‘Well, perhaps he’ll turn up and brazen it out. He doesn’t know he dropped the pellet of clay with his thumb-print. He doesn’t know Miss Lee overheard his conversations with Sonia. He doesn’t know Sonia told anyone she was going to have his child. He’ll think the motive won’t appear.’

‘He’ll know what will appear at the post-mortem. What’s worrying me is the double aspect of the crime, if Garcia’s the criminal. There’s no reason to suppose Malmsley lied about giving Garcia the opium. It’s the sort of thing he’d suppress if he could. Very well. The planning of the murder and the laying of the trap might have been done under the influence of a pipe or more of opium. The subsequent business with the caravan has every appearance of the work of a cool and clear-headed individual.’

‘Someone else in it?’

‘Who?’

‘Gawd knows,’ said Fox.

‘Meanwhile Garcia does not appear.’

‘Do you think he may have got out of the country?’

‘I don’t know. He had a hundred pounds.’

‘Where d’you get that, chief?’

‘From Miss Bobbie O’Dawne. Sonia gave him the hundred pounds she got from Basil Pilgrim.’

‘I’ve fixed up with the people at the ports,’ said Fox. ‘He won’t get by, now. But has he already slipped through? That’s what’s worrying me.’

‘If he left Tatler’s End House on his flat feet in the early hours of Saturday morning,’ said Alleyn, ‘we’ll pick up his track.’

‘If?’

‘It’s the blasted psychology of the brute that’s got me down,’ said Alleyn with unusual violence. ‘We’ve got a very fair picture of Garcia from all these people. They all agree that he lives entirely for his work, that he will sacrifice himself and everyone else to his work, that his work is quite remarkably good. I can’t see a man of this type deliberately committing a crime that would force him to give up the biggest job he has ever undertaken.’

‘But if the opium’s to blame? Not to mention the whisky?’

‘If they’re to blame I don’t think he’s responsible for the rest of the business with the caravan. He’d either sleep it off there in the studio or wander away without taking any particular pains to cover his tracks. In that case we’d have found him by now.’

‘Then do you think there’s any likelihood of someone else driving him up to London and hiding him in this blasted warehouse? What about the man Ethel and her boy saw in the lane? Say it wasn’t Garcia, but someone else. Could he have found Garcia under the weather and offered to drive him up to London with the stuff and return the caravan?’