“You mean?”

“She laughs a little too kindly at my dated jokes. She remembers not to forget I’m there. She includes me, with scarcely an effort, in their conversations. She’s even taken to bestowing the odd butterfly kiss on the top of my head. I might as well be bald,” said Mr. Markos bitterly.

“I’ll undertake not to do that, at least. But I’m not much of a cook.”

“My dear, my adorable lady, I said Egg and I meant Egg. I am,” said Mr. Markos, “your slave forever and if you will allow me will endorse the declaration with what used to be called a bottle of The Widow. Perhaps, at this juncture I should warn you that I shall also present you with a problem. A demain and a thousand thanks.”

“He gets away with it,” Verity thought, “but only just. And if he says eggs, eggs he shall have. On creamed spinach. And my standby: iced sorrel soup first and the Stilton afterwards.”

And as it was a lovely day they did have lunch under the limes. Mr. Markos, good as his word, had brought a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket and the slightly elevated atmosphere that Verity associated with him was quickly established. She could believe that he enjoyed himself as fully as he professed to do but he was as much of an exotic in her not very tidy English garden as frangipani. His hair luxuriant but disciplined, his richly curved, clever mouth and large, black eyes, his clothes that, while they avoided extravagance were inescapably very, very expensive — all these factors reminded Verity of Sybil Foster’s strictures.

“The difference is,” she thought, “that I don’t mind him being like this. What’s more I don’t think Syb would have minded either if he’d taken a bit more notice of her.”

When they had arrived at the coffee stage and he at his Turkish cigarette, he said: “I would choose, of course, to hear you talk about your work and this house and lovely garden. I should like you to confide in me and perhaps a little to confide in you myself.” He spread his hands. “What am I saying! How ridiculous! Of course I am about to confide in you; that is my whole intention, after all. I think you are accustomed to confidences: they are poured into your lap and you are discreet and never pass them on. Am I right?”

“Well,” said Verity, who was not much of a hand at talking about herself and didn’t enjoy it, “I don’t know so much about that.” And she thought how Alleyn, though without any Markosian floridity, had also introduced confidences. “Ratsy too,” she remembered, and thought irrelevantly that she had become quite a one for gentlemen callers over the last fortnight.

Mr. Markos fetched from his car two large sheets of cardboard tied together. “Do you remember,” he asked, “when we examined Prunella’s original plans of Quintern Place there was a smaller plan of the grounds that you said you had not seen before?”

“Yes, of course.”

“This is it.”

He put the cardboards on the table and opened them out. There was the plan.

“I think it is later than the others,” he said, “and by a different hand. It is drawn on the scale of a quarter of an inch to the foot and is very detailed. Now. Have a close, a very close look. Can you find a minute extra touch that doesn’t explain itself? Take your time,” Mr. Markos invited, with an air of extraordinary relish. He took her arm and led her close to the table.

Verity felt that he was making a great build-up and that the climax had better be good but she obediently pored over the map.

Since it was a scheme for laying out the grounds, the house was shown simply as an outline. The stable block was indicated in the same manner. Verity, not madly engaged, plodded conscientiously over elaborate indications of water-gardens, pavilions, fountains, terraces and spinnies but although they suggested a prospect that Evelyn himself would have treasured, she could find nothing untoward. She was about to say so when she noticed that within the empty outline of the stables there was an interior line suggesting a division into two rooms, a line that seemed to be drawn free-hand in pencil rather than ruled in the brownish ink of the rest of the plan. She bent down to examine it more closely and found, in one corner of the indicated stableroom a tiny X, also, she was sure, pencilled.

Mr. Markos, who had been watching her intently, gave a triumphant little crow. “Aha!” he cried. “You see! You’ve spotted it.”

“Well, yes,” said Verity. “If you mean—” and she pointed to the pencilled additions.

“Of course, of course. And what, my dear Miss Preston-Watson, do you deduce? You know my methods. Don’t bustle.”

“Only, I’m afraid, that someone at some time has thought of making some alteration in the old stable buildings.”

“A strictly Watsonian conclusion: I must tell you that at the moment a workman is converting the outer half of the amended portion — now an open-fronted broken-down lean-to, into a mushroom bed.”

“That will be Bruce, the gardener. Perhaps he and Sybil, in talking over the project, got out this plan and marked the place where it was to go.”

“But why ‘the point marked X’? It does not indicate the mushroom bed. It is in a deserted room that opens off the mushroom shed.”

“They might have changed their minds.”

“It is crammed into a corner where there are the remains of an open fireplace. I must tell you that after making this discovery I strolled round the stable yard and examined the premises.”

“I can’t think of anything else,” said Verity.

“I have cheated. I have withheld evidence. You must know, as Scheherazade would have said, meaning that you are to learn, that a few evenings after Prunella brought the plans to Mardling she found me poring over this one in the library. She remarked that it was strange that I should be so fascinated by it and then, with one of her nervous little spurts of confidence (she is, you will have noticed, unusually but, Heaven knows, understandably nervous just now), she told me that the egregious Claude Carter exhibited a similar interest in the plans and had been discovered examining this one through a magnifying glass. And I should like to know,” cried Mr. Markos, sparkling at Verity, “what you make of all that!”

Verity did not make a great deal of it. She knew he expected her to enter into zestful speculation but, truth to tell she found herself out of humour with the situation. There was something unbecoming in Nikolas Markos’s glee over his discovery and if, as she suspected, he was going to link it in some way with Sybil Foster’s death, she herself wanted no part in the proceedings. At the same time she felt apologetic — guilty, even — about her withdrawal, particularly as she was sure he was very well aware of it “He really is,” she thought, “so remarkably sharp.”

“To look at the situation quite cold-bloodedly,” he was saying, “and of course that is the only sensible way to look at it, the police clearly are treating Mrs. Foster’s death as a case of homicide. This being so, anything untoward that has occurred at Quintern either before or after the event should be brought to their notice. You agree?”

Verity pulled herself together. “I suppose so. I mean, yes, of course. Unless they’ve already found it out for themselves. What’s the matter?”

“If they have not, we have, little as I welcome the intrusion, an opportunity to inform them. Alas, you have a visitor, dear Verity,” said Mr. Markos and quickly kissed her hand.

Alleyn, in fact, was walking up the drive.

iv

“I’m sorry,” he said, “to come at such an unlikely time of day but I’m on my way back from Quintern Place and I thought perhaps you might like to know about the arrangements for this evening and tomorrow.”

He told them. “I daresay the Vicar will let you know,” he added, “but in case he doesn’t, that’s what will happen.”