‘That sounds perfectly splendid,’ said Alleyn and followed Harper into the police station.

They sat down in Harper’s office while he got out his files. Alleyn looked at the photographs of past superintendents, at the worn linoleum and varnished wood-work, and he wondered how many times he had sat in country police stations waiting for the opening gambit of a case that, for one reason or another, had been a little too much for the local staff. Alleyn was the youngest chief-inspector at the Central Branch of New Scotland Yard, but he was forty-three. ‘I’m getting on,’ he thought without regret. ‘Old Fox must be fifty, he’s getting quite grey. We’ve done all this so many times together.’ And he heard his own voice as if it was the voice of another man, uttering the familiar phrases.

‘I hope we won’t be a nuisance to you, Nick. A case of this sort’s always a bit tiresome isn’t it? Local feeling and so on.’

Harper clapped a file down on his desk, threw his head back and looked at Alleyn from under his spectacles.

‘Local feeling?’ he said. ‘Local stupidity! I don’t care. They work it out for themselves and get a new version every day. Old Pomeroy’s not the worst, not by a long chalk. The man’s got something to complain about or thinks he has. It’s these other experts, George Nark and Co, that make all the trouble. Nark’s written three letters to the Illington Courier. The first was about finger-printing. He called it the Bertillion system, of course, ignorant old ass, and wanted to know if we’d printed everyone who was there when Watchman died. So I got him round here and printed him. So he wrote another letter to the paper about the liberty of the subject and said the South Devon constabulary were a lot of Hitlers. Then Oates, the Coombe PC, found him crawling about outside Pomeroy’s garage with a magnifying class and kicked him out. So he wrote another letter saying the police were corrupt. Then the editor, who ought to know better, wrote a damn-fool leader, and then three more letters about me appeared. They were signed, “Vigilant”, “Drowsy” and “Moribund”. Then all the pressmen who’d gone away came back again. I don’t care. What of it? But the CC began ringing me up three times a day and I got fed up and suggested he asked you and he jumped at it. There’s the file.’

Alleyn and Fox hastened to make sympathetic noises.

‘Before we see the file,’ Alleyn said, ‘we’d very much like to hear your own views. We’ve looked up the report on the inquest so we’ve got the main outline or ought to have it.’

‘My views?’ repeated Mr Harper moodily. ‘I haven’t got any. I don’t think it was an accident.’

‘Don’t you, now!’