When he had closed the nursery door behind him, Alleyn made for the stairs. If Fox was still closeted in the library with Carrados conversation must be getting a bit strained. He passed Lady Carrados’s room and heard a distant noise.

“It’s insufferable, my dear Evelyn, that—”

Alleyn grimaced and went on downstairs.

He found Fox alone in the library.

“Hullo, Brer Fox,” said Alleyn. “Lost the simple soldier-man?”

“Gone upstairs,” said Fox. “I can’t say I’m sorry. I had a job to keep him here at all after you went.”

“How did you manage it?”

“Asked him if he had any experience of police investigation. That did it. We went from there to how he helped the police catch a footman that stole somebody’s pearls in Tunbridge and how if he just hadn’t happened to notice the man watching the vase on the piano nobody would ever have thought of looking in the Duchess’s potpourri. Funny how vain some of these old gentlemen get, isn’t it?”

“Screamingly. As we seem to have this important room all to ourselves we’d better see if we can get hold of Miss Harris. You might go and ask—”

But before Fox got as far as the door it opened and Miss Harris herself walked in.

“Good afternoon,” she said crisply, “I believe you wished to see me. Lady Carrados’s secretary.”

“We were on the point of asking for you, Miss Harris,” said Alleyn. “Won’t you sit down? My name is Alleyn and this is Inspector Fox.”

“Good afternoon,” repeated Miss Harris and sat down.

She was neither plain nor beautiful, short nor tall, dark nor fair. It crossed his mind that she might have won a newspaper competition for the average woman, that she represented the dead norm of femininity. Her clothes were perfectly adequate and completely without character. She was steeped in nonentity. No wonder that few people had noticed her at Marsdon House. She might have gone everywhere, heard everything like a sort of upper middle-class Oberon at Theseus’s party. Unless, indeed, nonentity itself was conspicuous at Marsdon House last night.

He noticed that she was not in the least nervous. Her hands rested quietly in her lap. She had laid a pad and pencil on the arm of her chair exactly as if she was about to take notes at his dictation. Fox took his own notebook out and waited.

“May we have your name and address?” asked Alleyn.

“Certainly, Mr Alleyn,” said Miss Harris crisply. “Dorothea Violet Harris. Address — town or country?”

“Both, please.”

“Town: fifty-seven Ebury Mews, S.W. Country: The Rectory, Barbicon-Bramley, Bucks.” She glanced at Fox. “B-a-r-b-i—”

“Thank you, miss, I think I’ve got it,” said Fox.

“Now, Miss Harris,” Alleyn began, “I wonder if you can give me any help at all in this business.”

To his tense astonishment Miss Harris at once opened her pad on which he could see a column of shorthand hieroglyphics. She drew out from her bosom on a spring extension a pair of rimless pince-nez. She placed them on her nose and waited with composure for Alleyn’s next remark.

He said: “Have you some notes there, Miss Harris?”

“Yes, Mr Alleyn. I saw Miss O’Brien just now and she told me you would be requiring any information I could give about Lord Gospell’s movements last night and this morning. I thought it better to prepare what I have to say. So I just jotted down one or two little memos.”

“Admirable! Let’s have ’em.”

Miss Harris cleared her throat.

“At about twelve-thirty,” she began in an incisive monotone, “I met Lord Robert Gospell in the hall. I was speaking to Miss O’Brien. He asked me to dance with him later in the evening. I remained in the hall until a quarter to one. I happened to glance at my watch. I then went downstairs to top landing. Remained there. Period of time unknown but I went down to the ballroom landing before one-thirty. Lord Gospell — I mean Lord Robert Gospell — then asked me to dance.”

Miss Harris’s voice stopped for a moment. She moved her writing-pad on the arm of her chair.

“We danced,” she continued. “Three successive dances with repeats. Lord Robert introduced me to several of his friends and then he took me into the buffet on the street-level. We drank champagne. He then remembered that he had promised to dance with the Duchess of Dorminster —” Here Miss Harris appeared to lose her place for a moment. She repeated: “Had promised to dance with the Duchess of Dorminster,” and cleared her throat again. “He took me to the ballroom and asked me for the next Viennese waltz. I remained in the ballroom. Lord Robert danced with the Duchess and then with Miss Agatha Troy, the portrait painter, and then with two ladies whose names I do not know. Not at once, of course,” said Miss Harris in parenthesis. “That would be ridiculous. I still remained in the ballroom. The band played the ‘Blue Danube’. Lord Robert was standing in a group of his friends close to where I sat. He saw me. We danced the ‘Blue Danube’ together and revisited the buffet. I noticed the time. I had intended leaving much earlier and was surprised to find that it was nearly three o’clock. So I stayed till the end.”

She glanced up at Alleyn with the impersonal attentive air proper to her position. He felt so precisely that she was indeed his secretary that there was no need for him to repress a smile. But he did glance at Fox, who for the first time in Alleyn’s memory, looked really at a loss. His large hand hovered uncertainly over his own notebook. AHeyn realized that Fox did not know whether to take down Miss Harris’s shorthand in his own shorthand.

Alleyn said: “Thank you, Miss Harris. Anything else?”

Miss Harris turned a page.

“Details of conversation,” she began. “I have not made memos of all the remarks I have remembered. Many of them were merely light comments on suitable subjects. For instance, Lord Robert spoke of Lady Carrados and expressed regret that she seemed to be tired. That sort of thing.”

“Let us have his remarks under this heading,” said Alleyn with perfect gravity.

“Certainly, Mr Alleyn. Lord Robert asked me if I had noticed that Lady Carrados had been tired for some time. I said yes I had, and that I was sorry because she was so nice to everybody. He asked if I thought it was entirely due to the season. I said I expected it was, because many ladies I have had posts with have found the season very exhausting, although in a way Lady Carrados took the entertaining side very lightly. Lord Robert asked me if I liked being with Lady Carrados. I replied that I did, very much. Lord Robert asked me several questions about myself. He was very easy to talk to. I told him about the old days at the rectory and how we ought to have been much better off, and he was very nice, and I told about my father’s people in Bucks and he seemed quite interested in so many of them being parsons and what an old Buckinghamshire family we really are.”

“Oh, God,” thought Alleyn on a sudden wave of painful compassion. “And so they probably are and because for the last two or three generations they’ve had to haul down the social flag inch by inch their children are all going to talk like this and nobody’s going to feel anything but uncomfortably incredulous.”

He said: “You come from Barbicon-Bramley? That’s not far from Bassicote, is it? I know that part of Bucks fairly well. Is your father’s rectory anywhere near Falconbridge?”

“Oh, no. Falconbridge is thirty miles away. My uncle Walter was rector at Falconbridge.”

Alleyn said: “Really? Long ago?”

“When I was a small girl. He’s retired now and lives in Barbicon-Bramley. All the Harrises live to ripe old ages. Lord Robert remarked that many of the clergy do. He said longevity was one of the more dubious rewards of virtue,” said Miss Harris with a glance at her notes.