When they were out of sight in the trees, they examined their booty.

Alleyn laid the shooting-stick on a bank and squatted beside it.

“The disk,” he said, “screws on above the ferrule leaving a two-inch spike. Soft earth all over it and forced up under the collar of the disk, which obviously hasn’t been disengaged for weeks! All to the good. If it’s the weapon, it may have been washed in the Chyne and wiped, and it has, of course, been subsequently rammed down in soft earth, but it hasn’t been taken apart. There’s a good chance of a blood trace under the collar. We must let Curtis have this at once. Now let’s have a look at her kit.”

“Which we didn’t really want, did we?”

“You never know. It’s a radial easel with spiked legs, and it’s a jointed gamp with a spiked foot. Lots of spikes available, b,ut the shooting-stick fits the picture best. Now for the interior. Here we are,” Alleyn said, unbuckling the straps and peering inside. “Large water-colour box. Several mounted boards of not-surface paper. Case of brushes. Pencils. Bunjy. Water-jar. Sponge. Paint-rag. Paint-rag,” he repeated softly and bent over the kit sniffing. He drew a length of stained cotton rag out of the kit. It was blotched with patches of watery colour with one dark brownish-reddish stain that was broken by a number of folds as if the rag had been twisted about some object.

Alleyn looked up at his colleague.

“Smell, Fox,” he said.

Fox squatted behind him and sniffed stertorously.

“Fish,” he said.

Before returning, they visited the second tee and looked down on the valley from the Nunspardon side. They commanded a view of the far end of the bridge and the reaches of the Chyne above it. As from the other side of the valley, the willow grove, the lower reaches and the Nunspardon end of the bridge were hidden by intervening trees through which they could see part of the hollow where Lady Lacklander had worked at her sketch.

“So you see,” Alleyn pointed out, “it was from here that Mrs. Cartarette and that ass George Lacklander saw Mr. Phinn poaching under the bridge, and it was from down there in the hollow that Lady Lacklander glanced up and saw them.” He turned and looked back at a clump of trees on the golf course. “And I don’t mind betting,” he added, “that all this chat about teaching her to play golf is the cover-story for a pompous slap-and-tickle.”

“Do you reckon, Mr. Alleyn?”

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s Oliphant at the bridge,” Alleyn said, waving his hand. “We’ll get him to take this stuff straight to Curtis, who’ll be in Chyning by now. He’s starting his P.M. by eleven. Dr. Lacklander’s arranged for him to use the hospital mortuary. I want a report, as soon as we can get it, on the rag and the shooting-stick.”

“Will the young doctor attend the autopsy, do you think?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. I think our next move had better be a routine check-up on Commander Syce.”

“That’s the chap Miss Kettle mentioned, with lumbago, who lives in the middle house,” Fox observed. “I wonder would he have seen anything.”

“Depends on the position of his bed.”

“It’s a nasty thing, lumbago,” Fox mused.

They handed over Lady Lacklander’s property to Sergeant Oliphant with an explanatory note for Dr. Curtis and instructions to search the valley for the whole or part of the missing trout. They then climbed the river path to Uplands.

They passed through the Hammer Farm spinney and entered that of Commander Syce. Here they encountered a small notice nailed to a tree. It was freshly painted and bore in neatly executed letters the legend: “Beware of Archery.”

“Look at that!” Fox said. “And we’ve forgotten our green tights.”

“It may be a warning to Nurse Kettle,” Alleyn said.

“I don’t get you, sir?”

“Not to flirt with the Commander when she beats up his lumbago.”

“Very far-fetched,” Fox said stiffly.

As they emerged from Commander Syce’s spinney into his garden, they heard a twang followed by a peculiar whining sound and the “tuck” of a penetrating blow.

“What the hell’s that!” Fox ejaculated. “It sounded like the flight of an arrow.”

“Which is not surprising,” Alleyn rejoined, “as that is what it was.”

He nodded at a tree not far from where they stood and there, astonishing and incongruous, was embedded an arrow prettily flighted in red and implanted in the centre of a neatly and freshly carved heart. It still quivered very slightly. “We can’t say we weren’t warned,” Alleyn pointed out.

“Very careless!” Fox said crossly.

Alleyn pulled out the arrow and looked closely at it. “Deadly if they hit the right spot. I hope you’ve noticed the heart. It would appear that Commander Syce has recovered from his lumbago and fallen into love’s sickness. Come on.”

They emerged from the spinney to discover Commander Syce himself some fifty yards away, bow in hand, quiver at thigh, scarlet-faced and irresolute.

“Look here!” he shouted. “Damn’ sorry and all that, but, great grief, how was I to know, and, damn it all, what about the notice!”

“Yes, yes,” Alleyn rejoined. “We’re here at our own risk.”

He and Fox approached Syce, who, unlike Lady Lacklander, evidently found the interval between the first hail and, as it were, boarding distance extremely embarrassing. As they plodded up the hill, he looked anywhere but at them and when, finally, Alleyn introduced himself and Fox, he shied away from them like an unbroken colt.

“We are,” Alleyn explained, “police officers.”

“Good Lord!”

“I suppose you’ve heard of last night’s tragedy?”

“What tragedy?”

“Colonel Cartarette.”

“Cartarette?”

“He has been murdered.”

“Great grief!”

“We’re calling on his neighbours in case…”

“What time?”

“About nine o’clock, we think.”

“How d’you know it’s murder?”

“By the nature of the injuries, which are particularly savage ones, to the head.”

“Who found him?”

“The District Nurse. Nurse Kettle.”

Commander Syce turned scarlet. “Why didn’t she get me?” he said.

“Would you expect her to?”

“No.”

“Well then…”

“I say, come in, won’t you? No good nattering out here, what!” shouted Commander Syce.

They followed him into his desolate drawing-room and noted the improvised bed, now tidily made-up, and a table set out with an orderly array of drawing materials and water-colours. A large picture-map in the early stages of composition was pinned to a drawing board. Alleyn saw that its subject was Swevenings and that a number of lively figures had already been sketched in.

“That’s very pleasant,” Alleyn said, looking at it.

Commander Syce made a complicated and terrified noise and interposed himself between the picture-map and their gaze. He muttered something about doing it for a friend.

“Isn’t she lucky?” Alleyn remarked lightly. Commander Syce turned, if anything, deeper scarlet, and Inspector Fox looked depressed.

Alleyn said he was sure Commander Syce would understand that as a matter of routine the police were calling upon Cartarette’s neighbours. “Simply,” he said, “to try and get a background. When one is casting about in a case like this…”

“Haven’t you got the fellah?”

“No. But we hope that by talking to those of the Colonel’s neighbours who were anywhere near…”

“I wasn’t. Nowhere near.”

Alleyn said with a scarcely perceptible modulation of tone, “Then you know where he was found?”

“ ’Course I do. You say nine o’clock. Miss… ah… the… ah… the lady who you tell me found him left here at five to nine and I saw her go down into the valley. If she found him at nine, he must have been in the perishing valley, mustn’t he? I watched her go down.”

“From where?”

“From up here. The window. She told me she was going down the valley.”

“You were on your feet, then? Not completely prostrate with lumbago?”