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it. "I believe you personally went to interview Painter after the crime was discovered?"
    "We were round at the coach house by a quarter to eight. Painter was out. I asked Mrs. Painter where he was and she said he'd come back from the big house some time after six-thirty, washed his hands and gone straight out again. He'd told her he was going to Stowerton to see his friend. We'd only been there about ten minutes when he came in. His story didn't stand up, there was far too much blood around to have come from a cut finger and—well, you know the rest. It's all down there. I charged him on the spot."
    The transcript fluttered a little in Archery's hand. He could not keep his fingers quite steady. "In evidence," he said, speaking slowly and evenly, "Painter said he hadn't been to Stowerton. 'I waited at the bus stop at the end of the lane, but the bus never came. I saw the police cars turn into the lane and I wondered what was up. Presently I felt a bit faint on account of my finger bleeding a lot. I came back to my flat. I thought my wife might know what it was all about.' " After a pause, he added with a kind of pleading eagerness, "That doesn't sound like the evidence of the complete moron you make him out to be."
    Wexford answered him patiently as if he were talking to a precocious teenager. "They edit these things, Mr. Archery. They condense them, make them sound coherent. Believe me. You weren't in court and I was. As to the truth of that statement, I was in one of those police cars and I was keeping my eyes open. We overtook the Stowerton bus and turned left into the lane. There wasn't anyone waiting at that bus stop."
    "I imagine you mean that while he said he was at the bus stop he was in fact hiding some clothes."
    "Of course he was hiding the clothes! When he was working he habitually wore a raincoat. You'll see that in Mrs. Crilling's evidence and in Alice's. Sometimes it hung in the coach house and sometimes on a hook behind the back door of Victor's Piece. Painter said he had worn it that evening and had left it hanging on the back door. That raincoat couldn't be found. Both Alice and Roger Primero said they remembered having seen it on the back door that afternoon, but Mrs. Crilling was certain it wasn't there when she brought Elizabeth in at seven."
    "You finally found the raincoat rolled up in a ball under a hedge two fields away from the bus stop."
    "The raincoat plus a pullover," Wexford retorted, "and a pair of rubber gloves. The lot was sodden with blood."
    "But anyone could have worn the raincoat and you couldn't identify the pullover."
    "Alice Flower went so far as to say it looked like one Painter sometimes wore."
    Archery gave a deep sigh. For a time he had been firing questions and statements briskly at Wexford, but suddenly he had fallen silent. Little more than indecision showed on his face. Wexford waited. At last, he thought, Archery had reached a point where it was going to become necessary to reveal those "personal reasons". A struggle was going on within him and he said in an artificial tone: "What about Painter's wife?"
    "A wife cannot be compelled to give evidence against her husband. As you know, she didn't appear at the trial. She and the child went off somewhere and a couple of years later I heard she'd married again."
    He stared at Archery, raising his eyebrows. Something he had said had made the clergyman's mind up for him. A slight flush coloured Archery's even tan. The brown eyes were very bright as he leaned forward, tense again.
    "That child..."
    "What of her? She was asleep in her cot when we searched Painter's bedroom and that's the only time I saw her. She was four or five."
    Archery said jerkily, "She's twenty-one now and she's a very beautiful young woman."
    "I'm not surprised. Painter was a nice enough looking fellow if you like the type, and Mrs. Painter was pretty." Wexford stopped. Archery was a clergyman. Had Painter's daughter taken after her father and somehow come into his