“It’s a tidy stretch, sir. You’ll be proper warmed up.”

“We’re not only warm but dry,” said Alleyn.

“Ripe for a pint, I dessay, sir?”

“A glorious thought,” said Alleyn.

Mr. Nark cleared his throat. Abel threw a glance of the most intense dislike at him and led the way into the private bar.

“ ’Morning,” said Mr. Nark, before Fox could get through the door.

“Morning, Mr. Nark,” said Fox.

“Don’t know but what I wouldn’t fancy a pint myself,” said Mr. Nark firmly, and followed them into the Private.

Abel drew Alleyn’s and Fox’s drinks.

“ ’Alf-’n-’alf, Abel,” said Mr. Nark, grandly.

Somewhat ostentatiously Abel wiped out a shining pint-pot with a spotless cloth. He then drew the mild and bitter.

“Thank ’ee,” said Mr. Nark. “Glad to see you’re acting careful. Not but what, scientifically speaking, you ought to bile them pots. I don’t know what the law has to say on the point,” continued Mr. Nark, staring very hard at Alleyn. “I’d have to look it up. The law may touch on it and it may not.”

“Don’t tell us you’m hazy on the subject,” said Abel bitterly. “Us can’t believe it.”

Mr. Nark smiled in an exasperating manner and took a pull at his beer. He made a rabbit-like noise with his lips, snapping them together several times with a speculative air. He then looked dubiously into his pint-pot.

“Well,” said Abel tartly, “what’s wrong with it? You’m not p’isoned this time, I suppose?”

“I dessay it’s all right,” said Mr. Nark. “New barrel, b’ain’t it?”

Abel disregarded this enquiry. The ship’s decanter, that they had seen in the cupboard, now stood on the bar counter. It was spotlessly clean. Abel took the bottle of Amontillado from a shelf above the bar. He put a strainer in the neck of the decanter and began, carefully, to pour the sherry through it.

“What jiggery-pokery are you up to now, Abel?” enquired Mr. Nark. “Why, Gor’dang it, that thurr decanter was in the pi’son cupboard.”

Abel addressed himself exclusively to Alleyn and Fox. He explained the various methods used by Mrs. Ives to clean the decanter. He poured himself out a glass of the sherry and invited them to join him. Under the circumstances they could scarcely refuse. Mr. Nark watched them with extraordinary solicitude and remarked that they were braver men than himself.

“Axcuse me for a bit if you please, gentlemen,” said Abel elaborately, to Alleyn and Fox. “I do mind me of summat I’ve got to tell Mrs. Ives. If you’d be so good as to ring if I’m wanted.”

“Certainly, Mr. Pomeroy,” said Alleyn.

Abel left them with Mr. Nark.

“Fine morning, sir,” said Mr. Nark.

Alleyn agreed.

“Though I suppose,” continued Mr. Nark wooingly, “all weathers and climates are one to a man of your calling? Science,” continued Mr. Nark, drawing closer and closer to Alleyn, “is a powerful highhanded mistress. Now, just as a matter of curiosity, sir, would you call yourself a man of science?”

“Not I,” said Alleyn, good-naturedly. “I’m a policeman, Mr. Nark.”

“Ah! That’s my point. See? That’s my point. Now sir, with all respect, you did ought to make a power more use of the great wonders of science. I’ll give in your fingerprints. There’s an astonishing thing, now! To think us walks about unconscious-like, leaving our pores and loops all over the shop for science to pick up and have the laugh on us.”

It was a peculiarity of Mr. Nark’s conversational style that as he drew nearer to his victim he raised his voice. His face was now about twenty inches away from Alleyn’s and he roared like an infuriated auctioneer.

“I’m a reader,” shouted Mr. Nark. “I’m a reader and you might say a student. How many printed words would you say I’d absorbed in my life? At a guess, now?”

“Really,” said Alleyn. “I don’t think I could possibly—”

“Fifty-eight million!” bawled Mr. Nark. “Nigh on it. Not reckoning twice-overs. I’ve soaked up four hundred words, some of ’em as much as five syllables, mind you, every night for the last forty years. Started in at the age of fifteen. ‘Sink or swim,’ I said, ‘I’ll improve my brain to the tune of four hundred words per day till I passes out or goes blind!’ And I done it. I don’t suppose you know a piece of work called The Evvylootion of the Spices?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a tough masterpiece of a job. Took me a year and more, that did. Yes, I’ve tackled most branches of science. Now the last two years I’ve turned my eyes in the direction of crime. Trials of famous criminals, lives of murderers, feats of detection, all the whole biling of ’em. Can’t get enough of ’em. I’m like that. Whole hog or nothing. Reckon I’ve sucked it dry.”

Mr. Nark emptied his pint-pot and, perhaps as an illustrative gesture, sucked his moustache. He looked at Alleyn out of the corners of his eyes.

“This is a very pretty little case now,” he said. “I don’t say there’s much in it, but it’s quite a pretty bit of an affair in its way. You’ll be counting on knocking it off in a day or two, I suppose?”

“I don’t know about that, Mr. Nark.”

“I was a witness.”

“At the inquest? I thought—”

“Not at the inquest,” interrupted Mr. Nark in a great hurry. “No. Superintendent Nicholas Gawd-Almighty Harper had the running of the inquest. I was a witness to the event. More than that I’ve made a study of the affair and I’ve drew my own deductions. I don’t suppose they’d interest you. But I’ve drew ’em.”

Alleyn reflected that it was extremely unlikely that Mr. Nark’s deductions would be either intelligible or interesting, but he made an agreeable noise and invited him to have another drink. Mr. Nark accepted and drew it for himself.

“Ah,” he said. “I reckon I know as much as anybody about this affair, There’s criminal carelessness done on purpose, and there’s criminal carelessness done by accident. There’s motives here and there’s motives there, each of ’em making t’other look like a fool, and all of ’em making the biggest fool of Nicholas Harper. Yes. Us chaps takes our lives in our hands when we calls in at Feathers for a pint. Abel knows it. Abel be too mortal deathly proud to own up.”

“Carelessness, you said? How did it come about?”

If Mr. Nark’s theory of how cyanide got on the dart was ever understood by him, he had no gift for imparting it to others. He became incoherent, and defensively mysterious. He dropped hints and when pressed to explain them, took fright and dived into obscurities. He uttered generalizations of bewildering stupidity, assumed an air of huffiness, floundered into deep water, and remained there, blowing like a grampus. Alleyn was about to leave him in this plight when, perhaps as a last desperate bid for official approval, Mr. Nark made a singular statement.

“The Garden of Eden,” he said, “as any eddicated chap knows, is bunk. You can’t tell me there’s any harm in apples. I grow ’em. Us started off as a drop of jelly. We’ve come on gradual ever since, working our way up through slime and scales and tails to what we are. We had to have a female to do the job. Us knows that. Biological necessity. But she’s been a poisonous snare and a curse to us, as even the ignorant author of Genesis had spotted and noted down, in his foolish fashion, under cover of a lot of clap-trap. She’s wuzz than a serpent on her own, and she’s mostly always at the back of our troubles. Searchy la fem as the French detectives say, and you ought to bear in mind. This ghastly affair started a year ago and there’s three alive now that knows it. There was four.”

Alleyn realized, with a sinking heart, that he would have to pay attention to Mr. Nark. He saw in Mr. Nark a desire for fame struggling with an excessive natural timidity. Mr. Nark hungered for the admiring attention of the experts. He also dreaded the law, to which he seemed to accord the veneration and alarm of a neophyte before the altar of some trick and fickle deity. Alleyn decided that he must attempt to speak to him in his own language.