‘He was taking the bitch for a walk,’ she said, after a pause. ‘Brought it into the house, like a fool, and of course, Li became hysterical and bit me, poor little chap. I’ve fixed it up with girth-gall stuff,’ she added, ‘it smells a bit, but it’s good.’

‘Did Mr Cartell meet anybody else during his call, do you remember?’

With a manner that was at once furtive and anxious she said: ‘Not that I know. I mean, I didn’t see anything.’ She might have been a great elderly schoolgirl caught on the hop. ‘He was here when I came in,’ she added. ‘I don’t know who he’d seen.’

‘Miss Cartell,’ Alleyn said, ‘I’m anxious to find out if your brother had any enemies. I expect that sounds rather melodramatic, but I’m afraid it’s unavoidable. Is there, do you know, anyone who had cause, for any reason, however trivial, to dislike or fear him?’

She waited much too long before she said: ‘No one in particular,’ and then after a pause: ‘he wasn’t awfully popular, I suppose. I mean he didn’t make friends with people all that easily.’ She reached down her blunt ill-kept hand to the Pekinese and fondled it. ‘He was a dry old stick,’ she said. ‘You know. Typical solicitor: I used to tell him he had ink instead of blood in his veins.’

She broke into one of her ungainly laughs and blew her nose on a man’s handkerchief.

‘There was a luncheon party,’ Alleyn said, ‘wasn’t there? Yesterday, at Mr Pyke Period’s house?’

Instead of answering him she suddenly blurted out: ‘But I thought it was an accident! The way they told me. It sounded like an accident.’

‘Who told you?’

‘P.P.,’ she said. ‘Alfred told him and he told me. He made it sound like an accident.’

‘The odds against,’ Alleyn said, ‘are considerable.’

‘Why?’

Everything about her was dull; her face, her manner, her voice. He wondered if she was really attending to him.

‘Because,’ he said, ‘accident would imply at least two lots of people behaving independently like dangerous hoodlums at the same spot with different objectives.’

‘I don’t follow that,’ said Miss Cartell.

‘Never mind, just tell me about the luncheon party. There were you and your adopted niece and Miss Nicola Maitland-Mayne and Mr Leonard Leiss. And, of course, your brother and Mr Period. Is that right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What did you talk about?’

Nicola had given him a pretty full account of the luncheon party. Miss Cartell was much less explicit. She described the Pixie incident with one or two dismal hoots of retrospective laughter and she dwelt, disjointedly, upon Mr Period’s references to blue blood and polite behaviour. She was clearly very ill at ease.

‘He’s got a bee in his bonnet over that sort of thing,’ she said. ‘My brother ragged him about it and he got jolly ratty. You could see. Can’t take a joke.’

‘What sort of joke?’ Alleyn ventured.