“Really, Mama, I’m afraid I don’t…”
“Nor do I. Mark?”
Mark grinned at her. “A green tent, I fancy, Gar darling, a solar topee and a pair of grandfather’s boots.”
“You’re perfectly right. My green Harris, it was. I’ll tell my maid, Roderick, and you shall have them.”
“Thank you.” Alleyn looked at George. “Your clothes and boots, please?”
“Ah, spiked shoes and stockings and plus fours,” George said loudly. “Very old-fogeyish. Ha-ha.”
“I think they’re jolly good,” Kitty said wearily. “On the right man.” George’s hand went to his moustache, but he didn’t look at Kitty. He seemed to be exquisitely uncomfortable. “I,” Kitty added, “wore a check shirt and a twin set. Madly county, you know,” she added, desperately attempting another joke, “on account we played golf.” She sounded near to tears.
“And your shoes?” Alleyn asked.
Kitty stuck out her feet. Her legs, Alleyn noted, were good. Her feet, which were tiny, were shod in lizard-skin shoes with immensely high heels. “Not so county,” Kitty said, with the ghost of a grin, “but the best I had.”
George, apparently in an agony of embarrassment, glanced at the shoes, at his mother and at the distant prospect of the Home Spinney.
Alleyn said, “If I may, I’ll borrow the clothes, gloves and stockings. We’ll pick them up at Hammer Farm on our way back to Chyning.”
Kitty accepted this. She was looking at Alleyn with the eye, however wan, of a woman who spots a genuine Dior in a bargain basement.
“I’ll hurry back,” she said, “and get them ready for you.”
“There’s no immediate hurry.”
Mark said, “I was wearing whites. I put brogues on for going home and carried my tennis shoes.”
“And your racket?”
“Yes.
“And, after Bottom Bridge, Lady Lacklander’s sketching gear and shooting-stick?”
“That’s right.”
“By the way,” Alleyn asked him, “had you gone straight to your tennis party from Nunspardon?”
“I looked in on a patient in the village.”
“And on the gardener’s child, didn’t you?” Kitty said. “They told me you’d lanced its gumboil.”
“Yes. An abscess, poor kid,” Mark said cheerfully.
“So you had your professional bag, too?” Alleyn suggested.
“It’s not very big.”
“Still, quite a load.”
“It was rather.”
“But Lady Lacklander had left it all tidily packed up, hadn’t she?”
“Well,” Mark said with a smile at his grandmother, “more or less.”
“Nonsense,” Lady Lacklander said; “there was no more or less about it. I’m a tidy woman and I left everything tidy.”
Mark opened his mouth and shut it again.
“Your paint-rag, for instance?” Alleyn said, and Mark glanced sharply at him.
“I overlooked the rag, certainly,” said Lady Lacklander rather grandly, “when I packed up. But I folded it neatly and tucked it under the strap of my haversack. Why have you put on that look, Mark?” she added crossly.
“Well, darling, when I got there, the rag, far from being neatly folded and stowed, was six yards away on a briar bush. I rescued it and put it into your haversack.”
They all looked at Alleyn as if they expected him to make some comment. He was silent, however, and after a considerable pause Lady Lacklander said, “Well, it couldn’t be of less significance, after all. Go indoors and ask them to get the clothes together. Fisher knows what I wore.”
“Ask about mine, old boy, will you?” said George, and Alleyn wondered how many households there were left in England where orders of this sort were still given.
Lady Lacklander turned to Rose. “And what about you, child?”
But Rose stared out with unseeing eyes that had filled again with tears. She dabbed at them with her handkerchief and frowned at herself.
“Rose?” Lady Lacklander said quietly.
Still frowning, Rose turned and looked at her. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“They want to know what clothes you wore, my dear.”
“Tennis things, I imagine,” Alleyn said.
Rose said, “Oh, yes. Of course. Tennis things.”
