“Sir?”

“Here is half a crown. Will you be so good as to go out into the street and watch for a car which should arrive for me at any moment? You can continue your treasure hunt when I have gone.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the porter in some confusion, and retired through the revolving doors. Alleyn gazed placidly at the reception clerk who turned away with an abstracted air and picked his teeth.

“Come over here,” suggested Alleyn to Hambledon.

“The occupants of the lounge can gaze their full but they can’t hear you. You were saying—?”

“I am sure the shock has been much greater than she realises. As a matter of fact I can’t help feeling she would do better to spend the day in bed.”

“Thinking?”

“She’ll do that wherever she is. I’m very worried about her, Alleyn. She’s altogether too bright and brave — it’s not natural. Look here — you won’t talk to her about Alf, will you? Keep right off this tragedy if you can. She’s in no state to discuss it with anybody. Last night those damn’ fellows kept her at it for God knows how long. I know that you, as a Yard man, are anxious to learn what you can, and I hope with all my heart that you get the swine; but — don’t worry Carolyn again just yet. She gets quite hysterical at the mention of it. I know I can depend on you?”

“Oh,” said Alleyn vaguely, “I’m very dependable. Here is Miss Dacres.”

Carolyn stepped out of the lift.

She wore a black dress that he had seen before and a black hat with a brim that came down over her face which, as usual, was beautifully made-up. But underneath the make-up he suspected she was very pale, and there was a darkness about her eyes. Carolyn looked a little older, and Alleyn felt a sudden stab of compassion. “That won’t do,” he thought, and started forward to greet her. He was aware that the old lady with the journalistic yashmak had boldly advanced to the plate-glass partition, and that three of the other occupants of the lounge were making hurriedly for the hall.

“Good morning,” said Carolyn. “This is very nice of you.”

“Come out to the car,” said Alleyn. “It is very nice of you.”

He and Hambledon walked out on either side of her. The porter, who had been deep in conversation with the mechanic from the garage, flew to open the door of the car. A number of people seemed to be hanging about on the footpath.

“Thank you,” said Alleyn to the mechanic. “I’m driving myself. Come back at about three, will you? Here you are, Miss Dacres.”

“You’re in a great hurry, both of you,” said Carolyn, as Hambledon slammed the door. Then she saw the little knot of loiterers on the footpath. “I see,” she whispered.

“Good-bye, my dear,” said Hambledon. “Have a lovely drive.”

“Good-bye, Hailey.”

The car shot forward.

“I suppose the paper is full of it,” said Carolyn.

“Not absolutely full. They don’t seem to go in for the nauseating front-page stuff in this country.”

“Wait till the evening papers come out before you’re sure of that.”

“Even they,” said Alleyn, “will probably show a comparative sense of decency. I thought we might drive up to where those mountains begin. They say it’s a good road and I got the people in the hotel to put some lunch in the car.”

“You felt sure I would come?” asked Carolyn.

“Oh, no,” said Alleyn lightly. “I only hoped you would. I’ve been a fair distance along this road already. It’s an uphill grade all the way, though you wouldn’t think it, and when we get to the hills it’s rather exciting.”

“You needn’t bother to make conversation.”

“Needn’t I? I rather fancy myself as a conversationalist. It’s part of my job.”

“In that case,” said Carolyn loudly, “you had better go on. You see, dear Mr. Alleyn, I do realise this is just a rather expensive and delicate approach to an interrogation.”

“I thought you would.”

“And I must say I do think it’s quite charming of you to take so much trouble over the setting. Those mountains are grand, aren’t they? So very up-stage and magnificent.”

“You should have seen them at 6 a.m.”

“Now you are being a Ruth Draper. They couldn’t have been any lovelier than they are at this moment, even with these depressing little bungalows in the foreground.”

“Yes, they were. They were so lovely I couldn’t look at them for more than a minute.”

“ ‘Mine eyes dazzle’?”

“Something like that. Why don’t you do some of those old things. The Maid’s Tragedy.”

“Too hopelessly frank and straightforward for the Lord Chamberlain, and not safe enough for the box-office. I did think once of Millament, but Pooh said—” She stopped for a second. “Alfie thought it wouldn’t go.”

“Pity,” said Alleyn.

They drove on in silence for a few minutes. The tram-line ended and the town began to thin out into scattered groups of houses.

“Here’s the last of the suburbs,” said Alleyn. “There are one or two small townships and then we are in the country.”

“And at what stage,” asked Carolyn, “do we begin the real business of the day? Shall you break down my reserve with precipitous roads, and shake my composure with hairpin bends? And then draw up at the edge of a chasm and snap out a question, before I have time to recover my wits?”

“But why should I do any of these things? I can’t believe that my few childish inquiries will prove at all embarrassing. Why should they?”

“I thought all detectives made it their business to dig up one’s disreputable past and fling it in one’s face.”

“Is your past so disreputable?”

“There you go, you see.”

Alleyn smiled, and again there was a long silence. Alleyn thought Hambledon had been right when he said that Carolyn was too brave to be true. There was a determined and painful brightness about her, her voice was pitched a tone too high, her conversation sounded brittle, and her silences were intensely uncomfortable. “I’ll have to wait,” thought Alleyn.

“Actually,” said Carolyn suddenly, “my past is quite presentable. Not at all the sort of thing that most people imagine about the actress gay. It began in a parsonage, went on in a stock drama company, then repertory, then London. I went through the mill, you know. All sorts of queer little touring companies where one had to give a hand with the props, help on the stage, almost bring the curtain down on one’s own lines.”

“Help on the stage? You don’t mean you had to lug that scenery about?”

“Yes, I do. I could run up a box-set as well as most people. Flick the toggle-cords over the hooks, drop the back-cloth — everything. Oh, but how lovely that is! How lovely!”

They had now left all the houses behind them. The road wound upwards through round green hills whose firm margins cut across each other like the curve of a simple design. As Carolyn spoke, they turned a corner, and from behind this sequence of rounded greens rose the mountain, cold and intractable against a brilliant sky. They travelled fast, and the road turned continually, so that the hills and the mountain seemed to march solemnly about in a rhythm too large to be comprehensible. Presently Alleyn and Carolyn came to a narrow bridge and a pleasant little hinterland through which hurried a stream in a wide and stony bed.

“I thought we might stop here,” said Alleyn.

“I should like to do that.”

He drove along a rough track that led down to the river-bed, and stopped in the shadow of thick white flowering manuka shrubs, honey-scented.

They got out of the car and instead of the stuffiness of leather and petrol they found a smooth freshness of air with a tang of snow in it. Carolyn, an incongruous figure in her smart dress, stood with her face raised.

“It smells clean.”

The flat stones were hot in the sun, and a heat-haze wavered above the river-bed. The air was alive with the voice of the stream. They walked over the stones, over springy lichen, and patches of dry grass, to the border of the creek where the grass was greener. Here there were scattered prickly shrubs and sprawling bushes, that farther upstream led into a patch of dark trees.