‘Now if this is true,’ Alleyn said, ‘and again you don’t deny it, you have misinformed us about your movements. You let us understand that you returned to the Bottom Meadow just before you came to Hammer Farm at about one o’clock. But your coat was as dry as a chip. So it must have been much earlier in the evening before the rain that you returned to the bridge in the hope of retrieving the fish and found it gone. And knowing that the Colonel was fishing his own waters not far away, would you not seek him out? Now, if you did behave as I have suggested, you did so at a time when nobody saw you. That must have been after Lady Lacklander, Mrs Cartarette and Dr Lacklander had all gone home. Mrs Cartarette reached Hammer Farm at about five past eight and Dr Lacklander went home at eight-fifteen. Neither of them saw the trout. On my working hypothesis, then, you revisited the valley after eight-fifteen and, one would suppose, before a quarter to nine when Nurse Kettle did so. And there, Mr Phinn, in the willow grove you found Colonel Cartarette’s dead body with your mammoth trout beside it. And didn’t Nurse Kettle very nearly catch you in the willow grove?’

Mr Phinn ejaculated: ‘Has she said …’ and caught his voice back.

‘No,’ Alleyn said. ‘Not specifically. It is I who suggest that you hid and watched her and crept away when she had gone. I suggest, moreover, that when you bolted for cover, your reading spectacles were snatched from your hat by an envious sliver and that in your panic and your terror of being seen, you dared not look for them. Possibly you did not realize they had gone until you got home. And that’s why, after the rain, you stole out again – to try and find your glasses in case they were lost in a place where they might incriminate you. Then you saw the lights of Hammer Farm and dared go no further. You couldn’t endure the suspense of not knowing if the Colonel had been found. You drew nearer and Sergeant Oliphant’s torchlight shone in your eyes.’

Alleyn turned to the window and looked down at Mr Phinn’s spinney, at the upper reaches of the Chyne and at a glimpse, between trees, of the near end of the bridge.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is how I think you moved about the landscape yesterday evening and last night.’ Alleyn drew a pair of spectacles from the breast-pocket of his coat and dangled it before Mr Phinn. ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you have them back just yet. But’ – he extended his long finger towards Mr Phinn’s breast-pocket – ‘isn’t that a magnifying glass you have managed to unearth?’

Mr Phinn was silent.