I looked up into eyes the color of lapis lazuli.“My dear Professor Tamar,” said Leonidas Demetriou, “I do hope you haven’t hurt yourself.”
“I feel,” I said, “no pain.” I feared this might signify that my injuries were unusually grave; but I accepted the boy’s assistance in rising from the undignified position in which I found myself. “Would you,” I continued, “be kind enough to tell me what has happened? Was I struck by the cricket ball?”
“Oh no,” said Leonidas, with his slightly malicious Byzantine smile. “Oh no, Professor Tamar, the ball was going far too high to have hit you. It went through the window of the cafe over there. The man who owns the cafe was rather put out about it — my parents are busy saying soothing things to him. But the lunatic fielding at mid-on thought it might be a catch — idiotic of him really, it was six all the way. He was running so hard to get to it, and not looking where he was going, that he went straight into your table and knocked your canopy down on top of you. And he’s quite a big chap, I’m afraid. I’m really extremely sorry.”
I considered his explanation and found it consistent with the evidence.
“Well,” I said, “I am glad at any rate that the Writers have been victorious. You are not, as it happens, my only acquaintance in the side. Sebastian Verity—”
“Oh yes, of course, Sebastian is a colleague of yours, isn’t he? And Selena — Miss Jardine — who is also a friend of yours, is here with him. Have you seen them yet? Do they know you’re here?”
“No,” I said. “My coming to Corfu was a matter of impulse and will be a surprise to them.” I looked towards the place where Selena and Sebastian had been sitting; but they were no longer there, nor could I see them elsewhere in the Liston. Indeed, although it could hardly have been for more than a minute or two that I had lain dazed and helpless under the wreckage of the canopy, the whole Demetriou family, with the exception of Leonidas himself, had somehow managed in that time to disappear from view. “I was meaning,” I went on, “to have a word with them when the match was over, but I seem to have lost sight of them. Do you know where they might have gone?”
“They’ve gone up to the Citadel,” said Leonidas. “My father said it was unthinkable for them to leave Corfu without seeing the view from the eastern summit, so they had to promise to go straight up there as soon as the match was finished. Do you want to follow them, or would you rather wait to see them when they come down again?”
My uneasiness returned. I did not imagine, certainly, that the Citadel would be deserted: on a fine evening in the height of summer, it would be surprising if my friends ever found themselves out of sight and earshot of at least half a dozen fellow tourists engaged on a similar exploration. Thinking, however, of its precipitous battlements; of the massive blocks of stonework poised above its narrow pathways; and of the inscriptions which one finds there commemorative of destruction and violent death — thinking of these things, and the apprehensions which had brought me to Corfu—
“I think I should prefer,” I said, “to follow them up to the Citadel.”
The boy appeared to assume that he should come with me. Reflecting that it was some time since I had last visited the Citadel and that unguided I might not strike on the most direct route to the eastern summit, I was not displeased to have his company. We set forth together across the Esplanade.
A narrow, steep-sided channel, deep enough for small sailing-boats to bob about in it, divides the town of Corfu from the projection of rock which by some irony of Nature makes the gentlest of islands one of the most powerful naval strongholds in the Mediterranean, impregnable save by guile for almost a millennium. The Citadel, I remembered, had not always been completely encircled by sea; but in the sixteenth century, perceiving the slender connecting isthmus as a weak point in the defenses, the Venetians had slit it as neatly and efficiently as if it had been the throat of some inconvenient diplomat.
“It occurs to me,” I said, when we had crossed the bridge over the channel and were approaching the great gateway, “that you were not surprised to find me beside the Esplanade.”
“My brother and sister told me you were here. They didn’t remember who you were, of course, but I recognized the description. What have you been saying to them, Professor Tamar? They’re off buying crucifixes at this very moment in case they meet you again.”
“That,” I said, “is most gratifying. But I fear that you, my dear boy, are less easily impressed.”
“I don’t think,” he said, with the same malicious and satirical smile, “that I believe in necromancy. But you do find things out, don’t you? Things that one wouldn’t expect.”
“It is by way,” I said, not ungratified, “of being my profession. The Scholar is dedicated to the pursuit of Truth, most of all when she is hidden and elusive.”
“Isn’t the pursuit sometimes fruitless?”
