‘There you go!’ cried Legge, half-crying but still with that curious air of admonishment. ‘There you go, you see! Straight off. Asking me things like that. It’s atrocious.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Alleyn.

‘Nonsense!’ echoed Legge, in a sort of fury. He shook his finger in Alleyn’s face. ‘Don’t you talk like that to me, sir. Do you know who I am? Do you know that before my misfortune I was the greatest power in English finance? Let me tell you that there are only three men living who fully comprehended the events that brought about the holocaust of ’29 and ’30, and I am one of them. If I had not put my trust in titled imbeciles, if I had not been betrayed by a skulking moron, I should be in a position to send for you when I wished to command your dubious services, or dismiss them with a contemptuous fiddle-de-dee.’

This astonishing and ridiculous word was delivered with such venom that Alleyn was quite taken aback. Into his thoughts, with the appropriate logic of topsy-turvy, popped the memory of a jigging line:

‘To shirk the task were fiddle-de-dee.

To shirk the task were fiddle-de, fiddle-de—’

He pulled himself together, cautioned and tackled Mr Legge, and at last got a statement from him. He had spent the afternoon packing his books, papers and effects, and putting them in his car. He had intended to take the first load into his new room that evening. He had also written some letters. He offered frantically to show Alleyn the letters. Alleyn had already seen them and they amounted to nothing. He turned Legge over to Oates whose nose was now plugged with cotton-wool.

‘You’d better take him to the station,’ said Alleyn.

‘I demand bail,’ cried Legge in a trembling voice.

‘Mr Harper will see about that,’ said Alleyn. ‘You’re under arrest for a misdemeanour.’

‘I didn’t kill him. I know what you’re up to. It’s the beginning of the end. I swear—’

‘You are under arrest for assaulting police officers,’ said Alleyn wearily. ‘I will repeat the caution you have already heard.’

He repeated it and was devoutly thankful when Legge, in a condition of hysterical prostration, was led away. Harper, with Oates and his mate, was to drive him to Illington and lodge him in the police station.

‘The colonel’s at the station,’ said Harper acidly. ‘That was him on the telephone while you were upstairs. His car’s broken down again. Why, in his position and with all his money, he doesn’t—oh, well! He wants me to bring him back here or you to come in. Which’ll it be? The man’ll talk us all dotty, wherever he is.’

‘I’ll have another look at Fox,’ said Alleyn. ‘If he’s awake, I’ll get him into bed and then follow you into Illington. I’d like the doctor to see him again.’