‘You see, Oliphant,’ Alleyn said with his customary air of diffidence, ‘at the outset it tied up with what all of you told me about the Colonel himself. He was an unusually punctilious man. “Oddly formal,” the Chief Constable said, “and devilishly polite, especially with people he didn’t like or had fallen out with.” He had fallen out with the Lacklanders. One couldn’t imagine him squatting on his haunches and going on with his job if Lacklander or his mother turned up in the punt. Or old Phinn with whom he’d had a flaring row. Then, as you and Gripper pointed out, the first injury had been the sort of blow that is struck by a quarryman on a peg projecting from a cliff face at knee-level, or by an underhand service. Or, you might have added, by a golfer. It seemed likely, too, that the murderer knew the habit of the punt and the contra-current of the Chyne, and the fact that where the punt came to rest in the willow grove bay, it was completely masked by trees. You will remember that we found one of Mrs Cartarette’s distinctive yellow hairpins in the punt in close association with a number of cigarette butts, some with lipstick and some not.’

‘Ah,’ Sergeant Oliphant said. ‘Dalliance, no doubt.’