So it must be, dear heart, I’ll not repine

  For while I live the Memory is Mine.

I should like to think that we know each other well enough for you to believe me when I say that I hope you won’t dream of answering this all-too-inadequate attempt to tell you how sorry I am.

Yours sincerely,

Percival Pyke Period

Alleyn folded the paper and looked at Miss Cartell. ‘But why,’ he said, ‘do you say that? Why do you say he must be mad?’

She waited so long, gaping at him like a fish, that he thought she would never answer. Then she made a fumbling, inelegant gesture towards the letter.

‘Because he must be,’ she said. ‘Because it’s all happening twice. Because he’s written it before. The lot. Just the same.’

‘You mean –? But when?’

‘This morning,’ Connie said and began rootling in the litter on her desk. ‘Before breakfast. Before I knew.’

She drew in her breath with a whistling noise. ‘Before anybody knew,’ she said. ‘Before they had found him.’

She stared at Alleyn, nodding her head and holding out a sheet of letter-paper.

‘See for yourself,’ she said miserably. ‘Before they had found him.’

Alleyn looked at the two letters. Except in one small detail they were, indeed, exactly the same.

CHAPTER 5

Postscript to a Party

Connie raised no objections to his keeping the letters and with them both in his pocket he asked if he might see Miss Ralston and Mr Leiss. She said that they were still asleep in their rooms and added, with a slight hint of gratification, that they had attended the Baynesholme festivities.

‘One of Desirée Bantling’s dotty parties,’ she said. ‘They go on till all hours. Moppett left a note asking not to be roused.’

‘It’s now one o’clock,’ Alleyn said, ‘and I’m afraid I shall have to disturb Mr Leiss.’

He thought she was going to protest but at that moment the Pekinese set up a petulant demonstration, scratching at the door and raising a crescendo of imperative yaps.

‘Clever boy!’ Connie said distractedly. ‘I’m coming!’ She went to the door. ‘I’ll have to see to this,’ she said. ‘In the garden.’

‘Of course,’ Alleyn agreed. He followed them into the hall and saw them out through the front door. Once in the garden the Pekinese bolted for a newly raked flowerbed.

‘Oh, no!’ Connie ejaculated. ‘After lunch,’ she shouted as she hastened in pursuit of her pet. ‘Come back later.’

The Pekinese tore round a corner of the house and she followed it.

Alleyn re-entered the house and went quickly upstairs.

On the landing he encountered Trudi, the maid, who showed him the visitors’ rooms. They were on two sides of a passage.

‘Mr Leiss?’ Alleyn asked.

A glint of feminine awareness momentarily transfigured Trudi’s not very expressive face.

‘He is sleeping,’ she said. ‘I looked at him. He sleeps like a god.’

‘We’ll see what he wakes like,’ Alleyn said, tipping her rather handsomely. ‘Thank you, Trudi.’