“Yes, Br’er Fox, I expect it is. But the interesting thing about Knight, I thought, was that when it came to Conducis he turned uncommunicative and cagey.”

“Fancied himself slighted over something, it seemed. Do you reckon Knight believes all that about Grove? Being a homicidal type? All that stuff about pale eyes etcetera. Because,” Fox said with great emphasis, “it’s all poppycock: there aren’t any facial characteristics for murder. What’s that you’re always quoting about there being no art to find the mind’s construction in the face? I reckon it’s fair enough where homicide’s concerned. Although,” Fox added, opening his own eyes very wide, “I always fancy there’s a kind of look about sex offenders of a certain type. That I will allow.”

“Be that as it may it doesn’t get us much further along our present road. No news from the hospital?”

“No. They’d ring through at once if there was.”

“I know. I know.”

“What do we do about Mr. Jeremy Jones?”

“Oh, blast! What indeed! I think we take delivery of the glove and documents, give him hell and go no further. I’ll talk to the A.C. about him and I rather think I’ll have to tell Conducis as soon as possible. Who’ve we got left here? Only little Meyer. Ask him into his own office, Br’er Fox. We needn’t keep him long, I think.”

Winter Meyer came in quoting Queen Mary. “This,” he said wearily, “is a pretty kettle of fish. This is a carry-on. I’m not complaining, mind, and I’m not blaming anybody but what, oh what, has set Marco off again? Sorry. Not your headache, old boy.”

Alleyn uttered consolatory phrases, sat him at his own desk, checked his alibi, which was no better and no worse than anyone else’s in that after he left the theatre with Knight he drove to his house at Golders Green where his wife and family were all in bed. When he wound up his watch he noticed it said ten to twelve. He had heard the Knight-Guzmann story. “I thought it bloody sad,” he said. “Poor woman. Terrible, you know, the problem of the plain, highly sexed woman. Marco ought to have held his tongue. He ought never to have told Harry. Of course Harry made it sound a bit of a yell, but I didn’t like Marco telling about it. I don’t think that sort of thing’s funny.”

“It does appear that on her own admission to Knight, she’s a buyer on a colossal scale under the museum-piece counter.”

Winter Meyer spread his hands. “We all have our weaknesses,” he said. “So she likes nice things and she can pay for them. Marcus Knight should complain!”

“Well!” Alleyn ejaculated. ’That’s one way of looking the Big Black Market in the eyes, I must say! Have you ever met Mrs. Guzmann, by the way?”

Winter Meyer had rather white eyelids. They now dropped a little. “No,” he said, “not in person. Her husband was a most brilliant man. The equal and more of Conducis.”

“Self-made?”

“Shall we say self-created? It was a superb achievement.”

Alleyn looked his enjoyment of this phrase and Meyer answered his look with a little sigh. “Ah yes!” he said. “These colossi! How marvellous!”

“In your opinion,” Alleyn said, “without prejudice and within these four walls and all that: how many people in this theatre know the combination of that lock?”

Meyer blushed. “Yes,” he said. “Well. This is where I don’t exactly shine with a clear white radiance, isn’t it? Well, as he’s told you, Charlie Random for one. Got it right, as you no doubt observed. He says he didn’t pass it on and personally I believe that. He’s a very quiet type, Charlie. Never opens up about his own or anybody else’s business. I’m sure he’s dead right about the boy not knowing the combination.”

“You are? Why?”

“Because as I said, the bloody kid was always pestering me about it.”

“And so you would have been pretty sure, would you, that only you yourself, Random, and Mr. Conducis knew the combination?”

“I don’t say that,” Meyer said unhappily. “You see, after that morning they did all know about the five-letter word being an obvious one and — and — well, Dessy did say one day, ‘Is it “glove,” Winty? We all think it might be? Do you swear it’s not “glove.” ’ Well, you know Dessy. She’d woo the Grand Master to let the goat out of the Lodge. I suppose I boggled a bit and she laughed and kissed me. I know. I know. I ought to have had it changed. I meant to. But — in the theatre we don’t go about wondering if someone in the company’s a big-time bandit.”

“No, of course you don’t, Mr. Meyer: thank you very much. I think we can now return your office to you. It was more than kind to suggest that we use it.”

“There hasn’t been all that much for me to do. The press is our big worry but we’re booked out solid for another four months. Unless people get it into their heads to cancel we should make out. You never know, though, which way a thing like this will take the public.”

They left him in a state of controlled preoccupation.

The circle foyer was deserted, now. Alleyn paused for a moment. He looked at the shuttered bar, at the three shallow steps leading on three sides from the top down to the half-landing and the two flights that curved down from there to the main entrance; at the closed safe in the wall above the landing, the solitary bronze dolphin and the two doors into the circle. Everything was quiet, a bit muffled and stuffily chilly.

He and Fox walked down the three canvas-covered steps to the landing. A very slight sound caught Alleyn’s ear. Instead of going on down he crossed to the front of the landing, rested his hands on its elegant iron balustrade and looked into the main entrance below.

His gaze lighted on the crown of a smart black hat and the violently foreshortened figure of a thin woman.

For a second or two the figure made no move. Then the hat tipped back and gave way to a face like a white disc, turned up to his own.

“Do you want to see me, Miss Bracey?”

The face tipped backwards and forwards in assent. The lips moved, but if she spoke her voice was inaudible.

Alleyn motioned to Fox to stay where he was and himself went down the curving right-hand stairway.

There she stood, motionless. The fat upsidedown cupids over the box-office and blandly helpful caryatids supporting the landing made an incongruous background for that spare figure and yet it crossed Alleyn’s mind, her general appearance was evocative, in a cock-eyed way, of the period: of some repressed female character from a Victorian play or novel. Rosa Dartle, he thought, that was the sort of thing: Rosa Dartle.

“What is it?” Alleyn asked. “Are you unwell?”

She looked really ill. He wondered if he had imagined that she had swayed very slightly, and then pulled herself together.

“You must sit down,” he said. “Let me help you.”

When he went up to her he smelt brandy and saw that her eyes were off-focus. She said nothing but let him propel her to Jeremy Jones’s plushy settee alongside the wall. She sat bolt upright. One corner of her mouth drooped a little as if pulled down by an invisible hook. She groped in her handbag, fetched up a packet of cigarettes and fumbled one out. Alleyn lit it for her. She made a great business of this. She’s had a lot more than’s good for her, he thought, and wondered where, on a Sunday afternoon, she’d get hold of it. Perhaps Fox’s Mrs. Jancy at The Wharfinger’s Friend had obliged.

“Now,” he said, “what’s the trouble?”

“Trouble? What trouble? I know trouble when I see it,” she said. “I’m saturated in it.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Not a question of me telling you. It’s what he told you. That’s what matters.”

“Mr. Grove?”

“Mr. W. Hartly Grove. You know what? He’s a monster. You know? Not a man but a monster. Cruel. My God,” she said and the corner of her mouth jerked again, “how cruel that man can be!”