‘George,’ said Mrs Folliat, ‘this is M. Poirot who is so kind as to come and help us. Sir George Stubbs.’

Sir George, who had been talking in a loud voice, swung round. He was a big man with a rather florid red face and a slightly unexpected beard. It gave a rather disconcerting effect of an actor who had not quite made up his mind whether he was playing the part of a country squire, or of a ‘rough diamond’ from the Dominions. It certainly did not suggest the navy, in spite of Michael Weyman’s remarks. His manner and voice were jovial, but his eyes were small and shrewd, of a particularly penetrating pale blue.

He greeted Poirot heartily.

‘We’re so glad that your friend Mrs Oliver managed to persuade you to come,’ he said. ‘Quite a brain-wave on her part. You’ll be an enormous attraction.’

He looked round a little vaguely.

‘Hattie?’ He repeated the name in a slightly sharper tone. ‘Hattie!’

Lady Stubbs was reclining in a big arm-chair a little distance from the others. She seemed to be paying no attention to what was going on round her. Instead she was smiling down at her hand which was stretched out on the arm of the chair. She was turning it from left to right, so that a big solitaire emerald on her third finger caught the light in its green depths.

She looked up now in a slightly startled childlike way and said, ‘How do you do.’

Poirot bowed over her hand.

Sir George continued his introductions.

‘Mrs Masterton.’

Mrs Masterton was a somewhat monumental woman who reminded Poirot faintly of a bloodhound. She had a full underhung jaw and large, mournful, slightly blood-shot eyes.

She bowed and resumed her discourse in a deep voice which again made Poirot think of a bloodhound’s baying note.

‘This silly dispute about the tea tent has got to be settled, Jim,’ she said forcefully. ‘They’ve got to see sense about it. We can’t have the whole show a fiasco because of these idiotic women’s local feuds.’

‘Oh, quite,’ said the man addressed.

‘Captain Warburton,’ said Sir George.

Captain Warburton, who wore a check sports coat and had a vaguely horsy appearance, showed a lot of white teeth in a somewhat wolfish smile, then continued his conversation.

‘Don’t you worry, I’ll settle it,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and talk to them like a Dutch uncle. What about the fortune-telling tent? In the space by the magnolia? Or at the far end of the lawn by the rhododendrons?’

Sir George continued his introductions.

‘Mr and Mrs Legge.’

A tall young man with his face peeling badly from sunburn grinned agreeably. His wife, an attractive freckled redhead, nodded in a friendly fashion, then plunged into controversy with Mrs Masterton, her agreeable high treble making a kind of duet with Mrs Masterton’s deep bay.

‘– not by the magnolia – a bottle-neck –’