Mr McCully got a key from behind a door, hooked an old tarpaulin over his shoulders and, talking incessantly, led the way out of the garage by a side door into a narrow alley.

It was now raining heavily. The alley smelt of soot, grease, and stagnant drainage. Water streamed down from defective gutters and splashed about their feet. The deadliness and squalor of the place seemed to close about them. Their footsteps echoed at the far end of the alley.

‘Nasty weather,’ said Mr McCully. ‘It’s only a step.’

They turned to the left into a wider lane that led back towards Cornwall Street, McCully stopped in front of a pair of rickety double-doors fastened with a padlock and chain.

‘Here we are, sir. Just half a tick and I’ll have her opened. She’s a bit stiff.’

While he fitted the key in the padlock Alleyn looked up the lane. He thought how like this was to a scene in a modern talking-picture of the realistic school. The sound of the rain, the grime streaked with running trickles, the distant mutter of traffic, and their own figures, black against grey—it was almost a Dostoievsky setting. The key grated in the lock, the chain rattled and McCully dragged the reluctant doors back in their grooves.

‘Darkish,’ he said. I’ll turn up the light.’

It was very dark inside the place they had come to. A greyness filtered through dirty skylights. The open doors left a patch of light on a wooden floor, but the far end was quite lost in shadow. McCully’s boots clumped over the boards.

‘I don’t just remember where the switch is,’ he said, and his voice echoed away into the shadows. Alleyn stood like a figure of stone in the entrance, waiting for the light. McCully’s hand fumbled along the wall. There was a click and a dull yellow globe, thick with dust, came to life just inside the door.

‘There we are, sir.’

Alleyn walked in.

The place at first looked almost empty. A few canvases stood at intervals with their faces to the wall. Half-way down there was a large studio easel, and beyond it, far away from the light, stood a packing-case with a few odd chairs and some shadowy bundles. Beyond that again, deep in shadow, Alleyn could distinguish the corner of a table. An acrid smell hung on the air. McCully walked on towards the dark.

‘Kind of lonesome, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Not much comfort about it. Bit of a smell, too. There was some storage batteries in here. Wonder if he broke one of them.’

‘Wait a moment,’ said Alleyn, but McCully did not hear him.

‘There’s another light at this end. I’ll find the switch in a minute,’ he said. ‘It’s very dark, isn’t it? Cripes, what a stink. You’d think he’d—’