“Not to say a complaint,” Trehern temporized. “Don’t put words into my mouth, souls. No call for that.”

“We wouldn’t dream of it,” Fox rejoined. “Take your time.”

After an uneasy silence, Trehern broke into a long, disjointed plaint. People, he said, were talking. Wally, he implied, had been taken aside and seduced with ice cream. Anybody would tell them that what the poor little lad said was not to be relied upon, since he was as innocent as a babe unborn and was only out to please all the sundry, such being his guileless nature. They let him ramble on disconsolately until he ran out of material. Fox took notes throughout.

Alleyn said: “Mr. Trehern, we meant to call on you this evening but you’ve anticipated us. We want to search your house and have a warrant to do so. If it suits you we’ll come down with you, now.”

Trehern ran the tip of his tongue round his mouth and looked frightened. “What’s that for?” he demanded. “What’s wrong with my property? I bean’t got nothing but what’s lawful and right and free for all to see.”

“In that case you can have no objection.”

“It’s a matter of principle, see?”

“Quite so.”

Trehern was staring through the wire enclosure at the spring, where Bailey and Thompson had begun to pack up their gear.

“Yurr!” he said. “What’s that! What be they chaps doing up there? Be they looking fur footprints?”

“Yes.”

“They won’t find our Wal’s then! They won’t find his’n. Doan’t ’ee tell me they will, mister. I know better.”

“He was there yesterday.”

“Not up to thikky shelf, he warn’t. Not up to the top neither.”

“How do you know it matters where he may have been? Do you know how Miss Cost was killed?”

Trehern gaped at him.

“Well,” Alleyn said, “do you feel inclined to tell us, Mr. Trehern?”

He said confusedly that everyone was talking about stones being thrown.

“Ah,” Alleyn said. “You’re thinking of the night you encouraged Wally to throw stones at Miss Pride, aren’t you?”

Trehern actually ducked his head as if he himself was some sort of target. “What’s the lad been telling you?” he demanded. “He’s silly. He’ll say anything.”

Alleyn said. “We’ll leave it for the moment and go down to the house.”

He called through the gate for Bailey and Thompson to follow, and led the way down. Trehern looked at Alleyn’s back and opened and shut his hands.

“Will you move along, Mr. Trehern?” Fox invited him. “After you.”

Trehern walked between them down to his cottage.

There were no visitors. The nets were blown half off the fence. The hollyhocks along the front path bent and sprang back in the wind. And the sign rattled.

Trehern stopped inside the gate. “I want to see thik. I want to see the writing.”

Alleyn showed him the warrant. He examined it with a great show of caution and then turned to the door.

Alleyn said: “One moment.”

“Well? What, then?”

“It will save a great deal of time and trouble if you will let us see the thing we’re most interested in. Where have you put the clothesline?”

“I don’t have to do nothing,” he said, showing the whites of his eyes. “You can’t force me.”

“Certainly not. It’s your choice.” He looked at Fox. “Will you take the outhouses? We can go round this way.”

He led the way round to the back yard.

Fox said pleasantly: “This’ll be the shed where you keep all your gear, won’t it? I’ll just take a look round, if you please.”

It was crammed with a litter of old nets, broken oars, sacking, boxes, tools and a stack of empty gin bottles. Alleyn glanced in and then left it to Fox.

There was a hen coop at the far end of the yard with a rubbish heap nearby that looked as if it had been recently disturbed.

“Give me that fork, would you, Fox?” he said and walked down the path with it. Trehern started to follow him and then stood motionless. The first of the rain drove hard on their backs.

The clothesline had been neatly coiled and buried under the rubbish. Alleyn uncovered it in a matter of seconds.

“Shall we get under shelter?” he said and walked back past Trehern to the shed. He wondered, for a moment, if Trehern would strike out at him, but Wally’s father fumbled with his oilskin coat and stayed where he was.

“All right, Fox,” Alleyn said. “First time, lucky. Here we are.”

He gave Fox the coil and took from his pocket the piece of trip wire from Coombe’s office. They held the ends together. “That’s it,” said Fox.

Alleyn looked at Trehern. “Will you come here for a moment?” hç asked.

He thought Trehern was going to refuse. He stood there with his head lowered and gave no sign. Then he came slowly forward, having been lashed, now, by the rain — a black shining figure.

“I am not going to arrest you at this juncture,” Alleyn said, “but I think it right to warn you that you are in a serious position. It is quite certain that the wire which on Friday was stretched across the way up to the shelf above the spring had been cut from this line. Photography and accurate measurements of the strands will prove it. Is there anything you want to say?”

Trehern’s jaw worked convulsively as if he were chewing gum. He made a hoarse indeterminate sound in his throat — like a nervous dog, Alleyn thought.

At last he said: “Whosumdever done them tricks was having no more than a bit of fun. Boy-fashion. No harm in it.”

“You think not?”

“If it was my Wal, I’ll have the hide off of him.”

“I shouldn’t go in for any more violence if I were you, Mr. Trehern. And Wally didn’t rig the trip wire. It was done by a man who knows how to use his hands, and it was done with a length of your clothesline which you’ve tried to conceal. Will you make a statement about that? You are not compelled to do so. You must use your own judgment.”

“A statement! And be took down in writing? Not such a damned fool. Lookie-yurr! What’s these silly larks to do with Elspeth Cost? It’s her that’s laying cold, bean’t it? Not t’other old besom.”

“Of course,” Alleyn said, swallowing the epithet. After all, he’d thrown one or two, himself, at Miss Emily. “So you don’t think,” he said, “that Miss Cost was mistaken for Miss Pride?”

“I do not, mister. Contrariwise. I reckon one female done in on t’other.”

“What were you doing at half past seven this morning?”

“Asleep in my bed.”

“When did you wake?”

“How do I know when I woke? Hold on, though.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, b’God!” Trehern said slowly. “Give a chap time to think, will you? I disremembered but it’s come back, like. I heered the lad, banging and hooting about the place. Woke me up, did young Wal, and I hollered out to him to shut his noise. He takes them fits of screeching. Por lil’ chap,” Trehern added with a belated show of parental concern. “Gawd knows why, but he does. I look at the clock and it’s five past eight. I rouse up my old woman, which is a masterpiece of a job, she being a mortal heavy slumberer, and tell ’er to wet a pot of tea. Nothing come of it. She sunk back in her beastly oblivyan. So I uprose myself and put the kettle on and took a look at the weather, which were mucky.”

“Was Wally still in the house?”

“So ’e were, then, singing to hisself after his simple fashion and setting in a corner.”

“Did you see anybody about when you looked out of doors?”

Trehern peered sidelong at him. He waited for a moment and then said: “I seed the Doctor. In ’is launch. Putting out across the gap to go home, he was, having seen Bessy Tretheway over the way, yurr, come to light with another in this sinful vale of tears.”

“Is your clock right?”

“Good as gold,” he said quickly. “Can’t go wrong.”

“Can I see it?”

He looked as if he might refuse; but in the end, he lurched into the house, followed by Fox, and returned to the shed with a battered alarm clock. Alleyn checked it by his watch.