He collected his key at the office and went up to his room. It was now a quarter past three. Miss Emily would still be having her siesta. In an hour and forty-five minutes, Detective-Inspector Fox, Detective-Sergeant Bailey and Detective-Sergeant Thompson would arrive. Curtis, the pathologist, would be driving to Dunlowman under his own steam. Coombe had arranged for Dr Maine to meet him there. The nearest mortuary was at Dunlowman. Alleyn would be damned glad to see them all.

He unpacked his suitcase and began to write his notes on hotel paper. It was the first time he’d ever embarked on a case without his regulation kit and he felt uncomfortable and amateurish. He began to wonder if, after all, he should hand over to Fox or somebody else. Triumph for the gallant Major, he thought.

For a minute or two he indulged in what he knew to be fantasy. Was it, in the smallest degree, remotely possible that Miss Emily, inflamed by Miss Cost’s activities, could have seen her approaching, bolted into the enclosure, hidden behind the boulder and under a sudden access of exasperation, hurled a rock at Miss Cost’s umbrella? It was not. But supposing for a moment that it was? What would Miss Emily then have done? Watched Miss Cost as she drowned in the pool; as her hair streamed out over the fall; as her dress inflated and deflated in the eddying stream? Taken another bit of rock, and scraped out her own footprints and walked back to The Boy-and-Lobster? And, where, all that time, was the Major? What became of his admission that he tore down the notice and threw it away? Suppose there was an arrest and a trial and defending council used Miss Emily as a counterblast? Could her innocence be established? Only, as things stood, by the careful presentation of the Major’s evidence and the Major thought, or pretended to think, she was guilty. And, in any case, the Major was a chronic alcoholic.

He got up and moved restlessly about the room. A silly, innocuous print of anemones in a mug, had been hung above the bed. He could have wrenched it down and chucked it, with as much fury as had presumably inspired the Major, into the wastepaper basket.