‘It’ll be all right,’ he said gently.

‘All right!’ Florence bitterly ejaculated. ‘It doesn’t strike me as being all right, and I wonder you’ve the nerve to say so!’

As if Florence had put a match to her, Old Ninn exploded into fury. ‘You’re a bad girl, Floy,’ she said, trembling very much and leaning across the table. ‘Riddled through and through with wickedness and jealousy and always have been.’

‘Thank you very much, I’m sure, Mrs Plumtree,’ Florence countered with a shrill outbreak of laughter.

‘Everyone knows where your favour lies, Mrs Plumtree, especially when you’ve had a drop of port wine. You wouldn’t stop short of murder to back it up.’

‘Ninn,’ Richard said, before she could speak, ‘for the love of Mike, darling, shut up.’

She reached out her small knotted hands to Charles Templeton. ‘You speak for him, sir. Speak for him.’

Charles said gently: ‘You’re making too much of this, Ninn. There’s no need.’

‘There shouldn’t be the need!’ she cried. ‘And she knows it as well as I do.’ She appealed to Alleyn. ‘I’ve told you. I’ve told you. After Mr Richard came out I heard her. That wicked woman, there, knows as well as I do.’ She pointed a gnarled finger at the spray gun. ‘We heard her using that thing after everyone had warned her against it.’

‘How do you know it was the spray gun, Ninn?’

‘What else could it have been?’

Alleyn said: ‘It might have been her scent, you know.’

‘If it was! If it was, that makes no difference.’

‘I’m afraid it would,’ Alleyn said. ‘If the scent spray had been filled up with Slaypest.’

CHAPTER 7

Re-entry of Mr Marchant

The scent spray, the bottle and the Slaypest tin had assumed star quality. There they stood in a neat row, three inarticulate objects, thrust into the spotlight. They might have been so many stagehands, yanked out of their anonymity and required to give an account of themselves before an unresponsive audience. They met with a frozen reception.

Timon Gantry was the first to speak. ‘Have you,’ he asked, ‘any argument to support your extraordinary assumption?’

‘I have,’ Alleyn rejoined, ‘but I don’t propose to advance it in detail. You might call it a reductio ad absurdum. Nothing else fits. One hopes,’ he added, ‘that a chemical analysis of the scent spray will do something to support it. The supposition is based on a notion that while Mrs Templeton had very little reason, after what seems to have been a stormy interview, to deluge her plants and herself with insecticide, she may more reasonably be pictured as taking up her scent spray, and using that.’

‘Not full on her face,’ Bertie said unexpectedly. ‘She’d never use it on her face. Not directly. Not after she was made up. Would she, Pinky? Pinky – would she?’