‘Who’s had it?’

‘I dunno. I haven’t.’

‘It really doesn’t matter, Mr Pomeroy,’ said Alleyn. ‘It’s bled itself clean. If I may have a bit of this lint and an inch of the strapping. Perhaps there wasn’t any iodine?’

‘‘Course there wurr,’ said Abel. ‘Yurr’s lil’ bed whurr it lay. Damme, who’s been at it? Mrs Ives!’

He stumped out and could be heard roaring angrily about the back premises.

Alleyn put a bit of lint over his finger and Miss Darragh stuck it down with strapping. He went upstairs, carrying his own glass of sherry and Fox’s. Fox was standing before the looking-glass in his room knotting a sober tie. He caught sight of Alleyn in the glass.

‘Lucky I brought my blue suit,’ said Fox, ‘and lucky you brought your dress clothes, Mr Alleyn.’

‘Why didn’t you let me tell Colonel Brammington that we’d neither of us change, Foxkin?’

‘No, no, sir. It’s the right thing for you to dress, just as much as it’d be silly for me to do so. Well, it’d be an affected kind of way for me to act, Mr Alleyn. I never get a black coat and boiled shirt on my back except at the Lodge meetings and when I’m on a night-club job. The colonel would only think I was trying to put myself in a place where I don’t belong. Did you find what you wanted, Mr Alleyn?’

‘Abel bought another first-aid set, two days before Watchman died. The iodine has been taken. He can’t find it.’

‘Is that so?’

Fox brushed the sleeves of his coat and cast a final searching glance at himself in the glass. ‘I washed that razor blade,’ he said.

‘Thank you, Fox. I was a little too free with it. Bled all over Abel’s bar. Most convincing. What’s the time? Half-past seven. A bit early yet. Let’s think this out.’

‘Right oh, sir,’ said Fox. He lifted his glass of sherry. ‘Good luck, Mr Alleyn,’ he said.

II

Decima had promised to come to Coombe Head at eight o’clock. Cubitt lay on the lip of the cliff and stared at the sea beneath him, trying, as Alleyn had tried, to read order in the hieroglyphics traced by the restless seaweed. The sequence was long and subtle, unpausing, unhurried. Each pattern seemed significant but all melted into fluidity, and he decided, as Alleyn had decided, that the forces that governed these beautiful but inane gestures ranged beyond the confines of his imagination. He fell to appraising the colour and the shifting tones of the water, translating these things into terms of paint, and he began to think of how, in the morning, he would make a rapid study from the lip of the cliff.