‘Thank you,’ Alleyn said, taking it. ‘I don’t want to loom any more than I can help, you know, but you can’t expect me to be all smiles and prattle when you, as a group, close your ranks with such a deafening clank whenever I approach you.’

‘Nonsense,’ she rejoined briskly, but a dull colour actually appeared under her weathered skin and for a moment there was a fleeting likeness to her son. Alleyn saw that Rose Cartarette was looking at him with a sort of anguished appeal and that Mark had taken her hand.

‘Well,’ Alleyn said cheerfully, ‘if it’s all nonsense I can forget all about it and press on with the no doubt irrelevant details. About the autobiography for instance. I’m glad Mr Phinn is not with us at the moment because I want to ask you if Sir Harold gives a full account of young Phinn’s tragedy. He could scarcely, one imagines, avoid doing so, could he?’

Alleyn looked from one blankly staring face to another. ‘Or could he?’ he added.

Lady Lacklander said: ‘I haven’t read my husband’s memoirs. Nor, I think, has anyone else except Maurice.’

‘Do you mean, Lady Lacklander, that you haven’t read them in their entirety or that you haven’t read or heard a single word of them?’

‘We would discuss them. Sometimes I could refresh his memory.’

‘Did you discuss the affair of young Ludovic Phinn?’

‘Never!’ she said very loudly and firmly, and George made a curious noise in his throat.

Alleyn turned to Kitty and Rose.

‘Perhaps,’ he suggested, ‘Colonel Cartarette may have said something about the memoirs?’

‘Not to me,’ Kitty said, and added: ‘Too pukka sahib.’

There was an embarrassed stirring among the others.

‘Well,’ Alleyn said, ‘I’m sorry to labour the point, but I should like to know, if you please, whether either Sir Harold Lacklander or Colonel Cartarette ever said anything to any of you about the Ludovic Phinn affair in connection with the memoirs.’

‘Damned if I see what you’re getting at!’ George began, to the dismay, Alleyn felt sure, of everybody who heard him. ‘Damned if I see how you make out my father’s memoirs can have anything to do with Maurice Cartarette’s murder. Sorry, Kitty. I beg pardon, Rose. But I mean to say!’