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an extraordinarily bad sense of timing, got back into active service just in time to get a crack on the head at Dunkirk.’ Fabian paused for a moment as if he had been about to say something further but now changed his mind. ‘Ah, well,’ he said. ‘There it was. Later on still, when I was supposed to be fairly fit, they put me into a special show in England. That’s when I got the germ of the idea. I cracked up again rather thoroughly and they kicked me out for good. While I was still too groggy to defend myself, Flossie, who was Home on a visit, bore down upon me and conceived the idea of bringing her poor English nephew-in-law back with her to recuperate in this country. She said she was used to looking after invalids, meaning poor old Arthur’s endocarditis. I started messing about with my notion soon after I got here.’
    â€˜And her own nephew? Captain Grace?’
    â€˜He was actually taking an engineering course at Heidelberg in 1939 but he left on the advice of some of his German friends and returned to England. May I take this opportunity of assuring you that Douglas is not in the pay of Hitler or any of his myrmidons, a belief ardently nursed, I feel sure, by Sub-Inspector Jackson. He enlisted when he got to England, was transferred to a New Zealand unit, and was subsequently pinked in the bottom by the Luftwaffe in Greece. Flossie hauled him in as soon as he was demobilized. He used to work here as a cadet in his school holidays. He’s always been good with his hands. He’d got a small precision lathe and some useful instruments. I pulled him in. It’s Douglas who’s got this bee in his bonnet. He will insist that in some fantastic way his Auntie Flossie’s death is mixed up with our egg-beater, which is what we ambiguously call our magnetic fuse.’
    â€˜Why does he think so?’
    Fabian did not answer.
    â€˜Has he any data—’ Alleyn began.
    â€˜Look here, sir,’ said Fabian abruptly. ‘I’ve got a notion for your visit. It may not appeal to you. In fact, you may dismiss it as the purest tripe, but here it is. You’re full of official information about the whole miserable show, aren’t you? All those files! You know, for example, that any one of us could have left the garden and gone to the shearing-shed. You may even have gathered that apart from protracted irritation, which God knows may be sufficient motive, none of us had any reason for killing Flossie. We were a tolerably happy collection of people. Flossie bossed us about but, more or less, we went our own way.’ He paused and added unexpectedly, ‘Most of us. Very well. It seems to me that as Flossie was murdered there was something about Flossie that only one of us knew. Something monstrous. I mean something monstrously out of character that I, for one, have conceived of as being “Flossie Rubrick”; something murder-worthy. Now that something may not appear in any one of the Flossies that each of us has formed for his or herself but, to a newcomer, an expert, might it not appear in the collective Flossie that emerges from all these units put together? Or am I talking unadulterated bilge?’
    Alleyn said carefully, ‘Women have been murdered for some chance intrusion upon other people’s affairs, some idiotic blunder that has nothing to do with character.’
    â€˜Yes. But in the mind of the murderer of such a victim she is forever The Intruder. If he could be persuaded to talk of his victim, don’t you feel that something of that aspect of her character in his mind would come out? To a sensitive observer?’
    â€˜I’m a policeman in a strange country,’ said Alleyn. ‘You mustn’t try me too high.’
    â€˜At any rate,’ said Fabian, with an air of relief that was unexpectedly naive, ‘you’re not laughing at me.’
    â€˜Of course not, but I don’t fully understand you.’
    â€˜The