Lady Lacklander put her little fat hands over her face. It was a gesture so out of key with the general tenor of her behaviour, that it was as shocking in its way as a bout of hysteria.

Alleyn said: ‘I think I understand. In the business of the railway concessions in Zlomce, was Sir Harold, while apparently acting in accordance with his instructions from the British Government, about to allow the German interest to get control?’

He saw that he was right and went on: ‘And at the most delicate stage of these negotiations at the very moment where he desired above all things that no breath of suspicion should be aroused, his private secretary goes out on a Central European bender and lets a German agent get hold of the contents of the vital cable which Sir Harold had left him to decode. Sir Harold is informed by his own government of the leakage. He is obliged to put up a terrific show of Ambassadorial rage. He has no alternative but to send for young Phinn. He accuses him of such things and threatens him with such disastrous exposures, such disgrace and ruin, that the boy goes out and puts an end to it all. Was it like that?’

He looked from one to the other.

‘It was like that,’ Lady Lacklander said. She raised her voice as if she repeated some intolerable lesson. ‘My husband writes that he drove Viccy Phinn to his death as surely as if he had killed him with his own hands. He was instructed to do so by his Nazi masters. It was then that he began to understand what he had done and to what frightful lengths his German associates could drive him. I knew, at that time, he was wretchedly unhappy, but put it down to the shock of Viccy’s death and – as I, of course, thought – treachery. But the treachery, Occy, was ours and your Viccy was only a foolish and tragically careless boy.’ She looked at Mr Phinn and frowned. ‘Yesterday,’ she said, ‘after your row with Maurice over the trout, he came to me and told me he’d left a copy of the amended Chapter 7 at your house. Why haven’t you produced it, Occy? Why just now did you try to stop me? Was it because –’

‘Dear me, no,’ Mr Phinn said very quietly, ‘not from any high-flown scruples, I assure you. It was, if you will believe me, in deference to my boy’s wishes. Before he killed himself, Viccy wrote to his mother and to me. He begged us to believe him innocent. He also begged us most solemnly, whatever the future might hold, never to take any action that might injure Sir Harold Lacklander. You may not have noticed, my dear Lady L., that my foolish boy hero-worshipped your husband. We decided to respect his wishes.’