“Ugh!”

“And that will be all.”

““Has the footpath comedian signed his pretty little rigmarole?”

“Not yet, Mr. Vernon.”

“Not yet. No doubt he will,” said Vernon bitterly. He shook hands with Alleyn. “Lucky you’re here, Mr. Alleyn. I shall now go to my home away from home. The bed is the undulating sort and I toboggan all night. The mattress appears to have been stuffed with the landlady’s apple dumplings of which there are always plenty left over. Talk of counterweights! My God! Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on. Good night. Good night, Inspector Wade.”

“What is the name of your hotel, sir?”

“The Wenderby, Inspector. It is a perfect sample of the Jack’s Come Home.”

“I’ve always heard it was very comfortable,” said Wade, with all the colonial’s defensiveness. “The landlady—”

sang old Vernon surprisingly in a wheezy bass:

He cocked his eyebrow, turned up the collar of his overcoat, clapped his hat on one side of his head and marched out.

“Aw, he’s mad,” said Wade disgustedly.

Alleyn lay back in his chair and laughed heartily.

“But he’s perfect, Wade. The real old actor. Almost too good to be true.”

“Making out he’s sorry deceased has gone and two minutes afterwards acting the fool. Our hotels are as good as you’d find anywhere,” grumbled Wade. “What’s he mean by a Jack’s Come Home, anyway?”

“I fancy it’s a professional term denoting a slapdash and carefree attitude on the part of the proprietress.”

“He’s mad,” repeated Wade. “Get the kid, Cass. Young Palmer.”

When Cass had gone, Wade got up and stamped about the office.

“It’s chilly,” he said.

The room was both cold and stuffy. The fire had gone out and the small electric heater was quite unequal to the thin draughts of night air that came in under the door and through the ill-fitting window-frame. The place was rank with tobacco-smoke and with an indefinable smell of dust and varnish. Somewhere outside in the sleeping town a clock struck two.

“Good Lord!” said Alleyn involuntarily.

“Like to turn it up for to-night, sir?” asked Wade.

“No, no.”

“Good-oh, then. Look, sir. On what we’ve got, who do you reckon are the possibles? Just on the face of it?”

“I’m afraid it’d be quicker to tick off the unlikelies,” said Alleyn.

“Well, take it that way.”

Alleyn did not reply immediately and Wade answered himself.

“Well, sir, I’ve got their names here and I’ll tick off the outsiders. Old Miss Max. No motive or opportunity. That old loony who’s just wafted away, Brandon Vernon. Same for him. Gascoigne, the stage-manager. Same for him on the evidence we’ve got so far. The funny little bloke, St. John Ackroyd, alias Biggs, according to Vernon. He may be a bit of a nosy but he doesn’t look like a murderer. Besides, his movements are pretty well taped out. The girl Gaynes. Well, I suppose you might say, if she’s going with Liversidge and knew Meyer was in the position to finish his career for him, that there’s a motive there, but I don’t see that silly little tart fixing counterweights and working out the machinery for a job of this sort. Do you?”

“The imagination does rather boggle,” agreed Alleyn.

“Yes. Well, now we get into shaky country. Hambledon. Let’s look at Mr. Hailey Hambledon. He’s after the woman. They none of them deny that. Seems as if he’s been kind of keen for a long while. Now if Ackroyd’s story is right, she said she’d marry him if Meyer was dead and not unless. There’s the motive. Now for opportunity. Hambledon could have gone aloft the first time and taken away the weight. He says he went to his dressing-room and took the muck off his dial. Maybe, but he told the dresser he wasn’t wanted, and he could have gone back on the stage, climbed aloft and done it. After the murder he went as far as her dressing-room with the Dacres woman— with deceased’s wife. She said she wanted to be alone and then sent for him, some time later. During the interval he may have gone up and put the weight back. That right?”

“Yes,” said Alleyn.

“Then there’s Carolyn Dacres. Same motive. Same opportunity. She was the last to appear for the party and she asked to be left alone after the fatality. I don’t know whether she’d be up to thinking out the mechanics of the thing but—”

“One should also remember,” said Alleyn, “that she was the one member of the party from whom the champagne stunt had been kept a secret.”

“By gum, yes. Unless she’d got wind of it somehow. Ye-ers. Well, that’s her. Now George Mason. Motive — he comes in for a fortune if the money’s still there. Opportunity — not so good. Before the show he was in this room. The stage-doorkeeper remembers Mason running out and warning him about the guests and returning here. Te Pokiha saw him here. You remember him coming out when you arrived. To get behind, between those times, he’d have had to pass the doorkeeper and would have been seen by anybody who happened to be about.”

“Is there a pass-door through the proscenium from the stalls?”

“Eh? No. No, there’s not. No, I don’t see how he could have done it. After the murder he came back with Te Pokiha and I saw him in the office here as I passed the door. We’ll check up just when Te Pokiha left him, but it doesn’t look too likely.”

“It does not. It looks impossible, Wade.”

“I hate to say so,” admitted Wade. “Next comes young Courtney Broadhead. If he stole the money and Meyer knew, that’s motive. Or if he doped it out he’d say Meyer had lent it to him — that’s another motive. There’s that business on the train—”

“Always remembering,” said Alleyn, “that the train attempt took place before Miss Gaynes discovered the theft of the money.”

“Aw, blast!” said Wade. “It just won’t make sense. Well — Liversidge. Motive. If he took the money and Meyer knew, and he knew Meyer knew — good enough. Opportunity. Each time he was the last to leave the stage. He could have done it. There you are, and where the bloody hell are you?”

“I weep with you,” said Alleyn. “I deeply sympathise. Isn’t Master Palmer taking rather a long time?”

He had scarcely asked his question before the most extraordinary rumpus broke out in the yard. There was a sudden scurry of running feet on asphalt, a startled bellow, and a crash, followed by a burst of lurid invective.

Alleyn, with Wade behind him, ran to the door, threw it open, and darted out into the yard. A full moon shone upon cold roofs and damp pavements, and upon the posterior view of Detective-Sergeant Cass. His head and shoulders were lost in shadow and he seemed, to their astonished eyes, to be attempting to batter his brains out against the wall of a bicycle shed. He was also kicking backwards with the brisk action of a terrier, this impression being enhanced by spurts of earth and gravel which shot out from beneath his flying boots.

“Here, ’ere, ’ere,” said Wade, “what’s all this!”

“Catch him!” implored a strangely muffled voice while Cass redoubled his activities. “Go after the… little… Get me out of this! Gawd! Get me out of it.”

Alleyn and Wade flew to the demented creature. Wade produced a torch, and by its light they saw what ailed the sergeant. His head and his enormous shoulders were wedged between the wall of the bicycle shed and that of a closely adjoining building. His helmet had slipped over his face like a sort of extinguisher, his fat arms were clamped to his sides. He could neither go forward nor back and he had already begun to swell.