There were no other papers and no diary in either of the boxes.

‘Did you reach to the end of the cupboard?’ Alleyn asked Fox.

‘No, I didn’t. It’s uncommonly deep. Extends through the wall and under the counter in the shop,’ Fox grumbled.

‘Let me try.’

Alleyn lay on the bedroom floor and reached his long arm into the cupboard. His fingers touched something – a book. ‘She must have used her brolly to fish it out,’ he grunted. ‘Hold on. There are two of them – no, three. Here they come: I think – yes. Yes. Br’er Fox. This is it.’

They were large commercial diaries and were held together with a rubber band. He took them into the parlour and laid them out on Miss Cost’s desk. When he opened the first he found page after page covered in Miss Cost’s small skeleton handwriting. He read an entry at random:

‘…sweet spot, so quaint and unspoilt. Sure I shall like it. One feels the tug of earth and sea. The “pub” (!) is really genuine and goes back to smuggling days. Kept by a gentleman. Major B. I take my noggin “of an evening” in the taproom and listen to the wonderful “burr” in the talk of the fisherfolk. All v. friendly…Major B. kept looking at me. I know your sort, sez I. Nothing to object to, really. Just an awareness. The wife is rather peculiar: I am not altogether taken. A man’s woman in every sense of the word, I’m afraid. He doesn’t pay her v. much attention.’

Alleyn read on for a minute or two. ‘It would take a day to get through it,’ he said. ‘This is her first visit to the Island. Two years ago.’

‘Interesting?’

‘Excruciating. Where’s that list of dates?’

Fox put it on the desk.

Alleyn turned the pages of the diary. References to Major B., later K., though veiled in unbelievable euphemisms, became more and more explicit. In this respect alone, Alleyn thought, the gallant Major had a lot to answer for. He turned back to the entry for the day after Wally’s cure. It was ecstatic.

‘I have always,’ wrote Miss Cost, ‘believed in fairies. The old magic of water and the spoken rune! The Green Lady! He saw her, this little lad saw her and obeyed her behest. Something led me to this Island.’ She ran on in this vein for the whole of the entry. Alleyn read it with a sensation of exasperated compassion. The entry itself was nothing to his purpose. But across it, heavily inked, Miss Cost on some later occasion had put down an enormous mark of interrogation and, beside this, had added a note: ‘30th Sept. 8.45.’

This was the second of the two underlined dates on the paper. He turned it up in the diary.