“It’s a shocking neg,” Thompson said. He added grudgingly: “She’s got an enlarger.”
Alleyn said: “On the face of it, do you think there’s any hope of a correspondence, Bailey?”
Bailey, still using his lens, said: “Can’t really say, sir. The casts are in my room at the pub.”
“What about you, Thompson? Got your shots of the prints?”
“They’re in the dish, now.”
“Well, take this out and see what you make of it. Have you found her camera?”
“Yes. Lovely job,” Thompson said. “You wouldn’t have expected it. Very fast.” He named the make with reverence.
“Pender,” Alleyn said, re-entering the shop, “do you know anything about Miss Cost’s camera?”
Pender shook his head and then did what actors call a “double-take.” “Yes, I do, though,” he said. “It was give her in gratitude by a foreign lady that was cured of a terrible bad rash. She was a patient up to hospital, and Miss Cost talked her into the spring.”
“I see. Thompson, would it get results around about 7:30 on a summer evening?”
“Certainly would. Better than this affair, if properly handled.”
“All right. See what you can do.”
Bailey and Thompson went away and Alleyn rejoined Fox in the bedroom.
“Fox,” Alleyn said distastefully, “I don’t know whose feet the male pair may prove to be, but I’m damn sure I’ve recognized the female’s.”
“Really, Mr. Alleyn?”
“Yes. Very good buckskin shoes with very good buckles. She wore them to the Festival. I’m afraid it’s Mrs. Barrimore.”
“Fancy!” said Fox, after a pause, and he added with his air of simplicity: “Well, then, it’s to be hoped the others turn out to be the Major’s.”
There were no other papers and no diary in either of the boxes.
“Did you reach to the end of the cupboard?” Alleyn asked Fox.
“No, I didn’t. It’s uncommonly deep. Extends through the wall and under the counter in the shop,” Fox grumbled.
“Let me try.”
Alleyn lay on the bedroom floor and reached his long arm into the cupboard. His fingers touched something — a book? “She must have used her brolly to fish it out,” he grunted. “Hold on. There are two of them — no, three. Here they come. I think… Yes. Yes, Br’er Fox. This is it.”
They were large commercial diaries and were held together with a rubber band. He took them into the parlour and laid them out on Miss Cost’s desk. When he opened the first he found page after page covered in Miss Cost’s small skeleton handwriting. He read an entry at random.
…Sweet spot, so quaint and unspoiled. Sure I shall like it. One feels the tug of earth and sea. The ‘pub’ (!) is really genuine and goes back to smuggling days. Kept by a gentleman. Major B. I take my noggin “of an evening” in the taproom and listen to the wonderful “burr” in the talk of the fisher-folk. All v. friendly…Major B. kept looking at me. I know your sort, sez I. Nothing to object to, really. Just an awareness. The wife is rather peculiar: I am not altogether taken, a man’s woman in every sense of the word, I’m afraid. He doesn’t pay her v. much attention.
Alleyn read on for a minute or two. “It would take a day to get through it,” he said. “This is her first visit to the Island. Two years ago.”
“Interesting?”
“Excruciating. Where’s that list of dates?”
Fox put it on the desk.
Alleyn turned the pages of the diary. References to Major B., later K., though veiled in unbelievable euphemisms, became more and more explicit. In this respect alone, Alleyn thought, the gallant Major has a lot to answer for. He turned back to the entry for the day after Wally’s cure. It was ecstatic:
I have always believed in fairies. The old magic of water and the spoken rune! The Green Lady! He saw her, this little lad saw her and obeyed her behest. Something led me to this Island.
She ran on in this vein for the whole of the entry. Alleyn read it with a sensation of exasperated compassion. The entry itself was nothing to his purpose. But across it, heavily inked, Miss Cost on some later occasion had put down an enormous mark of interrogation and, besides this, had added a note: “Sept. 30th—8:45.”
This was the second of the two underlined dates on the paper. He turned to it in the diary:
I am shocked and horrified and sickened by what I have seen this evening. My hand shakes. I can hardly bring myself to write it down. I knew, from the moment I first set eyes on her, that she was unworthy of him. One always knows. Shall not tell K. It would serve him right if I did. All these months and he never guessed. But I won’t tell him. Not yet. Not unless — But I must write it. Only so, can I rid myself of the horror. I was sitting on the hill, below the spring, thinking so happily of all my plans and so glad I have settled for the shop and ordered my lovely Green Ladies. I was feeling the magic of the water. (Blessed, blessed water. No asthma, now.) And then I heard them. Behind the boulder. Laughing. I shrank down in the bracken. And then she came out from behind the boulder in her green dress and stood above the pool. She raised her arms. I could hear the man laughing still but I couldn’t see him. I knew. I knew. The wicked desecration of it! But I won’t believe it. I’ll put it out of my mind forever. She was mocking-pretending. I won’t think anything else. She went back to him. I waited. And then, suddenly, I couldn’t bear it any longer. I came back here.…
Alleyn, looking increasingly grim, went over the entries for the whole list. Throughout two summers, Miss Cost had hunted her evening quarry with obsessive devotion, and had recorded the fruits of the chase as if in some antic game book: time, place and circumstance. On each occasion that she spied upon her victims, she had found the enclosure padlocked but had taken up a point of vantage on the hillside. At no stage did she give the names of the lovers, but their identity was inescapable.
“Mrs. Barrimore and Dr. Mayne,” Alleyn said. “To hell with this case!”
“Awkward!” observed Fox.
“My dear old Fox, it’s dynamite. And it fits,” Alleyn said, staring disconsolately at his colleague. “The devil of it is, it fits.”
He began to read the entries for the past month. Dr. Mayne, Miss Cost weirdly concluded, was not to blame. He was a victim, caught in the toils, unable to free himself and therefore unable to follow his nobler inclination towards Miss Cost herself. Interlarded with furious attacks upon Miss Emily and covert allusions to the anonymous messages were notes on the Festival, a savage comment on Miss Emily’s visit to the shop, and a distracted reference to the attack of asthma that followed it. “The dark forces of evil that emanate from this woman” were held responsible. There followed a number of cryptic asides. (“Trehern agrees. It’s right. I know it’s right!”).
“It is the Cause, it is the Cause, my soul,” Alleyn muttered, disconsolately. “The old, phony argument.”
Fox, who had been reading over his shoulder, said: “It’d be a peculiar thing if she’d worked Trehern up to doing the job, and then got herself mistaken for the intended victim!”