The inspector’s eyebrows went up slightly.

‘Oh – her!’ he said. ‘Quite a best-seller. I’ve read a lot of her books myself.’

‘She’s a bit upset at present,’ said Sir George, ‘naturally, I suppose. I’ll tell her you’ll be wanting her, shall I? I don’t know where my wife is. She seems to have disappeared completely from view. Somewhere among the two or three hundred, I suppose – not that she’ll be able to tell you much. I mean about the girl or anything like that. Who would you like to see first?’

‘I think perhaps your secretary, Miss Brewis, and after that the girl’s mother.’

Sir George nodded and left the room.

The local police constable, Robert Hoskins, opened the door for him and shut it after he went out. He then volunteered a statement, obviously intended as a commentary on some of Sir George’s remarks.

‘Lady Stubbs is a bit wanting,’ he said, ‘up here.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘That’s why he said she wouldn’t be much help. Scatty, that’s what she is.’

‘Did he marry a local girl?’

‘No. Foreigner of some sort. Coloured, some say, but I don’t think that’s so myself.’

Bland nodded. He was silent for a moment, doodling with a pencil on a sheet of paper in front of him. Then he asked a question which was clearly off the record.

‘Who did it, Hoskins?’ he said.

If anyone did have any ideas as to what had been going on, Bland thought, it would be P.C. Hoskins. Hoskins was a man of inquisitive mind with a great interest in everybody and everything. He had a gossiping wife and that, taken with his position as local constable, provided him with vast stores of information of a personal nature.

‘Foreigner, if you ask me. ’Twouldn’t be anyone local. The Tuckers is all right. Nice, respectable family. Nine of ’em all told. Two of the older girls is married, one boy in the Navy, the other one’s doing his National Service, another girl’s over to a hairdresser’s at Torquay. There’s three younger ones at home, two boys and a girl.’ He paused, considering. ‘None of ’em’s what you’d call bright, but Mrs Tucker keeps her home nice, clean as a pin – youngest of eleven, she was. She’s got her old father living with her.’

Bland received this information in silence. Given in Hoskins’ particular idiom, it was an outline of the Tuckers’ social position and standing.

‘That’s why I say it was a foreigner,’ continued Hoskins. ‘One of those that stop up to the Hostel at Hoodown, likely as not. There’s some queer ones among them – and a lot of goings-on. Be surprised, you would, at what I’ve seen ’em doing in the bushes and the woods! Every bit as bad as what goes on in parked cars along the Common.’