‘Ha, ha,’ he said, laughing hollowly. Sensing perhaps that this was a strange beginning he began again: ‘Look here!’ he shouted. ‘Good lord! Only just heard. Sickening for you. Are you all right? Not too upset and all that? What a thing!’

Nurse Kettle was greatly comforted. She had feared an entirely different reaction to Kitty Cartarette’s arrest in Commander Syce.

‘What about yourself?’ she countered. ‘It must be a bit of a shock to you, after all.’

He made a peculiar dismissive gesture with the white object he carried.

‘Never mind me. Or rather,’ Commander Syce amended, dragging feverishly at his collar, ‘if you can bear it for a moment …’

She now saw that the object was a rolled paper. He thrust it at her. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing, whatever. Don’t say a word.’

She unrolled it, peering at it in the dusk. ‘Oh,’ she cried in an ecstasy, ‘how lovely! How lovely! It’s my picture-map! Oh, look! There’s Lady Lacklander, sketching in Bottom Meadow. And the doctor with a stork over his head. Aren’t you a trick? And there’s me – only, you’ve been much too kind about me. ‘She leant out of the window turning her lovely map towards the fading light. This brought her closish to Commander Syce, who made a singular little ejaculation and was motionless. Nurse Kettle traced the lively figures through the map – the landlord, the parson, various rustic celebrities. When she came to Hammer Farm, there was the gardener’s cottage and his child, and there was Rose bending gracefully in the garden. Nearer the house, one could see even in that light, Commander Syce had used thicker paint.

As if, Nurse Kettle thought with a jolt, there had been an erasure.

And down in the willow grove, the Colonel’s favourite fishing haunt, there had been made a similar erasure.

‘I started it,’ he said, ‘some time ago – after your – after your first visit.’

She looked up, and between this oddly-assorted pair a silence fell.

‘Give me six months,’ Commander Syce said. ‘To make sure. It’ll be all right. Will you?’

Nurse Kettle assured him that she would.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My most grateful thanks to Michael Godby M.A. (Oxon) for his learned advice in the matter of scales, to Eileen Mackay, to Eskdale Moloney and, as ever, to Vladimir and Anita Muling without whom …

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dame Ngaio Marsh was born in New Zealand in 1895 and died in February 1982. She wrote over 30 detective novels and many of her stories have theatrical settings, for Ngaio Marsh’s real passion was the theatre. She was both actress and producer and almost single-handedly revived the New Zealand public’s interest in the theatre. It was for this work that the received what she called her ‘damery’ in 1966.

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