‘I’m extremely sorry. Would you lend your hot bottle? Take it along to his room, would you? Ah, there’s the cotton-wool. Thanks so much.’

He took it from her and turned to her glass. As he dabbed the wool on his jaw he watched her reflection. Her back was towards him. She stooped over the bed. When she moved aside, the bedclothes had been pulled up and the book was no longer on the table.

‘Here’s the bottle,’ she said, holding it out.

‘Will you be an angel and take it yourself? I’m just fixing this blasted cut.’

‘Mr Alleyn,’ she said loudly, and he turned to face her. ‘I’d rather you staunched your wounds in your own room,’ said Miss Lynne.

‘Please forgive me, I was trying to save my collar. Of course.’

He went to the door. ‘Terry!’ Ursula called quietly down the passage.

‘I’m off,’ said Alleyn. He crossed the landing to his own room. ‘Terry!’ Ursula called again. ‘Yes, coming,’ said Miss Lynne, and carrying the candle and her hot-water bottle she moved swiftly down the passage, observed by Alleyn through the crack of his own door.

‘Every blasted move in the game goes wrong,’ he thought and darted back to her room.

The book, a stoutly-bound squat affair, had been thrust well down between the sheets. It fell open in his hands and he read a single long sentence.

‘February 1st, 1942.

‘Since I am now assured of her affection towards me I must confess that the constant unrest of this house and (if I am to be honest in these pages, of Florence herself) under which I have for so long been complaisant, is now quite intolerable to me.’

Alleyn hesitated for a moment. A card folder slipped from between the pages. He opened it and saw the photograph of a man with veiled eyes, painfully compressed lips, and deep grooves running from his nostrils to beyond the corners of his mouth. The initials AR were written at the bottom in the same fine strokes that characterized the script in the book.

‘So that was Arthur Rubrick,’ Alleyn thought, and returned the photograph and the diary to their hiding-place.

Before he left Miss Lynne’s room, Alleyn took an extremely rapid look at her shoes. All except one pair were perfectly neat and clean. Her gardening brogues, brushed, but unpolished, were dry. He closed the door behind him as the voices of the two girls sounded in the passage. He found them at the head of the stairs in conference with Mrs Aceworthy, a formidable figure in mottled flannel, which she drew unhappily about her when she saw Alleyn. He persuaded her, with some difficulty, to return to her room.

‘I am going to Fabian,’ said Ursula. ‘How are we going to carry him upstairs?’