‘Do you think Garcia murdered Sonia?’ asked Malmsley vaguely. ‘I must say I don’t.’

‘The next point is this,’ said Alleyn, exactly as though Malmsley had not spoken. ‘I want to arrive at the order in which you all left the studio on Friday at midday. I believe Miss Troy and Miss Bostock came away together as soon as the model got down. Any objections to that?’

There was none apparently.

‘Well, who came next?’

‘I—I think I did,’ said Phillida Lee, ‘and I think I ought to tell you about an extraordinary thing that I heard Garcia say to Sonia one day—’

‘Thank you so much, Miss Lee. I’ll come to that later if I may. At the moment we’re talking about the order in which you left the studio on Friday at noon. You followed Miss Troy and Miss Bostock?’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Lee restlessly.

‘Good. Are you sure of that, Miss Lee?’

‘Yes. I mean I know I did because I was absolutely exhausted. It always takes it out of me most frightfully when I paint. It simply drains every ounce of my energy. I even forget to breathe.’

‘That must be most uncomfortable,’ said Alleyn gravely. ‘You came out to breathe, perhaps?’

‘Yes. I mean I felt I must get away from it. So I simply put down my brushes and walked out. Miss Troy and Bostock were just ahead of me.’

‘You went straight to the house?’

‘Yes, I think so. Yes, I did.’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said Watt Hatchett loudly. ‘You came straight up here because I was just after you, see? I saw you through the dining-room window. This window here, Mr Alleyn. That’s right, Miss Lee. You went up to the sideboard and began eating something.’

‘I—I don’t remember that,’ said Miss Lee in a high voice. She darted an unfriendly glance at Hatchett.

‘Well,’ said Alleyn briskly, ‘that leaves Miss Seacliff, Messrs Ormerin, Pilgrim, Malmsley and Garcia, and the model. Who came next?’

‘We all did—except Garcia and Sonia,’ said Valmai Seacliff. ‘Sonia hadn’t dressed. I remember I went into the junk-room and washed my brushes under the tap. Ormerin and Malmsley and Basil followed me there.’

She spoke with a slight hesitation, the merest shadow of a stutter, and with a markedly falling inflexion. She had a trick of uttering the last words of a phrase on an indrawn breath. Everything she looked and did, Alleyn felt, was the result of a carefully concealed deliberation. She managed now to convey the impression that men followed her inevitably, wherever she went.

‘They were in the way,’ she went on. ‘I told them to go. Then I finished washing my brushes and came up to the house.’

‘Garcia was in the junk-room, too, I think,’ said Ormerin.