‘I rather think he started in the RAF and then drifted on and off the boards until he got a big break in Cellar Stairs. He was out of a shop, he once told me, for so long that he got jobs as a lorry-driver, a steward and a waiter in a strip-tease joint. He said he took more in tips than he ever made speaking lines.’

‘When was that?’

‘Just before his break, he said. About six years ago. He signed off one job and before signing on for another took a trip round the agents and landed star-billing in Cellar Stairs. Such is theatre.’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘Is that all?’ Peregrine asked after a silence.

‘I’m going to ask you to do something else for me. I know you’ve got the change of casting and internal affairs on your hands but as soon as you can manage it I wonder if you’d take an hour to think back over your encounters with Mr Conducis and your adventures of last night, and note down everything you can remember. And any other item, by the way, that you may have overlooked in the excitement.’

‘Do you really think Conducis has got anything to do with last night?’

‘I’ve no idea. He occurs. He’ll have to be found irrelevant before we may ignore him. Will you do this?’

‘I must say it’s distasteful.’

‘So,’ said Alleyn, ‘is Jobbins’s corpse.’

‘Whatever happened,’ Peregrine said, looking sick, ‘and whoever overturned the bronze dolphin, I don’t believe it was deliberate, cold-blooded murder. I believe he saw Jobbins coming at him and overturned the pedestal in a sort of blind attempt to stop him. That’s what I think and my God,’ Peregrine said, ‘I must say I do not welcome an invitation to have any part in hunting him down: whoever it was, the boy or anyone else.’

‘All right. And if it wasn’t the boy, what about the boy? How do you fit him in as a useful buffer between your distaste and the protection of the common man? How do you think the boy came to be dropped over the circle? And believe me he was dropped. He escaped, by a-hundred-to-one chance, being spilt like an egg over the stalls. Yes,’ Alleyn said, watching Peregrine, ‘that’s a remark in bad taste, isn’t it? Murder’s a crime in bad taste. You’ve seen it, now. You ought to know.’ He waited for a moment and then said, ‘That was cheating and I apologize.’

Peregrine said: ‘You needn’t be so bloody upright. It’s nauseating.’

‘All right. Go away and vomit. But if you have second thoughts, sit down and write out every damn’ thing you remember of Conducis and all the rest of it. And now, if you want to go – go. Get the hell out of it.’

‘Out of my own office, I’d have you remember. To kick my heels on the landing.’