‘How dare you!’ Nurse Kettle cried out. ‘Wicked! Wicked! Wicked!’ She heard herself grow shrill and in the very heat of her passion she remembered an important item in her code: Never Raise the Voice. So although she would have found it less difficult to scream like a train she did contrive to speak quietly. Strangely commonplace phrases emerged and Kitty, slant-eyed, listened to them. ‘I would advise you,’ Nurse Kettle quavered, ‘to choose your words. People can get into serious trouble passing remarks like that.’ She achieved an appalling little laugh. ‘Murdered the Colonel!’ she said, and her voice wobbled desperately. ‘The idea! If it wasn’t so dreadful it’d be funny. With what may I ask? And how?’

Kitty, too, had risen and milk dribbled from her ruined skirt to the terrace. She was beside herself with rage.

‘How?’ she stammered. ‘I’ll tell you how and I’ll tell you with what. With a golf club and his mother’s shooting-stick. That’s what. Just like a golf ball it was. Bald and shining. Easy to hit. Or an egg. Easy –’

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.’