Outside in the sunshine, Ricky talked to Julia and Jasper. It was his first meeting with them since the accident, although they had spoken on the telephone. Nobody could have been more simply dressed than Julia and nobody could have looked more exquisite, he thought, or more exotic in that homespun setting.

“I don’t in the least understand all this,” Julia said. “Why an adjournment? Ricky, you’re the one to explain to us.”

“Why me?”

“Because your gorgeous papa is a copper. Is he perpetually asking for adjournments when everybody longs for the whole thing to be—” She stopped, looked for a moment into his eyes, and then said rapidly, “—to be dead, buried and forgotten.”

“Honestly, I don’t know anything at all about police goings-on. He never speaks of his cases. We’ve so much else to talk about,” Ricky said simply. “I imagine they have to be almost insanely thorough and exhaustive.”

“I can’t think that it makes any difference to anyone, not even Mr. Harkness in all his righteous anguish, whether poor Dulcie fell forwards, sideways, or over the horse’s tail. Oh God, Jasper, darling, why does everything I say always have to sound so perfectly heartless and beastly!”

“Because you’re a realist, my love, and anyway it doesn’t,” said Jasper. “You’d be the most ghastly fake if you pretended to be heartbroken over the wretched girl. You had a beastly shock because you saw her. If you’d only heard she’d been killed you’d have said, ‘How awful for poor Cuth,’ and sent flowers to the funeral. Which, by the way, we ought perhaps to do. What do you think?”

But Julia paid no attention.

“Ricky,” she said. “It couldn’t be, or could it? That the police — what is it that’s always said in the papers — don’t rule out the possibility of ‘foul play’? Could it be that, Ricky?”

“I don’t know. Truly I don’t know,” Ricky said. And then, acutely conscious of their fixed regard, he blurted out what he had in fact been thinking.

“I had wondered,” said Ricky.

iii

“ ‘So I thought,’ ” Alleyn read aloud, “ ‘I’d ask you if the idea’s just plain silly. And if you don’t think it’s silly, whether you think I ought to say anything to Sergeant Plank or whether that would be behaving like the typical idiot layman. Or, finally, whether it’s a guinea to a gooseberry Sergeant Plank will have thought of it for himself.’ Which,” Alleyn said looking up from the letter, “will certainly be the case if Sergeant Plank’s worth his stripes.”

“Wouldn’t we much rather Rick kept out of it, whatever it may be, and got on with his book?” asked Ricky’s mother.

“Very much rather. Drat the boy, why does he want to go and get himself involved?” Alleyn rubbed his nose and looked sideways at his wife. “Quite neat of him to spot that bit, though, wasn’t it? ‘Obviously recent,’ he says.”

“Should we suggest he come home?” Troy wondered and then: “No. Silly of me. Why on earth, after all?”

“He may be called when the inquest is reopened, in which case he’d have to go trundling back. No, I shouldn’t worry. It’s odds on there’s nothing in it and he’s perfectly well able to cope, after all, with anything that may turn up.” Alleyn returned to the letter. “I see,” he said, “that Julia was dreadfully upset but rallied gallantly and gave her evidence quite beautifully. So that’s still on the tapis, one gathers.”

“I hope she’s not finding him a bore.”

“Does a woman ever dislike the admiration of a reasonably presentable young chap?”

“True.”

“He really does seem to have struck a rum setup one way or another,” said Alleyn, still reading. “What with his odd-jobbing plumber of a landlord dressed up like a con man at the crack of dawn and going on holiday to Saint Pierre-des-Roches.”

“It’s a pretty little peep of a place. I painted it when I was a student. The egregious Syd has made a regrettable slosh at it. But it’s hardly the spot for camel’s hair coats and zoot suits.”

“Perhaps Ferrant uses it as a jumping-off place for the sophisticated south.”

“And then there’s Louis Pharamond,” said Troy, pursuing her own thoughts, “having had some sort of affair with poor Miss Harkness, doesn’t it seem? Or does it?”

“In company with your visitor with the free paints and the dizzy spell. And listen to this,” said Alleyn. “ ‘My Mrs. Ferrant reacts very acidly to mention of Dulcie Harkness, even though she does make obligatory ‘non nisi’ noises. I can’t help wondering if Mr. Ferrant’s roving eye has lit sometime or another on Miss Harkness.’ Really!” said Alleyn, “The island jollities seem to be of a markedly uninhibited kind. And Miss Harkness of an unusually obliging disposition.”

“Bother!” said Troy.

“I know. And then, why should the egregious Jones scream with rage when Ricky trod on his vermillion? There’s plenty more where that came from, it seems. For free. And if it comes to that, why should Jones take it into his head to cut Rick? Apparently he would neither look at, nor speak to him. Not a word about having taken a luncheon off us, it appears.”

“He’s a compulsive boor, of course. Mightn’t we be making far too much of a series of unrelated and insignificant little happenings?”

“Of course we might,” Alleyn agreed warmly. He finished reading his son’s letter, folded it, and put it down. “He’s taken pains over that,” he said. “Very long and very detailed. He even goes to the trouble of describing the contents of the old coach house.”

“The whole thing’s on his mind and he thinks writing it all out may help him to get shot of it.”

“He’s looking for a line. It’s rather like those hidden-picture games they used to put in kids’ books. A collection of numbered dots and you joined them up in the given order and found you’d got a pussycat or something. Only Rick’s dots aren’t numbered and he can’t find the line.”

“If there is one.”

“Yes. There may be no pussycat.”

“It’s the sort of thing you’re doing all the time, isn’t it?”

“More or less, my treasure. More or less.”

“Oh!” Troy exclaimed, “I do hope there isn’t a line and I do hope Miss Harkness wasn’t—”

“What?”

“Murdered,” said Troy. “That, really, is what the letter’s all about, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes,” Alleyn agreed. “That’s what it’s all about.”

The telephone rang and he answered it. It was his Assistant Commissioner. Being a polite man he made his usual token apology.

“Oh, Rory,” he said. “Sorry to disturb you at home. Did I hear you mention your boy was staying on that island where Sunniday Enterprises, if that’s what they call themselves, have set up a holiday resort of sorts?”

It pleased the A.C., nobody knew why, when engaged in preliminaries, to affect a totally false vagueness about names, places, and activities.

Alleyn said: “Yes, sir, he’s there,” and wondered why he was not surprised. It was as if he had been waiting for this development, an absurd notion to entertain.

“Staying at this place of theirs? What’s it called? Mount something?”

“Hotel Montjoy. Lord no. He’s putting up at a plumber’s cottage on the non-u side of the island.”

“The Bay. Or Deep Bay, would that be?”

“Deep Cove,” Alleyn said, beginning to feel exasperated as well as apprehensive.

“To be sure, yes. I remember, now, you did say something about a plumber and Deep Cove,” said the bland A.C.

Alleyn thought: “You devious old devil, what are you up to?” and waited.

“Well,” said the A.C, “the thing is I wondered if he might be helpful. You remember the dope case you tidied up in Rome? Some of the Ziegfeldt group?”

“Oh that,” Alleyn said, greatly relieved. “Yes.”

“Well, as we all know to our discomfort, Ziegfeldt himself still operates in a very big way.”

“Quite. I understand,” said Alleyn, “there have been extensive improvements to his phony castle in the Lebanon. Loos on every landing.”