‘I think,’ Alleyn said, ‘that the treasure has arrived. Will you stay here for a breather? Or come and receive it?’

‘I’ll come.’

When they reached the foyer, Emily and Jeremy Jones and the assistant from the museum had arrived. The assistant carried a metal case. Winter Morris had run downstairs to meet them. They all went up to the office and the whole affair became rather formal and portentous. The assistant was introduced to everybody. He laid his metal case on Peregrine’s desk, unlocked and opened it and stood back.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, looking round the little group and settling on Peregrine, ‘we should have formal possession taken. If you will just examine the contents and accept them as being in good order.’

‘Jeremy’s the expert,’ Peregrine said. ‘He must know every stitch and stain on the glove by this time, I should think.’

‘Indeed, yes,’ said the assistant warmly. ‘Mr Jones, then – will you?’

Jeremy said: ‘I’d love to.’

He removed the little desk from the case and laid it on the desk.

Peregrine caught Alleyn’s eye. ‘Stained, as you see,’ he murmured, ‘with water. They say: sea-water.’

Jeremy opened the desk. His delicate, nicotine-stained fingers folded back the covering tissues and exposed the little wrinkled glove and two scraps of documents.

‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Shall I?’

‘Please do.’

With great delicacy he lifted them from their housing and laid them on the desk.

‘And this,’ said the assistant pleasantly, ‘is when I bow myself out. Here is an official receipt, Mr Morris, if you will be good enough to sign it.’

While Morris was doing this Peregrine said to Alleyn: ‘Come and look.’

Alleyn moved forward. He noticed as he did so that Peregrine stationed himself beside Miss Emily Dunne, that there was a glint of fanaticism in the devouring stare that Jeremy Jones bent upon the glove, that Winter Morris expanded as if he had some proprietary rights over it and that Emily Dunne appeared to unfold a little at the approach of Peregrine. Alleyn then stooped over the notes and the glove and wished that he could have been alone. There could, at such a moment, be too much anticipation, too much pumping up of appropriate reactions. The emotion the relics were expected to arouse was delicate, chancy and tenuous. It was not much good thinking: ‘But the Hand of Glory moved warmly across that paper and four centuries ago a small boy’s sick fist filled out that glove and somewhere between then and now a lady called M. E. wrote a tidy little memorandum for posterity.’ Alleyn found himself wishing very heartily that Peregrine’s play would perform the miracle of awareness which would take the sense of death away from Shakespeare’s note and young Hamnet’s glove.

He looked up at Peregrine. ‘Thank you for letting me come so close,’ he said.

‘You must see them safely stowed.’

‘If I may.’