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'I see. But if you would give him my card I think he will see me.

'Are you from the publishers?

'No, I'm —

'Because I think it would be better to wait, and not interrupt him. He could meet you at the Swan, couldn't he? Just before lunch, perhaps.

'No, I'm afraid that I must see him. You see, it is a matter —

'It is very important that he shouldn't be disturbed. It interrupts his train of thought, and then he finds it difficult to-to get back. He writes very slowly-carefully, I mean-sometimes only a paragraph a day, so you see it is —

'Mrs Weekley, Grant said, bluntly, 'please give that card to your husband and say that I must see him, whatever he happens to be doing.

She stood with the card in her fingers, not even glancing at it, her mind obviously busy with the search for some excuse that would convince him. And he was all of a sudden aware that she was afraid to take that card to her husband. Afraid to interrupt him.

To help her, he said that surely there would be no interruption where the children had been making so much noise. Her husband could hardly be concentrating very hard.

'Oh, he doesn't work here, she said. 'In the house, I mean. He has a little house of his own at the end of the garden.

Grant took back the card she was holding, and said grimly: 'Will you show me the way, Mrs Weekley?

Dumbly she led him through a dark kitchen where a toddler sat splay-legged on the floor enjoying his tears, and an infant in a perambulator sobbed in elemental fury. Beyond, in the bright sunshine of the garden, a boy of three or so was throwing stones from the pebble path against the wooden door of an outhouse, an unproductive occupation which nevertheless made a satisfying noise.

'Stop that, Freddy, she said automatically, and Freddy as automatically went on throwing the stones against the door.

The back garden was a long thin strip of ground that ran along the side of the back lane, and at the very end of it, a long way from the house, was a wooden shed. Mrs Weekley pointed it out and said:

'Perhaps you would just go and introduce yourself, would you? The children will be coming in from school for their midday meal and it isn't ready.

'Children? Grant said.

'Yes, the three eldest. So if you don't mind.

'No, of course I don't mind, Grant said. Indeed, few things would please him like interrupting the great Silas Weekley this morning, but he refrained from saying so to Silas Weekley's wife.

He knocked twice on the door of the wooden hut-a very trim wooden hut-without getting an answer, and so opened the door.

Silas Weekley swung round from the table at which he was writing and said: 'How dare you walk into my — and then stopped as he saw Grant. He had quite obviously expected the intruder to be his wife.

'Who are you? he said rudely. 'If you are a journalist you will find that rudeness doesn't pay. This is private ground and you are trespassing.

'I am Detective-Inspector Grant from Scotland Yard, Grant said and watched the news sink home.

After a moment or two Silas got his lower jaw under control again and said: 'And what do you want, may I ask? It was an attempt at truculence and it was not convincing.

Grant said his regulation piece about investigating the disappearance of Leslie Searle and accounting for the movements of all those who knew Searle, and noted with the unoccupied half of his mind that the ink on the script that Weekley was working on was not only dry but dark. It was yesterday's ink. Weekley had done not a line this morning although it was now past noon.

At the mention of Searle Weekley began a diatribe against moneyed dilettantes which-in view of Weekley's income and the sum total of his morning's work-Grant thought inappropriate. He cut him short and asked what he had been doing on Wednesday night.

'And if I do not choose to tell you?

'I record your refusal and go away.

Weekley did not like the sound of this, so he muttered something about being badgered by the police.

'All that I am doing, Grant pointed out, 'is asking for your co-operation as a citizen. As I have pointed out, it is within your right to refuse co-operation.

Silas said sulkily that he had been writing on Wednesday night from supper-time onwards.

'Any witnesses to that? Grant asked, wasting no frills on Silas.

'My wife, of course.

'She was here with you?

'No, of course not. She was in the house.

'And you were here alone?

'I was.

'Thank you and good-morning, Grant said walking out of the hut and shutting the door crisply behind him.

The morning smelt very fresh and sweet. The sour smell of vomited milk and rough-dried dish-cloths that had hung about the house was nothing to the smell of soured humanity that filled the place where Silas Weekley worked. As he walked back to the house he remembered that it was from this joyless and distorted mind that the current English 'masterpieces' came. The thought did nothing to reassure him. He avoided the joyless house, where the agitated clattering of pans (an appropriate orchestration, he couldn't help thinking) conveyed the preoccupation of its mistress, and walked round the side of it to the front gate, accompanied by Freddy.

'Hullo, Freddy, he said, sorry for the bored brat.

'Hullo, Freddy said without enthusiasm.

'Isn't there a more exciting game than flinging stones at a door?

'No, said Freddy.

'Couldn't you find one if you looked about you?

'No, said Freddy, with cold finality.

Grant stood for a moment contemplating him.

'There will never be any doubt about your paternity, Frederick, he said, and walked away up the lane to the spot where he had left his car.

It was down this lane that Leslie Searle had walked on Wednesday night, calling farewells to the group in the village street. He had walked past the Weekley cottage to where a stile led into the first of the fields that lay between the village and the river bend.

At least that is what one took for granted that he did.

He could have walked along the back lane and come to the village street again. But there would have been little point, surely, in that. He was never seen again in the village. He had walked into the darkness of the lane and disappeared.

A little crazy, Tullis had said of Silas Weekley. But Silas Weekley didn't strike Grant as being crazy. A sadist, perhaps. A megalomaniac almost certainly. A man sick of a twisted vanity. But actually crazy no.

Or would an alienist think differently?

One of the most famous alienists in the country had once said to him that to write a book was to give oneself away. (Someone else had said the same thing more wittily and more succinctly, but he could not think at the moment who it was.) There was unconscious betrayal in every line, said the alienist. What, wondered Grant, would the alienist's verdict be after reading one of Silas Weekley's malignant effusions? That it was the outpouring of a petty mind, a mere fermentation of vanity? Or that it was a confession of madness?

He thought for a moment of going back to the Swan and ringing up Wickham police station from there, but the Swan would be busy just now and the telephone a far from confidential affair. He decided to go back to Wickham and have lunch there, so that he could see Inspector Rodgers at his leisure and pick up any messages that might be waiting for him from Headquarters.

In Wickham he found the higher orders at the police station preparing to retire into the peace of the weekend, and the lower ranks preparing for the weekly liveliness of Saturday night. Rodgers had little to say-he was never a talkative man-and nothing to report. The disappearance of Searle was the talk of Wickham, he said, now that the morning papers had made it general news; but no one had come in to suggest that they had seen him.