‘She knows what to do,’ he muttered, ‘if she wants to stop me. Or rather she doesn’t. I wouldn’t tell her,’ Commander Syce added in a deeper voice than Alleyn could have imagined him to produce, ‘I wouldn’t mention it to her on any account whatsoever, never.’

‘I’m afraid you really are very tight.’

‘It’s the last time so early: in future I’m going to wait till the sun’s over the yard arm. It happens to be a promise.’

‘To Miss Kettle?’

‘Who else?’ Syce said grandly. ‘Why not?’

‘An admirable idea. Was it,’ Alleyn asked, ‘on Miss Kettle’s account, by any chance, that you pretended to have lumbago last evening?’

‘Who else’s,’ admitted Syce who appeared to have got into one unchangeable gear. ‘Why not?’

‘Does she know?’

Fox muttered something undistinguishable, and Syce said: ‘She guessed.’ He added wretchedly: ‘We parted brass rags.’

‘You had a row about it?’ Alleyn ventured.

‘Not about that. About that.’ He indicated the tumbler. ‘So I promised. After today. Yard arm.’

‘Good luck to it.’

With the swiftest possible movement Alleyn whisked the arrow from the golf bag and held it under Syce’s nose. ‘Do you know anything about that?’ he asked.

‘That’s mine. You took it away.’

‘No. This is another of your arrows. This was found in Bottom Meadow at the foot of Watt’s Hill. If you examine it you’ll see there’s a difference.’

Alleyn whipped the cover off the tip of the arrow. ‘Look,’ he said.

Syce stared owlishly at the point.

‘Bloody,’ he observed.

‘Looks like it. What blood? Whose blood?’

Syce thrust his fingers distractedly through his thin hair. ‘Cat’s blood,’ he said.

IV

This was the selfsame arrow, Commander Syce urged, with which some weeks ago he had inadvertently slain the mother of Thomasina Twitchett. He himself had found the body and in his distress had withdrawn the arrow and qast it from him into the adjacent bushes. He had taken the body to Mr Phinn who had refused to accept his explanation and apologies and they had parted, as Commander Syce again put it, brass rags.

Alleyn asked him if he did not consider it at all dangerous to fire off arrows at random into his neighbours’ spinneys and over them. The reply was confused and shamefaced. More by surmise and conjecture than by any positive means, Alleyn understood Syce to suggest a close relationship between the degree of his potations and the incontinence of his archery. At this juncture he became moros and they could get no more out of him.

‘It appears,’ Alleyn said as they drove away, ‘that when he’s completely plastered he gets a sort of cupid fixation and looses off his shafts blindly into the landscape with a classic disregard for their billets. It’s a terrifying thought, but I suppose his immediate neighbours have learnt to look after themselves.’

‘I’m afraid,’ Fox said heavily, ‘she’s bitten off more than she can chew. I’m afraid so.’