“Where nothing at all is known, even Scholarship is helpless; but even a small amount of information, perhaps of little apparent relevance, will enable the Scholar to detect the minute inconsistencies which betray the boundary between truth and falsehood. It is logically impossible, you see, for a lie to be perfectly consistent with truth: in order to tell an undetectable lie, it would be necessary to invent an alternative universe.”
Having passed through the barbican, the visitor appears to be presented with a choice of three routes by which to explore the Citadel. The choice, however, is to some extent illusory. The broad, even-surfaced roadway to the right is no more than a digression, affording a closer look at the Doric facade of St. George’s Church before winding back though the pine trees to rejoin the central pathway on its ascent to the plateau known nowadays as the Square of Heroes. Turning to the left, the visitor may follow the outer line of battlements along the base of the western summit and round the eastern, but is eventually obliged, if wishing to explore further, to undertake the climb up to the plateau. From there, there is only one way up to the eastern summit. The western, having been appropriated to the purposes of local government or television or something of that sort, is not open to the public.
Despite its less inviting gradient, we took the route which leads most directly to the plateau, a marble-flagged roadway wide enough even to allow the passage of a small motor vehicle. I rather hoped, since I could not suppose that Selena and Sebastian were more than a few minutes ahead of us, that with haste we might overtake them by the time they reached the plateau.
“I should not have thought,” said Leonidas, as we continued on our upward path, “that the activities of my brother and sister were a very likely subject of scholarly investigation — how did you come to know about them?”
“For various reasons,” I said, “I have felt for some time a certain curiosity about the affairs of your family.”
“I thought perhaps you had. It did occur to me, after you came to Godmansworth, that you had shown a more flattering interest in my conversation than it quite deserved.”
“My dear boy,” I said, “you are too modest.”
“Thank you, Professor Tamar — people don’t often say so.”
The Square of Heroes is dominated by the barracks which the British built there in the nineteenth century — an unprepossessing building and now derelict. From the open space in front of it there is admittedly a very fine view across to the island of Vido; and part of the area has been at some time laid out as a formal garden, shaded by trelliswork, with an ornamental pond and two circular stone dance-floors: I could imagine it having once been a charming setting for women in evening dress and officers in brightly colored uniforms to drink champagne and eat water-ices; but there seemed to me now to be something melancholy about the place. Selena and Sebastian were nowhere to be seen.
“They must already be at the top,” said Leonidas. “Never mind, Professor Tamar, it isn’t far.”
I resigned myself to climbing the haphazard and irregular steps, providing an often treacherous foothold, which rise in a steep diagonal from the northeastern comer of the Square: the evening was still too warm for such an exertion to be pleasurably undertaken. Moreover, it seemed when accomplished to have been undertaken in vain: arriving at the entrance to the stairway which leads upwards through solid rock to the top of the eastern summit, we were confronted with a notice announcing in Greek and English that excavations were in progress and entrance was forbidden.
“Oh,” said Leonidas, “don’t worry about that. Millie was saying at tea-time that some idiot had put a ‘No Entry’ notice up here, but it’s a mistake or a joke or something. All the excavations are down by the main gateway.”
He stooped to go through the low doorway and I followed him with misgiving. The first few steps of the stairway were lit, though dimly so, by the fight from the doorway; after that there was total darkness. Proceeding cautiously up the worn and uneven stairs, I drew some comfort from the prospect of a reunion with friends. Sebastian, I supposed, would be taking the opportunity to explain to Selena that the Citadel had been the scene of events which changed the history of the world — it may fairly be claimed that if the Turkish siege of 1537 had been successful, Western Europe would have become part of the Ottoman Empire. I hoped he would remember that it was the western summit, not the eastern, which was so heroically and momentously defended — the Venetians had grudged the expense of fortifying the latter.
We emerged at last into daylight to stand on the crest of the eastern summit. The fortifications which Venice was at last persuaded to build there have crumbled again into ruin, and broom and wild sage grow rife among the stones; but the view of the island northwards and southwards and across the sea to the jagged mountains of Epirus remains commanding and majestic. It had deservedly been recommended by Constantine to the admiration of Selena and Sebastian — who were, however, notable by their absence.
“I know,” said Leonidas. “They must be down in the catacomb. I’ll go and find them and tell them you’re here.”
