While Mr Phinn still hesitated, eyeing Alleyn and fingering his lips, Lady Lacklander made a brief comprehensive gesture with her short arms and said: ‘Roderick, my husband was a traitor.’

II

They made a strange group, sitting there on uncomfortable rustic benches. Fox took unobtrusive notes, Mr Phinn held his head in his hands, Lady Lacklander, immobile behind the great façade of her fat, talked and talked. Cats came and went gracefully indifferent to the human situation.

‘That,’ Lady Lacklander said, ‘is what you will find in Chapter 7.’ She broke off and, after a moment, said: ‘This is not going to be easy and I’ve no wish to make a fool of myself. Will you forgive me for a moment?’

‘Of course,’ Alleyn said, and they waited while Lady Lacklander, staring before her, beat her puff-ball palms on her knees and got her mouth under control. ‘That’s better,’ she said at last. ‘I can manage now.’ And she went on steadily. ‘At the time of the Zlomce incident my husband was in secret negotiation with a group of Prussian Fascists. The top group: the men about Hitler a British diplomat whose name’ – her voice creaked and steadied –’was above reproach in his own country. He was absolutely and traitorously committed to the Nazi programme.’ Alleyn saw that her eyes were bitter with tears. ‘They never found that out at your MI5, Roderick, did they?’

‘No.’

‘And yet this morning I thought that perhaps you knew.’

‘I wondered. That was all.’

‘So she didn’t say anything.’

‘She?’

‘Maurice’s wife. Kitty.’

‘No.’

‘You never know,’ she muttered, ‘with that sort of people what they may do.’

‘Nor,’ he said, ‘with other sorts either, it seems.’

A dark unlovely flush flooded her face.

‘The extraordinary thing,’ Mr Phinn said suddenly, ‘is why? Why did Lacklander do it?’

‘The herrenvolk heresy?’ Alleyn suggested. ‘An aristocratic Anglo-German alliance as the only alternative to war and communism and the only hope for the survival of his own class? It was a popular heresy at that time. He wasn’t alone. No doubt he was promised great things.’

‘You don’t spare him,’ Lady Lacklander said under her breath.

‘How can I? In the new Chapter 7, I imagine, he doesn’t spare himself.’

‘He repented bitterly. His remorse was frightful.’

‘Yes,’ Mr Phinn said. ‘That is clear enough.’

‘Ah, yes!’ she cried out. ‘Ah, yes, Occy, yes. And most of all for the terrible injury he did your boy – most of all for that.’

‘The injury?’ Alleyn repeated, cutting short an attempt on Mr Phinn’s part to intervene. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Phinn. We must have it.’

Lady Lacklander said: ‘Why do you try to stop me, Occy? You’ve read it. You must want to shout it from the roof-tops.’

Alleyn said: ‘Does Sir Harold exonerate Ludovic Phinn?’

‘Of everything but carelessness.’

‘I see.’