‘Indeed? How I wish I could be of some help. I have spent a perfectly wretched night – such of it as remained to me – fretting and speculating, you know. A murderer in the Vale! Really, if it wasn’t so dreadful there would be a kind of grotesque humour in the thought. We are so very respectable in Swevenings. Not a ripple, one would have thought, on the surface of the Chyne!’

He flinched and made the sort of grimace that is induced by a sudden twinge of toothache.

‘Would one not? What,’ Alleyn asked, ‘about the Battle of the Old ’Un?’

Mr Phinn was ready for him. He fluttered his fingers. ‘Nil nisi,’ he said, with rather breathless airiness, ‘and all the rest of it but, really, the Colonel was most exasperating as an angler. A monument of integrity in every other respect, I dare say, but as a fly-fisherman I am sorry to say there were some hideous lapses. It is an ethical paradox that so noble a sport should occasionally be wedded to such lamentable malpractices.’

‘Such,’ Alleyn suggested, ‘as casting under a bridge into your neighbour’s preserves?’

‘I will defend my action before the Judgment Seat and the ghost of the sublime Walton himself will thunder in my defence. It was entirely permissible.’

‘Did you and the Colonel,’ Alleyn said, ‘speak of anything else but this – ah – this ethical paradox?’

Mr Phinn glared at him, opened his mouth, thought perhaps of Lady Lacklander and shut it again. Alleyn for his part, remembered, with exasperation, the law on extrajudicial admissions. Lady Lacklander had told him there had been a further discussion between the two men, but had refused to say what it was about. If Mr Phinn should ever come to trial for the murder of Maurice Cartarette or even if he should merely be called to give evidence against someone else, the use by Alleyn of the first of Lady Lacklander’s statements and the concealment of the second, would be held by a court of law to be improper. He decided to take a risk.

‘We have been given to understand,’ he said, ‘that there was in fact a further discussion.’

There was a long silence.

‘Well, Mr Phinn?’

‘Well. I am waiting.’

‘For what?’

‘I believe it is known as the Usual Warning,’ Mr Phinn said.

‘The police are only obliged to give the usual warning when they have decided to make an arrest.’

‘And you have not yet arrived at this decision?’

‘Not yet.’