‘January 13th: I cannot yet believe in my good fortune. My emotion is rather one of humility and wonder than of exaltation. I cannot but think I have made too much of her singular kindness, yet when I recollect, as I do continually, her sweetness and her agitation, I must believe she loves me. It is very strange, for what a poor thing I am, creeping about with my heart my enemy: her equal in nothing but my devotion, and even in that confused and uncertain. I mistrust Florence. She interpreted very shrewdly the scene she interrupted, and I fear she may conclude it to be the latest of many; she cannot believe it to be, as in fact it is, the first of its kind…Her strange and most unwelcome attentiveness, the watch she keeps upon me, her removal of Terence; these are signs that cannot be misread.’

Alleyn read on quickly, reaching the sentence he had lighted upon when he first opened the book. Behind the formal phrases he saw Arthur Rubrick, confused and desperately ill, moved and agitated by the discovery of Terence Lynne’s attachment to him, irked and repelled by his wife’s determined attentions. Less stylized phrases began to appear at the end of the day’s record. ‘A bad night.’ ‘Two bad turns today.’ A few days before his wife was killed, he had written: ‘I have been reading a book called “Famous Trials”. I used to think such creatures as Crippen must be monsters, unbalanced and quite without the habit of endurance by which custom inoculates the normal man against intolerance, but am now of a different opinion. I sometimes think that if I could be alone with her and at peace I might recover my health…’ On the night of Florence’s death, he had written: ‘It cannot go on like this. I must not see her alone. Tonight, when we met by chance, I was unable to obey the rule I had set myself. It is too much for me.’

There were no other entries.

Alleyn closed the book, shifted his position a little and switched off his torch. Cautiously he adjusted the covering over his head to leave a peephole for his right eye and, like a trained actor, dismissed all senses but one from his mind. He listened. Markins, a few inches away, whispered, ‘Now then, sir.’

The person who moved across the frozen ground towards the wool-shed did so very slowly. Alleyn was aware, not so much of footsteps as of interruptions in the silence, interruptions that might have been mistaken for some faint disturbance of his own eardrums. They grew more definite and were presently accompanied by a crisp undertone when occasionally the advancing feet brushed against stivered grass. Alleyn directed his gaze through his peephole towards that part of the darkness where the sacking should be.