James Barton locked the door behind him and took him to the lighted room with a friendly hand on his shoulder. The curtains were drawn, the lamp lit, and the cats laid out in front of the fire, but whereas they had not moved a whisker for the Chief Constable, they now rose, stretched, and came to rub themselves against Jason Leigh.

Jason had a name and a word for each of the seven- Achan-Abijah-Ahithophel-Agag-Abimelech-Abner -Absalom. Mr. Barton came as near a smile as he ever did.

“They don’t forget a friend. Animals don’t mostly, and cats are the choosiest of the lot. If they like you they do, and if they don’t like you they don’t, and that’s all there is about it.”

The cats went and lay down again. The two men seated themselves. After a while Barton said,

“When do you go off again?”

Jason laughed.

“Probably I don’t.”

“Quitting?”

“Probably. I have an urge to farm. I trained and did a couple of years after the war, you’ll remember, and I feel like taking it up again.”

Barton had picked up his pipe and was filling it.

“Why?”

“I’m thinking of getting married.”

“Then you’re a damned fool.”

“Not when it’s Valentine.”

Barton gave him a quick hard look.

“And what do you expect me to say to that?”

“If you’re a fool you’ll say all women are alike! But they’re not, any more than all men are. If you say what I expect you to say, it will be that there’s only one Valentine and I’m lucky to get her.”

There was a long pause. Barton struck a match and lit up. When he had got the pipe going he said in his deep throaty voice,

“No, you can’t expect me to say that-not when you know how I feel about women. But if there ever was one who was different from the rest, it was her mother.”

Jason looked across at him with a spark in his eyes.

“And what did you know about Mrs. Grey?” he said.

James Barton met the look.

“Just what anyone couldn’t help knowing. She was good, and something had broken her heart and she wasn’t one that could live without it. And when I say she was good, I don’t mean that she was what is commonly called a good woman, which is a way of speaking that can be stretched to cover all the pettiest and meanest of vices. So long as you don’t borrow your neighbour’s husband or step outside the bonds of your own marriage you may be mean, jealous, quarrelsome, deceitful, a spendthrift, a pinch-penny, a nagger, a doubter, and as vain as the devil, and yet be accounted a virtuous woman. Mrs. Grey had another kind of goodness than that. I didn’t speak to her more than three times. Once when she came in upon us when I was in the study with the Colonel. He named me as an old friend, and she said ‘How do you do, Mr. Barton?’ and I said, ‘How do you do?’ And two other times, when she said it was a fine day-that was one of them. And she was afraid it was going to snow-that was the other. But there was something in her that was like a light shining in a window. When you see goodness like that, you can’t blaspheme by saying it isn’t there. The girl has a touch of it, I’ll grant you that.”

Jason was oddly moved. His friendship with James Barton went a long way back to a day when, at ten years old, he had plunged into single combat with a bull-terrier in defence of one of the current cats, an earlier Ahithophel, who would usually have been more than a match for any dog but had in this instance just been disabled by a stone thrown by one William Clodd. The stone broke Ahithophel’s leg, and the bull-terrier got him by the scruff, after which several more boys and dogs joined in and the garden of Gale’s Cottage became a pandemonium into the midst of which James Barton erupted with a broom in one hand and a poker in the other. Everyone having taken to flight except the bull-terrier, from whose jaws Ahithophel had to be prised, Jason was invited in for the stanching of wounds. He had two bites, but he won James Barton’s heart by insisting that Ahithophel’s need was greater than his own. After which he was more or less free of the cottage and Tommy Martin let him go there.

They talked now in a desultory manner, with frequent intervals of silence. It was during one of these, when Jason had strayed over to the bookshelves which covered the whole of one wall, that Barton said,

“I had the Chief Constable here to see me, but you’ll have heard that, I suppose. Everyone knows everything in Tilling Green.”

Jason made some sort of a sound, noncommittal and of an uninterested nature, following it up with,

“Where on earth did you pick this up?”

“What have you got there? Oh, the Wonderful Magazine. Picked it up on the stall at the corner of Catchpenny Lane in Ledlington. Full of nice examples of early nineteenth-century credulity, including a particular account of a case of spontaneous combustion.”

Jason laughed.

“I don’t know that credulity stopped in the early nineteenth century. If a thing is wonderful enough, somebody will believe it. Anything to escape being dull.”

There was a pause, after which James Barton said,

“Tilling Green can’t have been exactly dull for the last ten days.”

“I suppose not.”

“Do you know, as far as I’m concerned none of it had happened until this man March came to see me.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t go out in the daytime unless I have to. When I have to, I don’t speak to anyone and nobody speaks to me except in the way of business across a counter, so I don’t hear any of the scandals with which the Green enlivens the tedium of its days. I was not aware, for instance, that the police are more than half inclined to suspect that Connie Brooke was murdered, and that they are quite sure Roger Repton was. And that being that, I am only surprised they don’t add in that other girl too, Doris Pell, and make a job of it. They can then tack the three of them on the anonymous letters that have been going around and lay the lot at my door.”

Jason looked over his shoulder.

“Is that March’s line, or did you think it up for yourself?”

James Barton said, “I was one of the last people to see Roger alive. He wanted to know what about it.”

Jason pushed the Wonderful Magazine back into its place on the shelf and came back to the table. He was frowning.

“His wife was the last to see him-no, Mettie Eccles when she brought him his tea.”

“Fortunately for me. But I could still have put cyanide into the whisky.”

“Why should you?”

“Oh, just an urge to kill my best friend, I suppose.”

“March can’t really think-”

Barton blew out a cloud of smoke.

“Perhaps not. Or-perhaps. I don’t suppose he has made up his mind. And that being the case, what happens if I tell him something which might point the finger of suspicion at somebody else?”

Jason made a quick impatient movement.

“You mean Scilla-Scilla Repton. The finger is pretty firmly pointed in her direction already. He was going to divorce her, you know-or perhaps you don’t.”

Barton nodded.

“Yes, he told me. He was a fool to marry her. I could have told him so, but for that sort of folly nobody takes advice. It’s like any other kind of poison, you must get it out of your system yourself. But sometimes it kills you first, or kills everything in you that has any interest in living.”

Jason said quickly, “What do you know?”

Barton drew on his pipe.

“Oh, just something-something.”

“What?”

“Nothing to do with Roger.”

“With what? With whom?”

Barton blew out his smoke.

“Perhaps not with anyone at all.”

“Are you going to tell me?”

“I don’t know-I’m thinking about it. I’d like you to do some talking first. Just tell me the whole thing right through as you know it-the letters, Doris Pell, that whey-faced Connie. Nothing to her one way or the other I always thought, but she gets herself mixed up in a murder! Now why did she want to do that?”