“This is the only message you’ve received?”

“There’s been something else. Something much worse. Last evening. Soon after eight. They fetched me from the dining-room.”

“What was it? A telephone call?”

“You knew!”

“I guessed. Go on, please.”

“When the waiter told me, I knew. I don’t know why but I did. I knew. I took it in one of the telephone boxes in the hall. I think he must have had something over his mouth. His voice was muffled and peculiar. It said: ‘You got the message.’ I couldn’t speak and then it said: ‘You did or you’d answer. Have you followed instructions?’ I — didn’t know what to say so I said: ‘I will’ and it said ‘you better.’ It said something else, I don’t remember exactly, something about the only warning, I think. That’s all,” said Sister Jackson, and finished her cognac. She held the unsteady glass between her white-gloved paws and put it down awkwardly.

Alleyn said:“Do you mind if I keep this? And would you be kind enough to refold it and put it in here for me?” He took an envelope from his pocket and laid it beside the paper.

She complied and made a shaky business of doing so. He put the envelope in his breast pocket.

“What will he do to me?” asked Sister Jackson.

“The odds are: nothing effective. The police may get something from him but you’ve anticipated that, haven’t you? Or you will do so.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Sister Jackson,” Alleyn said. “Don’t you think you had better tell me about your visit to Room Twenty?”

She tried to speak. Her lips moved. She fingered them and then looked at the smudge of red on her glove.

“Come along,” he said.

“You won’t understand.”

“Try me.”

“I can’t.”

“Then why have you asked to see me? Surely it was to anticipate whatever the concocter of this message might hâve to say to us. You’ve got in first.”

“I haven’t done anything awful. I’m a fully qualified nurse.”

“Of course you are. Now then, when did you pay this visit?”

She focussed her gaze on the couple in the far corner, stiffened her neck and rattled off her account in a series of disjointed phrases.

It had been at about nine o’clock on the night of Mrs. Foster’s death (Sister Jackson called it her “passing”). She herself walked down the passage on her way to her own quarters. She heard the television bawling away in Number 20. Pop music. She knew Mrs. Foster didn’t appreciate pop and she thought she might have fallen asleep and the noise would disturb the occupants of neighbouring rooms. So she tapped and went in.

Here Sister Jackson paused. A movement of her chin and throat indicated a dry swallow.When she began again her voice was pitched higher but not by any means louder than before.

“The patient—” she said, “Mrs. Foster, I mean — was, as I thought she would be. Asleep. I looked at her and made sure she was — asleep. So I came away. I came away. I wasn’t there for more than three minutes. That’s all. All there is to tell you.”

“How was she lying?”

“On her side, with her face to the wall.”

“When Dr. Schramm found her she was on her back.”

“I know. That proves it. Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it!”

“Did you turn off the television?”

“No. Yes! I don’t remember. I think I must have. I don’t know.”

“It was still going when Dr. Schramm found her.”

“Well, I didn’t, then, did I? I didn’t turn it off.”

“Why, I wonder?”

“It’s no good asking me things like that. I’ve been shocked. I don’t remember details.”

She beat on the table. The amorous couple unclinched and one of the card players looked over his shoulder. Sister Jackson had split her glove.

Alleyn said: “Should we continue this conversation somewhere else?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

With a most uncomfortable parody of coquettishness she leant across the table and actually smiled or seemed to smile at him.

“I’ll be all right,” she said.

Their waiter came back and looked enquiringly at her empty glass.

“Would you like another?” Alleyn asked.

“I don’t think so. No. Well, a small one, then.”

The waiter was quick bringing it.

“Right. Now — how was the room? The bedside table? Did you notice the bottle of barbiturates?”

“I didn’t notice. I’ve said so. I just saw she was asleep and I went away.”

“Was the light on in the bathroom?”

This seemed to terrify her. She said: “Do you mean—? Was he there? Whoever it was? Hiding? Watching? No, the door was shut, I mean — I think it was shut.”

“Did you see anybody in the passage? Before you went into the room or when you left it?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“There’s that alcove, isn’t there? Where the brooms and vacuum cleaner are kept?”

She nodded. The amorous couple were leaving. The man helped the girl into her coat. They both looked at Alleyn and Sister Jackson. She fumbled in her bag and produced a packet of cigareetes.

Alleyn said: “I’m sorry. I’ve given up and forget to keep any on me. At least I can offer you a light.” He did so and she made a clumsy business of using it. The door swung to behind the couple. The card players had finished their game and decided, noisily, to move into the bar. When they had gone Alleyn said: “You realize, don’t you — well of course you do — that the concocter of this threat must have seen you?”

She stared at him. “Naturally,” she said, attempting, he thought, a sneer.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s a glimpse of the obvious, isn’t it? And you’ll remember that I showed you a lily head that Inspector Fox and I found in the alcove?”

“Of course.”

“And that there were similar lilies in the hand-basin in Mrs. Foster’s bathroom?”

“Naturally. I mean — yes, I saw them afterwards. When we used the stomach pump. We scrubbed up under the bath taps. It was quicker than clearing away the mess in the basin.”

“So it follows as the night the day that the person who dropped the lily head in the alcove was the person who put the flowers in the hand-basin. Does it also follow that this same person was your blackmailer?”

“I — yes. I suppose it might.”

“And does it also follow, do you think, that the blackmailer was the murderer of Mrs. Foster?”

“But you don’t know. You don’t know that she was—that.”

“We believe we do.”

She ought, he thought, to be romping about like a Rubens lady in an Arcadian setting: all sumptuous flesh, no brains and as happy as Larry, instead of quivering like an overdressed jelly in a bar-parlour.

“Sister Jackson,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell the coroner or the police or anyone at all that you went into Room Twenty at about nine o’clock that night and found Mrs. Foster asleep in her bed?”

She opened and shut her smudged lips two or three times, gaping like a fish.

“Nobody asked me,” she said. “Why should I?”

“Are you sure Mrs. Foster was asleep?”

Her lips formed the words but she had no voice. “Of course I am.”

“She wasn’t asleep, was she? She was dead.”

The swing door opened and Basil Schramm walked in. “I thought I’d find you,” he said. “Good evening.”