Alleyn thanked him and returned the scalpel, the pocket-book and drawing materials. Fox laid the other things aside, sat down and opened his note-book.

“Next,” Alleyn said, “I think I’d better ask you what your official job is in this theatre. I see by the programme—”

“The programme,” Jacko said, “is euphemistic. ‘Assistant to Adam Poole,’ is it not? Let us rather say: Dogsbody in Ordinary to the Vulcan Theatre. Henchman Extraordinary to Mr. Adam Poole. At the moment, dresser to Miss Helena Hamilton. Confidant to all and sundry. Johannes Factotum and not without bells on. Le Vulcan, c’est moi, in a shabby manner of speaking. Also: j’y suis, j’y reste. I hope.”

“Judging by this scenery,” Alleyn rejoined, “and by an enchanting necklace which I think is your work, there shouldn’t be much doubt about that. But your association with the management goes farther back than the Vulcan, doesn’t it?”

“Twenty years,” Jacko said, licking his cigarette paper. “For twenty years I improvise my role of Pantaloon for them. Foolishness, but such is my deplorable type. The eternal doormat. What can I do for you?”

Alleyn said: “You can tell me if you still think Bennington committed suicide.”

Jacko lit his cigarette. “Certainly,” he said. “You are wasting your time.”

“Was he a vain man?”

“Immensely. And he knew he was artistically sunk.”

“Vain in his looks?”

“But yes, yes!” Jacko said with great emphasis, and then looked very sharply at Alleyn. “Why, of his looks?”

“Did he object to his make-up in this play? It seemed to me a particularly repulsive one.”

“He disliked it, yes. He exhibited the vanity of the failing actor in this. Always, always he must be sympathetic. Fortunately Adam insisted on the make-up.”

“I think you told me that you noticed his face was shining with sweat before he went for the last time to his room?”

“I did.”

“And you advised him to remedy this? You even looked into his room to make sure?”

“Yes,” Jacko agreed after a pause, “I did.”

“So when you had gone he sat at his dressing-table and carefully furbished up his repellent make-up as if for the curtain-call. And then gassed himself?”

“The impulse perhaps came very suddenly.” Jacko half-closed, his eyes and looked through their sandy lashes at his cigarette smoke. “Ah, yes,” he said softly. “Listen. He repairs his face. He has a last look at himself. He is about to get up when his attention sharpens. He continues to stare. He sees the ruin of his face. He was once a coarsely handsome fellow, was Ben, with a bold rakehelly air. The coarseness has increased, but where, he asks himself, are the looks? Pouches, grooves, veins, yellow eyeballs — and all emphasized most hideously by the make-up. This is what he has become, he thinks, he has become the man he has been playing. And his heart descends into his belly. He knows despair and he makes up his mind. There is hardly time to do it. In a minute or two he will be called. So quickly, quickly he lies on the floor, with trembling hands he pulls his coat over his head and puts the end of the gas tube in his mouth.”

“You knew how he was found, then?”

“Clem told me. I envisage everything. He enters a world of whirling dreams. And in a little while he is dead. I see it very clearly.”

“Almost as if you’d been there,” Alleyn said lightly. “Is this, do you argue, his sole motive? What about the quarrels that had been going on? The change of cast at the last moment? The handing over of Miss Gainsford’s part to Miss Tarne? He was very much upset by that, wasn’t he?”

Jacko doubled himself up like an ungainly animal and squatted on a stool. “Too much has been made of the change of casting,” he said. “He accepted it in the end. He made a friendly gesture. On thinking it over I have decided we were all wrong to lay so much emphasis on this controversy.” He peered sideways at Alleyn. “It was the disintegration of his artistic integrity that did it,” he said. “I now consider the change of casting to be of no significance.”

Alleyn looked him very hard in the eye. “And that,” he said, “is where we disagree. I consider it to be of the most complete significance: the key, in fact, to the whole puzzle of his death.”

“I cannot agree,” said Jacko. “I am sorry.”

Alleyn waited for a moment and then — and for the last time — asked the now familiar question.

“Do you know anything about a man called Otto Brod?”

There was a long silence. Jacko’s back was bent and his head almost between his knees.

“I have heard of him,” he said at last.

“Did you know him?”

“I have never met him. Never.”

“Perhaps you have seen some of his work?”

Jacko was silent.

“Können Sie Deutsch lesen?”

Fox looked up from his notes with an expression of blank surprise. They heard a car turn in from Carpet Street and come up the side lane with a chime of bells. It stopped and a door slammed.

“Jawohl,” Jacko whispered.

The outside doors of the dock were rolled back. The sound resembled stage-thunder. Then the inner and nearer doors opened heavily and someone walked round the back of the set. Young Lamprey came through the Prompt entrance. “The mortuary van, sir,” he said,

“All right. They can go ahead.”

He went out again. There was a sound of voices and of boots on concrete. A cold draught of night air blew in from the dock and set the borders creaking. A rope tapped against canvas and a sighing breath wandered about the grid. The doors were rolled together. The engine started up and, to another chime of bells, Bennington made his final exit from the Vulcan. The theatre settled back into its night-watch.

Jacko’s cigarette had burnt his lip. He spat it out and got slowly to his feet.

“You have been very clever,” he said. He spoke as if his lips were stiff with cold.

“Did Bennington tell you how he would, if necessary, play his trump card?”

“Not until after he had decided to play it.”

“But you had recognized the possibility?”

“Yes.”

Alleyn nodded to Fox, who shut his note-book, removed his spectacles and went out.

“What now?” Jacko asked,

“All on,” Alleyn said. “A company call. This is the curtain speech, Mr. Doré.”

Lamprey had called them and then retired. They found an empty stage awaiting them. It was from force of habit, Martyn supposed, that they took up, for the last time, their after-rehearsal positions on the stage. Helena lay back in her deep chair with Jacko on the floor at her feet. When he settled himself there, she touched his cheek and he turned his lips to her hand.

Martyn wondered if he was ill. He saw that she looked at him and made his clown’s grimace. She supposed that, like everybody else, he was merely exhausted. Darcey and Gay Gainsford sat together on the small settee and Parry Percival on his upright chair behind them. At the back, Dr. Rutherford lay on the sofa with a newspaper spread over his face. Martyn had returned to her old seat near the Prompt corner and Poole to his central chair facing the group. “We have come out of our rooms,” Martyn thought, “like rabbits from their burrows.” Through the Prompt entrance she could see Fred Badger, lurking anxiously in the shadows.

Alleyn and his subordinates stood in a group near the dock doors. On the wall close by them was the baize rack with criss-crossed tapes in which two receipts and a number of commercial cards were exhibited. Fox had read them all. He now replaced the last and looked through the Prompt corner to the stage.

“Are they all on?” Alleyn asked.

“All present and correct, sir.”

“Do you think I’m taking a very risky line, Br’er Fox?”

“Well, sir,” said Fox uneasily, “it’s a very unusual sort of procedure, isn’t it?”

“It’s a very unusual case,” Alleyn rejoined, and after a moment’s reflection he took Fox by the arm. “Come on, old trooper,” he said. “Let’s get it over.”