Connie Cartell had risen to her feet. She made an extraordinary gesture with her weather-chapped bandaged hand.

‘You can’t prove it,’ she said. ‘You haven’t got the gloves.’

At that moment a loud and confused rumpus broke out in the garden. There was a cry of frustration and a yelp of pain. The Pekinese leapt from Connie’s embrace.

A body crashed against the French windows. They burst open to admit Pixie, immensely overwrought and carrying some object in her mouth. She was closely followed by Alfred Belt.

Alleyn shouted: ‘Shut those windows.’ Alfred did so and stood in front of them, panting noisily.

With an expertise borne of their early training, Alleyn and Fox seized, respectively, Pixie and Li. Alleyn thrust his thumbs into the corners of Pixie’s slavering mouth.

Her plaything dropped to the floor. Alfred, gasping for breath, stammered: ‘In the garden, sir. Here. Ran her to earth. Digging.’

Moppett cried out: ‘Lennie! Lennie! Look! They’re your gloves!’

Alleyn said to Bimbo: ‘Catch hold of this dog.’

‘I’ll be damned if I do.’

‘I do her,’ said Trudi.

She dragged Pixie from the room.

Alleyn stooped to retrieve the gloves. He unrolled them. The leather in the palms had been torn and fragments of string hung loose from the knitted backs. The thumb of the left hand glove was discoloured with blood. He began to turn it inside out. As he did so, Connie Cartell screamed.

It was a shocking sound, scarcely less animal than the canine outcry that had preceded it. Her mouth remained open and for a moment she looked like a mask for a Fury. Then she plunged forward and when Fox seized her, screamed again.

The lining of the thumb showed a fragment of blackened and blood-stained cotton-wool and smelt quite distinctly of the black ointment used for girth-gall.

CHAPTER 8

Period Piece

Mr Pyke Period reclined on his library sofa, nibbling calves’-foot jelly and giving audience to Alleyn, Nicola and Andrew. He had just prevailed upon Dr Elekton to allow him downstairs. Wan though he was, he might nevertheless have been suspected of enjoying himself.

‘It’s so utterly dreadful,’ he said. ‘One cannot believe it. Connie! One knows, of course, that she has the reputation of a thruster in the hunting field, but I’ve always thought of her as just another of those fatiguing women who shout and laugh. Rather stupid, in fact.’

‘She is,’ Alleyn conceded, ‘a very stupid woman. But she has the cunning of her stupidity, I’m afraid.’

‘And all for that wretched girl! I fear,’ Mr Period said, ‘that I may have precipitated matters, I mean, by suggesting that the girl should come and see me. The thing was, my dear fellow, I woke on that dreadful night and I heard that tune being whistled somewhere outside. And voices: hers and that appalling young man’s. And when you described what must have been done, I thought they were responsible.’

‘But,’ Alleyn pointed out, ‘you decided not to tell me about this?’