‘I’m not answering any questions. I don’t know what’s going on here. A girl’s got to look after herself. I thought I had one friend in this crazy-gang, now I’m beginning to think he’s let me down.’

‘I suppose,’ said Alleyn, wearily, ‘you mean Sir Cedric Ancred?’

‘Sir Cedric Ancred,’ Miss Orrincourt repeated with a shrill laugh. ‘The bloody little baronet. Excuse my smile, but honestly it’s a scream.’ She turned her back on them and walked out, leaving the door open.

They could still hear her laughing with unconvincing virtuosity as she walked away down the corridor.

‘Have we,’ Fox asked blandly, ‘got anywhere with that young lady? Or have we not?’

‘Not very far, if anywhere at all,’ Alleyn said, morosely. ‘I don’t know about you, Fox, but I found her performance tolerably convincing. Not that impressions of that sort amount to very much. Suppose she did put arsenic in the old man’s hot milk, wouldn’t this be the only line she could reasonably take? And at this stage of the proceedings, when I still have a very faint hope that we may come across something that blows their damn’ suspicions to smithereens, I couldn’t very well insist on anything. We’ll just have to go mousing along.’

‘Where to?’ Fox asked.

‘For the moment, in different directions. I’ve been carrying you about like a broody hen, Foxkin, and it’s time you brought forth. Down you go and exercise the famous technique on Barker and his retinue of elderly maids. Find out all about the milk, trace its whole insipid history from cow to Thermos. Inspire gossip. Prattle. Seek out the paper-dump, the bottle-dump, the mops and the pails. Let us go clanking back to London like a dry canteen. Salvage the Thermos flask. We’ll have to try for an analysis but what a hope! Get along with you, Fox. Do your stuff.’

‘And where may I ask, Mr Alleyn, are you going?’

‘Oh,’ said Alleyn, ‘I’m a snob. I’m going to see the baronet.’

Fox paused at the doorway. ‘Taking it by and large, sir,’ he said, ‘and on the face of it as it stands, do you reckon there’ll be an exhumation?’

‘There’ll be one exhumation at all events. Tomorrow, if Dr Curtis can manage it.’

‘Tomorrow!’ said Fox, startled. ‘Dr Curtis? Sir Henry Ancred?’

‘No,’ Alleyn said, ‘the cat, Carabbas.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Spotlight on Cedric

ALLEYN INTERVIEWED CEDRIC in the library. It was a place without character or life. Rows of uniform editions stood coldly behind glass doors. There was no smell of tobacco, or memory of fires, only the darkness of an unused room.