“All he was entitled to do,” said Fabian with some heat, “was to burst into sobs and turn away his face. Did he, by any chance, show you his notes?”

“I was given full access to the files.”

“I couldn’t be more sorry for you. And I must say that in comparison with the files even my account may seem a model of lucidity.”

“At any rate,” said Alleyn placidly, “let’s have it. Pretend I’ve heard nothing.”

He waited while Fabian, driving at fifty miles an hour, lit a cigarette, striking the match across the windscreen and shaking it out carefully before throwing it into the dry tussock.

“On the evening of the last Thursday in January, 1942,” he began, with the air of repeating something he had memorized, “my aunt by marriage, Florence Rubrick, together with Arthur Rubrick (her husband and my uncle), Douglas Grace (her own nephew), Miss Terence Lynne, her secretary, Miss Ursula Harme, her ward, and me, sat on the tennis lawn at Mount Moon and made arrangements for a patriotic gathering to be held, ten days later, in the wool-shed. In addition to being our member, Flossie was also president of a local rehabilitation committee, set up by herself, to propagate the gospel of turning good soldiers into bewildered farmers. The meeting was to be given tea, beer, and a dance. Flossie, stationed on an improvised rostrum hard by the wool press, was to address them for three quarters of an hour. She was a remorseless orator, was Flossie. This she planned, sitting in a deck-chair on the tennis lawn. It may give you some idea of her character when I tell you she began with the announcement that in ten minutes she was going to the wool-shed to try her voice. We were exhausted. The evening was stiflingly hot. Flossie, who was fond of saying she thought best when walking, had marched us up and down the rose garden and had not spared us the glass-houses and the raspberry canes.