Alleyn saw that she was looking at him with a new interest and had a premonition of what was to come.

‘That’d be one of the high-ups, wouldn’t it? Chief Inspector who? I don’t seem to have caught the name.’

Any hopes he may have entertained that his connection with Troy was unknown to her vanished when she repeated his name, clapped her hand over her mouth and ejaculating ‘Coo! That’s a good one,’ burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter.

‘Pardon me,’ she said presently, ‘but when you come to think of it it’s funny. You can’t get away from it, you know, it’s funny. Seeing it was her that—Well, of course! That’s how you knew about the paint on the banisters.’

‘And what,’ Alleyn asked, ‘is the connection between Sir Cedric Ancred and the paint on the banisters?’

‘I’m not going to give myself away,’ said Miss Orrincourt, ‘nor Ceddie either, if it comes to that. Ceddie’s pretty well up the spout anyway. If he’s let me down he’s crazy. There’s a whole lot of things I want to know first. What’s all this stuff about a book? What’s the idea? Is it me, or is it everybody else in this dump that’s gone haywire? Look! Somebody puts a dirty little book in a cheese-dish and serves it up for lunch. And when they find it, what do these half-wits do? Look at me as if I was the original hoodunit. Well, I mean to say, it’s silly. And what a book! Written by somebody with a lisp and what about? Keeping people fresh after they’re dead. Give you the willies. And when I say I never put it in the cheese-dish what do they do? Pauline starts tearing herself to shreds and Dessy says, “We’re not so foolish as to suppose you’d want to run your head in a noose,” and Milly says she happens to know I’ve read it, and they all go out as if I was something the cat’d brought in, and I sit there wondering if it’s me or all of them who ought to be locked up.’

‘And had you ever seen the book before?’

‘I seem to remember,’ she began, and then looking from Alleyn to Fox with a new wariness, she said sharply: ‘Not to notice. Not to know what it was about.’ And after a pause she added dully: ‘I’m not much of a one for reading.’

Alleyn said: ‘Miss Orrincourt, will you without prejudice tell me if you personally were responsible for any of the practical jokes other than the ones already under discussion?’