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Weston-super-Mare last summer. The one who dragged Dom into her act, the way they do?”
    “Mmm!” said George, dazed by this seeming irrelevance. “What about her, for goodness’ sake?”
    “He noticed
her
all right, didn’t he?”
    “Couldn’t very well miss her,” admitted George, “she was round his neck. How on earth did she get him up there? Some trick—I don’t remember. I know I blushed for him.”
    “Yes,
you
did,” said Bunty significantly. “
He
didn’t. He bragged about it for days, the little ass. He said she was a dish.”
    “That’s all those paperbacks he reads.”
    “No, I think it’s pop records. The point is, apparently this Norris girl really is a dish. But he never said so. Why?”
    “No accounting for tastes,” mumbled George. “Maybe he doesn’t think she is a dish.”
    “Why shouldn’t he? Everybody else does.
You
do,” said Bunty, and was drifting off to sleep again, still worrying over the discrepancy, when the telephone beside their bed rang.
    “Damn and blast!” said George, sitting up in bed wide awake and reaching for the instrument. “
Now
what’s up?”
    The telephone bleated in a quavering voice which at first he hardly recognised for Bennie Blocksidge’s. “Mr. Felse?” it wailed. “Oh, Mr. Felse, I dunno if I’m doing right, but I’d sooner it was you, and you’re the nearest, and being as you were here to-night it’s you I called. We got bad trouble here, Mr. Felse. It’s the guv’nor, Mr. Armiger. He never come back. Past closing-time, and he never come, and eleven, and half past eleven, and the lights still on in there. And Mr. Calverley got worried, and one thing and another, even if he did say not to disturb him, they went to see was he all right—”
    “Make it short,” said George, groping for his slippers. “What’s happened? I’m on my way, but what’s happened? Make it three words, not three hundred.”
    “He’s dead,” said Bennie, making it two. “there in the barn, all by himself, stone dead and blood all over.”

----
CHAPTER III
    « ^ »
    THE MOMENT OF truth had overtaken Armiger in the middle of an expanse of new flooring almost big enough for a bull-ring, and of a colour not so far from that of fine sand. He lay in the full glare of his brand-new lights, sprawled on his face with arms and legs tossed loosely about him, his right cheek flattened against the glossy parquet. If you stooped to look carefully the thick profile in its bold, bright colouring still showed clear and undamaged; but the exposed back of his head was crumpled and indented, welling dark blood that oozed up out of the splintered cavities and spilled sluggishly over into the puddle gathering on the floor, where the crimson of blood and the thin clarity of wine met and intermingled in long, feathery fronds of pink.
    All round his head and shoulders blood and champagne had spattered to a distance of two or three feet, but not so lavishly as old Bennie had made out, you could easily approach him between the splashes, at least from the back, from which position, George thought, squatting over the body, this ferocious damage had been done. Any enemy of Alfred Armiger’s might well prefer not to face him when he hit out at him at last. The neck of the magnum lay in the pink ferns of the pool, close to the shattered head, and slivers of glass glittered on the bull shoulders; two yards away the rest of the bottle lay on its side, a thin dotted line of blood marking where it had rolled when it broke at last.
    Well at least, thought George grimly, we’re spared the classic hesitation between accident, suicide and murder; the one most easily associated with Armiger was the one that overtook him, and nobody’s ever going to argue about it.
    He had called his headquarters in Comerbourne before he left home, called them again after his first check-up on the scene, and turned everyone else out of the ballroom until the van should arrive. He had the place to himself