‘And no prints?’ he said, looking at Bailey.

‘There’s prints from the people that found him,’ Bailey said, ‘clear enough. Man and woman. Overlapping and straightforward … walk towards, squat down, stand, walk away. And there’s his own heel marks, Mr Alleyn, as you noticed last night. Half-filled with surface drainage they were then, but you can see how he was, clear enough.’

‘Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘Squatting on a bit of soft ground. Facing the stream. He’d cut several handfuls of grass with his knife and was about to wrap up that trout. There’s the knife, there’s the grass in his hands and there’s the trout! A whopper if ever there was one. Sergeant Oliphant says the Colonel himself hooked and lost him some days ago.’

He stooped and slipped an exploratory finger into the trout’s maw. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘it’s still there. We’d better have a look at it.’

His long fingers were busy for a minute. Presently they emerged from the jaws of the Old ’Un with a broken cast. ‘That’s not a standard commercial fly,’ he said. ‘It’s a beautiful home-made one. Scraps of red feather and gold cloth bound with bronze hair, and I think I’ve seen its mates in the Colonel’s study. Rose Cartarette tied the flies for her father and I fancy this is the one he lost when he hooked the Old ’Un on the afternoon before Sir Harold Lacklander’s death.’

Alleyn looked at the Colonel’s broken head and blankly acquiescent face. ‘But you didn’t hook him this time,’ he said, ‘and why in the world should you shout, at half-past seven, that you wouldn’t be seen dead with him, and be found dead with him at nine?’

He turned towards the stream. The willow grove sheltered a sort of miniature harbour with its curved bank going sheer down to the depth of about five feet at the top end of the little bay and running out in a stony shelf at the lower end. The stream poured into this bay with a swirling movement, turning back upon its course.

Alleyn pointed to the margin of the lower bank of the bay. It carried an indented scar running horizontally below the lip.

‘Look here, Fox,’ Alleyn said, ‘and here, above it.’ He nodded at a group of tall daisies, strung along the edge of the bank upstream from where the Colonel lay and perhaps a yard from his feet. They were in flower. Alleyn pointed to three leggy stems, taller than their fellows, from which the blooms had been cut away.

‘You can move him,’ he said. ‘But don’t tramp over the ground more than you can help. We may want another peer at it. And, by the way, Fox, have you noticed that inside the willow grove, near the point of entry, there’s a flattened patch of grass and several broken and bent twigs. Remember that Nurse Kettle thought she was observed. Go ahead, Oliphant.’