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But, you see, she only goes in mornings and she was gone before I got there. “I’ve just seen her go by”, the neighbour said. I nipped up the road smartish but she was out of sight.’
    Wexford turned his attention once more to the sheets of paper and to the lab report on that paper. No fingerprints had been found on the anonymous letter, no perfume clung to it; the pen with which it had been written was a cheap ballpoint such as could be bought in every stationers in the country. He had an inventive imagination but he could not visualise the concatenation of happenings that must have been the pre-requisite to this letter. Aginger-haired charwoman, whose own conduct was apparently not above reproach, had seen something or heard something that had led her to write to the police. Such communication would necessarily be alien to a woman of her type, a woman found to be an occasional thief. And yet she, or someone closely associated with her, had written it. Fear or spite might have prompted her action.
    ‘I wonder if it could be blackmail,’ Wexford said.
    ‘I don’t quite follow you, sir.’
    ‘Because we always think of blackmail being successful, or, at any rate, successful for a time. Suppose it isn’t successful at all. Suppose our ginger-haired woman tries to put the squeeze on Geoff Smith, but he won’t play. Then, if she’s vindictive, she carries out her threat.’
    ‘Blackmailers always are vindictive, sir,’ Martin said sagely unctuous. ‘A nasty spiteful thing, if ever there was one. Worse than murder, sir.’
    An excessive show of respect always grated on Wexford, especially as in this case when it was associated with the imparting of platitudes he had heard a thousand times before. ‘Here endeth the first lesson,’ he said sharply. ‘Answer that, will you?’
    Martin leapt to the phone before the end of the second double peal. ‘Inspector Burden for you, sir.’
    Wexford took the receiver without getting up. The stretched coil lead passed dangerously near his glass sculpture. ‘Move that thing,’ he said. The sergeant lifted it and stuck it on the narrow window sill. ‘Well?’ Wexford said into the mouthpiece.
    Burden’s voice sounded dazed. ‘I’m off to have a word with Cawthorne. Can we spare someone to come down here and fetch Miss Margolis’s car? Drayton, if he’s not tied up. Oh, and the cottage’ll have to be gone over.’ Wexford heard his tone drop to a whisper. ‘It’s a proper shambles, sir. No wonder he wanted a char.’
    ‘We want one, too,’ Wexford said crisply, ‘a snappy dresser with ginger hair.’ He explained. The phone made crackling sounds. ‘What’s going on?’
    ‘The cheese has fallen into a flower pot.’
    ‘My God,’ said Wexford. ‘I see what you mean.’
    Mark Drayton came down the police station steps and crossed the road. To reach Pump Lane he had to walk the whole length of the High Street and when he came to Grover’s the newsagent he stopped for a moment to glance at its window. It seemed incredible to him that Martin had for a moment considered this place as the possible purveyor of handmade paper. It had the shady, almost sordid aspect, of a shop in the slum streets of some great city. A high brick wall towered above it and between it and the florist’s next door a brown cobbled alley plunged deep into a dubious hinterland of dustbins and sheds and a pair of garages.
    In the shop window the displayed wares looked as if they had been arranged there some years before and since left utterly untended. Easter was not long past and the Easter cards were topical. But it seemed to them that their topicality must be an accident in the same way as a stopped clock must be correct twice a day, for there were Christmas cards there as well, some fallen on their sides and filmed with dust.
    Dying houseplants stood among the cards. Perhaps they were for sale or perhaps misguidedly intended for decoration. The earth around their roots had shrunk through