“I think he brought it from one of the chairs on the lawn. It – it turns cold down by the sea as soon as the sun goes.”

“That was very thoughtful of him.”

Lisle said, “Yes.” It rushed into her mind how often Rafe had done things like that. She felt a wave of emotion, a touch of comfort. And on that Rafe himself came strolling in through the window.

“How do you do, March?” he said. “More Third Degree? Just tell me if I’m in the way.”

“Not a bit. I have finished with Mrs. Jerningham. I was going to ask if I could see you. You couldn’t have timed your entrance better.”

“Perhaps I was listening for my cue.”

Lisle got up and left them. As Rafe opened the door for her she looked up at him and caught a queer crooked smile. It troubled her – a crooked, bitter smile. It robbed her of that new-found comfort. She heard Miss Silver’s voice again. “Tell them you’ve altered your will. Tell them all.” The door closed behind her.

Rafe came over to the writing-table and leaned against the corner of it. He wore a short-sleeved shirt with an open neck and a pair of grey flannel trousers, and he looked very much at his ease.

“Well?” he said. “What is it now? I thought we’d finished.”

“Not yet,” said Randal March.

“Because when we have, I was going to say I suppose you’re not on duty all the time, and what about coming up for some tennis?”

“Thank you – I’d like to – when we have finished. I’m afraid I’m strictly on duty this afternoon.”

“Too much on duty for this?” Rafe offered a battered cigarette case.

“I’m afraid so.”

“Oh, very well. I suppose you don’t mind if I smoke?”

“Not at all. I’ve just been asking Mrs. Jerningham about the coat she gave to Cissie Cole. We’ve been trying it out for fingerprints, and we naturally want to know who handled it before it changed ownership.”

Rafe struck a match, drew at his cigarette till it glowed, and dropped the match on to Dale’s pen-tray.

“Fingerprints?” he said. “On that woolly stuff?”

March watched him.

“Yes. It’s a new process. Some of the prints are marvellously clear.”

Rafe laughed.

“Mine amongst them? I suppose Lisle told you I fetched that coat for her and helped her on with it the last time she wore it – at least I suppose it was the last time.”

“Yes, that’s what she said.”

Rafe blew out a mouthful of smoke. Through the light haze his eyes danced mockingly.

“Too disappointing for you!”

March said, “Perhaps, ” and then, “Perhaps not.” He pushed his chair back, fixed his eyes sternly upon Rafe, and said, “When did you take hold of that coat by the shoulders and upper part of the arms – and who was wearing it at that time?”

Rafe put his cigarette to his lips. Was it to cover them? His hand was steady enough. March thought, “I’d rather trust my lips than my hand if I was in a hole.”

The hand dropped. The lips were smiling.

“Well, Lisle has just told you that I put her into her coat.”

March shook his head.

“These prints weren’t made that way. I’ll show you how they were done.” He sprang up and came round the table. Standing behind Rafe, he took him by the shoulders, the flat of the palm at the edge of the shoulder-blade, the fingers coming round the upper arm and gripping it. “Like that,” he said. And let go, and went back to his seat.

Rafe was still smiling.

“Any explanation?” said March.

Rafe shook his head.

“I can’t think of one – at least not a new one. I did help Lisle on with her coat, you know, but I suppose that’s too easy for the modern scientific policeman.”

“The prints are too fresh,” said March quietly. “They’re the freshest prints of the lot. The ones you made on Sunday are a perfectly different affair. These prints were made at a much later time, and they are most unmistakably yours.”

Rafe straightened up, still smiling.

“Well, you’ll have to prove it, you know. I don’t mind your trying, if it amuses you. But just speaking off hand, I should say that none of it would sound very convincing in, let’s say, a court of law – or a coroner’s court. And perhaps that’s the reason no one asked me all these interesting questions at the inquest. I was there, you know.”

“You don’t offer any explanation?”

Rafe shrugged his shoulders.

“You won’t take the obvious one. I’m afraid I haven’t any other.”

INSPECTOR MARCH got to his feet. “If you think of one perhaps you’ll let me know. But meanwhile I wonder whether you would care to walk along the beach and show me how far you went on Wednesday night.”

“Oh, certainly.” Rafe’s tone was casual in the extreme.

He led the way out by the french window and down through the Italian garden, talking as he would have done to any other guest.

“I don’t know if you hate this sort of thing – some people do like poison – Lisle does for one. Too much like a map with all these formal beds. And she doesn’t like statues and cypresses either. They’re a bit funerary for the climate – as a rule. They need an Italian sky to set them off.”

“They’ve got it today,” said March.

“Yes, but you can’t turn it on when you want to. The whole thing was a copy of a famous garden at Capua, with statues added by an ancestor who had more money than he knew what to do with. He developed a very pretty talent for chucking it away, so we don’t exactly bless his memory.”

From the Italian garden they came by way of a tree-planted walk and a long green ride to the sea wall. The bay lay clear before them in the morning sun, Tane Head across the water just softened by the faintest haze. And on the left, cliffs sweeping away from the gap in which they stood, and the black wall of the Shepstone Rocks running down from them to meet the sea and break its surface with a murderous line of jagged points. The tide was full, and everywhere except about the rocks the water lay silken-smooth and blue.

March turned his back on Tane Head and looked towards the cliffs.

“That’s a nasty bit of coast. Dangerous, isn’t it?”

“Very. There’s no real beach after you get round the Shepstone wall. The old story, which was quite strongly believed in my grandfather’s time, had it that the bay used to run right round to Sharpe’s Point – that’s the next headland. There weren’t any rocks in those days. It was all smooth hard sand, and the local bad man, Black Nym by name, used to come riding across from the Point at low tide, robbing, murdering, and generally making a public nuisance of himself. Well, one day he came along on a Sunday evening when everyone was at church and drove off a large flock of sheep. He brought them down here and started off across the sand with them, roaring at the top of his great bull voice that those who were fools enough to go to church and serve God should sit up and take notice what much better wages he got from the devil. There was an old woman in the village nearly a hundred when I was eight years old. She used to tell the tale, and this is how she told it – ‘And with that, Master Rafe, there did come the most ’orrible great blast of wind and a crack of thunder fit to split the sky. Dark as Christmas midnight it were all at once, and he could hear the sheep crying and the sea roaring, but he couldn’t see nothing, not so much as his own hand before his face. He swore worse than ever. There were those as heard him, and some say there was a voice that answered him out of the holy Book – “The wages of sin is death.” And some say there wasn’t nothing, but only one flash of lightning and a clap after it fit to bring the cliffs about his ears. And that’s just what it done – the sea come up in a ’uge unnatural wave and the cliff come down to meet it. And what happened to Black Nym nobody knows but the devil as was his master. Some folks say the sheep all turned to stone, but I reckon that’s a fond saying. Drownded they was, poor things. You won’t ever get me to believe as those wicked black rocks was ever anything so ’armless as a pack of soft, silly sheep. Bits of the cliff as come down, that’s what they are and you won’t get me from it. But whether or no, Shepstone Rocks was the name they got, and that’s how they got it.’ ”