DEDICATION

For Stella

MAP

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Nurse Kettle
Mr Octavius Danberry-Phinn		Of Jacob’s Cottage
Commander Syce
Colonel Cartarette		Of Hammer Farm
Rose Cartarette		His daughter
Kitty Cartarette		His wife
Sir Harold Lacklander Bt.		Of Nunspardon
Lady Lacklander		His wife
George Lacklander		Their son
Dr Mark Lacklander		George’s son
Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn
Detective-Inspector Fox		Of the CID New Scotland Yard
Detective-Sergeants Bailey and Thompson
Dr Curtis		Pathologist
Sergeant Oliphant		Of the Chyning Constabulary
PC Gripper
Sir James Punston		Chief Constable of Barfordshire

1. Swevenings

CHAPTER 1

Swevenings

Nurse Kettle pushed her bicycle to the top of Watt’s Hill and there paused. Sweating lightly, she looked down on the village of Swevenings. Smoke rose in cosy plumes from one or two chimneys; roofs cuddled into surrounding greenery. The Chyne, a trout stream, meandered through meadow and coppice and slid blamelessly under two bridges. It was a circumspect landscape. Not a faux-pas, architectural or horticultural, marred the seemliness of the prospect.

‘Really,’ Nurse Kettle thought with satisfaction, ‘it is as pretty as a picture.’ And she remembered all the pretty pictures Lady Lacklander had made in irresolute watercolour, some from this very spot. She was reminded, too, of those illustrated maps that one finds in the Underground, with houses, trees and occupational figures amusingly dotted about them. Seen from above, like this, Swevenings resembled such a map. Nurse Kettle looked down at the orderly pattern of field, hedge, stream, and land, and fancifully imposed upon it the curling labels and carefully naïve figures that are proper to picture-maps.

From Watt’s Hill, Watt’s Lane ran steeply and obliquely into the valley. Between the lane and the Chyne was contained a hillside divided into three strips, each garnished with trees, gardens and a house of considerable age. These properties belonged to three of the principal householders of Swevenings: Mr Danberry-Phinn, Commander Syce and Colonel Cartarette.

Nurse Kettle’s map, she reflected, would have a little picture of Mr Danberry-Phinn at Jacob’s Cottage surrounded by his cats, and one of Commander Syce at Uplands, shooting off his bow-and-arrow. Next door at Hammer Farm (only it wasn’t a farm now but had been much converted) it would show Mrs Cartarette in a garden chair with a cocktail shaker, and Rose Cartarette, her stepdaughter, gracefully weeding. Her attention sharpened. There, in point of fact, deep down in the actual landscape, was Colonel Cartarette himself, a lilliputian figure, moving along his rented stretch of the Chyne, east of Bottom Bridge, and followed at a respectful distance by his spaniel Skip. His creel was slung over his shoulder and his rod was in his hand.

‘The evening rise,’ Nurse Kettle reflected, ‘he’s after the Old ’Un.’ And she added to her imaginary map the picture of an enormous trout lurking near Bottom Bridge with a curly label above it bearing a legend: ‘The Old ’Un.’