He looked from one to the other.

“It was like that,” Lady Lacklander said. She raised her voice as if she repeated some intolerable lesson. “My husband writes that he drove Viccy Phinn to his death as surely as if he had killed him with his own hands. He was instructed to do so by his Nazi masters. It was then that he began to understand what he had done and to what frightful lengths his German associates could drive him. I knew, at that time, he was wretchedly unhappy, but put it down to the shock of Viccy’s death and — as I, of course, thought — treachery. But the treachery, Occy, was ours, and your Viccy was only a foolish and tragically careless boy.” She looked at Mr. Phinn and frowned. “Yesterday,” she said, “after your row with Maurice over the trout, he came to me and told me he’d left a copy of the amended Chapter 7 at your house. Why haven’t you produced it, Occy? Why just now did you try to stop me? Was it because—”

“Dear me, no,” Mr. Phinn said very quietly, “not from any high-flown scruples, I assure you. It was, if you will believe me, in deference to my boy’s wishes. Before he killed himself, Viccy wrote to his mother and to me. He begged us to believe him innocent. He also begged us most solemnly, whatever the future might hold, never to take any action that might injure Sir Harold Lacklander. You may not have noticed, my dear Lady L., that my foolish boy hero-worshipped your husband. We decided to respect his wishes.”

Mr. Phinn stood up. He looked both old and shabby. “I am not concerned,” he said, “with the Lacklander conscience, the Lacklander motive, or the Lacklander remorse. I no longer desire the Lacklanders to suffer for my dear boy’s death. I do not, I think, believe any more in human expiation. Now if I may, I shall ask you to excuse me. And if you want to know what I did with Chapter 7, I burnt it to ashes, my dear Chief Inspector, half an hour ago.”

He raised his dreadful smoking cap, bowed to Lady Lacklander and walked into his house, followed by his cats.

Lady Lacklander stood up. She began to move towards the gate, seemed to recollect herself and paused. “I am going to Nunspardon,” she said. Alleyn opened the gate. She went out without looking at him, got into her great car and was driven away.

Fox said, “Painful business. I suppose the young fellow suspected what was up at the last interview. Unpleasant.”

“Very.”

“Still, as Mr. Phinn says, this Chapter 7 really puts him in the clear as far as killing Colonel Cartarette is concerned.”

“Well, no,” Alleyn said.

“No?”

“Not exactly. The Colonel left Chapter 7 at Jacob’s Cottage. Phinn, on his own statement, didn’t re-enter the house after his row with the Colonel. He returned to the willow grove, found the body and lost his spectacles. He read Chapter 7 for the first time this morning, I fancy, by the aid of a magnifying glass.”

“Of course,” Fox said, as they turned into Commander Syce’s drive, “it will have been a copy. The Colonel’d never hand over the original.”

“No. My guess is he locked the original in the bottom drawer of the left-hand side of his desk.”

“Ah! Now!” Fox said with relish. “That might well be.”

“In which case one of his own family or one of the Lacklanders or any other interested person has pinched it, and it’s probably gone up in smoke like its sister-ship. On the other hand, the bottom drawer may have been empty and the original typescript in Cartarette’s bank. It doesn’t very much matter, Fox. The publisher was evidently given a pretty sound idea of the alternative version by its author. He could always be called. We may not have to bring the actual text in evidence. I hope we won’t.”

“What d’you reckon is the dowager’s real motive in coming so remarkably clean all of a sudden?”

Alleyn said crossly, “I’ve had my bellyful of motives. Take your choice, Br’er Fox.”

“Of course,” Fox said, “she’s a very sharp old lady. She must have guessed we’d find out anyway.”

Alleyn muttered obscurely, “The mixture as before. And here we go with a particularly odious little interview. Look out for squalls, Br’er Fox. Gosh! See who’s here!”

It was Nurse Kettle. She had emerged from the front door, escorted by Commander Syce, who carried a napkin in his hand. She was about to enter her car, and this process was accelerated by Commander Syce, who quite obviously drew her attention to the approaching police car and then, limping to her own, opened the door and waited with some evidence of trepidation for her to get in. She did so without glancing at him and started her engine.

“She’s told him,” Alleyn said crossly, “that we’ve rumbled the ’bago.”

“Acting, no doubt,” Fox rejoined stiffly, “from the kindest of motives.”

“No doubt.” Alleyn lifted his hat as Nurse Kettle, having engaged her bottom gear with some precipitance, shot past them like a leaping eland. She was extremely red in the face.

Syce waited for them.

Fox pulled up and they both got out. Alleyn slung the golf bag over his shoulder as he addressed himself to Syce.

“May we speak to you indoors somewhere?” Alleyn asked.

Without a word Syce led the way into his living-room, where a grim little meal, half consumed, was laid out on a small table in close proximity to a very dark whisky-and-water.

The improvised bed was still in commission. A dressing-gown was folded neatly across the foot.

“Sit down?” Syce jerked out, but, as he evidently was not going to do so himself, neither Alleyn nor Fox followed his suggestion.

“What’s up now?” he demanded.

Alleyn said, “I’ve come to ask you a number of questions, all of which you will find grossly impertinent. They concern the last occasion when you were in Singapore. The time we discussed this morning, you remember, when you told us you introduced the present Mrs. Cartarette to her husband?”

Syce didn’t answer. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat and stared out of the window.

“I’m afraid,” Alleyn said, “I shall have to press this a little further. In a word, I must ask you if you were not, in fact, on terms of the greatest intimacy with Miss de Vere, as she was then.”

“Bloody impertinence.”

“Well, yes. But so, when one comes to think of it, is murder.”

“What the hell are you driving at?”

“Ah!” Alleyn exclaimed with one of his very rare gestures. “How footling all this is! You know damn’ well what I’m driving at. Why should we stumble about like a couple of maladroit fencers? See here. I’ve information from the best possible sources that before she was married, you were living with Mrs. Cartarette in Singapore. You yourself have told me you introduced her to Cartarette. You came back here and found them man and wife: the last thing, so you told me, that you had intended. All right. Cartarette was murdered last night in the bottom meadow, and there’s a hole in his head that might have been made by an arrow. You gave out that you were laid by with lumbago, but you were heard twanging away at your sixty-pound bow when you were supposed to be incapacitated on your bed. Now, send for your solicitor if you like and refuse to talk till he comes, but for the love of Mike don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m driving at.”

“Great grief!” Syce exclaimed with exactly the same inflection he had used of cats. “I liked Cartarette.”

“You may have liked Cartarette, but did you love his wife?”

“ ‘Love,’ ” Syce repeated turning purple. “What a word!”

“Well, my dear man — put it this way. Did she love you?”

“Look here, are you trying to make out that she egged me on or — or — I egged her on or any perishing rot of that sort! Thompson,” Commander Syce shouted angrily, “and Bywaters, by God!”

“What put them into your head, I wonder? The coincidence that he was a seafaring man and she, poor woman, an unfaithful wife?”