“Oh, no,” said Alleyn lightly. “I only hoped you would. I’ve been a fair distance along this road already. It’s an uphill grade all the way, though you wouldn’t think it, and when we get to the hills it’s rather exciting.”

“You needn’t bother to make conversation.”

“Needn’t I? I rather fancy myself as a conversationalist. It’s part of my job.”

“In that case,” said Carolyn loudly, “you had better go on. You see, dear Mr. Alleyn, I do realise this is just a rather expensive and delicate approach to an interrogation.”

“I thought you would.”

“And I must say I do think it’s quite charming of you to take so much trouble over the setting. Those mountains are grand, aren’t they? So very up-stage and magnificent.”

“You should have seen them at 6 a.m.”

“Now you are being a Ruth Draper. They couldn’t have been any lovelier than they are at this moment, even with these depressing little bungalows in the foreground.”

“Yes, they were. They were so lovely I couldn’t look at them for more than a minute.”

“‘Mine eyes dazzle’?”

“Something like that. Why don’t you do some of those old things? The Maid’s Tragedy?”

‘Too hopelessly frank and straightforward for the Lord Chamberlain, and not safe enough for the box-office. I did think once of Millament, but Pooh said—” She stopped for a second. “Alfie thought it wouldn’t go.”

“Pity,” said Alleyn.

They drove on in silence for a few minutes. The tram-line ended and the town began to thin out into scattered groups of houses.

“Here’s the last of the suburbs,” said Alleyn. “There are one or two small townships and then we are in the country.”

“And at what stage,” asked Carolyn, “do we begin the real business of the day? Shall you break down my reserve with precipitous roads, and shake my composure with hairpin bends? And then draw up at the edge of a chasm and snap out a question, before I have time to recover my wits?”

“But why should I do any of these things? I can’t believe that my few childish inquiries will prove at all embarrassing. Why should they?”

“I thought all detectives made it their business to dig up one’s disreputable past and fling it in one’s face.”

“Is your past so disreputable?”

“There you go, you see.”

Alleyn smiled, and again there was a long silence. Alleyn thought Hambledon had been right when he said that Carolyn was too brave to be true. There was a determined and painful brightness about her, her voice was pitched a tone too high, her conversation sounded brittle, and her silences were intensely uncomfortable. “I’ll have to wait,” thought Alleyn.