“So you were her best friend, then?”

“Aw, well…” said Cissy, and shuffled her feet.

“What about gentleman friends?”

This produced a renewed attack of giggles. After a great deal of trouble he elicted the now familiar story of advance and frustration. Miss Cost had warned Cissy repeatedly of the gentlemen and had evidently dropped a good many dark hints about improper overtures made to herself. Cissy was not pretty and was no longer very young. He thought that, between them, they had probably indulged in continuous fantasy and the idea rather appalled him. On Major Barrimore’s name being introduced in a roundabout fashion, she became uncomfortable and said, under pressure, that Miss Cost was proper set against him, and that he’d treated her bad. She would say nothing more under this heading. She remembered Miss Cost’s visit to the hospital. It appeared that she had tried the spring for her moles but without success. Alleyn ventured to ask if Miss Cost liked Dr. Mayne. Cissy with a sudden burst of candour, said she fair worshipped him.

“Ah!” said Sergeant Pender, who had listened to all this with the liveliest attention. “So she did then, and hunted the poor chap merciless, didn’t she, Ciss?”

“Aw, you do be awful, George Pender,” said Cissy, with spirit.

“Couldn’t help herself, no doubt, and not to be blamed for it,” he conceded.

Alleyn again asked Cissy if Miss Cost had any close women friends. Mrs. Carstairs? Or Mrs. Barrimore, for instance?

Cissy made a prim face that was also, in some indefinable way, furtive. “She weren’t terrible struck on Mrs. Barrimore,” she said. “She didn’t hold with her.” “Oh? Why was that, do you suppose?” “She reckoned she were sly,” said Cissy and was not to be drawn any further.

“Did Miss Cost keep a diary, do you know?” Alleyn asked, and as Cissy looked blank, he added: “A book. A record of day-to-day happenings?”

Cissy said Miss Cost was always writing in a book of an evening but kept it away careful-like, she didn’t know where. Asked if she had noticed any change in Miss Cost’s behaviour over the last three weeks, Cissy gaped at Alleyn for a second or two and then said Miss Cost had been kind of funny.

“In what way, funny?”

“Laughing,” said Cissy. “She took fits to laugh, suddenlike. I never see nothing to make her.”

“As if she was — what? Amused? Excited?”

“Axcited. Powerful pleased, too. Sly-like.”

“Did you happen to notice if she sent any letters to London?”

Miss Cost had on several occasions put her own letters in the mailbag but Cissy hadn’t got a look at them. Evidently, Alleyn decided, Miss Cost’s manner had intrigued her assistant. It was on these occasions that Miss Cost laughed.

At this juncture, Cissy was required at the switchboard. Alleyn asked Pender to follow him into the back room. He shut the door and said he thought the time had come for Miss Pollock to return to her home. She lived on the Island, it appeared, in one of the Fisherman’s Bay cottages. Alleyn suggested that Pender had better see her to her door as the storm was so bad. Bailey and Thompson could be shown how to work the switchboard during his absence.

When they had gone, Alleyn retired to the parlour and began operations upon Miss Cost’s desk, which, on first inspection, appeared to be a monument to the dimmest kind of disorder. Bills, dockets, trade leaflets and business communications were jumbled together in ill-running drawers and overcrowded pigeonholes. He sorted them into heaps and secured them with rubber bands.

He called out to Fox, who was in the kitchen: “As far as I can make out she was doing very nicely indeed, thank you. There’s a crack-pot sort of day book. No outstanding debts and an extremely healthy bank statement. We’ll get at her financial position through the income tax people, of course. What’ve you got?”

“Nothing to rave about,” Fox said.

“Newspapers?”

“Not yet. It’s a coal range, though.”

“Damn.”

They worked on in silence. Bailey reported a good set of impressions from a tumbler by the bed, and Thompson, relieved of the switchboard, photographed them. Fox put on his mackintosh and retired with a torch to an outhouse, admitting, briefly, the cold and uproar of the storm. After an interval he returned, bland with success, and bearing a coal-grimed, wet, crumpled and scorched fragment of newsprint.

“This might be something,” he said and laid it out for Alleyn’s inspection.

It was part of a sheet from the local paper from which a narrow strip had been cleanly excised. The remainder of a headline read: “…to well-known beauty spot” and underneath: “The Natural Amenities Association. At a meeting held at Dunlowman on Wednesday it was resolved to lodge a protest at the threat to Hatcherds Common, where it is proposed to build…”

“That’s it, I’m sure,” Alleyn said. “Same type. The original messages are in my desk, blast it, but one of them reads threat (in these capitals) ‘to close You are warned’: a good enough indication that she was responsible. Any more?”

“No. This was in the ash-bin. Fallen into the grate, most likely, when she burned the lot. I don’t think there’s anything else but I’ll take another look by daylight. She’s got a bit of a darkroom rigged up out there. Quite well equipped, too, by the look of it.”

“Has she now? Like to take a slant at it, Thompson?”

Thompson went out and presently returned to say it was indeed a handy little job of a place and he wouldn’t mind using it. “I’ve got that stuff we shot up at the spring,” he said. “How about it, sir?”

“I don’t see why not. Away you go. Good. Fox, you might penetrate to the bedchamber. I can’t find her blasted diary anywhere.”

Fox retired to the bedroom. Pender came back and said it was rougher than ever out of doors, and he didn’t see himself getting back to the village. Would it be all right if he spent the rest of the night on Miss Cost’s bed? “When vacant, in a manner of speaking,” he added, being aware of Fox’s activities. Fox emerged from a pitchpine wardrobe, obviously scandalized by Sergeant Pender’s unconventional approach, but Alleyn said he saw nothing against the suggestion and set Pender to tend the switchboard and help Thompson.

He returned to his own job. The parlour was a sort of unfinished echo of the front shop. Rows of plastic ladies, awaiting coats of green, yellow and pink paint, smirked blankly from the shelves. There were stacks of rhyme-sheets and stationery, and piles of jerkins, still to be sewn up the sides. Through the open door he could see the kitchen table with a jug and sugar-basin and a dirty cup with a sodden crust in its saucer. Miss Cost would have washed them up, no doubt, if she had returned from early service and not gone walking through the rain to her death.

In a large envelope he came across a number of photographs. A group of village maidens, Cissy prominent among them, with their arms upraised in what was clearly intended for corybantic ecstasy. Wally, showing his hands. Wally with his mouth open. Miss Cost, herself, in a looking-glass with her thumb on the camera trigger and smiling dreadfully. Several snapshots, obviously taken in the grounds of the nursing home, with Dr. Mayne, caught in moments of reluctance shading into irritation. View of the spring and one of a dark foreign-looking lady with an intense expression.

He heard Fox pull a heavy piece of furniture across the wooden floor and then give an ejaculation.

“Anything?” Alleyn asked.

“Might be. Behind the bed-head. A locked cupboard. Solid, mortise job. Now, where’d she have stowed the key?”

“Not in her bag. Where do spinsters hide keys?”

“I’ll try the chest of drawers for a start,” said Fox.

“You jolly well do. A favourite cache. Association of ideas. Freud would have something to say about it.”