Paying no heed to my suggestion that we might simply call out and see if they answered, he scrambled with great agility down an opening very similar to the one from which we had just emerged, but enclosing a staircase in an even more alarming state of dilapidation. It led, I recalled, to a tunnel-shaped chamber, hollowed out of the rock, and having no other means of entry or exit. Two embrasures — one at the eastern end, beside the staircase, the other at the center of the south-facing wall, each high enough and deep enough for a tall man to stand or lie full-length without discomfort there — opened on to an almost sheer cliff-face and looked down to the rocks some hundreds of feet below. The boy was quite wrong, of course, in referring to it as a catacomb; but the thought crossed my mind that it must be curiously similar in size and shape to the sacrificial chamber in the Temple of the Dead, where Sebastian had stumbled and grazed his wrist. I called out to inquire of Leonidas whether Sebastian and Selena were indeed there.
“No.” His voice was blurred by its own echo. “No, they’re not here — I can’t think where they are. But I’ve found something rather extraordinary — do come down and see, Professor Tamar.”
Looking at the dilapidated staircase, I asked if he could not come above ground again, bringing with him whatever it was he thought might engage my interest.
“No, Professor Tamar, I can’t do that — it’s sort of attached. It isn’t really difficult to get down here, you know — if you sit on the edge, you have your feet on quite a solid bit of the stairway, and after that it’s all right.”
There are few hardships, as I have written elsewhere, which the Scholar is unwilling to endure in pursuit of knowledge. Following his advice, I managed to lower myself without misadventure into the underground chamber; but wondered, as I tried to accustom my eyes to the gloom, whether the ascent would be equally straightforward. The boy stood in the dark angle between the wall and the staircase with something in his hand which seemed to glitter in the remnants of light penetrating the embrasures: I drew closer, intending to study it.
“I’m really very sorry about this, Professor Tamar,” said Leonidas, holding me by the shoulder and the knife against my throat.
By declining the duties of examiner I had hoped to avoid this sort of treatment on the part of the young. I now saw that I had, on the contrary, deprived myself of the specialized experience required to deal with such contingencies. I also saw how much better it would have been to allow Timothy to come to Corfu in my stead.
“My dear boy,” I said, “you are making a grave mistake.”
“No,” said Leonidas, “no, Professor Tamar, I don’t think so. I understand now what you meant when you said you didn’t believe that Deirdre had killed herself. I was never quite sure that you meant you thought she had died by accident — and now I know you didn’t.” The blade of the knife seemed to draw even closer to my throat.
There appeared to be some misunderstanding. I had long discarded the notion of Leonidas having any responsibility for his cousin’s death; and if the view I now held were well-founded, nothing could be more absurd than any attempt on his part to protect the person culpable. The prospect, however, of having one’s throat cut has a remarkably stimulating effect on the mental processes: after only an instant or two of bewilderment, there came to me some notion of what was troubling him. He had thought again about the events of Boat Race Day; and he knew there had not been time for Dolly to have left the roof before Deirdre fell or was thrown from it.
“My dear boy,” I said again, striving with some difficulty to maintain that evenness of tone which is desirable when dissuading the young from behavior they may afterwards regret, “my dear boy, you don’t imagine that I believe your mother had any hand in Deirdre’s death?”
He seemed to relax a little, and the knife blade receded by about a millimeter; but then he grew tense again, as if fearing that I spoke from expedience rather than from conviction.
“If she was there when Tancred did it and didn’t say anything, she’d be an accessory, wouldn’t she?”
It was in the abstract sense a not unattractive theory, which under happier conditions I would have commended for its ingenuity. I had no doubt that the solicitor had formed for Dolly a passionate attachment of the kind which she was accustomed to inspire, and to encourage, perhaps, to an extent which might be misunderstood by both admirer and husband. If Deirdre had become aware of it — and to do so would have been not uncharacteristic of her; if she had seen an opportunity for profit or malevolence — and again, it would have been not uncharacteristic; if all three of them had been gathered together on the roof of Rupert’s flat… psychologically, however, it was inconceivable; besides—
“It is,” I said, “an ingenious suggestion. But it won’t do. It does not explain, you see, the most curious aspect of the whole episode. It does not explain how it happened that Deirdre fell to her death while your brother Lucian was still attentively watching the race from the balcony — and your brother did not see her fall.”
From above came the sound of voices: I was able to identify them, with some relief, as those of Selena and Sebastian.
