“I’ve not spoken with Miss Meade,” Alleyn said.

“They’ve laughed together,” he roared. “At Me!”

“Perfectly maddening for you if they have,” Alleyn said, “but, if you’ll forgive me, it isn’t, as far as I know, entirely relevant to the business under discussion.”

“Yes, it is,” Knight passionately contradicted. “By God it is and I’ll tell you why. I’ve put a restraint upon myself. I have not allowed myself to speak about this man. I have been scrupulous lest I should be thought biased. But now — now! I tell you this and I speak from absolute conviction: if, as you hold, that appalling boy is not guilty and recovers his wits, and if he was attacked by the man who killed Jobbins, and if he remembers who attacked him, it will be at W. Hartly Grove he points his finger. Now!”

Alleyn, who had seen this pronouncement blowing up for the past five minutes, allowed himself as many seconds in which to be dumbfounded and then asked Marcus if he had any reasons, other, he hastily added, than those already adduced, for making this statement about Harry Grove. Nothing very specific emerged. There were dark and vague allusions to reputation and an ambiguous past. As his temper abated, and it did seem to abate gradually, Knight appeared to lose the fine edge of his argument. He talked of Trevor Vere and said he couldn’t understand why Alleyn dismissed the possibility that the boy had been caught out by Jobbins, overturned the dolphin and then run so fast down the circle aisle that he couldn’t prevent himself diving over the balustrade. Alleyn once again advanced the logical arguments against this theory.

“And there’s no possibility of some member of the public’s having hidden during performance?”

“Jay assures me not. A thorough routine search is made and the staff on both sides of the curtain confirm this. This is virtually a ‘new’ theatre. There are no stacks of scenery or properties or neglected hiding places.”

“You are saying,” said Knight, beginning portentously to nod again, “that this thing must have been done by One of Us.”

“That’s how it looks.”

“I am faced,” Knight said, “with a frightful dilemma.” He immediately became a man faced with a frightful dilemma and looked quite haggard. “Alleyn: what can one do? Idle for me to pretend I don’t feel as I do about this man. I know him to be a worthless, despicable person. I know him—”

“One moment. This is still Harry Grove?”

“Yes.” (Several nods.) “Yes. I am aware that the personal injuries he has inflicted upon me must be thought to prejudice my opinion.”

“I assure you—”

“And I am assuring you—oh with such deadly certainty—that there is only one among us who is capable of the crime.”

He gazed fixedly into Alleyn’s face. “I studied physiognomy,” he surprisingly said. “When I was in New York”—for a moment he looked hideously put out but instantly recovered—“I met a most distinguished authority—Earl P. Van Smidt—and I became seriously interested in the science. I have studied and observed and I have proved, my conclusions. Over and again. I have completely satisfied myself—but com-pletely—that when you see a pair of unusually round eyes, rather wide apart, very light blue and without depth—look out. Look out!” he repeated and flung himself into the chair he had vacated.

“What for?” Alleyn inquired.

“Treachery. Shiftiness. Utter unscrupulousness. Complete lack of ethical values. I quote from Van Smidt.”

“Dear me.”

“As for Conducis! But no matter. No matter.”

“Do you discover the same traits in Mr. Conducis?”

“I — I — am not familiar with Mr. Conducis.”

“You have met him, surely?”

“Formal meeting. On the opening night.”

“But never before that?”

“I may have done so. Years ago. I prefer—” Knight said surprisingly—“to forget the occurrence.” He swept it away.

“May I ask why?”

There was an appreciable pause before he said: “I was once his guest, if you can call it that, and I was subjected to an insolent disregard which I would have interpreted more readily if I had at that time been acquainted with Smidt. In my opinion,” Knight said, “Smidt should be compulsory reading for all police forces. You don’t mind my saying this?” he added in a casual, lordly manner.

“Indeed no.”

“Good. Want me any more, dear boy?” he asked, suddenly gracious.

“I think not. Unless — and believe me I wouldn’t ask if the question was irrelevant to the case — unless you care to tell me if Mrs. Constantia Guzmann really confided to you that she is a buyer of hot objects d’art on the intercontinental black market.”

It was no good. Back in a flash came the empurpled visage and the flashing eye. Back, too, came an unmistakable background of sheepishness and discomfort

“No comment,” said Marcus Knight

“No? Not even a tiny hint?”

“You are mad to expect it,” he said, and with that they had to let him go.

“Well, Br’er Fox, we’ve caught a snarled up little job this time, haven’t we?”

“We have that,” Fox agreed warmly. “It’d be nice,” he added wistfully, “if we could put it down to simple theft, discovery and violence.”

“It’d be lovely but we can’t, you know. We can’t. For one thing the theft of a famous object is always bedevilled by the circumstance of its being indisposable through the usual channels. No normal high-class fence, unless he’s got very special contacts, is going to touch Shakespeare’s note or his son’s glove.”

“So, for a start you’ve got either a crank who steals and gloats or a crank of the type of young Jones who steals to keep the swag in England or a thorough wised-up, high grade professional in touch with the top international racket And at the receiving end somebody of the nature of this Mrs. Guzmann, who’s a millionaire crank in her own right and doesn’t care how she gets her stuff.”

“That’s right. Or a kidnapper who holds the stuff for ransom. And you might have a non-professional thief who knows all about Mrs. G. and believes she’ll play and he’ll make a pocket.”

“That seems to take in the entire boiling of this lot, seeing Mr. Grove’s broadcast the Guzmann-Knight anecdote for all it’s worth. I tell you what, Mr. Alleyn; it wouldn’t be the most astonishing event in my working life if Mr. Knight took to Mr. Grove. Mr. Grove’s teasing ways seem to put him out to a remarkable degree, don’t you think?”

“I think,” Alleyn said, “we’d better, both of us, remind ourselves about actors.”

“You do? What about them?”

“One must always remember that they’re trained to convey emotion. On or off the stage, they make the most of everything they feel. Now this doesn’t mean they express their feelings up to saturation point. When you and I and all the rest of the non-actors do our damnedest to understate and be ironical about our emotional reflexes, the actor, even when he underplays them, does so with such expertise that he convinces us laymen that he’s in extremis. He isn’t. He’s only being professionally articulate about something that happens offstage instead of in front of an official audience.”

“How does all this apply to Mr. Knight, then?”

“When he turns purple and roars anathemas against Grove it means A: that he’s hot-tempered, pathologically vain and going through a momentary hell and B: that he’s letting you know up to the nth degree just how angry and dangerous he’s feeling. It doesn’t necessarily mean that once his present emotion has subsided he will do anything further about it, and nor does it mean that he’s superficial or a hypocrite. It’s his job to take the micky out of an audience, and even in the throes of a completely genuine emotional crisis, he does just that thing if it’s only an audience of one.”

“Is this what they call being an extrovert?”