‘Of course he’s all right. I’ll take a look at him.’

She returned with him to the bedroom and stood by the window while Curtis stooped over his patient. It was a brilliant morning. The channel was dappled with sequins. The tide was low and three people walked over the causeway: an elderly woman, a young man and a girl. Five boats ducked and bobbed in Fisherman’s Bay. The hotel launch was still jammed in the understructure of the jetty and looked inconsequent and unreal, suspended above its natural element. A complete write-off, it was thought.

‘You’re doing fine,’ Curtis said.

‘Where’s Troy?’

‘Here, darling.’

‘Good. What happened?’

‘You were knocked out,’ Curtis said. ‘Coombe and two other chaps managed to fish you up.’

‘Coombe?’

‘Fox rang him from the hotel as soon as you’d set off on your wild goose chase. They were on the jetty.’

‘Oh yes. Yelling. Where’s Fox?’

‘You’d better keep quiet for a bit, Rory. Everything’s all right. Plenty of time.’

‘I want to see Fox, Curtis.’

‘Very well, but only for one moment.’

Troy fetched him.

‘This is more like it now,’ Fox said.

‘Have you found him?’

‘We have, yes. Yesterday evening, at low tide.’

‘Where?’

‘About four miles along the coast.’

‘It was deliberate, Fox.’

‘So I understand. Coombe saw it.’

‘Yes, well now, that’s quite enough,’ said Curtis.

Fox stepped back.

‘Wait a minute,’ Alleyn said. ‘Anything on him? Fox? Anything on him?’

‘All right. Tell him.’

‘Yes, Mr Alleyn, there was. Very sodden. Pulp almost, but you can make it out. The top copy of that list and the photograph.’

‘Ah!’ Alleyn said. ‘She gave them to him. I thought as much.’

He caught his breath and then closed his eyes.

‘That’s right,’ Curtis said. ‘You go to sleep again.’

III

‘My sister, Fanny Winterbottom,’ said Miss Emily, two days later, ‘once remarked with characteristic extravagance (nay, on occasion, vulgarity), that, wherever I went, I kicked up as much dust as a dancing dervish. The observation was inspired more by fortuitous alliteration than by any degree of accuracy. If, however, she were alive to-day, she would doubtless consider herself justified. I have made disastrous mischief in Portcarrow.’

‘My dear Miss Emily, aren’t you, yourself, falling into Mrs Winterbottom’s weakness for exaggeration? Miss Cost’s murder had nothing to do with your decision on the future of the Spring.’

‘But it had,’ said Miss Emily, smacking her gloved hand on the arm of Superintendent Coombe’s rustic seat. ‘Let us have logic. If I had not persisted with my decision, her nervous system, to say nothing of her emotions (at all times unstable), would not have been exacerbated to such a degree that she would have behaved as she did.’