“Professor Tamar,” said Leonidas very quickly, still holding me pinned at knife-point in the dark corner between the wall and the staircase, “you wouldn’t be so foolish, I hope, as to call out.” His lapis lazuli eyes shone like a cat’s in the darkness. I believed, however, that he would not wish to cut my throat without knowing my explanation for the curious circumstance to which I had just referred.
Then there was another voice, seeming to come from much closer at hand: a voice of great beauty and resonance, which I had never heard before but had no doubt was that of Constantine Demetriou. He spoke as if ill or injured, in halting and disjointed phrases which I could not think to be characteristic of him; though in his actual tone I could detect no note of alarm or anxiety.
“Is that you?… Sebastian?… I’m down here… Can you help me?… Sebastian… I’m down here.”
I tried in vain to imagine where he could be. His voice had seemed to come from within the underground chamber of which I supposed Leonidas and myself to be the only occupants. Although the further end of the room was in shadow, the darkness was not so impenetrable as to have concealed his presence; besides, it did not seem to me that his voice came from that direction. I could only suppose that he had descended the staircase unheard by Leonidas and myself, had stumbled perhaps on the last step, and was now lying hidden from our view by the projection of the supporting wall.
“Sebastian… I’m down here… Can you help?” The same disjointed phrases in the same even and unagitated tone.
“Constantine? Is that you? Don’t worry, I’ll be down in a few seconds.” I could hear Sebastian’s voice sufficiently clearly to know that he had already begun the descent. There followed a slithering of stones, the sound of a fall and of the mild imprecations to be expected from a young man of gentle and poetic disposition who has missed his footing and been thrown headlong on to a hard, uneven surface.
I must have made some involuntary movement as if to go to the assistance of my unfortunate young colleague: a slight increase in the pressure of the boy’s hand on my shoulder and the pricking of the knife point against my skin suggested that this would be imprudent.
“Sebastian, what’s happened? Are you all right?” Selena’s voice also was now clearly audible.
“More or less — I’ve tripped over some kind of netting and I can’t get free. And I can’t see Constantine — Constantine, are you there?”
He was answered by silence. My perplexity deepened, since he was now in the only part of the chamber which was hidden from my own view.
Not doubting that Selena would accomplish the descent with her customary elegant agility, I was astonished, a few seconds later, to hear further sounds of stumbling and a cry of vexation which suggested that she also had fallen.
I became conscious that one of the meager sources of light had been partially obscured. A tall, dark figure, holding what seemed to be a spear, stood in the embrasure nearer to the stairway: not Constantine: Camilla.
“Amazing how easy it is to trip on those stairs, isn’t it?” said Camilla. “Specially if someone’s chucked a bit of old fishing-net over the bottom step. Don’t try to move, by the way — Sebastian’s tummy’s just nicely in line with the point of this fishing-spear, and it’s sharp enough to go straight through.”
“Camilla,” said Sebastian, “what on earth do you think you’re doing? And where’s Constantine? We heard him calling out from here less than a minute ago.”
“Oh,” said the girl, “you don’t need to worry about Constantine. That was just a sort of selection of the great man’s conversation put together on my dinky little tape-recorder. I didn’t think you’d come down here if it was me you heard calling, so I spent a day last week getting it ready. Quite clever, don’t you think?”
“Most ingenious,” said Selena. “You have evidently been to some trouble to arrange this little gathering. And to some risk, if you got up there from the pathway. It’s quite a precipitous climb, and a long way down to the rocks.”
“Oh,” said Camilla, as if deprecating any praise for her athletic accomplishments, “that wasn’t difficult. I left a rope hanging down there earlier this afternoon, the same time I fixed up the ‘No Entry’ sign to make sure we weren’t disturbed. So when I was certain you were on your way up here, I just came round the other side and shinned up it.”
“Did you,” asked Sebastian, “have any particular purpose in making these arrangements?”
“So that I could kill you, of course,” said Camilla.
The boy and I remained equally motionless: I had hardly noticed, so entirely was my attention held by Camilla, the moment when he ceased to hold the knife to my throat; but when he drew breath as if to speak, I had put my hand to his mouth. My friend Sebastian, a glimmering patch of white in the shadows at the foot of the staircase, lay helpless at the mercy of Camilla’s spear; and I did not doubt, as Leonidas may have done, that she was wholly in earnest. I thought that it would require no little circumspection to ensure that any of us left the chamber alive.
