Fox, who had been reading over his shoulder, said: ‘It’d be a peculiar thing if she’d worked Trehern up to doing the job and then got herself mistaken for the intended victim.’

‘It sounds very neat, Br’er Fox, but in point of fact, it’s lousy with loose ends. I can’t take it. Just let’s go through the other statements now.’

They did this and Fox sighed over the result. ‘I suppose so,’ he said and added, ‘I like things to be neat and they so seldom are.’

‘You’re a concealed classicist,’ Alleyn said. ‘We’d better go back to this ghastly diary. Read on.’

They had arrived at the final week. Rehearsals for the Festival. Animadversions upon Miss Emily. The incident of the Green Lady on Miss Emily’s desk. ‘He did it. K. I’m certain. And I’m glad, glad. She no doubt, suspects me. I refused to go. She finds she can’t order me about. To sit in that room with her and the two she has ruined! Never.’

Alleyn turned a page and there, facing them, was the last entry Miss Cost was to make in her journal.

‘Yesterday evening,’ Alleyn said. ‘After the debacle at the Spring.’

The thunderstorm, he was not surprised to find, was treated as a judgment. Nemesis, in the person of one of Miss Cost’s ambiguous deities, had decided to touch-up the unbelievers with six of the cosmic best. Among these offenders Miss Emily was clearly included but it emerged that she was not the principal object of Miss Cost’s spleen. ‘Laugh at your peril,’ she ominously wrote, ‘at the Great Ones.’ And, as if stung by this observation she continued, in a splutter of disjointed venom, to threaten some unnamed persons. ‘At last,’ she wrote. ‘After the agony of months, the cruelty and now, the final insult, at last I shall speak. I shall face both of them with the facts. I shall tell her what was between us. And I shall show that other one how I know. He – both – all of them shall suffer. I’ll drag their names through the papers. Now. Tonight. I am determined. It is the end.’

‘And so it was,’ Fox said, looking up over his spectacles. ‘Poor thing. Very sad, really, these cases. Do you see your way through all this, Mr Alleyn?’

‘I think I do, Br’er Fox. I’m afraid I do. And I’ll tell you why.’

He had scarcely begun, when Bailey, moving rather more quickly than he was wont, came through from the shop.

‘Someone for you, sir. A Miss Williams. She says it’s urgent.’

Alleyn went to the telephone.

Jenny sounded as if it was very urgent indeed.