“I have forgotten.”

“Forgotten?”

“The name.”

“Was it Knight?”

“No.”

“There are maritime records. We shall be able to trace it. Will you go on, please?”

“He was a member of the ship’s complement. He asked to see me and showed me the desk which he said he wanted to sell. I understand that it had been given him by the proprietress of a lodging-house. I thought the contents were almost certainly worthless but I gave him what he asked for them.”

“Which was—?”

“Thirty pounds.”

“What became of this man?”

“Drowned,” said a voice from somewhere inside Mr. Conducis.

“How did it come about that the desk and its contents were saved?”

“I cannot conjecture by what fantastic process of thought you imagine any of this relates to your inquiry.”

“I hope to show that it does. I believe it does.”

“I had the desk on deck. I had shown the contents, as a matter of curiosity, to some of my guests.”

“Did Mrs. Guzmann see it, perhaps?”

“Perhaps.”

“Was she interested?”

A look which Alleyn afterwards described as being profoundly professional drifted into Mr. Conducis’s face.

He said, “She is a collector.”

“Did she make an offer?”

“She did. I was not inclined to sell.”

Alleyn was visited by a strange notion.

“Tell me,” he said, “were you both in fancy dress?”

Mr. Conducis looked at him with an air of wondering contempt. “Mrs. Guzmann,” he said, “was in costume: Andalusian, I understand. I wore a domino over evening dress.”

“Gloved, either of you?”

“No!” he said loudly and added: “We had been playing bridge.”

“Were any of the others gloved?”

“A ridiculous question. Some may have been.”

“Were the ship’s company in fancy dress?”

“Certainly not!”

“The stewards?”

“As eighteenth-century flunkeys.”

“Gloved?”

“I do not remember.”

“Why do you dislike pale gloves, Mr. Conducis?”

“I have no idea,” he said breathlessly, “what you mean.”

“You told Peregrine Jay that you dislike them.”

“A personal prejudice. I cannot account for it.”

“Were there gloved hands that disturbed you on the night of the disaster? Mr. Conducis, are you ill?”

“I—no. No, I am well. You insist on questioning me about an episode which distressed me, which was painful, tragic, an outrage to one’s sensibilities.”

“I would avoid it if I could. I’m afraid I must go further. Will you tell me exactly what happened at the moment of disaster: to you, I mean, and to whoever was near you then or later?”

For a moment Alleyn thought he was going to refuse. He wondered if there would be a sudden outbreak or whether Mr. Conducis would merely walk out of the room and leave them to take what action they chose. He did none of these things. He embarked upon a toneless, rapid recital of facts. Of the fact of fog, the sudden looming of the tanker, the splitting apart of the Kalliope. Of the fact of fire breaking out

Of oil on the water and of how he found himself looking down on the wooden raft from the swimming pool and of how the deck turned into a precipice and he slid from it and landed on the raft

“Still with the little desk?”

Yes. Clutched under his left arm, it seemed, but with no consciousness of this. He had lain across the raft with the desk underneath him. It had bruised him very badly. He gripped a rope loop at the side with his right hand. Mrs. Guzmann had appeared beside the raft and was clinging to one of the loops. Alleyn had a mental picture of an enormous nose, an open mouth, a mantilla plastered over a big head and a floundering mass of wet black lace and white flesh.

The recital stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

“That is all. We were picked up by the tanker.”

“Were there other people on the raft?”

“I believe so. My memory is not clear. I lost consciousness.”

“Men? Mrs. Guzmann?”

“I believe so. I was told so.”

“Pretty hazardous, I should have thought. It wouldn’t accommodate more than—how many?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Mr. Conducis, when you saw Peregrine Jay’s gloved hands clinging to the edge of that hole in the stage at the Dolphin and heard him call out that he would drown if you didn’t save him—were you reminded—”

Mr. Conducis had risen and now began to move backwards, like an image in slow motion, towards the bureau. Fox rose, too, and shifted in front of it. Mr. Conducis drew his crimson silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and pressed it against his mouth, and above it his upper lip glistened. His brows were defined by beaded margins and the dark skin of his face was stretched too tight and had blanched over the bones.

“Be quiet,” he said. “No. Be quiet.”

Somebody had come into the house. A distant voice spoke loudly but indistinguishably.

The door opened and the visitor came in.

Mr. Conducis screamed: “You’ve told them. You’ve betrayed me. I wish to Christ I’d killed you.”

Fox took him from behind. Almost at once he stopped struggling.

Trevor could be, as Alleyn put it, bent at the waist. He had been so bent and was propped up in a sitting position in his private room. A bed-tray on legs was arranged across his stomach, ready for any offerings that might be forthcoming. His condition had markedly improved since Alleyn’s visit of the day before, and he was inclined, though still feebly, to throw his weight about

The private room was small but there was a hospital screen in one corner of it and behind the screen, secreted there before Trevor was wheeled in, sat Inspector Fox, his large, decent feet concealed by Trevor’s suitcase. Alleyn occupied the bedside chair.

On receiving assurances from Alleyn that the police were not on his tracks Trevor reported, with more fluency, his previous account of his antics in the deserted auditorium, but he would not or could not carry the recital beyond the point when he was in the circle and heard a distant telephone ring. “I don’t remember another thing,” he said importantly. “I’ve blacked out. I was concussed. The doc says I was very badly concussed. Here! Where did I fall, Super? What’s the story?”

“You fell into the stalls.”

“Would you mind!”

“True.”

“Into the stalls! Cripes! Why?”

“That’s what I want to find out.”

Trevor looked sideways. “Did old Henry Jobbins lay into me?” he asked.

“No.”

“Or Chas Random?”

A knowledgeable look: a disfiguring look of veiled gratification, perhaps, appeared like a blemish on Trevor’s pageboy face. He giggled.

“He was wild with me, Chas was. Listen: Chas had it in for me, Super, really he did. I got that camp’s goat, actually, good and proper.”

Alleyn listened and absently noted how underlying Cockney seeped up through superimposed drama academy. Behind carefully turned vowel and consonant jibed a Southward urchin. “Goo’ ’un prop-per,” Trevor was really saying, however classy the delivery.

“Some of the company are coming in to see you,”

Alleyn said. “They may only stay for a minute or two but they’d like to say hullo.”

“I’d be pleased,” Trevor graciously admitted. He was extremely complacent.

Alleyn watched him and talked to him for a little while longer and then, conscious of making a decision that might turn out most lamentably, he said: “Look here, young Trevor, I’m going to ask you to help me in a very tricky and important business. If you don’t like the suggestion you needn’t have anything to do with it. On the other hand—”

He paused. Trevor gave him a sharp look.

“Nothing comes to the dumb,” he said. “What seems to be the trouble? Come in and give.”

Ten minutes later his visitors began to arrive, ushered in by Peregrine Jay. “Just tell them,” Alleyn had said, “that he’d like to see them for a few minutes and arrange the timetable. You can pen them up in the waiting-room at the end of the corridor.”