Kitty drew in her breath noisily. Her gaze was fixed not on Nurse Kettle, but beyond Nurse Kettle’s left shoulder. Her face was stretched and stamped with terror. It was as if she had laid back her ears. She was looking down the garden towards the spinney.

Nurse Kettle turned.

The afternoon was far advanced and the men who had come up through the spinney cast long shadows across the lawn, reaching almost to Kitty herself. For a moment she and Alleyn looked at each other and then he came forward. In his right hand he carried a pair of very small old-fashioned shoes: brogues with spikes in the heels.

‘Mrs Cartarette,’ Alleyn said, ‘I am going to ask you if when you played golf with Sir George Lacklander he lent you his mother’s shoes. Before you answer me I must warn you –’

Nurse Kettle didn’t hear the usual warning. She was looking at Kitty Cartarette in whose face she saw guilt itself. Before this dreadful symptom her own indignation faltered and was replaced as it were professionally by a composed, reluctant and utterly useless compassion.

Epilogue

Epilogue

‘George,’ Lady Lacklander said to her son, ‘we shall, if you please, get this thing straightened out. There must be no reservations before Mark or’ – she waved her fat hand at a singularly still figure in a distant chair –’or Octavius. Everything will come out later on. We may as well know where we are now, among ourselves. There must be no more evasions.’

George looked up, and muttered: ‘Very well, Mama.’

‘I knew, of course,’ his mother went on, ‘that you were having one of your elephantine flirtations with this wretched unhappy creature. I was afraid that you had been fool enough to tell her about your father’s memoirs and all the fuss over Chapter 7. What I must know, now, is how far your affair with her may be said to have influenced her in what she did.’

‘My God!’ George said. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Did she hope to marry you, George? Did you say things like: “If only you were free” to her?’

‘Yes,’ George said, ‘I did.’ He looked miserably at his mother, and added: ‘You see, she wasn’t. So it didn’t seem to matter.’

Lady Lacklander snorted but not with her usual brio. ‘And the memoirs? What did you say to her about them?’

‘I just told her about that damned Chapter 7. I just said that if Maurice consulted her I hoped she’d sort of weigh in on our side. And I … When that was no use – I – I said – that if he did publish, you know, it’d make things so awkward between the families that we – well –’

‘All right. I see. Go on.’

‘She knew he had the copy of Chapter 7 when he went out. She told me that – afterwards – this morning. She said she couldn’t ask the police about it, but she knew he’d taken it.’