And a few minutes later they joined Nigel Bathgate at breakfast.

‘You might have told me you were going out,’ complained Nigel.

‘I wouldn’t dream of interrupting your beauty sleep,’ said Alleyn. ‘Where’s my mamma?’

‘She finished her breakfast some minutes ago. She asked me to tell you she would be in her workshop. She’s going to weave me some tweed for a shooting jacket.’

‘Divine creature, isn’t she? What have you written for your paper?’

‘I’ll show you. I’ve left Miss Troy’s name out altogether, Alleyn. They simply appear as a group of artists in a charming old-world house in Buckinghamshire.’

‘I’ll try to be a good godfather,’ said Alleyn gruffly.

‘Good enough,’ said Nigel. ‘Can I publish a picture of the girl?’

‘Sonia? Yes, if you can rake one up. I can give you one of Garcia. Just talk about him as a very brilliant young sculptor, mention the job for the cinema if you like, and if you can manage it, suggest that we suspect the thing to be the work of some criminal lunatic who had got wind of the way the model was posed. Far-fetched, but I understand the tallest, the most preposterous tarradiddle will be gulped down whole by your public. You may even suggest that we have fears for Garcia’s safety. Do anything but cast suspicion on him. Is all this quite impossible, Bathgate?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Nigel thoughtfully. ‘It can be brought out with what I have already written. There’s nothing in this morning’s paper. That’s an almost miraculous bit of luck. Blackman and Co. must have been extraordinarily discreet.’

‘The hunt will be up and the murder out, at any moment now. Show me your stuff. We’re for London in twenty minutes.’

‘May I come with you? I’ve telephoned the office. I’ll make a bit of an entrance with this story.’

Alleyn vetted the story and Nigel made a great to-do at each alteration, but more as a matter of routine than anything else. He then went to the telephone to ring up his office, and his Angela. Alleyn left Fox with the morning paper and ran upstairs to his mother’s workshop. This was a large, sunny room, filled with what Lady Alleyn called her insurances against old age. An enormous hand-loom stood in the centre of the room. In the window was a bench for book-binding. On one wall hung a charming piece of tapestry worked by Lady Alleyn in a bout of enthusiasm for embroidery and on another wall was an oak shrine executed during a wave of intense wood-carving. She had made the rugs on the floor, she had woven the curtains on the walls, she had created the petit-point on the backs of the chairs, and she had done all these things extremely and surprisingly well.