“I don’t want to waste my breath and your time repeating myself, if you’ve already heard about the Will. And I think you must have heard it because, as I came up, the adjoining door in there was dragged shut.”

Claude gave a rather shrill titter. “You are quick, aren’t you?” he said. He lowered his voice. “As I said,” he confided, “I was looking for that gardener-man in there. As a matter of fact I thought he might be in the other room and then when you came in and began talking it was jolly awkward. I didn’t want to intrude so I–I mean I — you know — it’s difficult to explain—”

“You’re making a brave shot at it, though, aren’t you? Your sense of delicacy prompted you to remove into the next room, shut that same openwork door and remain close by it throughout our conversation. Is that it?”

“Not at all. You haven’t understood.”

“You’d seen us arrive in a police car, perhaps, and you left the house in a hurry for the rose-garden and thence proceeded round the left wing to the stables?”

“I don’t know,” said Claude with a strange air of frightened effrontery, “why you’re taking this line with me, Superintendent, but I must say I resent it.”

“Yes, I thought you might be a bit put out by our appearance. Because of an irregularity in your departure from the Poseidon.”

Claude began feverishly to maintain that there had been some mistake and the police had had to climb down and he was thinking of lodging a complaint only it didn’t seem worth while.

Alleyn let him talk himself to a standstill and then said his visit had nothing to do with any of this and that he only wanted to be told if Claude did in fact know of a recent Will made by Mrs. Foster shortly before her death.

An elaborate shuffling process set in, hampered, it seemed, by the proximity of the ever-industrious Bruce. By means of furtive little nods and becks Claude indicated the desirability of a remove. Alleyn disregarded these hints and continued on a loudish, cheerful note.

“It’s a perfectly simple question,” he said. “Nothing private about it. Have you, in fact, known of such a Will?”

Claude made slight jabs with his forefinger, in the direction of Bruce’s rear elevation.

“As it happens, yes,” he mouthed.

“You have? Do you mind telling me how it came to your knowledge?”

“It’s — I — it just so happened—”

“What did?”

“I mean to say—”

“Havers!” Bruce suddenly roared out. He became upright and faced them. “What ails you, man?” he demanded. “Can you no’ give a straight answer when you’re speired a straight question? Oot wi’ it, for pity’s sake. Tell him and ha‘ done. There’s nothing wrong wi’ the facts o’ the matter.”

“Yes, well, all right, all right,” said the wretched Claude and added with a faint show of grandeur: “And you may as well keep a civil tongue in your head.”

Bruce spat on his hands and returned to his shovelling.

“Well, Mr. Carter?” Alleyn asked.

By painful degrees it emerged that Claude had happened to be present when Bruce came into the house with the Will and had happened to see him hand it over to Mrs. Jim and had happened to notice what it was on account of the word “Will” being written in large letters on the envelope.

“And had happened,” Bruce said without turning round but with a thwack of his shovel on the heap of earth he had raised, “to inquire with unco perrrsistence as to the cirrrcumstances.”

“Look here, Gardener, I’ve had about as much of you as I can take,” said Claude with a woeful show of spirit.

“You can tak’ me or leave me, Mr. Carter, and my preference would be for the latter procedure.”

“Do you know the terms of the Will?” Alleyn cut in.

“No, I don’t. I’m not interested. Whatever they are they don’t affect me.”

“How do you mean?”

“My father provided for me. With a trust fund or whatever it’s called. Syb couldn’t touch that and she’s not bloody likely to have added to it,” said Claude with a little spurt of venom.

Upon this note Alleyn left them and returned deviously, by way of a brick-walled vegetable garden, to Fox. He noticed two newly made asparagus beds and a multitude of enormous cabbages and wondered where on earth they all went and who consumed them. Fox, patient as ever, awaited him in the car.

“Nothing to report,” Fox said. “I took a walk round but no signs of anyone.”

“The gardener’s growing mushrooms in the stables and the stepson’s growing butterflies in the stomach,” said Alleyn and described the scene.

“Miss Preston,” he said, “finds Bruce’s Scots a bit hard to take.”

“Phoney?”

“She didn’t say that. More, ‘laid on with a trowel.’ She might have said with a long-handled shovel if she’d seen him this morning. But — I don’t know. I’m no expert on dialects, Scots or otherwise, but it seemed to me he uses it more in the manner of someone who has lived with the genuine article long enough to acquire and display it inconsistently and inaccurately. His last job was in Scotland. He may think it adds to his charm or pawkiness or whatever.”

“What about the stepson?”

“Oh, quite awful, poor devil. Capable of anything if he had the guts to carry it through.”

“We move on?”

“We do. Hark forrard, hard forrard away to Greengages and the point marked X if there is one. Shall I drive and you follow the map?”

“Fair enough, if you say so, Mr. Alleyn. What do I look for?”

“Turn right after Maidstone and follow the road to the village of Greendale. Hence ‘Greengages,’ no doubt”

“Colicky sort of name for a hospital.”

“It’s not a hospital.”

“Colicky sort of a name for whatever it is.”

“There’s no suggestion that the lady in question died of that, at least.”

“Seeing I’ve only just come in could we re-cap on the way? What’ve we got for info?”

“We’ve got the lady who is dead. She was in affluent circumstances, stinking rich, in fact, and probably in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease but unaware of it, and we’ve got the medical incumbent of an expensive establishment that is neither hospital nor nursing home but a hotel that caters for well-to-do invalids, whose patient the lady was, and who did not spot the disease. We’ve got a local doctor called Field-Innis and a police pathologist who did. We’ve got the lady’s daughter who on the afternoon of her mother’s death announced her engagement to a rich young man who did not meet with the lady’s approval. We’ve got the rich young man’s millionaire papa who coveted the lady’s house, failed to buy it but will now live in it when his son marries the daughter.”

“Hold on,” said Fox, after a pause. “O.K. I’m with you.”

“We’ve got an elderly Scottish gardener, possible pseudoish, to whom the lady has left twenty-five thousand deflated quid in a recent Will. The rest of her fortune is divided between her daughter if she marries a peer called Swingletree and the medical incumbent who didn’t diagnose Parkinson’s disease. If the daughter doesn’t marry Swingletree the incument gets the lot.”

“That would be Dr. Schramm?”

“Certainly. The rest of the cast is made up of the lady’s stepson by her first marriage who is the archetype of all remittance-men and has a police record. Finally we have a nice woman of considerable ability called Verity Preston.”

“That’s the lot?”

“Give and take a trained nurse and a splendid lady called Mrs. Jim who obliges in Upper Quintern, that’s the lot.”

“What’s the score where we come in? Exactly, I mean?”

“The circumstances are the score really, Br’er Fox. The Will and the mise-en-scène. The inquest was really adjourned because everybody says the lady was such an unlikely subject for suicide and had no motive. An extended autopsy seemed to be advisable. Sir James Curtis performed it. The undelicious results of Dr. Schramm’s stomach pump had been preserved and Sir James confirms that they disclosed a quantity of the barbiturate found in the remaining tablets on the bedside table and in the throat and at the back of the tongue. The assumption had been that she stuffed down enough of the things to become so far doped as to prevent her swallowing the last lot she put in her mouth.”