‘What’s that?’ Williams asked, startled.

‘Prints that have escaped the boots of the drain-layers, suggest a large dog.’

‘Pixie,’ said Sergeant Raikes who had been silent for a considerable time.

‘Oh!’ said Superintendent Williams disgustedly. ‘Her.’

‘It’s a dirty great mongrel of a thing, Mr Alleyn,’ Raikes offered. ‘The deceased gentleman called it a boxer. He was in the habit of bringing it out here before he went to bed, which was at one o’clock, regular as clockwork. It’s a noisy brute. There have been,’ Raikes added, sounding a leitmotiv, ‘complaints about Pixie.’

‘Pixie,’ Alleyn said, ‘must be an athletic girl. She jumped the ditch. There are prints if you can sort them out. But have a look at Cartell’s right hand, Elekton, would you?’

Dr Elekton did so. ‘There’s a certain amount of contusion,’ he said, ‘with ridges. And at the edges of the palm, well-defined grooves.’

‘How about a leather leash, jerked tight?’

‘It might well be.’

‘Now the stanchion, Fox.’

Fox leaned over from his position on the hard surface of the lane. He carefully lifted and removed the stanchion. Handling it as if it was some fragile objet d’art, he said: ‘There are traces, Mr Alleyn. Lateral rubbings. Something dragged tight and then pulled away might be the answer.’

‘So it’s at least possible that as Cartell dropped, Pixie jumped the drain. The lead jerked. Pixie got entangled with the stanchion, pulled it loose, freed herself from it and from the hand that had led her, and made off. The lantern fell in the drain. Might be. Where is Pixie, does anyone know?’

‘Shall I inquire at the house?’ Raikes asked.

‘It can wait. All this is the most shameless conjecture, really.’

‘To me,’ Williams said, considering it, ‘it seems likely enough.’

‘It’ll do to go on with. But it doesn’t explain,’ Alleyn said, ‘why the wick in the lantern’s been turned hard off, does it?’

‘Is that a fact!’ Raikes remarked, primly.

‘This stanchion,’ said Williams, who had been looking at it. ‘Have you noticed the lower point? You’d expect it to come out of the soil clean or else dirty all round. But it’s dirty on one side and sort of scraped clean on the other.’

‘You’ll go far in the glorious profession of your choice.’

‘Come off it!’ said Williams, who had done part of his training with Alleyn.

‘Look at the ground where that great walloping pipe was laid out. That, at least, is not entirely obliterated by boots. See the scars in the earth on this side? Slanting hole with a scooped depression on the near side.’

‘What of them?’

‘Try it, Fox.’

Fox, who was holding the stanchion by its top, laid the pointed end delicately in one of the scars. ‘Fits,’ he said. ‘There’s your lever, I reckon.’

‘If so the mud on one side was scraped off on the pipe. Wrap it up and lay it by. The flash and dabs boys will be here any moment now. We’ll have to take casts, Br’er Fox.’