‘Ah!’ said Sergeant Pender who had listened to all this with the liveliest attention. ‘So, she did then, and hunted the poor chap merciless, didn’t she, Ciss?’

‘Aw, you do be awful, George Pender,’ said Cissy, with spirit.

‘Couldn’t help herself, no doubt, and not to be blamed for it,’ he conceded.

Alleyn again asked Cissy if Miss Cost had any close women friends. Mrs Carstairs? Or Mrs Barrimore, for instance?

Cissy made a prim face that was also, in some indefinable way, furtive. ‘She weren’t terrible struck on Mrs Barrimore,’ she said. ‘She didn’t hold with her.’

‘Oh? Why was that, do you suppose?’

‘She reckoned she were sly,’ said Cissy and was not to be drawn any further.

‘Did Miss Cost keep a diary, do you know?’ Alleyn asked, and as Cissy looked blank, he added: ‘A book. A record of day-to-day happenings?’

Cissy said Miss Cost was always writing in a book of an evening but kept it away careful-like, she didn’t know where. Asked if she had noticed any change in Miss Cost’s behaviour over the last three weeks, Cissy gaped at Alleyn for a second or two and then said Miss Cost had been kind of funny.

‘In what way, funny?’

‘Laughing,’ said Cissy. ‘She took fits to laugh, suddenlike. I never see nothing to make her.’

‘As if she was – what? Amused? Excited?’

‘Axcited. Powerful pleased too. Sly-like.’

‘Did you happen to notice if she sent any letters to London?’

Miss Cost had on several occasions put her own letters in the mailbag but Cissy hadn’t got a look at them. Evidently, Alleyn decided, Miss Cost’s manner had intrigued her assistant. It was on these occasions that Miss Cost laughed.

At this juncture, Cissy was required at the switchboard. Alleyn asked Pender to follow him into the back room. He shut the door and said he thought the time had come for Miss Pollock to return to her home. She lived on the Island, it appeared, in one of the Fisherman’s Bay cottages. Alleyn suggested that Pender had better see her to her door as the storm was so bad. They could be shown how to work the switchboard during his absence.

When they had gone, Alleyn retired to the parlour and began operations upon Miss Cost’s desk which, on first inspection, appeared to be a monument to the dimmest kind of disorder. Bills, dockets, trade-leaflets and business communications were jumbled together in ill-running drawers and overcrowded pigeon-holes. He sorted them into heaps and secured them with rubber bands.

He called out to Fox, who was in the kitchen: ‘As far as I can make out she was doing very nicely indeed, thank you. There’s a crack-pot sort of day-book. No outstanding debts and an extremely healthy bank statement. We’ll get at her financial position through the income-tax people, of course. What’ve you got?’

‘Nothing to rave about,’ Fox said.

‘Newspapers?’