Harry’s jaw dropped. ‘The wind,’ he said, ‘to coin a phrase, has departed from my sails. I’d better chug off under my own steam. I’m sorry, Mr Alleyn. Exit actor, looking crestfallen.’

‘No, wait a bit, as you are here. I’d like to know what bearing you think this might have on the case. Sit down. Confide in us.’

‘May I?’ Harry said, surprised. ‘Thank you, I’d like to.’

He sat down and looked fully at Alleyn. ‘I don’t always mean to behave as badly as in fact I do,’ he said and went on quickly: ‘About the coat. I don’t think I attached any great importance to it. But just now you did rather seem to make a point of what he was wearing. I couldn’t quite see what the point was but it seemed to me I’d better tell you that until Friday evening the coat had been mine.’

‘Why on earth didn’t you say so there and then?’

Harry flushed scarlet. His chin lifted and he spoke rapidly as if by compulsion. ‘Everybody,’ he said, ‘was fabulously amusing about my coat. In the OK hearty, public-school manner, you know. Frightfully nice chaps. Jolly good show. I need not, of course, tell you that I am not even a product of one of our dear old minor public schools. Or, if it comes to that, of a dear old minor grammar school like the Great King Dolphin.’

‘Knight?’

‘That’s right but it’s slipped his memory.’

‘You do dislike him, don’t you?’

‘Not half as heartily as he dislikes me,’ Harry said and gave a short laugh. ‘I know I sound disagreeable. You see before you, Superintendent, yet another slum kid with a chip like a Yule log on his shoulder. I take it out in clowning.’

‘But,’ Alleyn said mildly, ‘is your profession absolutely riddled with old Etonians?’

Harry grinned. ‘Well, no,’ he said. ‘But I assure you there are enough more striking and less illustrious OB ties to strangle all the extras in the battle scene for Armageddon. As a rank outsider I find the network nauseating. Sorry. No doubt you’re a product yourself. Of Eton, I mean.’

‘So you’re a post-Angry at heart? Is that it?’

‘Only sometimes. I compensate. They’re afraid of my tongue or I like to think they are.’

He waited for a moment and then said: ‘None of this, by the way and for what it’s worth, applies to Peregrine Jay. I’ve no complaints about him: he has not roused my lower-middle-class rancour and I do not try to score off him. He’s a gifted playwright, a good producer and a very decent citizen. Perry’s all right.’

‘Good. Let’s get back to the others. They were arrogant about your coat, you considered?’