“I never heard such utter tripe,” said Ursula, quite undisconcerted by this analysis. “All this talk of queen-mothers! Do pipe down, darling.”

“I mean it,” Fabian persisted. “Instead of having a good healthy giggle about some frightful youth or mooning over a talkie idol or turning violently Anglo-Catholic, which is the correct behaviour in female adolescence, you converted all these normal impulses into a blind devotion to Flossie.

“Shut up, do. We’ve had it all out a dozen times.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered if it had passed off in the normal way, but it became a fixation.”

“She was marvellous to me. I owed everything to her. I was decently grateful. And I loved her. I’d have been a monster if I didn’t. You and your fixations!”

“Would you believe it,” said Fabian, angrily addressing himself to Alleyn, “this silly girl, although she says she loves me, won’t marry me, not because I’m a bad bargain physically, which I admit, but simply because Flossie, who’s dead, screwed some sort of undertaking out of her that she’d give me up.”

“I promised to wait two years and I’m going to keep my promise.”

“There!” cried Fabian triumphantly. “A promise under duress if ever there was one. Imagine the interview. All the emotional jiggery-pokery that she’d tried on me and then some. ‘Darling little Ursy, if I’d had a baby of my own she couldn’t have been dearer. Poor old Floosie knows best. You’re making me so unhappy.’ Faugh!” said Fabian violently. “It’s enough to make you sick.”

“I didn’t think anybody ever said ‘Faugh’ in real life,” Ursula observed. “Only Hamlet: ‘And smelt so. Faugh!’ ”

“That was ‘Puh!’ ” said Alleyn mildly.

“Well, there you have it,” said Fabian after a pause. “Ursy went off the day after our respective scenes with Flossie. The Red Cross people rang up to know if she could do her sixty-hours hospital duty. I’ve always considered that Flossie arranged it. Ursula wrote to me from the hospital and that was the first I knew about this outrageous promise. And, by the way, Flossie didn’t commute the sentence into two years’ probation until afterwards. At first she exacted a straight-out pledge that Ursy would give me up altogether. The alteration was due, I fancy, to my uncle.”

“You confided in him?” Alleyn asked.

“He found out for himself. He was extraordinarily perceptive. He seemed to me,” said Fabian, “to resemble some instrument. He would catch and echo in himself, delicately, the coarser sounds made by other people. I suppose his ill health made for a contemplative habit of mind. At all events he achieved it. He was very quiet always. One would sometimes almost forget he was in the room, and then one would look up and meet his eye and know that he had been with one all the time; perhaps critically, perhaps sympathetically. That didn’t matter. He was a good companion. It was like that over this affair with Ursy. Apparently he had known all the time that I was in love with her. He asked me to come and see him while he was having his afternoon rest. It was the first time, I believe, that he’d ever asked me a direct question. He said: ‘Has it reached a climax, then, between you and that child?’ You know, he was fond of you, Ursy. He said, once, that since Flossie was not transparent he could hardly expect that you would notice him.”

“I liked him very much,” said Ursula defensively, “he was just so quiet that somehow one didn’t notice him.”

“I told him the whole story. It was one of his bad days. He was breathing short and I was afraid I’d tire him but he made me go on. When I’d finished he asked me what we were going to do if the doctor didn’t give me a clean bill. I said I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter much because Flossie was going to take a stand about it and I was afraid of her influence over Ursy. He said he believed that might be overcome. I thought then that perhaps he meant to tackle Flossie. I still think that he may have been responsible for her suddenly commuting the life sentence into a mere two years, but of course her row with Douglas over Markins may have had something to do with it. You were never quite the same hot favourite after that, were you, Douglas?”

“Not quite,” Douglas agreed sadly.

“Perhaps it was a bit of both,” Fabian continued. “But I fancy Uncle Arthur did tackle her. Before I left him he said with that wheezy little laugh of his: ‘It takes a strong man to be a weak husband. Matrimonially speaking a condition of perpetual apology is difficult to sustain. I’ve failed signally in the role.’ I think I know what he meant, don’t you, Terry?”

“I?” said Terence. “Why do you ask me?”

“Because, unlike Ursy, you were not blinded by Flossie’s splendours. You must have been able to look at them both objectively.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, but so quietly that perhaps only Alleyn heard her.

“And he must have been attached to you, you know, because when he became so ill you were the one he wanted to see.”

As if answering some implied criticism in this Douglas said: “I don’t know what we’d have done without Terry all through that time. She was marvellous.”

“I know,” said Fabian, still looking at her. “You see, Terry, I’ve often thought that of all of us you’re best equipped to look at the whole thing in perspective. Or are you?”

“I wasn’t a relation,” said Terence, “if that’s what you mean. I was an outsider, a paid employee.”

“Put it that way if you like. What I meant was that in your case there were no emotional complications.” He waited, and then, with a precise repetition of his former inflection, he added: “Or were there?”

“How could there be? I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m no good at this kind of thing.”

“Not much in our line, is it, Terry?” said Douglas, instantly forming an alliance. “When it comes to all this messing about and holding post-mortems and wondering what everybody was thinking about everybody else, you and I are out of the picture, aren’t we?”

“All right,” said Fabian, “let’s put it to the authority. What do you say, Mr. Alleyn? Is this admittedly ragged discussion a complete waste of time? Does it leave you precisely where you were with the police files? Or has it, if only in the remotest degree, helped you along the path towards a solution?”

“It’s of interest,” Alleyn replied. “It’s given me something that no amount of poring over the files could have produced.”

“And my third question?” Fabian persisted.

“I can’t answer it,” Alleyn rejoined gravely. “But I do hope, very much, that you’ll carry on with the discussion.”

“There you are, Terry,” said Fabian, “it’s up to you, you see.”

“To do what?”

“To carry forward the theme to be sure. To tell us where we were wrong and why. To give us, without prejudice, your portrait of Flossie Rubrick.”

Again Fabian looked up at the painting. “You said you thought that blank affair up there was like her. Why?”

Without glancing at the portrait, Miss Lynne said: “It’s a stupid-looking face in the picture. In my opinion that’s what she was. A stupid woman.”