The clear pallor of Decima’s face was again flooded with red. Alleyn thought, ‘Good Lord, she’s an attractive creature. I wonder what the devil she’s like.’ He saw, with discomfort, that she could not look at him. Fox made an uneasy noise in his throat and stared over the downs. Alleyn waited. At last Decima raised her eyes.

‘He was like that,’ she murmured.

Alleyn now saw a sort of furtiveness in Decima. She was no longer tense, her pose had changed and she offered him no challenge.

‘I suppose he couldn’t help it,’ she said, and then with a strange look from Alleyn to Fox she added, ‘It’s nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. You needn’t think ill of him. I was all right.’

In half a minute she had changed. The educational amenities provided by that superior mother had fallen away from her. She had turned into a rustic beauty, conscious of her power of provocation. The rumoured engagement to Will Pomeroy no longer seemed ridiculous. And, as if she had followed Alleyn’s thought, she said, ‘I’d be very glad if you wouldn’t say anything of this to Will Pomeroy. He knows nothing about it. He wouldn’t understand.’

‘I’ll sheer off it if it can be done. It was not the first time you’d had difficulty with Watchman?’

She paused and then said, ‘We hadn’t actually—come to blows before.’

‘Blows? Literally?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

She stood up. Alleyn thought she mustered her self-assurance. When she spoke again it was in a different key, ironically and with composure.

‘Luke,’ she said, ‘was amorous by habit. No doubt it was not the first time he’d miscalculated. He wasn’t in the least disconcerted. He—wasn’t in the least in love with me.’

‘No?’

‘It’s merely a squalid little incident which I had rather hoped to forget. It was, I suppose, very magnificent of Seb and Norman to lie about it, but the gesture was too big for the theme.’

‘Now she’s being grand at me,’ thought Alleyn. ‘We are back in St Margaret’s Hall.’

He said: ‘And Watchman had never made himself objectionable before that morning?’

‘I did not usually find him particularly objectionable.’

‘I intended,’ said Alleyn, ‘to ask you if he had ever made love to you before?’

‘I have told you he wasn’t in the least in love with me.’

‘I’m unlucky in my choice of words, I see. Had he ever kissed you, Miss Moore?’

‘This is very tedious,’ said Decima. ‘I have tried to explain that my acquaintance with Luke Watchman was of no interest or significance to either of us, or, if you will believe me, to you.’

‘Then why,’ asked Alleyn mildly, ‘don’t you give me an answer and have done with it?’