‘I only had two other goes of it,’ he said at last, rousing himself. ‘One was in the ship. I was supposed to be resting in my deck-chair. Ursy says she found me climbing. This time it was up the companionway to the boat-deck. I don’t know if I told you that when I caught my packet at Dunkirk I was climbing up a rope ladder into a rescue ship. I’ve sometimes wondered if there’s a connection. Ursy couldn’t get me to come down so she stayed with me. I wandered about, it seems, and generally made a nuisance of myself: I got very angry about something and said I was going to knock hell out of Flossie. A point to remember, Mr Alleyn. I think I’ve mentioned before that Flossie’s ministrations in the ship were very agitating and tiresome. Ursy seems to have kept me quiet. When I came up to the surface she was there and she helped me get back to my cabin. I made her promise not to tell Flossie. The ship’s doctor was generally tight so we didn’t trouble him either.

‘Then the last go. The last go. I suppose you’ve guessed. It was on what your friend in the force calls the Night In Question. It was, in point of fact, while I was among the vegetable marrows hunting for Flossie’s brooch. Unhappily, this time Ursy was not there.

‘I suppose,’ Fabian said, shifting his position and looking at his hands, ‘that I’d walked about, with my nose to the ground, for so long that I’d upset my equilibrium or something. I don’t know. All I do know is that I heard the two girls having their argument in the bottom path and then without the slightest warning there was the black-out and, after the usual age of nothingness, that abominable, that disgusting sense of coming up to the surface. There I was at the opposite end of the vegetable garden, under a poplar tree, feeling like death and bruised all over. I heard Uncle Arthur call out, “Here it is. I’ve found it.” I heard the others exclaim and shout to each other and then to me. So I pulled myself together and trotted round to meet them. It was almost dark by then. They couldn’t see my face which I dare say was bright green. Anyway, they were all congratulating themselves over the blasted brooch. I trailed indoors after them and genteelly sipped soda water while they drank hock and Uncle Arthur’s whisky. He was pretty well knocked up himself, poor old thing. So I escaped notice, except—’