‘Yes. We’ll have to get hold of something about Friday night. Damn it all, the studio is built into the wall, and the window opens on the lane. Surely to Heaven someone must have passed by that evening and heard voices if Garcia had the girl in the place with him.’

‘And how did he get his stuff away on Friday night or Saturday morning? They’ve tried all the carriers for miles around.’

‘I know, Brer Fox, I know. Well, on we go. We’ve got to get all these people’s time-tables from Friday noon till Sunday evening. What about Bailey? I’d better see him first, I suppose.’

Bailey came in with his usual air of mulish displeasure and reported that they had finished in the studio. They had gone over everything for prints, had photographed the scratched window-sill, measured and photographed the car’s prints and footprints in the lane, and taken casts of them. They had found the key of the studio hanging on a nail outside the door. It was smothered in prints. Under the pillow was an empty whisky bottle. On the window-sill one set of prints occurred many times, and seemed to be superimposed on most of the others. He had found traces of clay with these prints, and with those on the bottle.

‘Those will be Garcia’s,’ said Alleyn. ‘He worked in the window.’

In the junk-room Bailey had found a mass of jars, brushes, bottles of turpentine and oil, costumes, lengths of materials, a spear, an old cutlass, and several shallow dishes that smelt of nitric acid. There was also what Bailey described as ‘a sort of mangle affair with a whale of a heavy chunk of metal and a couple of rollers.’

‘An etching press,’ said Alleyn.

‘There’s a couple of stains on the floor of the junkroom,’ continued Bailey. ‘Look like nitric-acid stains. They’re new. I can’t find any nitric acid anywhere, though. I’ve looked in all the bottles and jars.’

‘Um!’ said Alleyn, and made a note of it.

‘There’s one other thing,’ said Bailey. He opened a bag he had brought in with him, and out of it he took a small box which he handed to Alleyn.

‘Hullo,’ said Alleyn. ‘This is the bonne-bouche, is it?’

He opened the little box and held it under the lamp. Inside was a flattened greenish-grey pellet.

‘Clay,’ said Alleyn. ‘Where was it?’

‘In the folds of that silk stuff that was rigged on the platform,’ said Bailey, staring morosely at his boots.

‘I see,’ said Alleyn softly. ‘Look here, Fox.’

Fox joined him. They could both see quite clearly that the flattened surface of the pellet was delicately scrolled by minute holes and swirling lines.

‘A nice print,’ said Fox, ‘only half there, but very sharp what there is.’

‘If the prints on the sill are Garcia’s,’ said Bailey, ‘that’s Garcia’s too.’

There was a silence.