“You must have seen it, Mark,” she said. “Great gaping thing lying there where Octavius Phinn must have chucked it down. On the bridge, my dear boy. You must have practically stepped over it.”

“It wasn’t there,” Mark said. “Sorry, Gar, but it wasn’t, when I went home.”

“Mrs. Cartarette,” Alleyn said, “you must have crossed Bottom Bridge a few minutes after Lady Lacklander had gone home, mustn’t you?”

“That’s right,” Kitty said. “We saw her going into the Nunspardon Home Spinney as we came over the hill by the second tee.”

“And Sir George, then, in his turn, went home through the Home Spinney, and you came down the hill by the river path?”

“That’s right,” she said drearily.

“Did you see the fabulous trout lying on Bottom Bridge?”

“Not a sign of it, I’m afraid.”

“So that between about ten to eight and ten past eight the trout was removed by somebody and subsequently left in the willow grove. Are you all of the opinion that Colonel Cartarette would have been unlikely to change his mind and go back for it?” Alleyn asked.

George looked huffy and said he didn’t know, he was sure, and Lady Lacklander said that judging by what Colonel Cartarette had said to her, she was persuaded that wild horses wouldn’t have induced him to touch the trout. Alleyn thought to himself, “If he was disinclined to touch it, still less would he feel like wrapping it up in grass in order to stow it away in his creel, which apparently was what he had been doing when he died.”

“I suppose there’s no doubt about this fish being the classic Old ’Un?” Alleyn asked.

“None,” Mark said. “There’s not such another in the Chyne. No question.”

“By the way, did you look down at the willow grove as you climbed up the hill to the Home Spinney?”

“I don’t remember doing so. I was hung about with my grandmother’s sketching gear and I didn’t…”

It was at this moment that Kitty Cartarette screamed.

She did not scream very loudly; the sound was checked almost as soon as it was born, but she had half risen from her sofa and was staring at something beyond and behind Alleyn. She had clapped her hands over her mouth. Her eyes were wide open beneath their raised brows. He noticed that they were inclined to be prominent.

They all turned to discover what it was that Kitty stared at but found only an uncovered French window reflecting the lighted room and the ghosts of their own startled faces.

“There’s someone out there!” Kitty whispered. “A man looked in at the window. George!”

“My dear girl,” Lady Lacklander said, “you saw George’s reflection. There’s nobody there.”

“There is.”

“It’s probably Sergeant Oliphant,” Alleyn said. “We left him outside. Fox?”

Fox was already on his way, but before he reached the French window, the figure of a man appeared beyond its reflected images. The figure moved uncertainly, coming in from the side and halting when it was some way from the glass. Kitty made a slight retching sound. Fox’s hand was on the knob of the French window when beyond it the beam of Sergeant Oliphant’s torchlight shot across the dark and the man’s face was illuminated. It was crowned by a tasselled smoking cap and was deadly pale.

Fox opened the French windows.

“Pray forgive an unwarrantable intrusion,” said Mr. Danberry-Phinn. “I am in quest of a fish.”

Mr. Phinn’s behaviour was singular. The light from the room seemed to dazzle him. He screwed up his eyes and nose, and this gave him a supercilious look greatly at variance with his extreme pallor and unsteady hands. He squinted at Fox and then beyond him at the company in the drawing-room.

“I fear I have called at an inconvenient moment,” he said. “I had no idea… I had hoped to see…” his Adam’s apple bobbed furiously …“to see,” he repeated, “in point of fact, Colonel Cartarette.” He disclosed his teeth, clamped together in the oddest kind of smile.

Kitty made an indeterminate sound, and Lady Lacklander began, “My dear Octavius…” but before either of them could get any further, Alleyn moved in front of Mr. Phinn. “Did you say, sir,” Alleyn asked, “that you are looking for a fish?”

Mr. Phinn said, “Forgive me, I don’t think I have the pleasure…?” and peered up into Alleyn’s face. “Have I the pleasure?” he asked. He blinked away from Alleyn towards Fox. Fox was one of those, nowadays rather rare, detectives who look very much like their job. He was a large, grizzled man with extremely bright eyes.

“And in this case,” Mr. Phinn continued with a breathless little laugh, “I indubitably have not the pleasure.”

“We are police officers,” Alleyn said. “Colonel Cartarette has been murdered, Mr. Phinn. You are Mr. Octavius Danberry-Phinn, I think, aren’t you?”

“But how perfectly terrible!” said Mr. Phinn. “My dear Mrs. Cartarette! My dear Miss Rose! I am appalled. APPALLED!” Mr. Phinn repeated, opening his eyes as wide as they could go.

“You’d better come in, Occy,” Lady Lacklander said. “They’ll want to talk to you.”

“To me!” he ejaculated. He came in and Fox shut the French window behind him.

Alleyn said, “I shall want to have a word with you, sir. In fact, I think it is time that we saw some of you individually rather than together, but before we do that, I should like Mr. Phinn to tell us about the fish he is looking for.” He raised his hand. If any of his audience had felt like interjecting, they now thought better of the impulse. “If you please, Mr. Phinn?” Alleyn said.

“I’m so confused, indeed so horrified at what you have told me…”

“Dreadful,” Alleyn said, “isn’t it? About the fish?”

“The fish? The fish, my dear sir, is or was a magnificent trout. The fish is a fish of great fame. It is the trout to end all trout. A piscine emperor. And I, let me tell you, I caught him.”

“Where?” Lady Lacklander demanded.

Mr. Phinn blinked twice. “Above Bottom Bridge, my dear Lady L.,” he said. “Above Bottom Bridge.”

“You are an old humbug, Occy,” she said.

George suddenly roared out, “That’s a bloody lie, Octavius. You poached him. You were fishing under the bridge. We saw you from the second tee.”

“Dear me, George,” said Mr. Phinn going white to the lips. “What a noise you do make, to be sure.”

Fox had stepped unobtrusively aside and was busy with his notebook.

“To talk like that!” Mr. Phinn continued with two half bows in the direction of Kitty and Rose. “In a house of mourning! Really, George, I must say!”

“By God…!” George began, but Alleyn intervened.

“What,” he asked Mr. Phinn, “happened to your catch?”

Mr. Phinn sucked in a deep breath and began to speak very quickly indeed. “Flushed,” he said in a voice that was not quite steady, “with triumph, I resolved to try the upper reaches of the Chyne. I therefore laid my captive to rest on the very field of his defeat, id est, the upper, repeat upper, approach to Bottom Bridge. When I returned, much later, I cannot tell you how much later for I did not carry a watch, but much, much later, I went to the exact spot where my Prince of Piscines should have rested and…” he made a wide gesture during the execution of which it was apparent that his hands were tremulous… “Gone! Vanished! Not a sign! Lost!” he said.

“Now, look here, Occy…” Lady Lacklander in her turn began, and in her tum was checked by Alleyn.

“Please, Lady Lacklander,” Alleyn interjected. She glared at him. “Do you mind?” he said.

She clasped her plump hands together and rested the entire system of her chins upon them. “Well,” she said, “I called you in, after all. Go on.”

“What did you do,” Alleyn asked Mr. Phinn, “when you discovered your loss?”

Mr. Phinn looked very fixedly at him. “Do?” he repeated” “What should I do? It was growing dark. I looked about in the precincts of the bridge but to no avail. The trout was gone. I returned home, a bitterly chagrined man.”