They slipped into the clear dark waters, the sluice-gates were shut, the paddles set, and the familiar slow ascent began. She moved to the after-end of the Zodiac and Caley Bard joined her there.

‘I don’t know if it has occurred to you,’ he said, ‘that everybody is cutting dead the obvious inference.’

‘Inference?’

‘Well—question if you prefer. Aren’t we all asking ourselves whether the ebullient Hay has been made away with?’

After a pause, Troy said: ‘I suppose so.’

‘Well, of course we are. We’d be certifiable if we didn’t. Do you mind talking about it?’

‘I think it’s worse not to do so.’

‘I couldn’t agree more. Have you heard what they found?’

‘In The River?’

‘Yes.’

‘I did hear a good deal. In my cabin.’

‘I was on deck. I saw.’

‘How horrible,’ said Troy.

But she was not as deeply horrified as she might have been because her attention was riveted by a pair of large, neat and highly polished boots and decent iron-grey trousers on the rim of the lock above her. They looked familiar. She tilted her head back and was rewarded by a worm’s-eye view in violent perspective of the edge of a jacket, the modest swell of a stomach, the underneath of a massive chin, a pair of nostrils and the brim of a hat.

As the Zodiac quietly rose in the lock, these items resolved themselves into an unmistakable whole.

‘Well,’ Troy thought, ‘this settles it. It’s a case,’ and when she found herself sufficiently elevated to do so without absurd contortion, she addressed herself to the person now revealed.

‘Hallo, Br’er Fox,’ she said.

IV

‘What was said,’ Fox explained, ‘was this. Tillottson’s asked for us to come in. He rang the Department on finding the body. The AC said that as you’ve been in on this Jampot thing from the time it came our way, the only sensible course is for you to follow it up. Regardless, as it were. And I’ve been shot up here by plane to act as your support and to let you know how things stand on my file. Which is a nice way of saying how big a bloody fool I’ve been made to look by this expert.’

‘But who says this is a Jampot affair, may I ask?’ Alleyn crossly interjected.

‘The AC works it out that this job up here, this river job, ought properly to be regarded as a possible lead on Foljambe. On account of the Andropulos connection. Having been made a monkey of,’ Fox added with feeling, ‘by a faked-up false scent to Paris, I don’t say I reacted with enthusiasm to his theories but you have to look at these things with what I’ve heard you call a disparate eye.’