He returned to his own job. The parlour was a sort of unfinished echo of the front shop. Rows of plastic ladies, awaiting coats of green, yellow and pink paint, smirked blankly from the shelves. There were stacks of rhyme-sheets and stationery and piles of jerkins, still to be sewn up the sides. Through the open door he could see the kitchen table with a jug and sugar-basin and a dirty cup with a sodden crust in its saucer. Miss Cost would have washed them up, no doubt, if she had returned from early service and not gone walking through the rain to her death.

In a large envelope he came across a number of photographs. A group of village maidens, Cissy prominent among them, with their arms upraised in what was clearly intended for corybantic ecstasy. Wally, showing his hands. Wally with his mouth open. Miss Cost herself, in a looking-glass with her thumb on the camera trigger and smiling dreadfully. Several snapshots, obviously taken in the grounds of the nursing home, with Dr Maine caught in moments of reluctance shading into irritation. Views of the Spring and one of a dark foreign-looking lady with an intense expression.

He heard Fox pull a heavy piece of furniture across the wooden floor and then give an ejaculation.

‘Anything?’ Alleyn asked.

‘Might be. Behind the bed-head. A locked cupboard. Solid, mortise job. Now, where’d she have stowed the key?’

‘Not in her bag. Where do spinsters hide keys?’

‘I’ll try the chest of drawers for a start,’ said Fox.

‘You jolly well do. A favourite cache. Association of ideas. Freud would have something to say about it.’

Drawers were wrenched open, one after another.

‘By gum!’ Fox presently exclaimed. ‘You’re right, Mr Alleyn. Two keys. Here we are.’

‘Where?’

‘Wrapped up in her combs.’

‘In the absence of a chastity belt, no doubt.’

‘What’s that, Mr Alleyn?’

‘No matter. Either of them fit?’

‘Hold on. The thing’s down by the skirting board. Yes. Yes, I do believe – here we are.’

A lock clicked.

‘Well?’

‘Two cash boxes, so far,’ Fox said, his voice strangely muffled.

Alleyn walked into the bedroom and was confronted by his colleague’s stern, up-ended beneath an illuminated legend which read:

‘Jog on, jog on the footpath way And merrily hent the stile-a.’

This was supported by a bookshelf on which the works of Algernon Blackwood and Dennis Wheatley predominated.

Fox was on his knees with his head to the floor and his arm in a cupboard. He extracted two japanned boxes and put them on the unmade bed, across which lay a rumpled nightgown embroidered with lazy daisies.

‘The small key’s the job for both,’ he said. ‘There you are, sir.’