“How about the taste, if they do taste?”

“It’s a strong Scotch. And,” Fox said quickly, “she attributes the taste, if noticed, to the one or maybe two tablets she’s given herself. She has now taken, say, six tablets.”

“Go on. If you’ve got the nerve.”

“He waits. He may even persuade her to have another drink. With him. And put more tablets in it.”

“What’s he drink out of? The bottle?”

“Let that be as it may. He waits, I say, until she’s dopey.”

“Well?”

“And he puts on his gloves and smothers her,” said Fox suddenly. “With the pillow.”

“I see.”

“You don’t buy it, Mr. Alleyn?”

“On the contrary, I find it extremely plausible.”

“You do? I forgot to say,” Fox added, greatly cheered, “that he put the extra tablets in her mouth after she was out. Gave them a push to the back of the tongue. That’s where he overdid it. One of those fancy touches you’re so often on about. Yerse. To make suicide look convincing he got rid of a lot more down the loo.”

“Was the television going all this time?”

“Yes. Because Dr. Schramm found it going when he got there. Blast,” said Fox vexedly. “Of course if he’s our man—”

“He got home much earlier than he makes out. The girl at reception would hardly mistake him for an itinerant electrician. So someone else does that bit and hides with the vacuum cleaner and puts the lilies in the basin and goes home as clean as a whistle.”

“Yerse,” said Fox.

“There’s no call for you to be crestfallen. It’s a damn’ good bit of barefaced conjecture and may well be right if Schramm’s not our boy.”

“But if this Claude Carter is?”

“It would fit.”

“Ah! And Gardener? Well,” said Fox, “I know he’s all wrong if the receptionist girl’s right. I know that. Great hulking cross-eyed lump of a chap,” said Fox crossly.

There followed a discontented pause at the end of which Fox said, with a touch of diffidence: “Of course, there is another fringe character, isn’t there? Perhaps two. I mean to say, by all accounts the deceased was dead set against the engagement, wasn’t she?”

Alleyn made no reply. He had wandered over to the dressing table and was gazing at its array of Sybil Foster’s aids to beauty and at the regimental photograph in a silver frame. Bailey had dealt delicately with them all and scarcely disturbed the dust that had settled on them or upon the looking-glass that had reflected her altered face.

After another long silence Alleyn said: “Do you know, Fox, you have, in the course of your homily, proved me, to my own face and full in my own silly teeth, to be a copybook example of the unobservant investigating officer.”

“You don’t say!”

“But I do say. Grinding the said teeth and whipping my cat, I do say.”

“It would be nice,” said Fox mildly, “to know why.”

“Let’s pack up and get out of this and I’ll tell you on the way.”

“On the way to where?” Fox reasonably inquired.

“To the scene where I was struck down with sand-blindness or whatever. To the source of all our troubles, my poor Foxkin.”

“Upper Quintern, would that be?”

“Upper Quintern it is. And I think, Fox, we’d better find ourselves rooms at a pub. Better to be there than here. Come on.”

Chapter 6: Point Marked X

i

Prunella was at home at Quintern Place. Her car was in the drive and she herself answered the door, explaining that she was staying at Mardling and had merely called in to pick up her mail. She took Alleyn and Fox into the drawing-room. It was a room of just proportions with appointments that had occurred quietly over many years rather than by any immediate process of collective assembly. The panelling and ceiling were graceful. It was a room that seemed to be full of gentle light.

Alleyn exclaimed with pleasure.

“Do you like it?” Prunella said. “Most people seem to like it.”

“I’m sure you do, don’t you?”

“I expect so. It always feels quite nice to come back to. It’s not exactly rivetting, of course. Too predictable. I mean it doesn’t send one, does it? I don’t know though. It sends my father-in-law-to-be up like a rocket. Do sit down.”

She herself sat between them. She arranged her pretty face in a pout almost as if she parodied some Victorian girl. She was pale and, Alleyn thought, very tense.

“We won’t be long about this,” he said. “There are one or two bits and pieces we’re supposed to tidy up. Nothing troublesome, I hope.”

“Oh,” said Prunella. “I see. I thought that probably you’d come to tell me my mother was murdered. Officially tell me, I mean. I know, of course, that you thought so.”

Until now she had spoken in her customary whisper but this was brought out rapidly and loudly. She stared straight in front of her and her hands were clenched in her lap.

“No,” Alleyn said. “That’s not it.”

“But you think she was, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid we do think it’s possible. Do you?”

Prunella darted a look at him and waited a moment before she said: “I don’t know. The more I wonder the less I can make up my mind. But then, of course, there are all sorts of things the police dig up that other people know nothing about. Aren’t there?”

“I suppose so.”

“My first reason for coming is to make sure you have been properly consulted about the arrangements for tomorrow and to ask if there is anything we can do to help. The service is at half-past-three, isn’t it? The present suggestion is that your mother will be brought from Maidstone to the church arriving about two o’clock but it has occurred to me that you might like her to rest there tonight. If so, that can easily be arranged.”

Prunella for the first time looked directly at him. “That’s kind,” she said. “I’d like that, I think. Please.”

“Good. I’ll check with our chaps in Maidstone and have a word with your Vicar. I expect he’ll let you know.”

“Thank you.”

“All right, then?”

“Super,” said Prunella with shaking lips. Tears trickled down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I’d got over all this. I thought I was O.K.” She knuckled her eyes and fished a handkerchief out of her pocket. Mr. Fox rose and walked away to the farthest windows through which he contemplated the prospect.

“Never mind,” Alleyn said. “That’s the way delayed shock works. Catches you on the hop when you least expect it”

“Sickening of it,” Prunella mumbled into her handkerchief. “You’d better say what you wanted to ask.”

“It can wait a bit.”

“No!” said Prunella and stamped like an angry child. “Now.”

“All right. I’d better say first what we always say. Don’t jump to conclusions and read all sorts of sinister interpretations into routine questions. You must realize that in a case of this sort everyone who saw anything at all of your mother or had contact, however trivial, with her during the time she was at Greengages, and especially on the last day, has to be crossed off.”

“All except one.”

“Perhaps not excepting even one and then we do look silly.”

Prunella sniffed. “Go ahead,” she said.

“Do you know a great deal about your mother’s first husband?”

Prunella stared at him.

“Know? Me? Only what everyone knows. Do you mean about how he was killed and about the Black Alexander stamp?”

“Yes. We’ve heard about the stamp. And about the unfinished letter to your mother.”

“Well then—. There’s nothing else that I can think of.”

“Do you know if she kept that letter? And any other of his letters?”

Prunella began: “If I did I wouldn’t—” and pulled herself up. “Sorry,” she said, “yes, she did. I found them at the back of a drawer in her dressing-table. It’s a converted sofa-table and it’s got a not terribly secret, secret drawer.”

“And you have them still?”