‘She’s not sick in the mornings any more. We want you to be a godfather. Will you, Alleyn?’

‘I should be charmed.’

‘Alleyn!’

‘What?’

‘You might tell me a bit about this case. Somebody’s murdered the model, haven’t they?’

‘Quite possibly.’

‘How?’

‘Stuck a knife through the throne so that when she took the pose—’

‘She sat on it?’

‘Don’t be an ass. She lay on it and was stabbed to the heart, poor little fool!’

‘Who’s the prime suspect?’

‘A bloke called Garcia, who has been her lover, was heard to threaten her, has possibly got tired of her, and has probably been living on her money.’

‘Is he here?’

‘No. He’s gone on a walking tour to Lord knows where, and is expected to turn up at an unknown warehouse in London in the vaguely near future, to execute a marble statue of “Comedy and Tragedy” for a talkie house.’

‘D’you think he’s bolted?’

‘I don’t know. He seems to be one of those incredible and unpleasant people with strict aesthetic standards, and no moral ones. He appears to be a genius. Now shut up. Here comes another of his fellow-students.’

Fox came in with Phillida Lee.

Alleyn, who had only met her across the dining-room table, was rather surprised to see how small she was. She wore a dull red dress covered in a hand-painted design. It was, he realized, deliberately unfashionable and very deliberately interesting. Miss Lee’s hair was parted down the centre and dragged back from her forehead with such passionate determination that the corners of her eyes had attempted to follow it. Her face, if left to itself, would have been round and eager, but the austerities of the Slade school had superimposed upon it a careful expression of detachment. When she spoke one heard a faint undercurrent of the Midlands. Alleyn asked her to sit down. She perched on the edge of a chair and stared fixedly at him.

‘Well, Miss Lee,’ Alleyn began in his best official manner, ‘we shan’t keep you very long. I just want to have an idea of your movements during the weekend.’

‘How ghastly!’ said Miss Lee.

‘But why?’

‘I don’t know. It’s all so terrible. I feel I’ll never be quite the same again. The shock. Of course, I ought to try and sublimate it, I suppose, but it’s so difficult.’

‘I shouldn’t try to do anything but be common-sensical if I were you,’ said Alleyn.

‘But I thought they used psycho methods in the police!’

‘At all events we don’t need to apply them to the matter in hand.

You left Tatler’s End House on Friday afternoon by the three o’clock bus?’

‘Yes.’

‘With Mr Ormerin and Mr Watt Hatchett?’

‘Yes,’ agreed Miss Lee, looking self-conscious and maidenly.

‘What did you do when you got to London?’