“Perhaps,” said the Vicar, “we’d better—?”

Jim, moving like a gaffer in a Victorian melodrama, achieved the handrail and clung to it. He shouted: “I won’t be able to do the job now, will I?”

There was an awkward silence broken by Bruce. “Dinna fash yourself,” he said. “No problem. With the Mister’s kind permission I’ll dig it myself and think it an honour. I will that.”

“The full six foot, mind.”

“Ou aye,” Bruce agreed. “All of it. I’m a guid hand at digging,” he added.

“Fair enough,” said Jim and began to ease himself down the steps.

“This is a most fortunate solution, Bruce,” said the Vicar. “Shall we just leave Jim as he wishes?” and he ushered them into the church.

St. Crispin’s-in-Quintern was one of the great company of parish churches that stand as milestones in rural history: obstinate registers to the ravages of time. It had a magnificent peal of bells, now unsafe to ring, one or two brasses, a fine east window and a surprising north window in which — strange conceit — a walrus-mustachioed Passcoigne, looking startlingly like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was depicted in full plate armour, an Edwardian St. Michael without a halo. The legend indicated that he had met his end on the African veld. The familiar ecclesiastical odour of damp held at bay by paraffin heaters greeted Verity and the two men.

Verity explained that she would like to do anything that would help about the flowers. The Vivar said that custody of all brass vases was inexorably parcelled out among the Ladies Guild, five in number. She gathered that any attempt to disrupt this procedure would trigger off a latent pecking order.

“But they would be grateful for flowers,” he added.

Bruce said that there were late roses up at Quintern Place and he’d thought it would be nice to have her ain favourites to see her off. He muttered in an uneven voice that the name was appropriate: Peace. “They endure better than most oot o’ water,” he added and blew his nose. Verity and the Vicar warmly supported this suggestion and Verity left the two men to complete, she understood, the arrangements for digging Sybil’s grave.

When she returned to the top of the steps she found that Jim Jobbin had reached the bottom on his hands and knees and was being manipulated through the lych-gate by his wife. Verity joined them. Mrs. Jim explained that she was on her way to get dinner and had found Jim crawling backward down the last four steps. It was no distance, they both reminded Verity, along the lane to their cottage. Jim got to his feet by swarming up his wife as if she was a tree.

“It’ll ease off once he straightens himself,” she said. “It does him good to walk.”

“That’s what you think,” her husband groaned but he straightened up and let out an oath as he did so. They made off in slow motion.

Verity returned to her car and to Claude, lounging in the passenger’s seat. He made a token shuffle with his feet and leant over to open the door.

“That was as good as a play,” he said. “Poor old Jobbin. Did you see him beetling down the steps? Fantastic!” He gave a neighing laugh.

“Lumbago’s no joke to the person who’s got it,” Verity snapped.

“It’s hysterical for the person who hasn’t, though.”

She drove as far as the corner where the lane up to Quintern Place branched off to the left.

“Will this suit you?” she asked, “or would you like me to run you up?”

He said he wouldn’t take her out of her way but when she pulled up he didn’t get out

“What did you make of the inquest?” he asked. “I must say I thought it pretty off.”

“Off?”

“Well — you know. I mean what does that extraordinary detective person think he’s on about? And a further postponement. Obviously they suspect something.”

Verity was silent.

“Which isn’t exactly welcome news,” he said. “Is it? Not for this medico, Schramm. Or for Mr. Folksy Gardener if it comes to that.”

“I don’t think you should make suggestions, Claude.”

“Suggestions! I’m not suggesting anything, but people are sure to look sideways. I know I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I were in those gentlemen’s boots, that’s all. Still, they’re getting their lovely legacies, aren’t they, which’ll be a great consolation. I could put up with plenty of funny looks for twenty-five thousand of the best. Still more for Schramm’s little lot.”

“I must get home, Claude.”

“Nothing can touch my bit, anyway. God, can I use it! Only thing: that old relic Rattisbon says it won’t be available until probate is allowed or passed or whatever. Still, I suppose I can borrow on my prospects, wouldn’t you think?”

“I’m running late.”

“Nobody seems to think it’s a bit oft-colour her leaving twenty-five thousand of the best to a jobbing gardener she’d only hired a matter of months ago. It’s pretty obvious he’d got round her in a big way: I could tell you one or two things about Mr. gardener-Gardener.”

“I must go, Claude.”

“Yes. O.K.”

He climbed out of the car and slammed the door. “Thanks for the lift, anyway,” he said. “See you at the funeral. Ain’t we got fun?”

Glad to be rid of him but possessed by a languor she could not understand, Verity watched him turn up the lane. Even seen from behind there was a kind of furtive jauntiness in his walk, an air of complacency that was out of character. He turned a corner and was gone.

“I wonder,” she thought, “what he’ll do with himself.”

She drove on up her own lane into her own little avenue and got her own modest luncheon. She found she hadn’t much appetite for it.

The day was gently sunny but Verity found it oppressive. The sky was clear but she felt as if it would almost be a relief if bastions of cloud shouldered each other up from beyond the horizon. It occurred to her that writers like Ibsen and Dickens — unallied in any other respect — were right to make storms, snow, fog and fire the companions of human disorders. Shakespeare too, she thought. We deprive ourselves aesthetically when we forgo the advantages of symbolism.

She had finished the overhaul of her play and had posted it off to her agent. It was not unusual, when work-in-hand had been dealt with and she was cleaned out, for her to experience a nervous impulse to start off at once on something new. As now, when she found herself wondering, if she could give a fresh look to an old, old theme: that of an intelligent woman enthralled by a second-rate charmer, a “bad lot,” in Verity’s dated jargon, for whom she had no respect but was drawn to by an obstinate attraction. If she could get such a play successfully off her chest, would she scotch the bogey that had returned to plague her?

When at that first Markos dinner-party, she found that Basil Schramm’s pinchbeck magnetism had evaported, the discovery had been a satisfaction to Verity. Now, when a shadow crept toward him, how did she feel? And why, oh why, had she bleated out her confession to Alleyn? He won’t let it rest, she thought, her imagination bolting with her. He’ll want to know more about Basil. He may ask if Basil ever got into trouble and what’ll I say to that?

And Alleyn, returning with Fox to Greengages via Maidstone, said: “This case is getting nasty. She let it out without any pushing or probing and I think she amazed herself by doing so. I wouldn’t mind betting there was more to it than the predatory male jilt and the humiliated woman, though there was all of that, too, I daresay.”

“If it throws any light on his past?”

“We may have to follow it up, of course. Do you know what I think she’ll do about it?”

“Refuse to talk?”

“That’s it. There’s not much of the hell-knows-no-fury in Verity Preston’s makeup.”

“Well,” said Fox reasonably, “seeing how pretty he stands we have to make it thorough. What comes first?”

“Get the background. Check up on the medical side. Qualified at Lausanne, or whatever it was. Find out the year and the degree. See if there was any regular practice in this country. Or in the U.S.A. So much waste of time, it may be, but it’ll have to be done, Br’er Fox. And, on a different lay: here comes Maidstone again. Call at stationers and bookshops and see if anyone’s bought any Will forms lately. If not, do the same in villages and towns and in the neighbourhood of Greengages.”