‘I’m sorry, Mummy. That was me. It blew overboard in the Mediterranean. I’d borrowed it. I meant to tell you but I forgot.’

‘Really, Jennifer, how often have I asked you not to borrow things without telling me first?’

‘Can I have some more pudding?’ said Jennifer, creating a diversion.

‘I suppose so. Really, Mrs Ellis has a wonderfully light hand. It makes it worth while having to shout at her so much. I do hope, though, that they won’t think you too greedy at school. Meadowbank isn’t quite an ordinary school, remember.’

‘I don’t know that I really want to go to Meadowbank,’ said Jennifer. ‘I knew a girl whose cousin had been there, and she said it was awful. They spent all their time telling you how to get in and out of Rolls-Royces, and how to behave if you went to lunch with the Queen.’

‘That will do, Jennifer,’ said Mrs Sutcliffe. ‘You don’t appreciate how extremely fortunate you are in being admitted to Meadowbank. Miss Bulstrode doesn’t take every girl, I can tell you. It’s entirely owing to your father’s important position and the influence of your Aunt Rosamond. You are exceedingly lucky. And if,’ added Mrs Sutcliffe, ‘you are ever asked to lunch with the Queen, it will be a good thing for you to know how to behave.’

‘Oh well,’ said Jennifer. ‘I expect the Queen often has to have people to lunch who don’t know how to behave—African chiefs and jockeys and sheikhs.’

‘African chiefs have the most polished manners,’ said her father, who had recently returned from a short business trip to Ghana.

‘So do Arab sheikhs,’ said Mrs Sutcliffe. ‘Really courtly.’

‘D’you remember that sheikh’s feast we went to,’ said Jennifer. ‘And how he picked out the sheep’s eye and gave it to you, and Uncle Bob nudged you not to make a fuss and to eat it? I mean, if a sheikh did that with roast lamb at Buckingham Palace, it would give the Queen a bit of a jolt, wouldn’t it?’

‘That will do, Jennifer,’ said her mother and closed the subject.

IV

When Andrew Ball of no fixed abode had been sentenced to three months for breaking and entering, Derek O’Connor, who had been occupying a modest position at the back of the Magistrate’s Court, put through a call to a Museum number.

‘Not a thing on the fellow when we picked him up,’ he said. ‘We gave him plenty of time too.’

‘Who was he? Anyone we know?’

‘One of the Gecko lot, I think. Small time. They hire him out for this sort of thing. Not much brain but he’s said to be thorough.’

‘And he took his sentence like a lamb?’ At the other end of the line Colonel Pikeaway grinned as he spoke.

‘Yes. Perfect picture of a stupid fellow lapsed from the straight and narrow path. You’d never connect him with any big time stuff. That’s his value, of course.’

‘And he didn’t find anything,’ mused Colonel Pikeaway. ‘And you didn’t find anything. It rather looks, doesn’t it, as though there isn’t anything to find? Our idea that Rawlinson planted these things on his sister seems to have been wrong.’