‘The final entry was made last night. In it she suggests that as a result of some undefined insult she is going to make public certain matters which are not specifically set out in that part of the diary but will not, I think, be difficult to arrive at when the whole document is reviewed. It may be that after she made this last entry, she wrote a letter to the Press. If so, it will be in the mailbag.’

‘Has it gone out yet?’ Patrick asked sharply.

‘I haven’t inquired,’ Alleyn said coolly.

‘It must be stopped.’

‘We don’t usually intercept Her Majesty’s mail.’

Barrimore said thickly: ‘You can bloody well intercept this one.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Dr Maine crisply.

‘By God, sir, I won’t take that from you. By God!’ Barrimore began, trying to get to his feet.

‘Sit down,’ Alleyn said. ‘Do you want to be taken in charge for assault? Pull yourself together.’

Barrimore sank back. He looked at his handkerchief, now drenched with blood. His face was bedabbled and his nose still ran with it. ‘Gimme ‘nother,’ he muttered.

‘A towel, perhaps,’ Miss Emily suggested. Jenny fetched one from the bathroom.

‘He’d better lie down,’ Dr Maine said impatiently.

‘I’ll be damned if I do,’ said the Major.

‘To continue,’ Alleyn said, ‘the facts that emerge from the diary and from the investigations are these. We now know the identity of the Green Lady. Miss Cost found it out for herself on 30th September of last year. She saw the impersonator repeating her initial performance for a concealed audience of one. She afterwards discovered who this other was. You will stay where you are, if you please, Major Barrimore. Miss Cost was unwilling to believe this evidence. She began, however, to spy upon the two persons involved. On 17th June of this year she took a photograph at the Spring.’

Dr Maine said: ‘I can’t allow this,’ and Patrick said: ‘No, for God’s sake!’

‘I would avoid it if I could,’ Alleyn said. ‘Mrs Barrimore, would you rather wait in the next room? Miss Williams will go with you, I’m sure.’

‘Yes, darling,’ Jenny said quickly. ‘Do.’

‘O no,’ she said. ‘Not now. Not now.’

‘It would be better,’ Patrick said.

‘It would be better, Margaret,’ Dr Maine repeated.

‘No.’

There was a brief silence. An emphatic gust of wind battered at the window. The lights flickered, dimmed and came up again. Alleyn’s hearers were momentarily united in a new uneasiness. When he spoke again, they shifted their attention back to him with an air of confusion.

‘Miss Cost,’ he was saying, ‘kept her secret to herself. It became, I think, an obsession. It’s clear from other passages in her diary that some time before this discovery, she had conceived an antagonism for Major Barrimore. The phrases she uses suggest that it arose from the reaction commonly attributed to a woman scorned.’