‘There now,’ returned Nigel, ‘aren’t you wonderful, Inspector? Yes, Lady Alleyn rang me up to say you’d been sooled on to the trail before your time, and she thought the odds were you’d forget to let us know you couldn’t come and stay with us.’

‘So you instantly motored twenty miles in not much more than as many minutes in order to tell me how sorry you were?’

‘That’s it,’ said Nigel cheerfully. ‘You read me like a book. Angela sends her fondest love. She’d have come too only she’s not feeling quite up to long drives just now.’

He sat down in one of the largest chairs.

‘Don’t let me interrupt,’ he said. ‘You can give me the story later on. I’ve got enough to go on with from the local cop. I’ll ring up the office presently and give them the headlines. Your mother—divine woman— has asked me to stay.’

‘Has my mother gone out of her mind?’ asked Alleyn of nobody in particular.

‘Come, come Inspector,’ reasoned Nigel, with a trace of nervousness in his eye, ‘you know you’re delighted to have me.’

‘There’s not the smallest excuse for your bluffing your way in, you know. I’ve a damn good mind to have you chucked out.’

‘Don’t do that. I’ll take everything down in shorthand and nobody will see me if I turn the chair round. Fox will then be able to fix the stammering witness with a basilisk glare. All will go like clockwork. All right?’

‘All right. It’s quite irregular, but you occasionally have your uses. Go into the corner there.’

Nigel hurried into a shadowy corner, turned a high armchair with its back to the room and dived into it.

‘“I am invisible,”’ he said. ‘“And I shall overhear their conference.” The Bard.’

‘I’ll deal with you later,’ said Alleyn grimly. ‘Tell them to send another of these people along, Fox.’

When Fox had gone Nigel asked hoarsely from the armchair if Alleyn had enjoyed himself in New Zealand.

‘Yes,’ said Alleyn.

‘Funny you getting a case there,’ ventured Nigel. ‘Rather a bus-man’s holiday, wasn’t it?’

‘I enjoyed it. Nobody interfered and the reporters were very wellbehaved.’

‘Oh,’ said Nigel.

There was a short silence broken by Nigel.

‘Did you have a slap-and-tickle with the American lady on the boat deck?’

‘I did not.’

‘Oh! Funny coincidence about Agatha Troy. I mean she was in the same ship, wasn’t she? Lady Alleyn tells me the portrait is quite miraculously like you.’

‘Don’t prattle,’ said Alleyn. ‘Have you turned into a gossip hound?’

‘No. I say!’

‘What!’

‘Angela’s started a baby.’

‘So I gathered, and so no doubt Fox also gathered, from your opening remarks.’

‘I’m so thrilled I could yell it in the teeth of the whole police force.’

Alleyn smiled to himself.

‘Is she all right?’ he asked.