Alleyn said carefully that so far no hard and fast conclusion could be drawn and that he hoped they would all welcome the opportunity of proving that they were away from the theatre during the crucial period, which was between eleven o’clock, when Peregrine and Emily left the theatre, and about five past twelve, when Hawkins came running down the stage-door alleyway and told them of his discovery.
“So far,” Alleyn said, “we’ve only got as far as learning that when Miss Bracey left the theatre the rest of you were still inside it.”
“Not I,” Jeremy said. “I’ve told you, I think, that I was at home.”
“So you have,” Alleyn agreed. “It would help if you could substantiate the statement. Did anyone ring you up, for instance?”
“If they did, I don’t remember.”
“I see,” said Alleyn.
He plodded back through the order of departure until it was established beyond question that Gertrude and Marcus had been followed by Charles Random, who had driven to a pub on the South Bank where he was living for the duration of the play. He had been given his usual late supper. He was followed by Destiny Meade and her friends, all of whom left by the stage-door and spent about an hour at The Younger Dolphin and then drove to her flat in Cheyne Walk where they were joined, she said, by dozens of vague chums, and by Harry Grove, who left the theatre at the same time as they did, fetched his guitar from his own flat in Canonbury, and then joined them in Chelsea. It appeared that Harry Grove was celebrated for a song sequence in, which, Destiny said, obviously quoting someone else, he sent the sacred cows up so high that they remained in orbit forevermore.
“Quite a loss to the nightclubs,” Marcus Knight said to nobody in particular. “One wonders why the legitimate theatre should still attract.”
“I assure you, Marco dear,” Grove rejoined, “only the Lord Chamberlain stands between me and untold affluence.”
“Or you might call it dirty-pay,” said Knight. It was Miss Bracey’s turn to laugh very musically.
“Did any of you,” Alleyn went on, “at any time after the fall of curtain see or speak to Trevor Vere?”
“I did, of course,” Charles Random said. He had an impatient, rather injured manner which it would have been going too far to call feminine. “He dresses with me. And without wanting to appear utterly brutal I must say it would take nothing less than a twenty foot drop into the stalls to stop him talking.”
“Does he write on the looking-glass?”
Random looked surprised. “No,” he said. “Write what? Graffiti?”
“Not precisely. The word ‘Slash.’ In red greasepaint.”
“He’s always shrieking ‘Slash.’ Making a great mouthful of it. Something to do with his horror comics, one imagines.”
“Does he ever talk about the treasure?”
“Well, yes,” Random said uneasily. “He flaunts away about how—well, about how any fool could pinch it and—and: no, it’s of no importance.”
“Suppose we just hear about it?”
“He was simply putting on his act but he did say anyone with any sense could guess the combination of the lock.”
“Intimating that he had, in fact, guessed it?”
“Well — actually — yes.”
“And did he divulge what it was??’
Random was of a sanguine complexion. He now lost something of his colour. “He did not,” Random said, “and if he had, I should have paid no attention. I don’t believe for a moment he knew the combination.”
“And you ought to know, dear, oughtn’t you?” Destiny said with the gracious condescension of stardom to bit-part competence. “Always doing those ghastly puzzles in your intellectual papers. Right up your alleyway.”
This observation brought about its own reaction of discomfort and silence.
Alleyn said to Winter Meyer, “I remember I suggested that you would be well advised to make the five-letter key group rather less predictable. Was it in fact changed?”
Winter Meyer raised his eyebrows, wagged his head and his hands and said: “I was always going to. And then when we knew they were to go—one of those things.” He covered his face for a moment. “One of those things,” he repeated, and everybody looked deeply uncomfortable.
Alleyn said, “On that morning, besides yourself and the boy, there were present, I think, everybody who is here now except Miss Bracey, Mr. Random and Mr. Grove. Is that right? Miss Bracey?”
“Oh, yes,” she said with predictable acidity. “It was a photograph call, I believe. I was not required.”
“It was just for two pictures, dear,” little Meyer said. “Destiny and Marco with the glove. You know?”
“Oh, quite. Quite.”
“And the kid turned up so they used him.”
“I seem to remember,” Harry Grove observed, “that Trevor was quoted in the daily journals as saying that the glove made him feel kinda funny like he wanted to cry.”
“Am I wrong,” Marcus Knight suddenly demanded of no one in particular, “in believing that this boy is in a Critical Condition and May Die? Mr. — ah — Superintendent — ah — Alleyn?”
“He is still on the danger list,” Alleyn said.
“Thank you. Has anybody else got something funny to say about the boy?” Knight demanded. “Or has the fount of comedy dried at its source?”
“If,” Grove rejoined, without rancour, “you mean me, it’s dry as a bone. No more jokes.”
Marcus Knight folded his arms.
Alleyn said, “Miss Meade, Miss Dunne, Mr. Knight, Mr. Jay and Mr. Jones—and the boy of course—were all present when the matter of the lock was discussed. Not for the first time, I understand. The safe had been installed for some days and the locking system had been widely canvassed among you. You had heard from Mr. Meyer that it carried a five-number combination and that this was based on a five-letter key word and a very commonplace code. Mr. Meyer also said, before I stopped him, that an obvious key word had been suggested by Mr. Conducis. Had any of you already speculated upon what this word might be? Or discussed the matter?”
There was a long silence.
Destiny Meade said plaintively: “Naturally we discussed it. The men seemed to know what it was all about. The alphabet and numbers and not enough numbers for all the letters or something. And anyway it wasn’t as if any of us were going to do anything, was it? But everyone thought—”
“What everyone thought—” Marcus Knight began, but she looked coldly upon him and said: “Please don’t butt in, Marco. You’ve got such a way of butting in. Do you mind?”
“My God!” he said with all the repose of an unexploded land mine.
“Everyone thought,” Destiny continued, gazing at Alleyn, “that this obvious five-letter word would be ‘glove.’ But as far as I could see that didn’t get one any nearer to a five-figure number.”
Harry Grove burst out laughing. “Darling!” he said. “I adore you better than life itself.” He picked up her gloved hand and kissed it, peeled back the gauntlet, kissed the inside of her wrist and then remarked to the company in general that he wouldn’t exchange her for a wilderness of monkeys. Gertrude Bracey violently re-crossed her legs. Marcus Knight rose, turned his face to the wall and with frightful disengagement made as if to examine a framed drawing of The Dolphin in the days of Adolphus Ruby. A pulse beat rapidly under his empurpled cheek.
“Very well,” Alleyn said. “You all thought that ‘glove’ was a likely word and so indeed it was. Did anyone arrive at the code and produce the combination?”
“Dilly, dilly, dilly, come and be killed,” cried Harry.
“Not at all,” Alleyn rejoined, “Unless (the security aspect of this affair being evidently laughable) you formed yourselves into a syndicate for robbery. If anyone did arrive at the combination it seems highly unlikely that he or she kept it to himself. Yes, Mr. Random?”
Charles Random had made an indeterminate sound. He looked up quickly at Alleyn, hesitated and then said rapidly, “As a matter of fact, I did. I’ve always been mildly interested in codes and I heard everybody muttering away about the lock on the safe and how the word might be ‘glove.’ I have to do a lot of waiting about in my dressing-room and thought I’d try to work it out. I thought it might be one of the sorts where you write down numerals from 1 to 0 in three rows one under another and put in succession under each row the letters of the alphabet, adding an extra A B C D to make up the last line. Then you can read the numbers off from the letters. Each number has three equivalent letters.”