Alleyn knew about the terms of the Will and about Joan Hart getting the wearing apparel. Indeed Peregrine would have betted Alleyn knew as much as he did about Shakespearian scholarship and was as familiar with the plays as he was himself.

For his part, Alleyn liked this strained, intelligent and modest young man. He hoped Peregrine had written and produced a good play. Alleyn asked one or two questions and since he was a trained investigator and was personally attracted by the matter in hand, Peregrine found himself talking about his work with an ease that he would never have thought possible on a ten minutes’ acquaintance. He began to speak quickly and excitedly, his words tumbling over each other. His love of The Dolphin welled up into his voice.

‘Shall we go backstage?’ he said. ‘Or – wait a moment. I’ll take the Iron up and you can see Jeremy Jones’s set for the first act.’

He left Alleyn in the stalls, went through the pass-door, and sent up the elegantly painted fireproof curtain. He then moved onstage and faced the house. He had run up the pass-door passage very quickly and his blood pounded in his ears. Nervous exhaustion, wasn’t it called? He even felt a bit dizzy.

The cleaners upstairs had unshuttered a window and a shaft of sunlight struck down upon the stage. It was peopled by dancing motes.

‘Is anything the matter?’ an unusually deep voice asked quite close at hand. Alleyn had come down the centre aisle. Peregrine, dazzled, thought he was leaning on the rail of the orchestra well.

‘No – 1 mean – no nothing. It’s just that I was reminded of my first visit to The Dolphin.’

Was it because the reminder had been so abrupt or because over the last week Peregrine had eaten very little and slept hardly at all that he felt so monstrously unsure of himself? Alleyn wouldn’t have thought it was possible for a young man to turn any whiter in the face than Peregrine already was but, somehow he now contrived to do so. He sat down on Jeremy’s Elizabethan dower chest and wiped his hand across his mouth. When he looked up Alleyn stood in front of him. ‘Just where the hole was,’ Peregrine thought.

He said: ‘Do you know, underneath your feet there’s a little stone well with a door. It was there that the trap used to work. Up and down, you know, for Harlequin and Hamlet’s Ghost and I dare say for a Lupino or a Lane of that vintage. Or perhaps both. Oh, dear.’

‘Stay where you are for the moment. You’ve been over-doing things.’

‘Do you think so? I don’t know. But I tell you what. Through all the years after the bomb that well gradually filled with stinking water and then one morning I nearly drowned in it.’