He repeated this conversation almost word for word on three more calls.

In each instance, it seemed, a blank.

‘No trips to Crossdyke,’ said Mr Bonney, ‘between 6.45 last evening and 11 a.m. today.’

‘Well, well,’ said Mr Tillottson, ‘that’s quite interesting, Bob, isn’t it?’

All Troy’s apprehensions that with the lightened atmosphere of the morning had retired to an uneasy hinterland now returned in force.

‘But that means whoever rang gave a false identity,’ she said.

Mr Tillottson said it looked a wee bit like that but they’d have to check with the lock-keeper at Crossdyke. He might have mistaken the message. It might have been, he suggested, Miss Rickerby-Carrick herself saying she was hiring a car.

‘That’s true!’ Troy agreed.

‘What sort of a voice, now, would she have, Mrs Alleyn?’

‘She’s got a heavy cold and she sounds excitable. She gabbles and she talks in italics.’

‘She wouldn’t be what you’d call at all eccentric?’

‘She would. Very eccentric.’

Mr Tillottson said ah, well, now, there you were, weren’t you? Mr Bonney asked what age Miss Rickerby-Carrick might be and when Troy hazarded, ‘fortyish’, began to look complacent. Troy mentioned Mavis of Birmingham now in the Highlands and when they asked Mavis who, and where in the Highlands was obliged to say she’d forgotten. This made her feel foolish and remember some of her husband’s strictures upon purveyors of information received.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘to be so perfectly hopeless.’

They soothed her. Why should she remember these trifles? They would, said Mr Tillottson, have a wee chin-wag with the lock-keeper at Crossdyke just to get confirmation of the telephone call. They would ring the telephone department and they would make further inquiries to find out just how Miss Rickerby-Carrick got herself removed in the dead of night. If possible they would discover her destination.

Their manner strongly suggested that Troy’s uneasiness rather than official concern was the motive for these inquiries.

‘They think I’ve got a bee in my bonnet,’ she told herself. ‘If I wasn’t Rory’s wife they wouldn’t be bothered with me.’

She took what she felt had now become her routine leave of Superintendents in North Country police stations and, once more reassured by Mr Tillottson, prepared to enjoy herself in Longminster.

II

She spent the rest of the morning looking at the gallery and the Minster and wandering about the city which was as beautiful as its reputation.