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will.
    As soon as I saw her examine the street numbers and wait to cross the road, I hopped fast down the stairs with the aid of the banisters and was inside my front door before she rang. She was in
her late thirties, taller than I had thought and authoritative. She struck me as a woman of experience with whom it might be possible to talk frankly without bringing police—or
Dobermans—too crudely into the picture.
    I supplied her with sherry and cigarettes—she puffed continuously and aggressively—and admired the dog. She said that she bred them. I then expressed my admiration of Dr Dunton,
though by now I was sure that she had only used his name as a passport. Her response was curt, so I left a pause for her to open up.
    ‘A Mr Fosworthy,’ she said, ‘has been making himself a nuisance to my ward.’
    So that was it. The wardship was rather out of my depth. I could, however, understand it when I remembered the devastating effect which Cynthia Carlis had on some of my sex. It was more than
likely that in early youth one or two of her contemporaries had been far too brutal. And then there were the rest of us who stared at her with an almost insulting absence of desire. She must have
found men cruel and unaccountable. Even more convincing than anything else was the fact that Fosworthy, being Fosworthy, would of course have set his guileless heart on a girl who was
unattainable.
    He had had, from his point of view, a damnable stroke of bad luck, caught out by his innocence not by any carelessness. His Undine ought to have foreseen that Miss Filk was likely to become
suspicious about her mysterious absences. Perhaps she did foresee it, didn’t care, even welcomed it. After all, she could not know that the looking round corners was deadly serious.
    And so Miss Filk, after jealously trailing Undine to Bristol station and skulking behind a barrow load of fish boxes or racing pigeons or whatever was handy, had been doubly shocked to find that
her secret rival was a man and that the man was the missing Fosworthy. I take it that her first action was to warn Aviston-Tresco or some other associate that she had sighted him on the London
train, and that later in the day she had such a flaming row with her ‘ward’ that the girl walked out on her.
    Even so Fosworthy’s trail could never have been recovered if they had not been so obsessed by his connection with me. The gaps were now easy to fill in. Somebody had obtained my address,
cautiously watched my flat and spotted Fosworthy’s first visit. That gave time for Aviston-Tresco to arrange the front seat of his van and to organise whatever simple trick would be enough to
fool Fosworthy. It was a hundred to one that after his second visit to me he had again been put out of circulation.
    ‘Miss Filk, I’m not going to pretend to you,’ I said. ‘I am sure you are well aware of the circumstances in which I met Mr Fosworthy.’
    ‘He is quite mad, you know.’
    ‘He is certainly eccentric when he talks about your ward. Otherwise I find him reliable for so quixotic a person.’
    ‘You believe what he has told you?’
    ‘He hasn’t told me anything except that he suddenly found his feeling for Miss Carlis getting in the way of some personal creed of his.’
    It was only then that I noticed an unsteady brilliance in her eyes. I warned myself that I had better be careful. Whether she had come to negotiate or not, she was in a savage temper and more
likely to blow up than to listen.
    ‘Then why have you financed him?’
    ‘I have not exactly financed him. I lent him money because he was obviously in trouble and I couldn’t help liking him. I am very sorry that he can’t keep away from your ward,
but it was not my primary intention to make things easier for him.’
    ‘I am quite sure it was not.’
    She said this slowly and contemptuously, and I thought it was time to give her something which could be passed back.
    ‘I’m a working mining engineer, Miss