He had his back to the windows and Alleyn faced them. Sergeant Oliphant had come out of the spinney and stood at the foot of the garden. Alleyn moved up to the windows. The sergeant, when he saw him, put his thumb up and turned back into the trees.

Fox picked up the parcel of clothes.

Alleyn said: ‘We’ll call later for the statement. Or perhaps you would bring it to the police station in Chyning this evening?’

‘Very well.’ Mr Phinn swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘I would hardly desert my Glorious Fin. Would I?’

‘You did so before. Why shouldn’t you do so again?’

‘I am completely innocent.’

‘Grand. We mustn’t bother you any longer. Goodbye, then, until, shall we say, five o’clock in Chyning.’

They went out by a side door and down the garden to the spinney. The path wound downhill amongst trees to a stile that gave on to the River Path. Here Sergeant Oliphant waited for them. Alleyn’s homicide bag, which had been entrusted to the sergeant, rested on the stile. At the sound of their voices he turned and they saw that across his palms there lay a sheet of newspaper.

On the newspaper were the dilapidated remains of a trout.

‘I got ’er,’ said Sergeant Oliphant.

II

‘She was a short piece above the bridge on this side,’ explained the sergeant who had the habit of referring to inanimate but recalcitrant objects in the feminine gender. ‘Laying in some long grass to which I’d say she’d been dragged. Cat’s work, sir, as you can see by the teeth-marks.’

‘As we supposed,’ Alleyn agreed. ‘Mrs Thomasina Twitchett’s work.’

‘A nice fish, she’s been, say two pound, but nothing to the Old ’Un,’ said the sergeant.

Alleyn laid the paper and its contents on a step of the stile and hung fondly over it. Mrs Twitchett, if indeed it was she, had made short work of most of the Colonel’s trout, if indeed this was his trout. The body was picked almost clean, and some of the smaller bones had been chewed. The head appeared to have been ejected after a determined onslaught and the tail was semi-detached. But from the ribs there still depended some pieces of flesh and rags of skin that originally covered part of the flank and belly of the fish, and it was over an unlovely fragment of skin that Alleyn pored. He laid it out flat, using two pairs of pocket tweezers for the purpose, and with a long finger pointed to something that might have been part of an indented scar. It was about a quarter of an inch wide and had a curved margin. It was pierced in one place as if by a short spike.