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clearly in focus from the start? When a man bolts from his job it is probably because he is fed up with it. And the natural thing to do, when one is fed up with one’s job, is to turn to one’s hobbies. Dry-fly fishing had been Marchbanks’ hobby. What about Howard Juniper’s? Drop for the moment – Appleby said to himself – all the more sinister pictures this business has conjured up. See if you can get anywhere with the simple notion of a chap bolting to have a go at something he is known to like.
    He reached for one among the several neat files that the Juniper affair was bringing to his desk every day. It was the one that began with Howard Juniper’s entry in Who’s Who and went on to as complete a biographical outline as could be built up. When he reread it carefully he pressed a bell on his desk.
    ‘You see that ?’ he said to the secretary who answered it – and pointed to a place on the page. ‘What do you think of the possibility of our missing friend’s having gone harking back to something of the sort?’
    ‘Not much,’ the secretary said promptly.
    ‘Nor I. Would you say it would be a good time of year for it?’
    ‘Nice weather, and all that, sir. But I really haven’t a clue. Get an expert view, of course, in ten minutes.’
    Appleby nodded. ‘Go ahead. It’s another of those tiresome stones.’
    ‘Not to be left unturned, sir? Quite so.’ The secretary, who was young and alert, nodded cheerfully.
    ‘And find out about the most likely place where this sort of interest’ – Appleby tapped his file again – ‘may be – um – prosecuted.’
    ‘Certainly, sir. Anything else?’
    ‘Yes, Charles. Just see if you can get me Judith on the telephone.’
    Two minutes later the instrument purred on the desk. ‘Lady Appleby on the line, sir,’ a voice said.
    ‘Judith – is that you?’
    ‘Of course it’s me. Aren’t you coming home to lunch?’
    ‘No, I’m not. And I want you to make yours a sandwich in the car. Do you think that you could – entirely unobtrusively – do a job that normally requires quite a large squad of police?’
    ‘I imagine so.’ Judith Appleby sounded entirely unsurprised. ‘But just what’s the idea? A tardy thought at Scotland Yard about saving the taxpayer’s money?’
    Appleby laughed. ‘There’s that aspect to it, no doubt. But it’s not precisely what’s in my mind. Listen.’
    ‘Go ahead,’ Judith said.

 
     
3
    Judith Appleby, as it happened, had heard of Splaine Croft. Two of her friends had sent sons there, and had reported with satisfaction that it seemed a fairly civilized sort of place. It was funny how, as civilization seeped away, the idea of civilization became all the go. She rather distrusted it. People now said ‘a civilized chap’ where she herself would have been prompted to say ‘rather a smooth type’. Certainly to go looking for civilized boarding-schools for one’s young was dangerous, even if laudable. If what you insisted on were the old-fashioned desiderata: gravel soil, southern exposure, all-Oxford staff, toughening them up, licking them into shape, rubbing off the awkward corners – if you were after these and similar prescriptive futilities and iniquities, you were at least pretty sure of getting what you looked for; and, if you were eccentric enough to want something else, you kept the kids at home. But if you went round looking for civilization, you were only too likely to get heaven knew what…
    Still, reasonable friends had praised Splaine Croft. Judith therefore drove up to it in a mood of only modified prejudice. She was acquiescing in more or less orthodox education for her own young; and it couldn’t be said that they showed any marked ill-effects so far. But having herself been brought up at home, in a large house full of assorted relations who were mostly mad, and having found this interesting and entirely satisfactory, she was always ready to take a poor view of what she called