Robert had the odd feeling that she suddenly liked him; but if so she was making no verbal confession of it. Her dry voice said tartly: “Yes, I expect the distractions of Milford are scarce and mild. My daughter pursues a piece of gutta-percha round the golf course—”

“It is not gutta-percha any more, Mother,” her daughter put in.

“But at my age Milford does not provide even that distraction. I am reduced to pouring weedkiller on weeds—a legitimate form of sadism on a par with drowning fleas. Do you drown your fleas, Mr. Blair?”

“No, I squash them. But I have a sister who used to pursue them with a cake of soap.”

“Soap?” said Mrs. Sharpe, with genuine interest.

“I understand that she hit them with the soft side and they stuck to it.”

“How very interesting. A technique I have not met before. I must try that next time.”

With his other ear he heard that Marion was being nice to the snubbed Inspector. “You play a very good game, Inspector,” she was saying.

He was conscious of the feeling you get near the end of a dream, when waking is just round the corner, that none of the inconsequence really matters because presently you’ll be back in the real world.

This was misleading because the real world came through the door with the return of Inspector Grant. Grant came in first, so that he was in a position to see the expressions on all the faces concerned, and held the door open for a police matron and a girl.

Marion Sharpe stood up slowly, as if the better to face anything that might be coming to her, but her mother remained seated on the sofa as one giving an audience, her Victorian back as flat as it had been as a young girl, her hands lying composedly in her lap. Even her wild hair could not detract from the impression that she was mistress of the situation.

The girl was wearing her school coat, and childish low-heeled clumpish black school shoes; and consequently looked younger than Blair had anticipated. She was not very tall, and certainly not pretty. But she had—what was the word?—appeal. Her eyes, a darkish blue, were set wide apart in a face of the type popularly referred to as heart-shaped. Her hair was mouse-coloured, but grew off her forehead in a good line. Below each cheek-bone a slight hollow, a miracle of delicate modelling, gave the face charm and pathos. Her lower lip was full, but the mouth was too small. So were her ears. Too small and too close to her head.

An ordinary sort of girl, after all. Not the sort you would notice in a croc. Not at all the type to be the heroine of a sensation. Robert wondered what she would look like in other clothes.

The girl’s glance rested first on the old woman, and then went on to Marion. The glance held neither surprise nor triumph and not much interest.

“Yes, these are the women,” she said.

“You have no doubt about it?” Grant asked her, and added: “It is a very grave accusation, you know.”

“No, I have no doubt. How could I?”

“These two ladies are the women who detained you, took your clothes from you, forced you to mend linen, and whipped you?”

“A remarkable liar,” said old Mrs. Sharpe, in the tone in which one says, “A remarkable likeness.”

“Yes, these are the women.”

“You say that we took you into the kitchen for coffee,” Marion said.

“Yes, you did.”

“Can you describe the kitchen?”

“I didn’t pay much attention. It was a big one—with a stone floor, I think—and a row of bells.”

“What kind of stove?”

“I didn’t notice the stove, but the pan the old woman heated the coffee in was a pale blue enamel one with a dark blue edge and a lot of chips off round the bottom edge.”

“I doubt if there is any kitchen in England that hasn’t a pan exactly like that,” Marion said. “We have three of them.”

“Is the girl a virgin?” asked Mrs. Sharpe, in the mildly interested tone of a person inquiring: “Is it a Chanel?”

In the startled pause that this produced Robert was aware of Hallam’s scandalised face, the hot blood running up into the girl’s, and the fact that there was no protesting “Mother!” from the daughter as he unconsciously, but confidently, expected.