‘Do you want the car, Jer? I’m going to the Yard now,’ Peregrine said and explained why. Jeremy remarked that Peregrine was welcome to the car and added that he was evidently quite the whitehaired Trusty of the Establishment. He stood in the middle of the room and watched them go.

‘He is in a rage,’ Emily said as they went to the car.

‘I don’t know what he’s in but he’s bloody lucky it’s not the lock-up. Come on.’

IV

Alleyn put down Peregrine’s report and gave it a definitive slap. ‘It’s useful, Fox,’ he said. ‘You’d better read it.’

He dropped it on the desk before his colleague, filled his pipe and strolled over to the window. Like Peregrine Jay, an hour earlier, he looked down at the Thames and he thought how closely this case clung to the river as if it had been washed up by the incoming tide and left high-and-dry for their inspection. Henry Jobbins of Phipps Passage was a waterside character if ever there was one.

Peregrine Jay and Jeremy Jones were not far east along the Embankment. Opposite them The Dolphin pushed up its stage-house and flagstaff with a traditional flourish on Bankside. Behind Tabard Lane in the Borough lurked Mrs Blewitt while her terrible Trevor, still on the South Bank, languished in St Terence’s. And as if to top it off, he thought idly, here we are at the Yard, hard by the river.

‘But with Conducis,’ Alleyn muttered, ‘we move West and, I suspect, a good deal further away than Mayfair.’

He looked at Fox who, with eyebrows raised high above his spectacles in his stuffy reading expression, concerned himself with Peregrine’s report.

The telephone rang and Fox reached for it. ‘Super’s room,’ he said. ‘Yes? I’ll just see.’

He laid his great palm across the mouthpiece. ‘It’s Miss Destiny Meade,’ he said, ‘for you.’

‘Is it, by gum! What’s she up to, I wonder. All right. I’d better.’

‘Look,’ cried Destiny when he had answered. ‘I know you’re a kind kind man.’

‘Do you?’ Alleyn said. ‘How?’

‘I have a sixth sense about people. Now, you won’t laugh at me will you? Promise.’

‘I’ve no inclination to do so, believe me.’

‘And you won’t slap me back. You’ll come and have a delicious little dinky at six, or even earlier or whenever it suits and tell me I’m being as stupid as an owl. Now, do, do, do, do, do. Please, please, please.’

‘Miss Meade,’ Alleyn said, ‘it’s extremely kind of you but I’m on duty and I’m afraid I can’t.’

‘On duty! But you’ve been on duty all day. That’s worse than being an actor and you can’t possibly mean it.’

‘Have you thought of something that may concern this case?’