‘I’m afraid I can’t. I haven’t seen the print on the clod of mud, of course, but it seems to me it can’t be an old one if it suggests that somebody kicked the clod loose. If that’s so, it looks as if there has been foul play. And yet I’m afraid I don’t think Questing was drunk enough to fall in or even that it’s at all likely, if he did put his foot into the gap, that he would go right over. And it seems to be a very chancy sort of trap for a murderer to set, doesn’t it? I mean Simon might have gone over, or anybody else who happened to walk that way. How could a murderer reckon on Questing being the first to leave the concert?’

‘You don’t think it was an accident. You can’t advance any tenable theory of homicide. You find my theory logical and yet cannot accept it. I think, Mr Bell,’ Dr Ackrington summed up, ‘you may be excused from any further attempts to explain yourself.’

‘Thank you very much, sir,’ said Dikon sincerely. ‘I think I may.’

He walked round the table and sat down by Barbara.

From that moment the other men treated Dikon as an onlooker. It was impossible, they agreed, that in a homicide investigation the police could regard him as a suspect. He was with Mrs Claire and Barbara when Questing screamed, he drove to the hall and had no opportunity to enter the thermal reserve either before, after, or during the concert. The fact that the path had been intact when the other men walked over to the village excluded him from any suspicion of complicity as far as the displaced clod was concerned. ‘Even the egregious Webley,’ said Dr Ackrington, ‘could scarcely blunder where Bell is concerned.’ Dikon realized with amusement that in a way he lost caste by his immunity.

‘As for the rest of us,’ said Dr Ackrington importantly, ‘I have no doubt that Webley, in the best tradition of the worst type of fiction, will suspect each of us in turn. For this reason I have thought it well that we should consult together. We do not know along what fantastic corridors his fancy may lead him but it is quite evident from certain questions that he has already put to me that he has crystallized upon the footprint. Now, did any of us wear boots or shoes with nails in them?’

Only Simon and Smith, it appeared, had done so. ‘I got them on now,’ Smith roared out. ‘In my position you don’t wear pansy shoes. I wear working boots and I wear them all the time.’ He hitched up his knee and planked a most unlovely boot firmly against the edge of the table. ‘Anybody’s welcome to inspect my feet,’ he said.

‘Thank you so much,’ Gaunt murmured. ‘No. Definitely no.’