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she’s in.”
    “You I’d like to speak to.”
    “What?”
    “I said , it’s you I wanted to speak to.” Jane had the habit, when speaking to him over the telephone, of enunciating with exceptional clarity and in tones one might normally use when addressing foreigners, total imbeciles or golden retrievers. And not only over the telephone, either. This always made Dobie feel and even speak (when an occasion arose) like Bertie Wooster. “Oh, right-ho,” he said.
    “Are you there?” the voice said suspiciously. Are you all there, was what its tone implied.
    “I think so. I mean yes, I am. Definitely. Cogito ergo sum.”
    “I’m glad to find you in such high spirits. In fact I’m glad to find you at all. I’ve been trying to get through to you most of the day. I want to have a little chat with you, John. Privately.”
    “Oh, right. Fire away.”
    “No, not over the telephone if you don’t mind.” No one but a congenital idiot would have conceived of such a plan, as was now obvious. “Are you free tomorrow evening?”
    “Well, I’m rather bogged down this week,” Dobie said. “Exam papers and such. And Jenny’s off to Paris day after tomorrow, did she tell you?… Oh. She did. What about Friday? I finish work on Friday. What about Friday evening, say around—”
    “Let’s say at exactly eight o’clock.”
    “Fine.” Dobie took out his pocket diary and scribbled in it furiously.
    “Now you won’t just forget about it, John? I know when you’re busy you often tend—”
    “No, no, I’ve written it down, look forward to it.”
    “Bye then.” The phone clicked in his ear. Dobie, perceiving that in his haste he had made the appropriate entry for eight a.m. on the Thursday morning, drew a little arrow to rectify the error and put his diary away in his coat pocket.
    It was odd about Jane. Certainly there was nothing remotely Aunt Agatha-like in her appearance, which was that of a tall well-manicured fluffy blonde well preserved for her age which had to be about the same as Dobie’s. Which was forty-eight. All the same. Jenny was right. She was bossy. An eye like Ma’s, as Bertie would have put it, to threaten and command. And since she was, in point of concrete fact, Wendy’s Ma, no doubt Wendy felt the same way about it. In view of this general agreement, then, it was odd that Jenny should have taken to her quite so strongly. Perhaps Jane supplied a certain element that was lacking in her married life. Dobie wasn’t bossy. Certainly not.
    Ineffectual, more like it. Maybe that was why she’d got the blonde wig. In imitation, conscious or otherwise, of Jane. Well, you had to admit Jane’s turn-out was always impeccable. As befitted a very rich man’s consort. If it was elegance you were after. Jenny couldn’t really compete. Which mightn’t stop her from trying, all the same.
    Nothing you can do to help, Kate Coyle had said. But that hadn’t stopped him from trying, either. Ineffectually, of course. At the police station, where he’d stopped on the way back home, the fuzz had barely given him the time of day. What had been the big copper’s name? I’m all right with names, Dobie thought. Most of the time. Superintendent…
    Pontin.
    That was it.
    “… I’m not questioning the cause of death,” Dobie had said plaintively. “What I want to know is why he did it.”
    “Why he did what?”
    “Killed himself.”
    “Oh, he’ll have had his reasons,” Pontin said.
    “Yes, but what are they? Nobody seems to have come up with anything. And it seems there wasn’t any letter or anything like that. Suicides usually leave letters, don’t they? – or some kind of indication why they—”
    “Offhand, sir, I can’t give you the exact statistics, but I’m pretty sure some bloke or other will have worked them out by now. Fed ’em into a computer, like as not. That’s what happens to everything these days, far as I can see. I don’t believe too much in all that stuff meself. It’s