‘Not very.’ Alleyn was silent for a moment or two. ‘I saw her a week ago,’ he said, ‘ on the last night of that play of Richard Dakers’s that’s been running so long. It was a flimsy, conventional comedy, but she filled it with her own kind of gaiety. And now – to this favour is she come.’ He looked more closely. ‘Could the stuff have blown back in her face? But you tell me they say the windows were shut?’

‘That’s right.’

‘The face and chest are quite thickly spattered.’

‘Exactly. I wondered,’ Fox said, ‘if the spray gun mechanism on the Slaypest affair was not working properly and she turned it towards her to see.’

‘And it did work? Possible, I suppose. But she’d stop at once and look at her. Just look, Fox. There’s a fine spray such as she’d get if she held the thing at arm’s length and didn’t use much pressure. And over that there are great blotches and runnels of the stuff, as if she’d held it close to her face and pumped it like mad.’

‘People do these things.’

‘They do. As a theory I don’t fancy it. Nobody’s handled the Slaypest tin? Since the event?’

‘They say not,’ Fox said.

‘Bailey’ll have to go over it for dabs, of course. Damn this scent. You can’t get a whiff of anything else.’

Alleyn bent double and advanced his nose to the tin of Slaypest. ‘I know this stuff,’ he said. ‘It’s about as highly concentrated as they come, and in my opinion shouldn’t be let loose on the public for all the warnings on the label. The basic ingredient seems to be hexa-ethyl-tetra-phosphate.’

‘You don’t say,’ Fox murmured.

‘It’s a contact poison and very persistent.’ He replaced the sheet, got up and examined the bank of growing plants in the bay window. ‘Here it is again. They’ve got thrips and red spider.’ He stared absently at Fox. ‘So what does she do, Br’er Fox? She comes up here in the middle of her own party wearing her best red wisp of tulle and all her diamonds and sets about spraying her azaleas.’

‘Peculiar,’ Fox said. ‘What I thought.’

‘Very rum indeed.’

He wandered to the dressing-table. The central drawer was pulled out. Among closely packed ranks of boxes and pots was an open powder bowl. A piece of cotton-wool coloured with powder lay on the top of the table near a lipstick that had been imperfectly shut. Nearby was a bunch of Parma violets, already wilting.

‘She did have a fiddle with her face,’ Alleyn pointed out. ‘She’s got a personal maid, you say. The woman that found her.’

‘Florence.’