There were no photographs or feminine toys of any kind on the tables and chimney-piece, and Sybil’s sofa-cum-dressing-table, with its cupid-encircled looking-glass, had been bereft of all the pots, bottles and jars that Alleyn supposed had adorned it.

Prunella said, following his look. “I got rid of everything. Everything.” She was defiant.

“I expect it was the best thing to do.”

“We’re going to change the room. Completely. My father-in-law-to-be’s fantastic about houses — an expert. He’ll advise us.”

“Ah, yes,” said Alleyn politely.

She almost shouted at him: “I suppose you think I’m hard and modern and over-reacting to everything. Well, so I may be. But I’ll thank you to remember that Will. How she tried to bribe me, because that’s what it was, into marrying a monster, because that’s what he is, and punish me if I didn’t. I never thought she had it in her to be so mean and despicable and I’m not going to bloody cry again and I don’t in the least know why I’m talking to you like this. The letters are in the dressing-table and I bet you can’t find the hidden bit.”

She turned her back on Alleyn and blew her nose.

He went to the table, opened the central drawer, slid his finger round inside the frame and found a neat little knob that released a false wall at the back. It opened and there in the “secret” recess was the classic bundle of letters tied with the inevitable faded ribbon.

There was also an open envelope with some half-dozen sepia snapshots inside.

“I think,” he said, “the best way will be for me to look at once through the letters and if they are irrelevant return them to you. Perhaps there’s somewhere downstairs where Fox and I could make ourselves scarce and get it settled.”

Without saying anything further Prunella led the way downstairs to the “boudoir” he had visited on his earlier call. They paused at the drawing-room to collect Mr. Fox, who was discovered in contemplation of a portrait in pastel of Sybil as a young girl.

“If,” said Prunella, “you don’t take the letters away perhaps you’d be kind enough to leave them in the desk.”

“Yes, of course,” Alleyn rejoined with equal formality. “We mustn’t use up any more of your time. Thank you so much for being helpful.”

He made her a little bow and was about to turn away when she suddenly thrust out her hand.

“Sorry I was idiotic. No bones broken?” Prunella asked.

“Not even a green fracture.”

“Goodbye, then.”

They shook hands.

“That child,” said Alleyn when they were alone, “turned on four entirely separate moods, if that’s what they should be called, in scarcely more than as many minutes. Not counting the drawing-room comedy which was not a comedy. You and your Aunt Elsie!”

“Perhaps the young lady’s put about by recent experience,” Fox hazarded.

“It’s the obvious conclusion, I suppose.”

In the boudoir Alleyn divided the letters — there were eight — between them. Fox put on his spectacles and read with the catarrhal breathing that always afflicted him when engaged in that exercise.

Prunella had been right They were indeed love letters, “pure and simple” within the literal meaning of the phrase, and most touching. The young husband had been deeply in love and able to say so.

As his regiment moved from the Western Desert to Italy, the reader became accustomed to the nicknames of fellow officers and regimental jokes. The Corp, who was indeed Captain Carter’s servant, featured more often as time went on. Some of the letters were illustrated with lively little drawings. There was one of the enormous Corp being harassed by bees in Tuscany. They were represented as swarming inside his kilt and he was depicted with a violent squint and his mouth wide open. A balloon issued from it with a legend that said: “It’s no sae much the ticklin’, it’s the imperrtinence, ye ken.”

The last letter was as Prunella had described it. The final sentences read: “So my darling love, I shan’t see you this time. If I don’t stop I’ll miss the bloody train. About the stamp — sorry, no time left Your totally besotted husband, Maurice.”

Alleyn assembled the letters, tied the ribbon and put the little packet in the desk. He emptied out the snapshots: a desolate, faded company well on its slow way to oblivion. Maurice Carter appeared in all of them and in all of them looked like a near relation of Rupert Brooke. In one, he held by the hand a very small nondescript child: Claude, no doubt. In another, he and a ravishingly pretty young Sybil appeared together. A third was yet another replica of the regimental group still in her desk drawer. The fourth and last showed Maurice kilted and a captain now, with his enormous “Corp” stood-to-attention in the background.

Alleyn took it to the window, brought out his pocket lens and examined it. Fox folded his arms and watched him,

Presently he looked up and nodded.

“We’ll borrow these four,” he said. “I’ll leave a receipt.”

He wrote it out, left it in the desk and put the snap-shots in his pocket. “Come on,” he said.

They met nobody on their way out. Prunella’s car was gone. Fox followed Alleyn past the long windows of a library and the lower west flank of the house. They turned right and came at last to the stables.

“As likely as not, he’ll still be growing mushrooms,” Alleyn said.

And so he was. Stripped to the waist, bronzed, golden-bearded and looking like a much younger man. Bruce was hard at work in the converted lean-to. When he saw Alleyn he grounded his shovel and arched his earthy hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun.

“Ou aye,” he said, “so it’s you again, Chief Superintendent. What can I do for you, the noo?”

“You can tell us, if you will, Corporal Gardener, the name of your regiment, and of its captain,” said Alleyn.

ii

“I canna credit it,” Bruce muttered and gazed out of his nonaligned blue eyes at Alleyn. “It doesna seem within the bounds of possibility. It’s dealt me a wee shock. I’ll say that for it.”

“You hadn’t an inkling?”

“Don’t be sae daft, man,” Bruce said crossly. “Sir, I should say. How would I have an inkling, will you tell me that? I doubt if her first husband was ever mentioned in my hearing and why would he be?”

“There was this stepson,” Fox said to nobody in particular. “Name of Carter.”

“Be damned to that,” Bruce shouted. “Carrrter! Carrrter! Why would he not be Carrrter? Would I be sae daft as to say: my Captain, dead nigh on forty years, was a man o’ the name of Carrrter so you must be his son and he the bonniest lad you’d ever set eyes on and you, not’ to dra’ it mild, a puir, sickly, ill-put-taegither apology for a man? Here, sir, can I have another keek at them photies?”

Alleyn gave them to him.

“Ah,” he said, “I mind it fine, the day that group was taken. I’d forgotten all about it but I mind it fine the noo.”

“But didn’t you notice the replica of this one in her bedroom at the hotel?”

Bruce stared at him. His expression became prudish. He half-closed his eyes and pursed his enormous mouth. He said, in a scandalized voice: “Sir, I never set fut in her bedroom. It would have not been the thing at a’. Not at a’.”

“Indeed?”

“She received me in her wee private parlour upstairs or in the garden.”

“I see. I beg your pardon.”

“As for these ither ones: I never saw them before.”

He gazed at them in silence for some moments. “My God,” he said quietly, “look at the bairn, just. That’ll be the bairn by the first wife. My God, it’ll be this Claude! Who’d’ve thought it. And here’s anither wi’ me in the background. It’s a strange coincidence, this, it is indeed.”

“You never came to Quintern or heard him speak of it?”

“If I did, the name didna stick in my mind. I never came here. What for would I? When we had leave and we only had but one before he was kilt, he let me gang awa’ home. Aye, he was a considerate officer. Christ!”