“Case of inverted snobbism, I daresay. It’s a nice front, nevertheless. Might have been the dower house to Nunspardon at one time. Rum go, couple of unattached males living side-by-side in houses that are much too big for them.”

“I wonder how Mr. Phinn and the Commander hit it off.”

“I wouldn’t mind having a bet that they don’t. Look, here he comes.”

“Cripes!” Mr. Fox ejaculated. “What a menagerie!”

Mr. Phinn had, in fact, come out of his house accompanied by an escort of cats and Mrs. Twitchett’s three fat kittens.

“No more!” he was saying in his curious alto voice. “All gone! Go and catch micey, you lazy lot of furs.”

He set down the empty dish he had been carrying. Some object fell from his breast pocket and he replaced it in a hurry. Some of his cats pretended alarm and flounced off, the others merely stared at him. The three kittens, seeing their mother, galloped unsteadily towards her with stiff tails and a great deal of conversation. Mr. Phinn saw Alleyn and Fox. Staring at them, he clapped his hands like a mechanical toy that had not quite run down.

The tassel of his smoking cap had swung over his nose, but his sudden pallor undid its comic effect. The handle of the concealed object protruded from his breast pocket. He began to walk towards them, and his feline escort, with the exception of the Twitchetts, scattered before him.

“Good morning,” Mr. Phinn fluted thickly. He swept aside his tassel with a not quite steady hand and pulled up a dingy handkerchief, thus concealing the protruding handle. “To what beneficent constabular breeze do I owe this enchanting surprise? Detectives, emerging from a grove of trees!” he exclaimed and clasped his hands. “Like fauns in pursuit of some elusive hamadryad! Armed, I perceive,” he added with a malevolent glance at Commander Syce’s arrow, which Alleyn had retained by the simple expedient of absent-mindedly walking away with it.

“Good morning, Mr. Phinn,” Alleyn said. “I have been renewing my acquaintance with your charming cat.”

“Isn’t she sweet?” Mr. Phinn moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. “Such a devoted mama, you can’t think!”

Alleyn sat on his heels beside Mrs. Twitchett, who gently kicked away one of her too-greedy kittens. “Her fur’s in wonderful condition for a nursing mother,” he said, stroking it. “Do you give her anything special to eat?”

Mr. Phinn began to talk with the sickening extravagance of the feline-fanatic. “A balanced diet,” he explained in a high-pitched voice, “of her own choosing. Fissy on Mondays and Fridays. Steaky on Tuesdays. Livvy on Wednesdays. Cooked bun on Thursdays and Sundays. Embellished,” he added with a merciless smile, “by our own clever claws, with micey and birdie.”

“Fish only twice a week,” Alleyn mused, and Fox, suddenly feeling that something was expected of him, said, “Fancy!”

“She is looking forward to to-morrow,” Mr. Phinn said, “with the devoted acquiescence of a good Catholic, although, of course, theistically, she professes the mysteries of Old Nile.”

“You don’t occasionally catch her dinner for her in the Chyne?”

“When I am successful,” Mr. Phinn said, “we share.”

“Did you,” Alleyn asked, fatuously addressing himself to the cat, “did you have fresh fissy for your supper last night, my angel?” Mrs. Twitchett turned contemptuously to her kittens.

“No!” said Mr. Phinn in his natural voice.

“You made no other catch then, besides the fabulous Old ’Un?”

“No!”

“May we talk?”

Mr. Phinn, silent for once, led the way through a side door and down a passage into a sizable library.

Alleyn’s eye for other people’s houses unobtrusively explored the room. The Colonel’s study had been pleasant, civilized and not lacking in feminine graces. Commander Syce’s drawing-room was at once clean, orderly, desolate and entirely masculine. Mr. Phinn’s library was disorderly, dirty, neglected and ambiguous. It exhibited confused traces of Georgian grace, Victorian pomposity and Edwardian muddle. Cushions that had once been fashionably elaborate were now stained and tarnished. There were yards of dead canvas that had once been acceptable to Burlington House, including the portrait of a fragile-looking lady with a contradictory jaw that was vaguely familiar. There were rows and rows of “gift” books about cats, cheek-by-jowl with Edwardian novels which, if opened, would be found to contain illustrations of young women in dust coats and motoring veils making haughty little moues at gladiators in Norfolk jackets. But there were also one or two admirable chairs, an unmistakable Lyly and a lovely, though filthy, rug. And among the decrepit novels were books of distinction and authority. It was on Mr. Phinn’s shelves that Alleyn noticed an unexpected link with the Colonel. For here among a collection of books on angling he saw again The Scaly Breed by Maurice Cartarette. But what interested Alleyn perhaps more than all these items was a state of chaos that was to be observed on and near a very nice serpentine-fronted bureau. The choked drawers were half out, one indeed was on the floor, the top was covered with miscellaneous objects which, to a police-trained eye, had clearly been dragged out in handfuls, while the carpet nearby was littered with a further assortment. A burglar, taken by surprise, could not have left clearer evidence behind him.

“How can I serve you?” asked Mr. Phinn. “A little refreshment, by the way? A glass of sherry? Does Tio Pepe recommend himself to your notice?”

“Not quite so early in the morning, thank you, and I’m afraid this is a duty call.”

“Indeed? How I wish I could be of some help. I have spent a perfectly wretched night — such of it as remained to me — fretting and speculating, you know. A murderer in the Vale! Really, if it wasn’t so dreadful, there would be a kind of grotesque humour in the thought. We are so very respectable in Swevenings. Not a ripple, one would have thought, on the surface of the Chyne!”

He flinched and made the sort of grimace that is induced by a sudden twinge of toothache.

“Would one not? What,” Alleyn asked, “about the Battle of the Old ’Un?”

Mr. Phinn was ready for him. He fluttered his fingers. “Nil nisi,” he said, with rather breathless airiness, “and all the rest of it, but really the Colonel was most exasperating as an angler. A monument of integrity in every other respect, I daresay, but as a fly-fisherman I am sorry to say there were some hideous lapses. It is an ethical paradox that so noble a sport should occasionally be wedded to such lamentable malpractices.”

“Such,” Alleyn suggested, “as casting under a bridge into your neighbour’s preserves?”

“I will defend my action before the Judgment Seat, and the ghost of the sublime Walton himself will thunder in my defence. It was entirely permissable.”

“Did you and the Colonel,” Alleyn said, “speak of anything else but this… ah… this ethical paradox?”

Mr. Phinn glared at him, opened his mouth, thought perhaps of Lady Lacklander and shut it again. Alleyn for his part remembered, with exasperation, the law on extra-judicial admissions. Lady Lacklander had told him there had been a further discussion between the two men but had refused to say what it was about. If Mr. Phinn should ever come to trial for the murder of Maurice Cartarette, or even if he should merely be called to give evidence against someone else, the use by Alleyn of the first of Lady Lacklander’s admissions and the concealment of the second would be held by a court of law to be improper. He decided to take a risk.

“We have been given to understand,” he said, “that there was, in fact, a further discussion.”

There was a long silence.

“Well, Mr. Phinn?”

“Well. I am waiting.”

“For what?”

“I believe it is known as the Usual Warning,” Mr. Phinn said.

“The police are only obliged to give the Usual Warning when they have decided to make an arrest.”