“Oh God!” Ricky said under his breath, and aloud: “He’s away. Over at Saint Pierre-des-Roches.”

“I see. I think I must find out what Selina is doing. It’s Nanny’s evening off and there’s an ominous silence. Goodbye.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about all of you.”

“Have you?”

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

Ricky was cast down by this exchange. It had been miserably unsatisfactory. He felt that the relationship so elegantly achieved with Julia had been lost in a matter of minutes and there he was floundering about among evasions and excuses while she got more and more remote. She hadn’t spluttered. Not once.

Mrs. Ferrant opened the kitchen door, releasing the honeyed cajolements of a commercial jingle and the subtle aroma of a béarnaise sauce.

“I didn’t think to ask,” she said, “did you happen to see him over in Saint Pierre?”

“Yes,” said Ricky. “We ran into each other.”

“Any message?”

“No. Nothing particular.”

She said: “That black eye of yours is a proper masterpiece, isn’t it?”

Ricky returned to his room.

ii

Alleyn had finished outdoors at Leathers. He went inside to ask Mr. Harkness if he might look at his niece’s bedroom and found him snoring hideously in his office chair. He could not be roused to a sensible condition. Alleyn, in Fox’s presence, formally put his request and took the snort that followed it as a sign of consent.

They all went upstairs to Dulcie’s room.

It was exactly what might have been expected. The walls were covered in horsey photographs, the drawers and wardrobe were stuffed with equestrian gear. Riding boots stood along the floor. The bed was dragged together rather than made. On a table beside it were three battered pornographic paperbacks. A tube of contraceptive pills was in the drawer: half empty.

“Must have been careless,” Fox said. They began a systematic search.

After an unproductive minute or two Plank said: “You don’t suppose she thought taking that dirty great jump might do the trick, do you, sir?”

“Who can tell? On what we’ve got it sounds more as if the jump was the climax of a blazing row with her uncle. Did they blast off at each other as a regular practice do you know, Plank?”

“Only after he took up with this funny religion, or so they reckon in the Cove. Before that they was thought to be on very pleasant terms. He taught her to ride and was uncommon proud of the way she shaped up.”

Fox threw his head back in order to contemplate from under his spectacles an item of Miss Harkness’s underwear. “Free in her ways,” he mused, “by all accounts. By your account if it comes to that, Sarge.”

Sergeant Plank reddened. “According to the talk,” he said, “that was the trouble between them. After he took queer with his Inner Brethren he cut up rough over Dulcie’s life-style. The general opinion is, he tried to hammer it out of her but what a hope. I daresay her being in the family way put the lid on it.” He entered the wardrobe and was enveloped in overcoats.

“When the Pharamonds and my son went to pick up their horses they interrupted a ding-dong go during which she roared out that she was pregnant and he called her a Whore of Babylon.”

“I never knew that,” said Plank’s voice, stuffy with clothes. “Is that a fact.”

“You wouldn’t get round to wondering,” Fox suggested, “if his attitude could have led to anything serious?”

Plank, still red-faced, emerged from the wardrobe, “No, Mr. Fox,” he said loudly. “Not to him rigging wire in the gap. Not Cuth Harkness. Not a chap like him, given over to horses and their management. And that mare the apple of his eye! It’s not in the man to do it, drunk or sober, dotty or sane.” He appealed to Alleyn. “I’ve known the man for four years and it’s not on, sir, it’s not bloody on. Excuse me. Like you was saying yourself, sir, about this being an affair of character. Well, there’s no part of this crime, if it is a crime, in Cuth Harkness’s character and I’d stake my promotion on it.”

Alleyn said: “It’s a point well taken. You might just remember something else they tell us.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“Don’t get emotionally involved.”

“Ah,” said Fox. “There’s always that, Sarge. There’s always that.”

“Well, I know there is, Mr. Fox. But it does seem to me — well — Considering—”

“Considering,” Alleyn said, “that Harkness locked her up in her room and on pain of hellfire and damnation forbade her to jump. Considering that, would you say, Plank?”

“Yes, sir. I would.”

Mr. Fox, who was replacing Miss Harkness’s undergarments with the careful devotion of a lady’s maid, said generously, “Which is what you might call a glimpse of the obvious, I’ll say that for it.”

“Well, ta, Mr. Fox,” said Plank, mollified.

Alleyn was going through the pockets of a hacking jacket that hung from the back of a chair. They yielded a grubby handkerchief, small change, and a rumpled envelope of good paper, addressed in a civilized hand. It had been opened. Alleyn drew out a single sheet with an engraved heading — L’Espérance and the address. On it was written in the same hand, “Cliffs. Thursday. Usual time. L.P.”

He showed it to the others.

“ ‘L.P.’ eh,” Fox remarked.

“It doesn’t stand for ‘long playing,’ ” said Alleyn, “although I suppose, in a cockeyed sense, it just might.”

“Plank,” he said as they drove away from Leathers. “I want you to go over everything that Sydney Jones told you about the dialogue with Harkness after the riding party left. Not only the row with Dulcie but what he said to Jones himself. We won’t need your notebook again: just tell me.”

Plank, who was driving, did so. Jones had described Harkness in the yard and Dulcie at her bedroom window, hurling insults at each other. Dulcie had said she could take not only the sorrel mare, but the walleyed Mungo over the gap in the blackthorn hedge. Her uncle violently forbad her, under threat of a hiding, to make the attempt on any of the horses, least of all the mare. He had added the gratuitous opinion that she sat a jumping horse like a sack of potatoes. She had sworn at him and banged down the window.

“And then?”

“According to Jones, Harkness had told him to drive the car to a corn merchant on the way to Montjoy and pick up some sacks of fodder.”

“Rick remembers,” Alleyn said, “that after the body was found, Mr. Harkness said Jones had been told to take the mare to the smith to be reshod and that he’d given this order to get the mare out of Dulcie’s way. Harkness had added that because Jones didn’t carry out this order he was as good as a murderer. Didn’t Jones tell you about this?”

“Not a word, sir. No, he never.”

“Sure?”

“Swear to it, sir.”

Fox said: “Mr. Harkness isn’t what you’d call a reliable witness. He could have invented the bit about the blacksmith.”

“He wasn’t drinking then, Mr. Fox. That set in later,” said Plank, who seemed set upon casting little rays of favorable light upon the character of Mr. Harkness. “But he was very much upset,” he added. “I will say that for him. Distracted is what he was.”

“However distracted,” Alleyn said, “one would hardly expect him to cook up a pointless fairy tale, would one? I’d better talk to Rick about this,” he said vexedly and asked Plank to drive into the Cove. “Come and take a look at your godson, Br’er Fox,” he suggested, and to Plank: “Drop us round the corner at the station. You’ll be able to put in half an hour catching up on routine.”

“Don’t make me laugh, sir,” said Plank.

They passed the Ferrants’ house, turned into the side lane, and pulled up at the corner cottage that was also the local police station. A compact little woman with tight hair and rosy cheeks was hoeing vigorously in the garden. Nearby a little girl with Plank’s face at the wrong end of a telescope was knocking up a mud pie in a flowerpot.