‘It may be a valuable painting and it may be a forgery.’

‘I’ll be damned!’

‘Now, all I want to know, and I hope you’ll see your way to telling me, is whether, on thinking it over, you can remember seeing the roll of prints in that cupboard before yesterday.’

‘What I meantersay, no. No, I can’t. No.’

‘Had you never opened the cupboard, or sideboard is it, since you bought it?’

‘No. I can’t say fairer than that, mister, can I? No. Not me, I never.’

‘May I look at it?’

He grumbled a little but finally led them out to his yard where the very dregs of his collection mouldered. The sideboard was a vast Edwardian piece executed in pitchpine with the cupboard in the middle. Alleyn tried the door which had warped and only opened to a hard wrench and a screech that compared favourably with that of the front door.

‘She was nosey,’ Mr Bagg offered. ‘Had to open everything she saw. Had a job with that one. Still nothing would do—nosey.’

‘And there it was.’

‘That’s correct, mister. There it was. And there it wasn’t if you can understand, three days before.’

‘What?’

‘Which I won’t deceive you, mister. While my old woman was looking over the stock out here, Monday, she opened that cupboard and she mentions the same to me when them two Yanks had gone and she says it wasn’t there then.’

‘Why couldn’t you tell us at once, Jo?’ Mr Tillottson asked more in resignation than in anger.

‘You arst, you know you did, or this gentleman which is all one, arst if I never opened the cupboard and I answered truthfully that I never. Now then!’

‘All right, Jo, all right. That’s all we wanted to know.’

‘Not quite,’ Alleyn said. ‘I wonder, Mr Bagg, if you’ve any idea of how the bundle could have got there. Have you anybody working for you? A boy?’

‘Boy! Don’t mention Boy to me. Runaway knockers and ringers, the lot of them. I wouldn’t have Boys on me property, not if they paid me.’

‘Is the gate from this yard to the road unlocked during the day?’

‘Yes, it is unlocked. To oblige.’

‘Have many people been in over the last two days, would you say?’

Not many, it appeared. His customers, as a general rule came into the shop. All the stuff in the yard was of a size or worthlessness that made it unpilferable. It was evident that anybody with a mind to it could wander round the yard without Mr Bagg being aware of their presence. Under persuasion he recalled one or two locals who had drifted in and bought nothing. Alleyn delicately suggested that perhaps Mrs Bagg—?