“Are you sure,” asked Selena at last, in a pleasantly conversational tone, “that that is a very good idea? The consequences, if you happened to be found out, would be rather disagreeable; and it is not immediately clear what advantage you hope to obtain.”
“You must be joking,” said the other girl. “You don’t think I’m going to spend the rest of my days letting you two blackmail me, do you? I suppose you thought you’d have a meal-ticket for life, once my great-grandmother died and I came into the money. Well, you’ve picked the wrong woman for that game — I know what to do about blackmailers.”
“What on earth makes you think—?” Some warning movement by Selena, I supposed, discouraged Sebastian from completing the question.
“Oh, don’t start trying to pretend you weren’t going to blackmail me, I know what you were up to. It makes it absolutely justifiable to get rid of you in any way I can — every one agrees that blackmail’s worse than murder. And no one’s going to find out about it. You’re going to have a nasty accident due to fooling about too close to the edge of that opening.” She pointed towards the embrasure facing southwards.
“Rather like Deirdre,” said Selena, sounding interested. “You don’t feel that people may begin to make unpleasant remarks about the inflationary effect of your presence on the fatal accident figures?”
“Why should they? When Deirdre fell off the roof of Daddy’s flat I was down in the drawing-room, with half a dozen witnesses to prove it.”
“Ah yes, so you were,” said Selena thoughtfully. “How did you manage it? It sounds rather clever.”
“Yes, it was rather, though I says it as shouldn’t. Specially as I didn’t have time to plan anything properly — I didn’t know I was going to kill her, you see, I’m not even sure I really meant to. Afterwards, of course, I saw it was the only thing I could have done. She’d been all excited and pleased with herself all through lunch, but I didn’t know why. And then afterwards, when we were alone on the roof, she told me she’d found out — well, the same thing as you two, of course. She was gloating and crowing over me fit to burst, you’d have thought she wanted to get herself murdered. Anyway, I got so riled I just went for her, and before I knew what had happened there she was with her neck broken, silly little beast. So I had to think pretty quickly what to do about it. The first thing I thought of was chucking her straight over on to the pavement, but then I thought it might mean some embarrassing questions. So I pitched her over the side on to the bedroom balcony — it sticks out a bit further than the roof — and went downstairs to watch the Boat Race on television. When it got to the exciting bit and everyone was concentrating on it, I muttered something about going to the loo, and went and tipped her over on to the pavement — from the end of the balcony, of course, so it would look as if she’d fallen from the front of the building. It didn’t take a minute, I don’t think anyone even noticed I was gone. Not bad for the spur of the moment, don’t you think?”
“Extremely quick-witted,” said Selena. “But how did you persuade Dolly to say that Deirdre was still on the roof when she went up there again?”
“Oh, Dolly didn’t go back on to the roof. She was having a touching farewell scene in the study with old Tanks — she’d let him squire her about for a few weeks before Costas came over to London and he’d fallen for her in a big way. The twins were covering for her, the way they always do. So when Dolly came back into the drawing-room, she pretended she’d come down from the roof — and of course she thought Deirdre was still up there.”
“From your point of view,” said Selena, “a rather fortunate combination of circumstances.”
“Yes, it was rather, because it meant no one twigged that I was the last person who’d been alone with Deirdre. Mind you, it’s a good thing I wasn’t counting on it — Costas got the idea it was his fault Dolly hadn’t been on the roof at the right time to stop Deirdre falling off it, and she got in a tizzwozz and started thinking she ought to set his mind at rest by saying where she really was. But I managed to persuade her he’d be happier feeling bad about Deirdre than knowing about the little fling with Tancred.”
Looking at the boy Leonidas, I noted that his expression was one of relief. His satisfaction in being assured of his mother’s innocence was no doubt very commendable; I hoped it would not render him for too long impervious to the danger of our present position.
“The sailing accident,” said Selena, “was also most ingenious. You arranged a suitable compass deviation, I suppose, with the assistance of a transistor radio or some other magnetic object, and left Leonidas obediently steering straight for the rocks of Parga. So when you went overboard, you knew just where you were and what point to swim for. You were wearing a wetsuit, I expect, under the famous black pajamas, and I suppose you had a face mask and flippers and so forth — it would have been too dark for Leonidas to see what you were wearing. You’d have had to dispose of them, of course, before you went ashore — that must have been rather nerve-racking. How disappointing, after so much risk and effort, to find that your cousins had all survived.”
