn said, “is how it was when you were called in?”

“The things on the table have been removed. And there’s no body,” she pointed out sourly.

“No more there is.”

“It’s disgusting,” said Sister Jackson. “Being left like this.”

“Horrid, isn’t it? Could you just give us a picture of how things were when you arrived on the scene?”

She did so, eyeing him closely and with a certain air of appraisal. It emerged that she had been in her room and thinking of retiring when Dr. Schramm telephoned her, asking her to come at once to Number 20. There she found him stooping over the bed on which lay Mrs. Foster, dead and cooling. Dr. Schramm had drawn her attention to the table and its contents and told her to go to the surgery and fetch the equipment needed to empty the stomach. She was to do this without saying anything to anyone she met.

“We knew it was far too late to be of any use,” she said, “but we did it. Dr. Schramm said the contents should be kept and they were. In a sealed jar. We had to move the table away from the bed but nothing else was disturbed. Dr. Schramm was very particular about that. Very.”

“And then?”

“We informed Mr. Delaware, the manager. He was upset, of course. They don’t like that sort of thing. Then we got Dr. Field-Innis to come over from Upper Quintern and he said the police should be informed. We couldn’t see why but he said he thought they ought to be. So they were.”

Alleyn noticed the increased usage of the first person plural in this narrative and wondered if he only imagined that it sounded possessive.

He thanked Sister Jackson warmly and handed her a glossy photograph of Mr. Fox’s Aunt Elsie which was kept for this purpose. Aunt Elsie had become a kind of code-person between Alleyn and Fox and was sometimes used as a warning signal when one of them wished to alert the other without being seen to do so. Sister Jackson failed to identify Aunt Elsie and was predictably intrigued. He returned the photograph to its envelope and said they needn’t trouble her any longer. Having dropped his handkerchief over his hand, he opened the door to her.

“Pay no attention,” he said. “We do these things, hoping they give us the right image. Goodbye, Sister.” In passing between him and Fox her hand brushed his. She rustled off down the passage, one hundred and fifty pounds of active femininity if she was an ounce.

“Cripes,” said Fox thoughtfully.

“Did she establish contact?”

“En passant,” he confessed in his careful French. “What about you, Mr. Alleyn?”

“En passant, moi aussi.”

“Do you reckon,” Mr. Fox mused, “she knew about the engagement?”

“Do you?”

“If she did, I’d say she didn’t much fancy it,” said Fox.

“We’d better push on. You might pack up that glass slipper, Fox. We’ll get Sir James to look at it.”

“In case somebody put prussic acid in it?”

“Something like that. After all there was and is a strong smell of almonds. Only ‘Oasis,’ you’ll tell me, and I’m afraid you’ll be right.”

On their way out the receptionist said she had made enquiries as to the electrical repairs man. Nobody knew anything about him except the girl who had given him Mrs. Foster’s flowers. He told her he had been sent to repair a lamp in Number 20 and the lady had asked him to collect her flowers when he went down to his car to get a new bulb for the bedside lamp. She couldn’t really describe him except that he was slight, short and well-spoken and didn’t wear overall but did wear spectacles.

“What d’you make of that?” said Alleyn when they got outside.

“Funny,” said Fox. “Sussy. Whatever way you look at it, not convincing.”

“There wasn’t a new bulb in the bedside lamp. Old bulb, murky on top. Ready to conk out.”

“Lilies in the basin, though.”

“True.”

“What now, then?”

Alleyn looked at his watch. “I’ve got a date with the coroner,” he said. “In one hour. At Upper Quintern. In the meantime Bailey and Thompson had better give these premises the full treatment. Every inch of them.”

“Looking for what?”

“All the usual stuff. Latent prints, including Sister J.’s on Aunt Elsie, of course. Schramm’s will be on the book wrapping and Prunella Foster’s and her mother’s on the vanity box. We’ve got to remember the room was done over in the morning by the housemaids so anything that crops up will have been established during the day. We haven’t finished with that sickening little room, Br’er Fox. Not by a long bloody chalk.”