“I’m sure I couldn’t say, Miss de Suze,” said Fox blandly.

“How you could!” she accused Alleyn. “Which of them was it? Was it Hortense? My poor Mr. Alleyn, you don’t know Hortense. She’s the world’s most accomplished liar! She just can’t help herself, poor thing. It’s pathological.”

“So there was no quarrel?” Alleyn said. “Between any of you?”

“My dear, haven’t I told you!”

“Then why,” he asked, “did Mr. Manx punch Mr. Rivera over the ear?”

Félicité’s eyes and mouth opened. Then she hunched her shoulders and caught the tip of her tongue between her teeth. He could have sworn she was astonished and in a moment it was evident that she was gratified.

“No!” she said. “Honestly? Ned did? Well, I must say I call that a handsome tribute. When did it happen? Before we went down to the Met? After dinner? When?”

Alleyn looked steadily at her. “I thought,” he said, “that perhaps you could tell me that.”

“I? But I promise you…”

“Had he got a trickle of blood on his ear when you talked to him in the study? On the occasion, you know, when you say there was no quarrel?”

“Let me think,” said Félicité, and rested her head on her crossed arms. But the movement was not swift enough. He had seen the blank look of panic in her eyes. “No,” her voice, muffled by her arms, said slowly, “no, I’m sure…”

There was some change of light above, where the stairs ran up to the first landing. He looked up. Carlisle Wayne stood there in the shadow. Her figure and posture still retained the effect of movement, as if while she came downstairs she had suddenly been held in suspension as the action of a motion picture may be suspended to give emphasis to a specific moment. Over Félicité’s bent head, Alleyn with a slight movement of his hand arrested Carlisle’s descent. Félicité had begun to speak again.

“After all,” she was saying, “one is a bit uplifted. It’s not every day in the week that people give other people cauliflower ears for love of one’s bright eyes.” She raised her face and looked at him. “How naughty of Ned, but how sweet of him. Darling Ned!”

“No, really!” said Carlisle strongly. “This is too much!”

Félicité, with a stifled cry, was on her feet.

Alleyn said: “Hullo, Miss Wayne. Good morning to you. Have you any theory about why Mr. Manx gave Rivera a clip over the ear? He did give him a clip, you know. Why?”

“If you must know,” Carlisle said in a high voice, “it was because Rivera kissed me when we met on the landing.”

“Good Lord!” Alleyn ejaculated. “Why didn’t you say so before? Kissed you, did he? Did you like it?”

“Don’t be a bloody fool!” Carlisle shouted and bolted upstairs.

“I must say,” Félicité said, “I call that rather poor of darling Lisle.”

“If you’ll excuse us,” Alleyn said. He and Fox left her staring thoughtfully at her finger-nails.

“A shave,” Alleyn said in the car, “a bath and, with luck, two hours’ sleep. I’ll take it out at home. We’ll send the stuff on to the experts. What about you, Fox? Troy will be delighted to fix you up.”

“Thank you very much, sir, but I wouldn’t think of troubling Mrs. Alleyn. There’s a little place — ”

“Be damned to your little place. I’ve had enough insubordination from you, my lad. To hell with you. You’re coming to us.”

Fox accepted this singular invitation in the spirit in which it was made. He took out his spectacles, Alleyn’s notebook and Lord Pastern’s time-table. Alleyn dragged his palm across his jaw, shuddered, yawned and closed his eyes. “A hideous curse on this case,” he murmured and appeared to sleep. Fox began to whisper to himself. The car slipped down Cliveden Place, into Grosvenor Place, into Hyde Park Corner. “ ’T,’t,’t,” Fox whispered over the time-table.

“You sound,” Alleyn said without opening his eyes, “like Dr. Johnson on his way to Streatham. Can you crack your joints, Foxkin?”

“I see what you mean about this ruddy time-table.”

“What did I mean? Split me and sink me if I know what I meant.”

“Well, sir, our customer, whoever he or she may be — and you know my views on the point — had to be in the ballroom to pick up the bit of umbrella shaft, in the drawing-room to collect the stiletto and alone in the study to fix the stiletto in the bit of umbrella shaft with plastic wood.”

“You’ll be coming round the mountain when you come.”

“It is a bit of a mountain and that’s a fact. According to what the young lady, Miss Wayne, I mean, told you, sir, this perishing parasol was all right before dinner when she was in the ballroom and handled it, and according to her, his lordship was in the study drawing the bullets out of the cartridges. If that’s correct he didn’t get a chance to play the fool with the parasol before dinner. What’s more it fits in with his lordship’s own statement, which Bellairs can speak to if he ever wakes up, that he took the parasol to bits on the piano after dinner. For fun.”

“Quite.”

“All right. Now where does this get us? If the time-table’s correct, his lordship was never alone in the study after that.”

“And the only time he was alone at all, moreover, he was up and down the house, bellowing like a bull for his sombrero.”

“Doesn’t that look like establishing an alibi?” Fox demanded.

“It looks a bit like the original alibi itself, Br’er Fox.”

“He might have carried the tube of plastic wood round in his pocket.”

“So he might. Together with the bit of parasol and the stiletto, pausing in mid-bellow to fix the job.”

“Gah! How about him just taking the stuff in his pocket to the Metronome and fixing everything there?”

“Oh Lord! When? How?”

“Lavatory?” Fox suggested hopefully.

“And when did he put the weapon in the gun? Skelton looked down the barrel just before they started playing, don’t forget.”

The car had stopped in a traffic jam in Piccadilly. Fox contemplated the Green Park with disapproval, Alleyn still kept his eyes shut. Big Ben struck seven.

“By Gum!” Fox said, bringing his palm down on his knee. “By Gum, how about this? How about his lordship in his damn-your-eyes fashion fitting the weapon into the gun while he sat there behind his drums? In front of everybody, while one of the other turns was on? It’s amazing what you can do when you brazen it out. What’s that yarn they’re always quoting, sir? I’ve got it. The Purloined Letter. Proving that if you make a thing obvious enough nobody notices it?”

Alleyn opened one eye. “The Purloined Letter,” he said. He opened the other eye. “Fox, my cabbage, my rare edition, my objet d’art, my own especial bit of bijouterie, be damned if I don’t think you’ve caught an idea. Come on. Let’s further think of this.”

They talked intensively until the car pulled up, in a cul-de-sac off Coventry Street, before Alleyn’s flat.

Early sunlight streamed into the little entrance hall. Beneath a Benozzo Gozzoli, a company of dahlias, paper-white in a blue bowl, cast translucent shadows on a white parchment wall. Alleyn looked about him contentedly.

“Troy’s under orders not to get up till eight,” he said. “You take first whack at the bath, Fox, while I have a word with her. Use my razor. Wait a bit.” He disappeared and returned with towels. “There’ll be something to eat at half-past nine,” he said. “The visitors’ room’s all yours, Fox. Sleep well.”

“Very kind, I’m sure,” said Fox. “May I send my compliments to Mrs. Alleyn, sir?”

“She’ll be delighted to receive them. See you later.”

Troy was awake in her white room, sitting up with her head aureoled in short locks of hair. “Like a faun,” Alleyn said, “or a bronze dahlia. Are you well this morning?”

“Bouncing, thanks. And you?”

“As you see. Unhousel’d, unanel’d and un-everything that’s civilized.”

“A poor state of affairs,” said Troy. “You look like the gentleman in that twenty-foot canvas in the Luxembourg. Boiled shirt in dents and gazing out over Paris through lush curtains. I think it’s called ‘The Hopeless Dawn’! His floozy is still asleep on an elephantine bed, you remember.”