‘We had tea and then we went to a theatre they called the Vortex, and it was just about the lousiest show I’ve ever had to sit through. Gosh! it gave me a pain in the neck, dinkum it did. Three blokes in a sewer nagging each other for two bloody hours, and they called it a play. If that’s a play give me the talkies in Aussie. They’ll do me. We met the chap that runs the place. One of these die-away queens that likes to kid himself he amounts to something. You won’t get me inside a theatre again.’

‘Have you never seen a flesh-and-blood show before?’

‘Naow, and I never will again. The talkies’ll do me.’

‘But I assure you the Vortex is no more like the genuine theatre than, shall we say Mr Malmsley’s drawings are like Miss Troy’s portraits.’

‘Is that a fact?’

‘Certainly. But we’re straying a little from the matter in hand. You spent Friday night at the Vortex and returned with Miss Lee to the Fulham Road?’

‘Yeah, that’s right. I took her home and then I went to my own place close by.’

‘Anyone see you come in?’

They plodded on. Hatchett could, if necessary, produce the sort of alibi that might hold together or might not. Alleyn gleaned enough material to enable him to verify the youth’s account of himself.

‘To return to Garcia,’ he said at last. ‘I want you to tell me if you have ever heard Garcia say anything about this warehouse he intends to use as a studio in London.’

‘I never had much to do with that bloke. I reckon he’s queer. If you talk to him, half the time he never seems to listen. I did say once I’d like to have a look when he started in on the marble. I reckon that statue’ll be a corker. He’s clever all right. D’you know what he said? He said he’d take care nobody knew where it was because he didn’t want any of this crowd pushing in when he was working. He did let out that it belonged to a bloke that’s gone abroad somewhere. I heard him tell the girl Sonia that much.’

‘I see. That’s no go, then. Now, on your bus trip to and from London, did you sit anywhere near Sonia Gluck?’