‘This evening. I mean last evening, don’t I? He went out soon after seven. I think it was about ten past seven.’

‘Where did he go?’

She hesitated, and then said: ‘I believe to call on Mr Phinn. He took his rod and told me he would go on down to the Chyne for the evening rise. He said he wouldn’t come in for dinner and I asked for something to be left out for him.’

‘Do you know why he called on Mr Phinn?’

Rose waited for a long time and then said: ‘I think it had something to do with – with the publishing business.’

‘The publishing business?’

She pushed a strand of hair back and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. ‘I don’t know who could do such a thing to him,’ she said. Her voice was drained of all its colour. ‘She’s exhausted,’ Alleyn thought and against his inclination, decided to keep her a little longer.

‘Can you tell me, very briefly, what sort of pattern his life has taken over the last twenty years?’

Rose sat on the arm of her father’s chair. Her right arm was hooked over its back and she smoothed and resmoothed the place where his bald head had rested. She was quite calm and told Alleyn in a flat voice of the Colonel’s appointments as military attaché at various embassies, of his job at Whitehall during the war, of his appointment as military secretary to a post-war commission that had been set up in Hong Kong and finally, after his second marriage, of his retirement and absorption in a history he had planned to write of his own regiment. He was a great reader it seemed, particularly of the Elizabethan dramatists, an interest that his daughter had ardently shared. His only recreation apart from his books had been fishing. Rose’s eyes, fatigued by tears, looked for a moment at a table against the wall where a tray of threads, scraps of feathers and a number of casts was set out.

‘I always tied the flies. We made up a fly he nearly always fished with. I tied one this afternoon.’

Her voice trembled and trailed away and she yawned suddenly like a child.

The door opened and Mark Lacklander came in looking angry.

‘Ah, there you are!’ he said. He walked straight over to her and put his fingers on her wrist. ‘You’re going to bed at once,’ he said. ‘I’ve asked Nurse Kettle to make a hot drink for you. She’s waiting for you now. I’ll come and see you later and give you a nembutal. I’ll have to run into Chyning for it. You don’t want me again, I imagine?’ he said to Alleyn.

‘I do for a few minutes, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh!’ Mark said, and after a pause. ‘Well, yes, of course, I suppose you do. Stupid of me.’