“I had the rottenest luck,” said Camilla. “It was a super plan, and the conditions were simply perfect. That’s the important thing — seeing one’s opportunities and making the most of them. Well, that’s what I did, and if it hadn’t been for those damned fishermen it would have worked perfectly.”
“Still, as you say, it was an excellent plan — with the particular merit that whatever happened no suspicion could possibly attach to yourself. That’s why I’m surprised at your putting yourself in this awkward position so far as Sebastian and I are concerned.”
“I wouldn’t say I was the one who’s in an awkward position,” said Camilla.
“Oh, don’t you think so?” Selena seemed to find this a novel and interesting point of view. “I thought the idea was that we would appear to have fallen by accident. That means, surely, that you have to persuade us to go close enough to the edge to be pushed over; and your only means of persuasion is that fishing-spear.”
“I think,” said Camilla, “it’ll be quite an efficient form of persuasion.”
“Do you think so? But if we’re supposed to have died by accident, you see, it really won’t do for us to be found with spear-wounds: all sorts of questions would be asked, and you can’t risk that, can you? That’s what I mean by your being in an awkward position: you can’t expect to achieve much by threatening us with a weapon which we both know you can’t afford to use.”
“Don’t kid yourselves,” said Camilla. “I’ll use it if I have to.”
“I find it hard to believe,” said Selena, with a smoothness which she generally reserved for the Court of Appeal, “that you would do anything so… unintelligent. Do you really prefer the prospect of twenty years in a Greek prison to paying Sebastian and myself a modest retainer in exchange for our continued discretion?”
“Ah,” said the other girl triumphantly, “you admit you were going to blackmail me.”
“In the circumstances, it would clearly be useless to deny it. But what makes you think it would be so very unpleasant? You don’t imagine, surely, that we would make demands which would reduce you to unaccountable penury or raise ourselves to unaccountable affluence? Anything on that scale would lead inevitably to our exposure, and we don’t share this taste of yours for spending long periods in prison. We would content ourselves, in our own interest, with a very trifling proportion of your total income, such as you would happily expend on services of far less value. Moreover, since you are the only potential purchaser of our discretion, we would naturally have your welfare very much at heart: our own safety and prosperity would depend on yours, and we could be expected, in our own interests, to use for your advantage whatever talents and influence either of us may possess.” A wistful note came into her voice. “It’s still very difficult, you know, for a woman to achieve recognition at the Bar, whatever her abilities. It makes all the difference if one has someone whose help and support can be absolutely relied on — not simply for the sake of friendship, which may be capricious and half-hearted, but because there is a genuine identity of interest.”
“My God,” said Camilla, “you make it sound as if you’d be doing me a favor.” She stood gazing at Selena with fascinated amazement; and the spearpoint wavered forgetfully from its menacing direction.
There was perhaps no need for haste. I have known Selena, when negotiating a compromise of Chancery litigation, to divert the attention of far abler lawyers than Camilla with arguments no less specious for considerably longer than five seconds. It took no more than that, however, for Sebastian to rise from the darkness and leap for the embrasure.
The struggle might have been brief if both participants had been of equally murderous intention, each content to send the other on the swift and deadly journey from the edge of the embrasure to the jagged rocks below. It could not be expected, however, that Sebastian would so easily set aside the constraints of temperament, education and principle: he fought only for possession of the spear, and any advantage he may have had in strength was cancelled out by his care for the safety of his antagonist. She drew him, as they struggled in the confined space of the narrow aperture, ever closer to the edge; and it seemed to me that none of us who watched had any power to prevent her.
But the boy Leonidas stepped out of the shadows and called to her by name. When she saw him she released her grip on the spear; without resisting further, she allowed Sebastian to take it from her and step back to the safety of the chamber. If she had chosen to follow him, I scarcely know what we would have done: it would have been a hard thing, when it came to it, to consign so splendid a creature to long years of dark imprisonment.
She chose instead to retreat as she had come — by the rope hanging down the precipitous rockface: she was still confident, it seemed, that her athletic skills would assure her a safe descent; but on this occasion they failed her.