Syce didn’t answer. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat and stared out of the window.

‘I’m afraid,’ Alleyn said, ‘I shall have to press this a little further. In a word I must ask you if you were not in fact on terms of the greatest intimacy with Miss de Vere, as she was then.’

‘Bloody impertinence.’

‘Well, yes. But so, when one comes to think of it, is murder.’

‘What the hell are you driving at?’

‘Ah!’ Alleyn exclaimed with one of his very rare gestures, ‘how footling all this is! You know damn’ well what I’m driving at. Why should we stumble about like a couple of maladroit fencers? See here. I’ve information from the best possible sources that before she was married you were living with Mrs Cartarette in Singapore. You yourself have told me you introduced her to Cartarette. You came back here and found them man and wife: the last thing, so you told me, that you had intended. All right. Cartarette was murdered last night in the Bottom Meadow and there’s a hole in his head that might have been made by an arrow. You gave out that you were laid by with lumbago but you were heard twanging away at your sixty-pound bow when you were supposed to be incapacitated on your bed. Now, send for your solicitor if you like and refuse to talk till he comes, but for the love of Mike don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m driving at.’

‘Great grief!’ Syce exclaimed with exactly the same inflection he had used of cats, ‘I liked Cartarette.’

‘You may have liked Cartarette, but did you love his wife?’

‘Love,’ Syce repeated, turning purple. ‘What a word!’

‘Well, my dear man – put it this way. Did she love you?’

‘Look here, are you trying to make out that she egged me on or – or – I egged her on or any perishing rot of that sort! Thompson,’ Commander Syce shouted angrily, ‘and Bywaters, by God!’

‘What put them into your head, I wonder? The coincidence that he was a seafaring man and she, poor woman, an unfaithful wife?’

‘A few more cracks like that and I bloody well will send for a solicitor.’

‘You are being difficult,’ Alleyn said without rancour. ‘Will you let me have the clothes you were wearing last evening?’

‘What the hell for?’

‘For one thing to see if Cartarette’s blood is on them.’

‘How absolutely piffling.’

‘Well, may I have them?’

‘I’m wearing them, blast it.’

‘Would you mind wearing something else?’

Commander Syce fixed his intensely blue and slightly bloodshot eyes on a distant point in the landscape, and said: ‘I’ll shift.’

‘Thank you. I see you’ve been using this as a bed-sitting-room during, no doubt, your attack of lumbago. Perhaps for the time being you could shift into your dressing-gown and slippers.’