He looked from Fox to Oliphant and the attentive Gripper.

‘When she got home,’ he said, ‘no doubt she at once bathed and changed. She put out her tweed skirt to go to the cleaners. Having attended very carefully to the heel, she then polished Lady Lacklander’s shoes. I think that heel must have worried her more than anything else. She guessed that Lacklander hadn’t told his mother he’d borrowed the shoes. As we saw this morning, she had no suitable shoes of her own and her feet are much smaller than her stepdaughter’s. She drove herself over to Nunspardon this morning and instead of ringing walked in and put the shoes in the downstairs cloakroom. I suppose Lady Lacklander’s maid believed her mistress to have worn them and accordingly packed them up with her clothes instead of the late Sir Harold’s boots which she had actually worn.’

Fox said: ‘When you asked for everybody’s clothes, Mrs Cartarette remembered, of course, that her skirt would smell of fish.’

‘Yes. She’d put it in the box for the dry cleaning. When she realized we might get hold of the skirt she remembered the great trout brushing against it. With a mixture of bravado and cunning which is, I think, very characteristic, she boldly told me it would smell of fish and had the nerve and astuteness to use Thomasina as a sort of near-the-truth explanation. She only altered one fact. She said she tried to take a fish away from a cat whereas she had given a fish to a cat. If she’d read her murdered husband’s book she’d have known that particular cat wouldn’t jump and the story was, in fact, a bit too fishy. The scales didn’t match.’

Oliphant said suddenly: ‘It’s a terrible thing to happen in the Vale. Terrible the things that’ll come out! How’s Sir George going to look?’

‘He’s going to look remarkably foolish,’ Alleyn said with some heat, ‘which is no more than he deserves. He’s behaved very badly as his mother has no doubt pointed out to him. What’s more, he’s made things beastly and difficult for his son, who’s a good chap, and for Rose Cartarette, who’s a particularly nice child. I should say Sir George Lacklander has let his side down. Of course he was no match at all for a woman of her hardihood: he’d have been safer with a puff-adder than Kitty Cartarette, née, heaven help her, de Vere.’

‘What, sir, do you reckon –?’ Oliphant began and, catching sight of his superior’s face, was silent.