“Suppose she’d posted it today, first-class mail, it wouldn’t arrive at the earliest until tomorrow,” said Alleyn.

“They’ve got the shop under obbo non-stop. If he shows, they’ll feel his collar, all right,” said Fox.

“If. It’s an odd development, isn’t it?” Alleyn said. “There he is, large as life, mousing about up at Quintern Place and in and around the district until (according to Daft Artie) twelve o’clock or (according to Bruce) nine, last night. He comes down the lane with his pack on his back. He opens the squeaky lych-gate and leaves his prints there. And vanishes.”

“Now you see him, now you don’t. Lost his nerve, d’you reckon?”

“We mustn’t forget he left that note for Mrs. Jim.”

“P’raps that’s all there is to it. P’raps,” said Fox bitterly, “he’ll come waltzing back with a silly grin on his face having been to stay with his auntie. P’raps it was somebody else blackmailing Sister J., and we’ll get egg all over our faces.”

“It’s an occupational hazard,” Alleyn said vaguely and then to himself: “ ‘Into thin air’ and but for the footprints at the lych-gate, leaving ‘not a rack behind.’ Why? And then — where to, for pity’s sake?”

“Not by the late train to London,” said Fox. “They said at the station, nobody entered or left it at Great Quintern.”

“Hitched a lift?”

“Nice job for our boys, that’ll be. Ads in the papers and what a hope.”

“You’re in a despondent mood, my poor Foxkin.”

Mr. Fox, who, although an occasional grumbler, was never known to succumb to the mildest hint of depression, placidly ignored this observation.

“I shall cheer you up,” Alleyn continued. “You need a change of scene. What do you say to a moonlight picnic?”

“Now then!” said Fox guardedly.

“Well, not perhaps a picnic but a stroll in a graveyard? Bruce Gardener would call it a Gothic stroll, no doubt.”

“You don’t mean this, I suppose, Mr Alleyn?”

“I do, though, I can not get Daft Artie’s story out of my head, Fox. It isn’t all moonshine, presumably, because there are those prints, Carter has disappeared and there is the lay-by in the hedge. I suggest we return to the scene and step it out. What’s the time?”

“Eleven-ten.”

“The village ought to be asleep.”

“So ought we,” sighed Fox.

“We’d beter give the ‘factory’ a shout and ask if they can raise an acetylene lamp or its equivalent.”

“A reconstruction, then?”

“You find it a fanciful notion? A trifle vieux-jeu, perhaps?”

“I daresay it makes sense,” said Fox resignedly and went off to telephone.

Sergeant McGuiness on night duty at the station did produce an acetylene lamp, kept in reserve against power failures. He had it ready for them and handed it over rather wistfully. “I’d’ve liked to be in on this,” he confided to Fox. “It sounds interesting.”

Alleyn overheard him. “Can you raise a copper to hold the desk for an hour?” he asked. “We could do with a third man.”

Sergeant McGuiness brightened. He said: “Our P.C. Dance was competing in the darts semi-finals at the local tonight. He’ll be on his way home but if he’s won he’ll be looking in to tell me. I daresay if it’s agreeable to you, sir—”

“I’ll condone it,” said Alleyn.

A scraping sound and a bobbing light on the window-blind announced the arival of a bicycle. The sergeant excused himself and hurried to the door. A voice outside shouted: “Done it, Sarge.”

“You never!”

“Out on the double seven.”

“That’s the stuff.”

“Very near thing, though. Wait till I tell you.”

“Hold on.” The sergeant’s voice dropped to a mumble. There was a brief inaudible exchange. He returned followed by a ginger-headed simpering colossus.

“P.C. Dance, sir,” said Sergeant McGuiness.

Alleyn congratulated P.C. Dance on his prowess and said he would be obliged if they could “borrow” him. “Borrow” is a synonym for “arrest” in the Force and the disreputable pun, if pun it was, had an undeserved success. They left Dance telephoning in triumph to his wife.

On their way to the village Alleyn outlined the object of the exercise for the gratified McGuiness. “We’re trying to make sense of an apparently senseless situation,” he said. “Item: could a walker coming down Stile Lane into Long Lane see much or anything of the light from Bruce Gardener’s lamp? Item: can someone hidden in the hedge see the walker? Item: can the walker, supposing he climbs the steps to the church and goes into the church—”

“Which,” said the sergeant, “excuse me, he can’t. The church is locked at night, sir. By our advice. Possibility of vandals.”

“See how right we were to bring you in. Who locks it? The Vicar?”

“That’s correct, Mr. Alleyn. And once the deceased lady was brought in that’s what he’d do. Lock up the premises for the night.”

“Leaving the church in darkness?” Fox asked.

“I think not, Fox. I think he’d leave the sanctuary lamp alight. We can ask.”

“So it’s after the arrival of the deceased that Artie’s story begins?”

“And our performance too for what it’s worth. Do they keep early hours in the village, Sergeant?”

“Half an hour after the local closes they’re all in bed.”

“Good.”

“Suppose,” Fox said on a note of consternation, “Daft Artie’s sleeping out?”

“It’ll be a bloody nuisance,” Alleyn grunted. “If he is we’ll have to play it by ear. I don’t know, though. We might pull him in to demonstrate.”

“Would he co-operate?”

“God knows. Here we are. We make as little noise as possible. Don’t bang the doors. Keep your voices down.”

They turned a sharp corner through a stand of beech trees and entered the village: a double row of some dozen cottages on either side of Long Lane, all fast asleep: the church, high above, its tower silhouetted against the stars, the rest almost disappearing into its background of trees. The moon had not yet risen so that Long Lane and the bank and hedge above it and the hillside beyond were all deep in shadow.

Alleyn drove the car on to the green near the steps and they got out.

“Hullo,” he said. “There’s somebody still awake up Stile Lane.”

“That’s the widow Black’s cottage,” said the sergeant. “There’ll be someone looking after her — the brother, no doubt.”

“Looking after her? Why?”

“Did you not hear? She was knocked over by a truck on the way back from the funeral this afternpon. The blind corner up the lane. I’ve been saying for years it’d happen. The chap was driving dead slow for the turning and she fell clear. He helped her in and reported it to us.”

“Would that be Bruce Gardener’s sister?” asked Fox.

“That’s right, Mr. Fox. We’re not likely to disturb them.”

“I don’t know so much about that,” Alleyn murmured. “If it’s Bruce up there and he looks out of the window and sees light coming from where he dug the grave and had his own lamp last night, he may come down to investigate. Damn!” He thought for a moment. “Oh, well,” he said, “we tell him. Why not? Let’s get moving. I’d like you, Sergeant, to act as the boy says he did. Get into the layby in the hedge when the times comes. Not yet. We’ll set you up. I’ll do the Carter bit. Mr. Fox is Bruce. All you have to do is to keep your eyes and ears open and report exactly what you see. Got the lamp? And the shovel? Come on, and quietly does it.”

He opened the lych-gate very cautiously, checking it at the first sign of the squeak. They slid through, one by one and moved quietly up the steps.

“Don’t use your torches unless you have to,” Alleyn said and as their eyes adjusted to the dark it thinned and gravestones stood about them. They reached the top. Alleyn led the way round the church: the nave, the north transept, the chancel, until they came to the Passcoigne plot and Sybil Foster’s grave. The flowers on the mound smelt heavy on the night air and the plastic covers glinted in the starlight as if phosphorescent.