He hung up. The porter was agog. Alleyn produced a ten-shilling note. ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘can you keep quiet about this? I don’t want people to collect. Be a good chap, will you, and get Sergeant Pender on the telephone. Ask him to come to the Spring. Say the message is from Mr Coombe. Will you do that? And don’t talk.’

He slid the note across the desk and left.

As he returned by the footpath, he saw a car drive along the foreshore to the causeway. A man with a black bag in his hand got out.

Coombe, waiting by the gate, was peering into the enclosure.

‘I may have broken the slot-machine,’ Alleyn said. But it worked and they went through.

He had dragged the body on to the verge of the pool and masked it, as well as he could, by the open umbrella.

Coombe said: ‘Be damned, when I saw that brolly, if I didn’t think I’d misheard you and it was the other old – Miss Pride.’

‘I know.’

‘How long ago, d’you reckon?’

‘I should have thought about an hour. We’ll see what the doctor thinks. He’s on his way. Look at this, Coombe.’

The neck was rigid. He had to raise the body by the shoulders before exposing the back of the head.

‘Well, well,’ said Coombe. ‘Just fancy that, now. Knocked out, fell forward into the pool and drowned. That the story?’

‘Looks like it, doesn’t it? And, see here.’

Alleyn lifted a fold of the dripping skirt. He exposed Miss Cost’s right hand, bleached and wrinkled. It was rigidly clenched about a long string of glittering beads.

‘Cor!’ said Coombe.

‘The place is one solid welter of footprints but I think you can pick hers: leading up to the shelf. The girl dropped the beads yesterday from above, I remember. They dangled over this ledge, half in the pool. In the stampede nobody rescued them.’

‘And she came back? To fetch them?’

‘It’s a possibility, wouldn’t you think? There’s her handbag on the shelf.’

Coombe opened it. ‘Prayer-book and purse,’ he said.

‘When’s the first service?’

‘Seven, I think.’

‘There’s another at nine. She was either going to church or had been there. That puts it at somewhere before seven for the first service. Or round about eight-forty-five if she had attended it or was going to the later one. When did it stop raining? About eight-thirty, I think. If those are her prints, they’ve been rained into and she’d got her umbrella open. Take a look at it.’