Lastly she took a manilla envelope file and wrote the name Clarissa lisle in capitals on the cover, taking care to make the letters neat and even. She had often thought that this was the most satisfying part of a new investigation, a moment of hope spiced with anticipatory excitement, the pristine folder and crisp lettering themselves symbolic of a fresh beginning. She glanced through her notebook before adding it to the folder. Except for Sir George and his briefly seen wife, her companions on the island were still only names, a roll-call of putative suspects: Simon Lessing, Roma Lisle, Rose Tolgarth, Ambrose Gorringe; Ivo Whittingham; sounds written on paper but holding the promise of discovery, of challenge, of the fascinating variety of human personality. And all of them, Clarissa Lisle's stepson, her cousin, her dresser, her host, her friend, circling like planets round that central golden figure.

She spread out the twenty-three quotations on the table to study them before filing them in the case folder in the order of their receipt by Miss Lisle. Then she took from her shelf her two volumes of quotations, the paperback Penguin Dictionary of Quotations and the second edition of the Oxford Dictionary. As she had expected, all the passages appeared in one or the other, all but three in the paperback. Almost certainly that had been the dictionary used; it could be bought in almost any bookshop and its size would make it easy to conceal and light to carry about. To select the quotations would take no great trouble or time, merely a look at the index under death or dying or a quick read through the forty-five pages devoted to the plays of Shakespeare, the two which covered Marlowe and Webster. And it would not be too difficult to discover which plays Clarissa Lisle had appeared in. She had been a member of the Malvern Repertory Company for three years and Shakespeare and the

Jacobean dramatists were its forte. Any programme note covering her career, then or later, would list her main appearances. But it was a safe bet that, given the exigencies of a Shakespearean production with the resources, of a medium-sized repertory company, she would have had at least a walking-on part in all the plays.

Only two of the quotations which she had tentatively identified as Webster were not in the Penguin Dictionary. But these could be found by studying the texts. All the quotations were familiar; she herself had had no difficulty in recognizing most of them even if she wasn't always sure of the play. But typing them accurately from memory was another matter. In each passage the lines were set out correctly and the punctuation was faultless; another reason for concluding that the typist had worked with the Penguin Dictionary at his or her elbow.

Next she studied them under her magnifying glass, wondering as she did so how much scientific attention the Metropolitan Police had thought it worth while to give them. As far as she could judge only three were typed on the same machine. The quality as well as the size of the letters varied; some were uneven, others faint or partly broken. The typing wasn't particularly expert; the work of someone who was used to a machine, perhaps for his own correspondence, but didn't type professionally. She thought that none had been typed on an electric typewriter. And who would have access to twenty different machines? Obviously someone who dealt in second-hand typewriters or someone who owned or worked in a secretarial school. It was unlikely to be a secretarial agency; the quality of the machines wasn't good enough. And it needn't necessarily be a secretarial school. Probably most modern comprehensives taught shorthand and typing; what was to prevent any member of the staff, whatever his or her subjects, from staying after school hours and making private use of the machines?

And there was another way in which the messages could have been produced and one which she thought the most likely. She had bought cheap second-hand machines for her own Agency, visiting the shops and showrooms where they were chained on display and trying them out, moving unhindered and unregarded from machine to machine. Anyone armed with a pad of paper and the Dictionary of Quotations could have provided himself – or herself- with a sufficient supply to keep the menace going, making a series of short visits to a variety of shops in districts where he was unlikely to be recognized. A reference to the Yellow Pages of the telephone directory would show him where to find them.

Before filing the messages in the folder she looked closely at the one which Sir George had told her had been typed on his machine. Was it her imagination that the skull and crossbones had been drawn by a different, a more careful, less assured ? Certainly the heads of the two crossing bones were differently shaped and slightly larger than in the other examples, the skull more broad. The differences were small, but she thought significant. The drawings of the other skulls and the coffin were practically identical. And the quotation itself, typed with erratic spacing of the letters, had no venom in its admonition:

On pain of death let no man name death to me: It is a word infinitely terrible.

It wasn't a quotation known to her and she couldn't find it in the Penguin Dictionary. Webster, she thought, rather than Shakespeare; perhaps The White Devil or The Devil's Law Case. The punctuation looked accurate enough although she would have expected a comma after the first word 'death'. Perhaps this quotation had been remembered not looked up; certainly it had been typed by a different and less expert hand. And she thought she knew whose.

The remaining quotations varied in the degree of their menace. Christopher Marlowe's bleak despair,

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place; for where we are is hell, And where hell is, must we ever be could only doubtfully be described as a death threat although its stark contemporary nihilism might well be unwelcome to a nervous recipient. The only other Marlowe quotation, received six weeks earlier,

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, And then thou must be damned perpetually!

was direct enough but the threat had proved baseless: Clarissa had lived out more than her hour. But it seemed to Cordelia that, since these earlier messages, the quotations had increased in menace, had been selected to build up to some kind of climax from the sinister threat typed underneath a coffin;

I wish you joy o' the worm

to the brutally explicit lines from King Henry VI:

Down, down to hell; and say I sent thee thither.

Seen together, the sonorous reiteration of death and hatred was oppressive, the silly childish drawings limned with menace. She began to understand what this carefully organized programme of intimidation might do to a sensitive and vulnerable woman, to any woman come to that, darkening the mornings, making terrible such ordinary events as the arrival of the post, a letter on the hall salver, a note pushed under the door. It was easy to advise the victim of a poison pen to flush the messages down the lavatory like the rubbish they were. But in all societies there was an atavistic fear of the malevolent power of a secret adversary, working for evil, willing one to failure, perhaps to death. There was a horrible and rather frightening intelligence at work here, and it wasn't pleasant to think that the person responsible might be one of that small group who would be with her on Courcy Island, that the eyes which would meet hers over the dining-table could be hiding such malignancy. For the first time she wondered whether Clarissa Lisle could be right, whether there really was a threat to her life. Then she put the thought aside, telling herself that the messages were beginning to exercise their malevolence even on her. A murderer did not advertise his intention over a period of months. But was that necessarily true? To a mind consumed with hatred, might not the act of killing be too swift, too momentary in its satisfaction? Could Clarissa Lisle have an enemy so bitter that he needed to watch her suffer, to destroy her slowly with terror and failure before he moved in for the kill?