“Does anyone believe in it!”

“My deceased aunt’s nephew, Douglas Grace, urges it passionately. He wanted to come and meet you in order to press his case, but I thought I’d get in first. After all it was I who wrote to you and not Douglas.”

The road they had taken was rough, little more than a pair of wheel tracks separated by a tussocky ridge. It ran up to the foot-hills of the eastern mountains and skirted them. Far to the west now, midway across the plateau, Alleyn could still see the service car, a clouded point of movement driving south.

“I didn’t expect you to come,” said Fabian Losse.

“No!”

“No. Of course I wouldn’t have known anything about you if Flossie herself hadn’t told me. That’s rather a curious thought, isn’t it? Horrible in a way. It was not long before it happened that you met, was it? I remember her returning from her lawful parliamentary occasions (you knew of course that she was an M.P.) full of the meeting and of dark hints about your mission in this country. ‘Of course I tell you nothing that you shouldn’t know but if you imagine there are no fifth columnists in this country…’ I think she expected to be put on some secret convention but as far as I know that never came off. Did she invite you to Mount Moon?”

“Yes. It was extremely kind of her. Unfortunately, at the moment…”

“I know, I know. More pressing business. We pictured you in a false beard, dodging round geysers.”

Alleyn grinned. “You can eliminate the false beard, at least,” he said.

“But not the geysers? However, curiosity, as Flossie would have said, is the most potent weapon in the fifth-column armoury.