‘Jenny and Patrick. I should have said “the young” I expect. Will you come in.’

He could hardly recognize the woman he had seen in her garden, veering this way and that like a rudderless ship and unable to control her hands. She sat perfectly still and allowed him to look at her while she kept her own gaze on her quietly, interlaced fingers.

He supposed she must have had a hand in the transformation of the old bar-parlour into a private living-room: if so she could have taken little interest in the process. Apart from the introduction of a few unexceptionable easy-chairs, one or two photographs, a noncommittal assembly of books and a vase of the flowers she had so mishandled in the garden, it must be much as it was two years ago: an impersonal room.

Alleyn began by following the beaten paths of routine investigation. He tried to establish some corroboration of her alibi, though he did not give it this name, for the period covered by Miss Emily’s visit to the enclosure up to the probable time of Miss Cost’s death. There was none to be had. Nobody had visited the kitchen-dining-room while she drank her coffee and ate her toast. The servants were all busy in the main building. Jenny and Patrick had breakfasted in the public dining-room, her husband was presumably asleep. Alleyn gathered that they occupied separate rooms. She had no idea how long this solitary meal had lasted. When it was over she had attended to one or two jobs, interviewed the kitchen staff and then gone up to her room and changed from a housecoat to a day dress. When she came downstairs again she had found the young people in the parlour. Alleyn had arrived soon afterwards.

‘And for the rest of the morning,’ he asked casually, ‘did you go out at all?’

‘No farther than the garden,’ she said after a fractional pause. ‘I went into the garden for a time.’

‘To cut flowers?’ he suggested, looking at those in the room.

She lifted her eyes to his for a moment. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘to cut flowers. I do the flowers on Sunday as a rule: it takes quite a time. Jenny helped me,’ she added as an afterthought.

‘In the garden?’

Again the brief look at him, this time perhaps, fractionally less controlled. ‘No. Not in the garden. In the house. Afterwards.’

‘So you were alone in the garden?’

She said quickly with the slight hesitation he had noticed before in her speech: ‘Yes. Alone. Why d-do you keep on about the garden? What interest can it have for you? It was after – afterwards. Long afterwards.’

‘Yes, of course. Did the news distress you very much, Mrs Barrimore?’