‘I – oh, yes. Oh, thank you, M. Poirot. Where did you find it?’

‘It was here, on the floor, in that crack over there.’

‘I must have dropped it some time.’

‘Yesterday?’

‘Oh, no, not yesterday. It was before that.’

‘But surely, Madame, I remember seeing that particular charm on your wrist when you were telling me my fortune.’

Nobody could tell a deliberate lie better than Hercule Poirot. He spoke with complete assurance and before that assurance Sally Legge’s eyelids dropped.

‘I don’t really remember,’ she said. ‘I only noticed this morning that it was missing.’

‘Then I am happy,’ said Poirot gallantly, ‘to be able to restore it to you.’

She was turning the little charm over nervously in her fingers. Now she rose.

‘Well, thank you, M. Poirot, thank you very much,’ she said. Her breath was coming rather unevenly and her eyes were nervous.

She hurried out of the Folly. Poirot leaned back in the seat and nodded his head slowly.

No, he said to himself, no, you did not go to the tea tent yesterday afternoon. It was not because you wanted your tea that you were so anxious to know if it was four o’clock. It was here you came yesterday afternoon. Here, to the Folly. Halfway to the boathouse. You came here to meet someone.

Once again he heard footsteps approaching. Rapid impatient footsteps. ‘And here perhaps,’ said Poirot, smiling in anticipation, ‘comes whoever it was that Mrs Legge came up here to meet.’

But then, as Alec Legge came round the corner of the Folly, Poirot ejaculated:

‘Wrong again.’

‘Eh? What’s that?’ Alec Legge looked startled.

‘I said,’ explained Poirot, ‘that I was wrong again. I am not often wrong,’ he explained, ‘and it exasperates me. It was not you I expected to see.’

‘Whom did you expect to see?’ asked Alec Legge.

Poirot replied promptly.

‘A young man – a boy almost – in one of these gaily-patterned shirts with turtles on it.’

He was pleased at the effect of his words. Alec Legge took a step forward. He said rather incoherently:

‘How do you know? How did – what d’you mean?’

‘I am psychic,’ said Hercule Poirot, and closed his eyes.

Alec Legge took another couple of steps forward. Poirot was conscious that a very angry man was standing in front of him.

‘What the devil did you mean?’ he demanded.

‘Your friend has, I think,’ said Poirot, ‘gone back to the Youth Hostel. If you want to see him you will have to go there to find him.’

‘So that’s it,’ muttered Alec Legge.

He dropped down at the other end of the stone bench.