‘– one wants to disperse things – but if there’s a queue –’

‘– much cooler. I mean, with the sun full on the house –’

‘– and the coconut shy can’t be too near the house – the boys are so wild when they throw –’

‘And this,’ said Sir George, ‘is Miss Brewis – who runs us all.’

Miss Brewis was seated behind the large silver tea tray.

She was a spare efficient-looking woman of forty-odd, with a brisk pleasant manner.

‘How do you do, M. Poirot,’ she said. ‘I do hope you didn’t have too crowded a journey? The trains are sometimes too terrible this time of year. Let me give you some tea. Milk? Sugar?’

‘Very little milk, mademoiselle, and four lumps of sugar.’ He added, as Miss Brewis dealt with his request, ‘I see that you are all in a great state of activity.’

‘Yes, indeed. There are always so many last-minute things to see to. And people let one down in the most extraordinary way nowadays. Over marquees, and tents and chairs and catering equipment. One has to keep on at them. I was on the telephone half the morning.’

‘What about these pegs, Amanda?’ said Sir George. ‘And the extra putters for the clock golf ?’

‘That’s all arranged, Sir George. Mr Benson at the golf club was most kind.’

She handed Poirot his cup.

‘A sandwich, M. Poirot? Those are tomato and these are paté. But perhaps,’ said Miss Brewis, thinking of the four lumps of sugar, ‘you would rather have a cream cake?’

Poirot would rather have a cream cake, and helped himself to a particularly sweet and squelchy one.

Then, balancing it carefully on his saucer, he went and sat down by his hostess. She was still letting the light play over the jewel on her hand, and she looked up at him with a pleased child’s smile.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’

He had been studying her carefully. She was wearing a big coolie-style hat of vivid magenta straw. Beneath it her face showed its pinky reflection on the dead-white surface of her skin. She was heavily made up in an exotic un-English style. Dead-white matt skin; vivid cyclamen lips, mascara applied lavishly to the eyes. Her hair showed beneath the hat, black and smooth, fitting like a velvet cap. There was a languorous un-English beauty about the face. She was a creature of the tropical sun, caught, as it were, by chance in an English drawing-room. But it was the eyes that startled Poirot. They had a childlike, almost vacant, stare.

She had asked her question in a confidential childish way, and it was as though to a child that Poirot answered.

‘It is a very lovely ring,’ he said.

She looked pleased.

‘George gave it to me yesterday,’ she said, dropping her voice as though she were sharing a secret with him. ‘He gives me lots of things. He’s very kind.’