Alleyn walked past the shearing-board or floor. The wall opposite was a five-foot-high partition separating the indoor pens from the rest of the shed. Further along, behind the press, this wall was extended up towards the roof. At some time a nail had been driven through it from the other side and the point, now rusty, projected close to the wool-press. He stopped to look at it. The machines still thrummed and the sheep plunged and skidded as they were hauled out of the pens. The work went on but Alleyn thought that the men knew exactly what he was doing. He straightened up. Above the rusty nail there ran a cross beam in the wall on which anybody intending to mount the press might find foothold. Round the nail they had found a thread of Flossie’s dress material. The apex of the tear in her dress had been uppermost, so it had been caused by an upward pull. ‘As she climbed the press,’ thought Alleyn, ‘not when her assailant disposed of the body. It was too securely bound and the press opens from the front. He would truss the body, then clear the tramped wool out of the pack, leaving only the bottom layer, then open the front of the press and get the body into the bale, then would begin the repacking. But where was she when he struck her? A downward blow from behind near the base of the skull and grazing the back of the neck. Was she bent forward, her hands on the press? Stooping to free her dress? Was she in the act of climbing down from the press to speak to him, her feet already on the floor, her back towards him? That seemed most likely,’ he thought.

Near the wool-press a hurricane lantern hung from a nail in the wall. Further along, to the left, a rough candlestick hammered out of tin was nailed high up on a joist. It held a guttered stump of candle. A box of matches stood beside it. These appointments had been there at the time of the tragedy. Had Flossie lit the lantern or the candle? Surely. It was dusk outside and the wool-shed must have been in darkness. How strange, he thought, as the image of a tiny indomitable woman, lit fantastically, grew in his imagination. There she must have stood, in semi-darkness, shouting out the phrases of which Terence Lynne and Fabian Losse had grown weary, while her sharp voice echoed in the emptiness. ‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ How far had she got? What did her assailant hear as he approached? Was he—or she—actually an audience, stationed by Flossie at the far end of the shed, to mark the resonant phrases? Or did he creep in under cover of the darkness and wait until she descended? With the branding iron grasped in his right hand? Behind her and to her right, the inside pens had been crowded with sheep waiting for the next day’s shearing, too closely packed to do more than shift a little and tap with their small hooves on the slatted floor. Did they bleat at all, Alleyn wondered, when Flossie tried her voice? ‘Ladies and gentlemen.’ ‘Ba-a-a.’ From where he stood Alleyn could see slantwise through the five portholes and the open doorway at the end of the shearing-board. The sun was bright on the sheep-pens outside. But when Florence Rubrick stood on the wool-press it had been almost dark outside, the portholes must have been shut and the sacking curtain dropped over the doorway. The main doors of the shed had been shut that night and a heap of folded wool bales that had fallen across the floor, inside the main entrance, had not been disturbed; the murderer, then, had come in by this sacking door. Did Flossie see the sacking drawn aside and a black silhouette against the dusk? Or did he, perhaps, crawl in through one of the portholes, unobserved. ‘Ladies and gentlemen. It gives me great pleasure…’