‘Good God, yes!’ George ejaculated automatically, without looking at Kitty.

‘It’s a possible explanation,’ Alleyn said as if it didn’t much matter either way.

Mark came back from the house. ‘The clothes,’ he said to Alleyn, ‘will be packed up and put in your car which has arrived, by the way. I rang up Hammer and asked them to keep back the things for the cleaner.’

‘Thank you so much,’ Alleyn said. He turned to Lady Lacklander. ‘I know you’ll understand that in a case like this we have to fuss about and try to get as complete a picture as possible of the days, sometimes even the weeks and months, before the event. It generally turns out that ninety-nine per cent of the information is quite useless and then everybody thinks how needlessly inquisitive and impertinent the police are. Sometimes, however, there is an apparently irrelevant detail that leads, perhaps by accident, to the truth.’

Lady Lacklander stared at him like a basilisk. She had a habit of blinking slowly, her rather white eyelids dropping conspicuously like shutters: a slightly reptilian habit that was disconcerting. She blinked twice in this manner at Alleyn, and said: ‘What are you getting at, my dear Roderick? I hope you won’t finesse too elaborately. Pray, tell us what you want.’

‘Certainly. I want to know if, when I arrived, you were discussing Sir Harold Lacklander’s memoirs.’

He knew by their very stillness that he had scored. It struck him, not for the first time, that people who have been given a sudden fright tend to look alike; a sort of homogeneous glassiness overtakes them.

Lady Lacklander first recovered from whatever shock they had all received.

‘In point of fact we were,’ she said. ‘You must have extremely sharp ears.’

‘I caught the name of my own publishers,’ Alleyn said at once. ‘Brierley and Bentwood. An admirable firm. I wondered if they are to do the memoirs.’

‘I’m glad you approve of them,’ she said dryly. ‘I believe they are.’

‘Colonel Cartarette was entrusted with the publication, wasn’t he?’

There was a fractional pause before Mark and Rose together said: ‘Yes.’

‘I should think,’ Alleyn said pleasantly, ‘that that would have been a delightful job.’

George, in a strangulated voice, said something about ‘Responsibility,’ and suddenly offered Alleyn a drink.

‘My good George,’ his mother said impatiently, ‘Roderick is on duty and will have none of your sherry. Don’t be an ass.’

George blushed angrily and glanced, possibly for encouragement, at Kitty.

‘Nevertheless,’ Lady Lacklander said, with a sort of grudging bonhomie, ‘you may as well sit down, Rory. One feels uncomfortable when you loom. There is, after all, a chair.’