Her eyes never left Alleyn’s face. ‘It’s about – ‘ she began and her voice resentfully indicated the presence of Mr Fox. ‘It’s about ME.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes. I’m afraid I must be terribly frank. Or no. Why do I say that? To you of all people who, of course, understand – ’ she executed a circular movement of her arm – ‘everything. I know you do. I wouldn’t have asked you if I hadn’t known. And you see I have nowhere to turn.’

‘Oh, surely!’

‘No. I mean that,’ she said with great intensity. ‘I mean it. Nowhere. No one. It’s all so utterly unexpected. Everything seemed to be going along quite naturally and taking the inevitable course. Because – I know you’ll agree with this – one shouldn’t – indeed one can’t resist the inevitable. One is fated and when this new thing came into our lives we both faced up to it, he and I, oh, over and over again. It’s like,’ she rather surprisingly added, ‘Antony and Cleopatra. I forget the exact line. I think, actually, that in the production it was cut but it puts the whole thing in a nutshell, and I told him so. Ah, Cleopatra,’ she mused and such was her beauty and professional expertise, that, there and then, lying (advantageously of course) on the sofa she became for a fleeting moment the Serpent of the old Nile. ‘But now,’ she added crossly as she indicated a box of cigarettes that was not quite within her reach, ‘now, with him turning peculiar and violent like this I feel I simply don’t know him. I can’t cope. As I told you on the telephone, I’m terrified.’

When Alleyn leant forward to light her cigarette he fancied that he caught a glint of appraisal and of wariness but she blinked, moved her face nearer to his and gave him a look that was a masterpiece.

‘Can you,’ Alleyn said, ‘perhaps come to the point and tell us precisely why and of whom you are frightened, Miss Meade?’

‘Wouldn’t one be? It was so utterly beyond the bounds of anything one could possibly anticipate. To come in almost without warning and I must tell you that of course he has his own key and by a hideous chance my married couple are out this afternoon. And then, after all that has passed between us to – to…’

She turned her head aside, swept back the heavy wing of her hair and superbly presented herself to Alleyn’s gaze.

‘Look,’ she said.

Unmistakably someone had slapped Miss Meade very smartly indeed across the right-hand rearward aspect of her face. She had removed the diamond ear-ring on this side but its pendant had cut her skin behind the point of the jaw and the red beginnings of a bruise showed across the cheek.

‘What do you think of that?’ she said.

‘Did Grove do this?’ Alleyn ejaculated.