‘No,’ Alleyn said. ‘I don’t. I think she was killed on board the Zodiac. I think the body was handed over to Smith together with the suitcase and probably the Fabergé jewel. Now, dare we take a look inside this diary.’

It had deteriorated since poor Hazel Rickerby-Carrick had examined it after its first immersion. The block of pages had parted company with the spine and had broken into sections. The binding was pulpy and the paper softened.

‘Should we dry it out first?’ Fox asked.

‘I’ll try one gingerly fiddle. Got a broadish knife in the station?’

Tillotson produced a bread knife. With infinite caution Alleyn introduced it into the diary at the place where the condition of the edges suggested a division between the much used and still unused sections. He followed the knife blade up with a wider piece of card and finally turned the top section back.

Blotched, mottled, in places blistered and in others torn, it was still for the most part legible.

‘Waterproof ink,’ Alleyn said. ‘God bless the self-propelling pencil.’

And like the writer, when she sat in her cabin on the last day of her life, Alleyn read the final entry in her diary.

‘I’m at it again. Trying too hard, as usual—’

And like her, having read it, he turned the page and drew a blank.

II

‘So there it is,’ Alleyn said. ‘She writes that she returned from compline at St Crispin-in-the-Fields to the motor-vessel Zodiac. She doesn’t say by what road but as Troy followed the same procedure and returned by Ferry Lane and did not encounter her, it may be that she took a different route.’

‘She could,’ Tillottson said. ‘Easily. Weyland Street, it’d have to be.’

‘All right. She was wearing rubber-sole shoes. At some stage in her return trip she retired into a dark shop-entry to remove a pebble or something from one of her sneakers. From this position, she overheard a conversation between two or more—from the context I would think more—people that, quote, “froze” and “riveted” her. One of the voices, it was a whisper, she failed to identify. The other—or others—she no doubt revealed on the subsequent page which has been torn out of the diary. Now. My wife has told me that after Lazenby rescued the diary she thought she saw, for a fractional moment, paper with writing on it, clutched in his left hand. That evening at Crossdyke, Miss Rickerby-Carrick, who was in a state of violent excitement, intimated that she wanted urgently to confide in Troy, to ask her advice. No doubt she would have done so but Troy got a migraine and instead of exploring Crossdyke went early to bed. Miss R-C. joined the others and inspected the ruins and was shown how to catch butterflies by Caley Bard. Troy, who was feeling better, saw this episode through her porthole.