Nurse Kettle had finished her afternoon jobs in Swevenings but before she returned to Chyning she thought she should visit the child with the abscess in the gardener’s cottage at Hammer Farm. She felt some delicacy about this duty because of the calamity that had befallen the Cartarettes. Still, she could slip quietly round the house and down to the cottage without bothering anybody and perhaps the gardener’s wife would have a scrap or two of mournful gossip for her about when the funeral was to take place, and what the police were doing and how the ladies were bearing up, and whether general opinion favoured an early marriage between Miss Rose and Dr Mark. She also wondered privately what, if anything, was being said about Mrs Cartarette and Sir George Lacklander, though her loyalty to The Family, she told herself, would oblige her to give a good slap down to any nonsense that was talked in that direction.

Perhaps her recent interview with Commander Syce had a little upset her. It had been such a bitter and unexpected disappointment to find him at high noon so distinctly the worse for wear. Perhaps it was disappointment that had made her say such astonishingly snappish things to him; or, more likely, she thought, anxiety. Because, she reflected as she drove up Watt’s Hill, she was dreadfully anxious about him. Of course she knew very well that he had pretended to be prostrate with lumbago because he wanted her to go on visiting him and this duplicity, she had to admit, gave her a cosy feeling under her diaphragm. But Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn would have a very different point of view about the deception; perhaps a terrifying point of view. Well, there, she thought, turning in at the Hammer Farm drive, it was no good at her age getting the flutters. In her simple snobbishness she comforted herself with the thought that ‘Handsome Alleyn,’ as the evening papers called him, was the Right Sort by which Nurse Kettle meant the Lacklander as opposed to the Kettle or Fox or Oliphant sort or, she was obliged to add to herself, the Kitty Cartarette sort. As this thought occurred to her she compressed her generous lips. The memory had arisen of Commander Syce trying half-heartedly to conceal a rather exotic watercolour of Kitty Cartarette. It was a memory that, however much Nurse Kettle might try to shove it out of sight, recurred with unpleasant frequency.

By this time she was out of the car and stumping round the house by a path that ran down to the gardener’s cottage. She carried her bag and looked straight before her and she quite jumped when she heard her name called. ‘Hallo, there! Nurse Kettle!’

It was Kitty Cartarette sitting out on the terrace with a tea-table in front of her. ‘Come and have some,’ she called.