4.50 from Paddington. Агата Кристи

built this awful house instead.’

      He added: ‘A lot of grandfather’s collection is in the barn. Things he had sent home from abroad when he was a young man. Most of them are pretty awful, too. The Long Barn is used sometimes for whist drives and things like that. Women’s Institute stuff. And Conservative Sales of Work. Come and see it.’

      Lucy accompanied them willingly.

      There was a big nail-studded oak door to the barn.

      Alexander raised his hand and detached a key on a nail just under some ivy to the right hand of the top of the door. He turned it in the lock, pushed the door open and they went in.

      At a first glance Lucy felt that she was in a singularly bad museum. The heads of two Roman emperors in marble glared at her out of bulging eyeballs, there was a huge sarcophagus of a decadent Greco-Roman period, a simpering Venus stood on a pedestal clutching her falling draperies. Besides these works of art, there were a couple of trestle tables, some stacked-up chairs, and sundry oddments such as a rusted hand mower, two buckets, a couple of moth-eaten car seats, and a green painted iron garden seat that had lost a leg.

      ‘I think I saw the paint over here,’ said Alexander vaguely. He went to a corner and pulled aside a tattered curtain that shut it off.

      They found a couple of paint pots and brushes, the latter dry and stiff.

      ‘You really need some turps,’ said Lucy.

      They could not, however, find any turpentine. The boys suggested bicycling off to get some, and Lucy urged them to do so. Painting the clock golf numbers would keep them amused for some time, she thought.

      The boys went off, leaving her in the barn.

      ‘This really could do with a clear up,’ she had murmured.

      ‘I shouldn’t bother,’ Alexander advised her. ‘It gets cleaned up if it’s going to be used for anything, but it’s practically never used this time of year.’