Dalgliesh privately thought that it was more neat than convincing. He said: 'So you're assuming that the smashed portrait isn't directly connected with the murder. I can't see Blaney destroying his own work.'
'Why not? From what I saw of it, it wasn't anything special.'
'I think it was to him.'
'The portrait is a puzzle, I'll grant you that. And that's not the only difficulty. Someone had a drink with Robarts before she took that last swim, someone she let into the cottage, someone she knew. There were those two glasses on the draining board and, in my book, that means two people were drinking. She wouldn't have invited Blaney to Thyme Cottage and if he turned up I doubt if she would have let him in, drunk or sober.'
Dalgliesh said: 'But if you believe Miss Mair, your case against Blaney collapses anyway. She claims to have seen him at Scudder's Cottage at 9.45, or shortly afterwards, and he was then half drunk. All right, he could have feigned his drunkenness; that wouldn't present much difficulty. What he couldn't do was to kill Hilary Robarts at about 9.20 and get home by 9.45, not without the use of a car or van which he didn't have.'
Rickards said: 'Or a bicycle.'
'It would need fast pedalling. We know that she died after her swim, not before. Her hair was still damp at the roots when I found her. So you're probably safe enough in putting the time of death at between 9.15 and 9.30. And he couldn't have taken the bicycle with him and ridden back along the shore. The tide was high; he'd have been riding over the shingle which would be more difficult than the road. There's only one part of the shore where you get a stretch of sand at high tide and that's the small cove where Hilary Robarts swam. And if he had been on the road Miss Mair must have seen him. She's given him an alibi which I don't think you'll be able to break.'
Rickards said: 'But he hasn't given her one, has he? Her story is that she was alone in Martyr's Cottage until she left just after 9.30 to collect the portrait. She and that housekeeper at the Old Rectory, Mrs Dennison, are the only ones who were at the Mairs' dinner party who made no attempt to produce an alibi. And she has a motive. Hilary Robarts was her brother's mistress. I know he tells us it was over, but we've only his word for that. Suppose they'd planned to marry when he goes to London. She's devoted her life to her brother. Unmarried. No other outlet for her emotions. Why give way to another woman just when Mair is about to achieve his ambition?'
Dalgliesh thought that this was an altogether too facile explanation of a relationship which, even on his brief acquaintance, had seemed more complicated. He said: 'She's a successful professional writer. I imagine that success provides its own form of emotional fulfilment, assuming she needs it. She seemed to me very much her own woman.'
'I thought she wrote cookery books. Is that what you call being a successful professional writer?'
'Alice Mair's books are highly regarded and extremely lucrative. We share the same publisher. If he had to make a choice between us, he'd probably prefer to lose me.'
'So you think the marriage might almost be a relief, release her from responsibilities? Let another woman cook and care for him for a change?'
'Why should he need any woman to care for him? It's dangerous to theorize about people and their emotions, but I doubt whether she feels that kind of domestic, quasi-maternal responsibility or whether he either needs or wants it.'
'How do you see it then, the relationship? They live together, after all, most of the time anyway. She's fond of him, that seems to be generally accepted.'
'They'd hardly live together if they weren't, if you can call it living together. She's away a great deal, I understand, researching her books, and he has a London flat. How can someone who's only met them together across the table at a dinner party get to the heart of their relationship? I should have thought that there was loyalty, trust, mutual respect. Ask them.'
'But not jealousy, of him or his mistress?'
'If there is, she's clever at concealing it.'
'All right, Mr Dalgliesh, take another scenario. Suppose he was tired of Robarts, suppose she's pressing him to marry her, wants to quit the job, move to London with him. Suppose she's making herself a nuisance. Wouldn't Alice Mair feel like doing something about that?'
'Like devising and carrying out a singularly ingenious murder to relieve her brother of a temporary embarrassment? Isn't that carrying sisterly devotion to unreasonable lengths?'
'Ah, but they aren't temporary embarrassments, are they, these determined women? Think. How many men do you know who've been forced into marriages they didn't really want because the woman's will was stronger than theirs? Or because they couldn't stand all the fuss, the tears, recriminations, the emotional blackmail?'
Dalgliesh said: 'She could hardly blackmail him with the relationship itself. Neither was married; they weren't deceiving anyone; they weren't causing public scandal. And I can't see anyone, man or woman, coercing Alex Mair into something he didn't want to do. I know it's dangerous to make facile judgements, although that's what we've been doing for the last five minutes, but he seems to me a man who lives his life on his own terms and probably always has.'
'Which might make him vicious if someone tried to stop him.'
'So now you're casting him as murderer?'
'I'm casting him as a strong suspect.'
Dalgliesh asked: 'What about that couple at the caravan? Is there any evidence that they knew about the Whistler's methods?'
'None that we could discover, but how certain can you be? The man, Neil Pascoe, gets about in that van of his, drinks in local pubs. He could have heard some talk. Not every policeman on the case has necessarily been discreet. We've kept the details out of the papers but that doesn't mean that there hasn't been talk. He's got an alibi of sorts. He took the van just south of Norwich to talk to a chap there who'd written to him expressing interest in PANUP, that anti-nuclear organization of his. Had some hopes, apparently, of getting a group started there. I sent a couple of DCs to see the chap. He says they were together until just after 8.20 when Pascoe started for home – said he was starting for home, anyway. The girl he lives with, Amy Camm, says he got back to the caravan by nine and they were together for the rest of the evening. My guess is that he got back a bit later. In that van he must have been pushing it a bit to get from beyond Norwich to Larksoken in forty minutes. And he's got a motive, one of the strongest. If Hilary Robarts had gone ahead with her libel action it could have ruined him. And it's in Camm's interests to support the alibi. She's got herself very cosily fixed up with the kid in that caravan. I'll tell you something else, Mr Dalgliesh, they had a dog once. The lead is still hanging inside the caravan.'
'But if one or both of them used it to strangle Robarts, would it be?'
'People might have seen it. They might have thought it would have been more suspicious to destroy or hide it than to leave it there. We took it away, of course, but it was little more than a formality. Robarts's skin was unbroken. There'll be no physical traces. And if we do manage to get prints, they'll be hers and his. We shall go on checking the alibis, obviously. Every blasted employee at that station, and there are over five hundred of them. You'd never believe that, would you? You go in the place and hardly set sight on a soul. They seem to move through the countryside as invisibly as the energy they're generating. Most of them live at Cromer or Norwich. They want to be near schools and shops, presumably. Only a handful choose to live near the station. Most of the Sunday day shift were home well before ten and virtuously watching the telly or out with their friends. We shall check on them whether or not they had anything to do with Robarts at work. But it's only a formality. I know where to look for my suspects, the guests at that dinner party. Due to Lessingham's inability to keep his mouth shut they were they were told two crucial facts; that the hair stuffed into her mouth was pubic hair and the mark on the forehead was an L. So that narrows the field very conveniently. Alex Mair, Alice Mair, Margaret Dennison, Lessingham himself, and, assuming that Theresa Blaney reported the conversation to her father, you can add Blaney. All right, I may not be able to break his alibi, his or Mair's, but I shall have a damn good try.'