Kitty said, “It’s the day for the cleaner. I saw your tennis things in the box, didn’t I, Rose?”
“I—? Yes,” Rose said. “I’m sorry. Yes, I did put them in.”
“Shall we go and rescue them?” Mark asked.
Rose hesitated. He looked at her for a moment and then said in a level voice, “O.K. I’ll come back,” and went into the house. Rose turned away and stood at some distance from the group.
“It’s toughest for Rose,” Kitty said, unexpectedly compassionate, and then with a return to her own self-protective mannerisms she sipped her sherry. “I wish you joy of my skirt, Mr. Alleyn,” she added loudly. “You won’t find it very delicious.”
“No?” Alleyn said, “Why not?”
“It absolutely reeks of fish.”
Alleyn observed the undistinguished little face and wondered if his own was equally blank. He then, under the guise of bewilderment, looked at the others. He found that Lady Lacklander seemed about as agitated as a Buddha and that George was in process of becoming startled. Rose was still turned away.
“Are you a fisherman too, then, Mrs. Cartarette?” Alleyn asked.
“God forbid!” she uaid with feeling. “No, I tried to take a fish away from a cat last evening.” The others gaped at her.
“My dear Kitty,” Lady Lacklander said, “I suggest that you consider what you say.”
“Why?” Kitty countered, suddenly common and arrogant. “Why? It’s the truth. What are you driving at?” she added nervously. “What’s the matter with saying I’ve got fish on my skirt? Here,” she demanded of Alleyn, “what are they getting at?”
“My good girl—” Lady Lacklander began, but Alleyn cut in. “I’m sorry, Lady Lacklander, but Mrs. Cartarette’s perfectly right. There’s nothing the matter, I assure you, with speaking the truth.” Lady Lacklander shut her mouth with a snap. “Where did you meet your cat and fish, Mrs. Cartarette?”
“This side of the bridge,” Kitty muttered resentfully.
“Did you, now?” Alleyn said with relish.
“It looked a perfectly good trout to me, and I thought the cat had no business with it. I suppose,” Kitty went on, “it was one of old Occy Phinn’s swarm; the cat, I mean. Anyhow, I tried to get the trout away from it. It hung on like a fury. And then when I did jerk the trout away, it turned out to be half eaten on the other side, sort of. So I let the cat have it back,” Kitty said limply.
Alleyn said, “Did you notice any particular mark or scar on the trout?”
“Well, hardly. It was half eaten.”
“Yes, but on the part that was left?”
“I don’t think so. Here! What sort of mark?” Kitty demanded, beginning to look alarmed.
“It doesn’t matter. Really.”
“It was quite a nice trout. I wondered if Maurice had caught it, and then I thought old Occy Phinn must have hooked it and given it to the cat. He’s crazy enough on his cats to give them anything, isn’t he, George?”
“Good God, yes!” George ejaculated automatically, without looking at Kitty.
“It’s a possible explanation,” Alleyn said as if it didn’t much matter either way.
Mark came back from the house. “The clothes,” he said to Alleyn, “will be packed up and put in your car, which has arrived, by the way. I rang up Hammer and asked them to keep back the things for the cleaner.”
“Thank you so much,” Alleyn said. He turned to Lady Lacklander. “I know you’ll understand that in a case like this we have to fuss about and try to get as complete a picture as possible of the days, sometimes even the weeks and months, before the event. It generally turns out that ninety-nine per cent of the information is quite useless, and then everybody thinks how needlessly inquisitve and impertinent the police are. Sometimes, however, there is an apparently irrelevant detail that leads, perhaps by accident, to the truth.”
Lady Lacklander stared at him like a basilisk. She had a habit of blinking slowly, her rather white eyelids dropping conspicuously like shutters: a slightly reptilian habit that was disconcerting. She blinked twice in this manner at Alleyn and said, “What are you getting at, my dear Roderick? I hope you won’t finesse too elaborately. Pray tell us what you want.”