“One finds it hard to believe,” he said. “One is appalled.”

Alleyn asked him when the first service ended, and he said at about a quarter to eight.

“I’d expected a large congregation. There are so many visitors. But the downpour, no doubt, kept a lot of folk away and there were only six communicants. The nine o’clock was crowded.”

Alleyn wondered absently why clergymen were so prone to call people “folk,” and asked Mr. Carstairs if he knew Miss Cost very well. He seemed disturbed and said: Well, yes, in so far as she was a member of his congregation. He glanced at his wife and added: “Our friendship with Miss Cost was perhaps rather limited by our views on the spring. I could not sympathize with or, indeed, approve of her, as I thought, rather extravagant claims. I thought them woolly,” said the Rector. “Woolly and vulgar.” He expounded, carefully, his own attitude, which, in its anxious compromise, declared, Alleyn thought, its orthodoxy.

“And you saw her,” he asked, “after the service?”

They said simultaneously that they did.

“I’m one of those parsons who come out to the porch and see folk off,” the Rector explained. “But Miss Cost was on her way when I got there. Going down the path. Something about my wife’s necklace. Wasn’t it, Dulcie?”

“Yes, dear. I told Mr. Alleyn.”

Coombe said: “The necklace has been recovered and will be returned in due course, Mrs. Carstairs.”

“Oh, dear!” she said. “Will it? I–I don’t think—”

“Never mind, dear,” said her husband.

Alleyn asked if anybody else from the Island had been at the first service. Nobody, it appeared. There were several at the nine o’clock.

“The Barrimores, for instance?”

No, not the Barrimores.

There was a silence, through which the nonattendance of the Barrimores was somehow established as a normal state of affairs.

“Although,” Mrs. Carstairs said, in extenuation of a criticism that no one had voiced, “Margaret used to come quite regularly at one time, Adrian. Before Wally’s warts, you remember?”

“Not that there’s any connection, Dulcie.”

“Of course not, dear. And Patrick and nice Jenny Williams have been to Evensong, we must remember.”

“So we must,” her husband agreed.

“Poor things. They’ll all be terribly upset, no doubt,” Mrs. Carstairs said to Alleyn. “Such a shock to everyone.”

Alleyn said carefully: “Appalling. And apart from everything else, a great worry for Barrimore, one imagines. After all it won’t do his business any good, this sort of catastrophe.”

They looked uncomfortable, and faintly shocked. “Well,” they both said — and stopped short.

“At least,” Alleyn said casually, “I suppose the Boy-and-Lobster is his affair, isn’t it?”

“It’s the property of the estate,” Coombe said. “Miss Pride’s the landlord. But I have heard they put everything they’d got into it.”

“She did,” Mrs. Carstairs said firmly. “It was Margaret Barrimore’s money, wasn’t it, Adrian?”

“My dear, I don’t know. In any case—”

“Yes, dear. Of course,” said Mrs. Carstairs, turning pink. She glanced distractedly at the knees of her linen dress. “Oh, look!” she said. “Now I shall have to change. It was that henbane that did it. What a disgrace I am. Sunday and everything.”

“You melt into your background, my dear,” the Rector observed. “Like a wood-nymph,” he added with an air of recklessness.

“Adrian, you are awful,” said Mrs. Carstairs automatically. It was clear that he was in love with her.

Alleyn said: “So there would be a gap of about an hour and a quarter between the first and second services?”

“This morning, yes,” said the Rector. “Because of the rain, you see, and the small attendance at seven.”

“How do you manage?” Alleyn asked Mrs. Carstairs. “Breakfast must be quite a problem.”

“Oh, there’s usually time to boil an egg before nine. This morning, as you see, we had over an hour. At least,” she corrected herself, “You didn’t, did you, dear? Adrian had to make a visit: poor old Mr. Thomas,” she said to Coombe. “Going, I’m afraid.”

“So you were alone, after all. When did you hear of the tragedy, Mrs. Carstairs?”

“Before matins. Half past ten. Several people had seen the — well, the ambulance and the stretcher, you know. And Adrian met Sergeant Pender and — there it was.”

“Is it true?” the Rector asked abruptly. “Was it — deliberate? Pender said — I mean…?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“How very dreadful,” he said. “How appallingly dreadful.”

“I know,” Alleyn agreed. “A woman, it appears, with no enemies. It’s incomprehensible.”

Coombe cleared his throat. The Carstairses glanced at each other quickly and as quickly looked away.

“Unless, I suppose,” Alleyn said, “you count Miss Pride.”

“There, I’m afraid,” the Rector said, and Alleyn wondered if he’d caught an overtone of relief, “there, it was all on Miss Cost’s side, poor soul.”

“You might say,” his wife added, “that Miss Pride had the whip hand.”

“Dulcie!”

“Well, Adrian, you know what I mean.”

“It’s quite beside the point,” said the Rector with authority.

A telephone rang in the house. He excused himself and went indoors.

“There was nothing, I suppose, in her day-to-day life to make people dislike her,” Alleyn said. “She seems, as far as I can make out, to have been a perfectly harmless obsessive.”

Mrs. Carstairs began to pick up her scattered belongings, rather as if she was giving herself time to consider. When she straightened up, with her arms full, she was quite red in the face.

“She wasn’t always perfectly kind,” she said.

“Ah! Which of us is?”

“Yes, I know. You’re quite right. Of course,” she agreed in a hurry.

“Did she make mischief?” he asked lightly.

“She tried. My husband… Naturally, we paid no attention. My husband feels very strongly about that sort of thing. He calls it a cardinal sin. He preaches very strongly against. Always.” Mrs. Carstairs looked squarely at Alleyn. “I’m offending, myself, to tell you this. I can’t think what came over me. You must have a — have a talent for catching people off guard.”

He said wryly: “You make my job sound very unappetizing. Mrs. Carstairs, I won’t bother you much longer. One more question and we’re off. Have you any idea who played those ugly tricks on Miss Pride? If you have, I do hope you will tell me.”

She seemed, he thought, to be relieved. She said at once: “I’ve always considered she was behind them — Miss Cost.”

“Behind them? You thought she encouraged someone else to take the active part?”

“Yes.”

“Wally Trehern?”

“Perhaps.”

“And was that what you were thinking of when you said Miss Cost was not always kind?”

“Oh no!” she ejaculated and stopped short. “Please don’t ask me any more questions, Mr. Alleyn. I shall not answer them, if you do.”

“Very well,” he said. He thanked her and went away, followed, uncomfortably, by Coombe.

They lunched at the village pub. The whole place was alive with trippers. The sun glared down, the air was degraded by transistors and the ground by litter. Groups of sightseers in holiday garments crowded the foreshore, eating, drinking and pointing out the Island to each other. The tide was full. The hotel launch and a number of dinghies plied to and fro, and their occupants stared up at the enclosure. It was obvious that the murder of Miss Cost was now common knowledge.

The enclosure itself was not fully visible from the village, being masked by an arm of Fisherman’s Bay, but two constables could be seen on the upper pathway. Visitors returning from the Island told each other, and anybody that cared to listen, that you couldn’t get anywhere near the spring. “There’s nothing to see,” they said. “The coppers have got it locked up. You wouldn’t know.”

When they had eaten a flaccid lunch they called on the nearest J.P. and picked up a search-warrant for Wally’s cottage. They went on to the station, where Alleyn collected a short piece of the trip wire. It was agreed that he would return to the Boy-and-Lobster; Coombe was to remain at the station, relieving his one spare constable, until the Yard men arrived. He would then telephone Alleyn at the Boy-and-Lobster. Pender would remain on duty at Miss Cost’s shop.