“Oh, yes. You,” he said. “You move up the hill on my left.” And to the two remaining men: “And you watch the Zodiac. She’s in the lock and the lock’s at its lowest. Nobody can leap ashore in seconds but that doesn’t say they can’t make it.”

Tillottson said: “The Zodiac? In the lock?”

“Yes,” Alleyn said. He looked at the keeper who was grinning. “By arrangement. Like it or lump it with any luck and a good watch they’re there till we want them. Come on.”

-3-

Seven hours ago he and Fox had climbed this hill and Troy, a little later, had come to them in the wapentake. Four days ago Troy and the other passengers had met there and Troy had sat in the Wapentake Pot and talked with Dr Natouche.

Alleyn tried to recall the lie of the land. This was the first grassy slope under his feet, now, and ahead of him must be the tufted embankment below the wapentake field. He had begun to think he must have veered and now walked parallel with the embankment when it rose at his feet. He climbed it and could hear the others breathe and the soft thud of their feet. They used torches to show their whereabouts. The insignificant yellow discs floated and bobbed, giving an occasional glimpse of a leg or coat or a few inches of earth and grass.

The ascent felt steeper and more uneven under these blind-fold conditions than it had in the afternoon. They had only climbed a few paces when, suddenly and inconsequently there was less mist. It drifted and eddied and thinned out and now they waded rather than swam through it and appeared to each other as familiar phantoms.

“Clearing,” Fox murmured.

Alleyn sniffed. “Rum!” he said, “I seem to smell dust.”

The hillside was before them, living its own life under the stars. A blackness vaguely defined the wapentake itself. Alleyn moved his torchlight slowly across to his right and gave a stifled exclamation.

“Come in on this, all of you,” he said.

Their lights met at a dishevelment of earth, gravel and pieces of half-buried timber.

“It’s that old digging,” Fox exclaimed. “I said it wasn’t safe. It’s caved in.”

“Come in, all of you.”

The seven men collected round him and used their torch-lights. The crazy structure had collapsed. A fang of broken timber stuck out of the rubble and the edge of an old door that had supported an overhanging roof of earth now showed beneath a landslide of earth and gravel.

Alleyn said: “And there’s still a smell of dust in the air. Don’t go nearer, any of you. Stay where you are. Give me all the light you can raise. Here.”

Their lights concentrated round his on a patch of ground near his feet and came to a halt again at the edge of the rubble.

“Bailey,” Alleyn said.

Bailey and he knelt together, their heads bowed devotedly over slurs, indentations and flattened grass.

“Here’s a good one. A patch of bare soil. Take a look at this,” Alleyn said. Bailey took a long hard look.

“Fair enough,” he said. “She was wearing them and there’s another pair in her cabin.”

“American type, low-heeled walking jobs.”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Good Gawd!” Tillottson loudly exclaimed. “She went in there to hide and—Good Gawd!”

But Alleyn and Bailey paid no attention to Tillottson and Fox said: “Wait on, Bert.”

The wapentake field had turned towards a rising moon and was illuminated. The mist had now retired upon its source and wound like a cottonwool snake between the river banks. The landscape had changed and lightened.

Alleyn had thrown off his overcoat and was working at the rubble with his gloved hands.

“Bear a hand,” he said. “We’re too late but bear a hand.”

The other men joined him. They mounted their torches where they shone on the rubble and went hard to work.

“Very painstaking,” Alleyn grunted. “But not quite painstaking enough. Something—a stone, a bit of broken wood from the rubble—something—has been scuffed over the ground. Prints of the woman’s shoes have been left. Right up to where the rubble has lapped over them and pointing towards the excavation. But the surrounding patches of soil have been scuffed. We are meant to think what you thought, Bert.”

Superintendent Tillottson peered sideways at PC Cape as if longing for a better view.

“You hear that?” he said. “You understand what’s been said? You know what you’ve allowed to be done, you disgusting chap?”

Alleyn said: “All right, Cape, you’ll have to take what’s coming, won’t you?”

He squatted back on his heels. “This is no good,” he said and turned to the two constables: “Go down to the lockhouse and get spades. There’s not a hope, now, but we’ve got to act as if there was. And bring something — pieces of wood — galvanised iron — anything to cover these prints. Quick as you can. Thompson, have you got a flash? All right. Go ahead.”

Sergeant Thompson moved in with the hand-held camera he used in emergencies. His light flashed intermittently. The wretched Cape and his opposite number thundered downhill.

“We’d better continue to go through the motions,” Alleyn said: “As I recollect there were two props. One may have been used to knock away the other. He’d have a second or two to jump clear. Or there may have been a spare timber lying around.”

Fox said: “What’s the form, Mr Alleyn? About that lot down there in the lock? There’s nobody missing?” He jerked his head at the rubble. ”Apart from her?”

“The Skipper says not but we’ll have to see them. Look Bert, will you go down there? Ring your local police surgeon. My compliments and he’ll be needed again, with the ambulance and the usual equipment. Give him the story and tell him it’s suspected homicide. Then get yourself aboard the Zodiac. We won’t raise her until we’ve checked and then only when we can muster a closer guard. We’ve got a tough little clutch of villains down there and the big double-barrel himself.”

“I’ll go, then. And if they are all there?”

“Call off the general search and bring the men in to Ramsdyke.”

“See you in a wee while, then,” Tillottson said.

Bailey and Thompson went back to the car to fetch their heavy gear and Alleyn and Fox were left together: a tall elegant figure and a large thickset one incongruously moonlit in the wapentake field and scraping like dogs with their forepaws at gravelly rubble.

“This is quite a big case,” Fox remarked.

“You are the king of meiosis. Take an international triple murderer fresh from his latest kill, and pen him up with his associates in a pleasure craft at the bottom of a lock. Flavour with at least three innocent beings and leave to explode. And you call it quite a big case.”

“I suppose,” Fox said, disregarding this, “it was all done under—” He stopped short. “How do you work it out?” he said. “A put-up job, the whole thing? What?”

“She was blowing up for trouble when we had that last interview. She may have threatened to grass on them. Perhaps, the Jampot saw how she shaped up, and offered to get her away. Or—,” Alleyn panted as he shifted a largish boulder, “or she may simply have bolted. Whichever way it was, she raised a rumpus—screeching and on-going. When that ass Cape flung himself aboard, off she lit in the fog, pursued I don’t mind betting by the Jampot. In a matter of minutes they were over the embankment and into the pit. And that was it.”

“I like that one best.”

“It has a Foljambe smack about it, you think?”

“Suppose,” Fox said, “she’s not here. Suppose she and whoever-it-was came up here this afternoon and she poked into this excavation and came out again and it collapsed later?”

“No prints to suggest a return. And why did whoever-it-was try to obliterate his own prints?”

“There’s that, of course. And you make out that while the commotion in the Zodiac still continued he went straight back and was all present and correct when that silly chump Cape and the Skipper started counting heads in the saloon?”