‘Yes. Of course. I forgot.’

‘If you’ll just wait down here.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

The sergeant was not long on the landing. Peregrine could not help looking up at him and saw that, like himself, the sergeant did not go beyond the top step. He returned and went to the telephone. As he passed Peregrine he said: ‘Very nasty, sir, isn’t it,’ in a preoccupied voice.

Peregrine couldn’t hear much of what the sergeant said into the telephone. ‘Some kind of caretaker – Jobbins – and a young lad – looks like it. Very good, sir. Yes. Yes. Very good’: and then after a pause and in a mumble of words, one that came through very clearly.

‘ – robbery – ’

Never in the wide world would Peregrine have believed it of himself that a shock, however acute or a sight however appalling, could have so bludgeoned his wits. There, there on the wall opposite the one in which the treasure was housed, shone the tell-tale square of reflected light and there above his head as he stood on the stairs had been the exposed casket – exposed and brightly lit when it should have been shut off and –

He gave a kind of stifled cry and started up the stairs.

‘Just a moment, sir. If you please.’

‘The glove,’ Peregrine said. ‘The letters and the glove. I must see. I must look.’

The sergeant was beside him. A great hand closed without undue force round his upper arm.

‘All right, sir. All right. But you can’t go up there yet, you know. You join your young lady and the sick kiddy. And if you’re referring to the contents of that glassed-in cabinet up there, I can tell you right away. It’s been opened from the back and they seem to have gone.’

Peregrine let out an incoherent cry and blundered into the stalls to tell Emily.

For him and for Emily the next half hour was one of frustration, confusion and despair. They had to collect themselves and give statements to the sergeant who entered them at an even pace in his notebook. Peregrine talked about hours and duties and who ought to be informed and Mr Greenslade and Mr Conducis, and he stared at the sergeant’s enormous forefinger, flattened across the image of a crown on a blue cover. Peregrine didn’t know who Jobbins’s next-of-kin might be. He said, as if that would help: ‘He was a nice chap. He was a bit of a character. A nice chap.’

The theatre continually acquired more police: plainclothes, unhurried men, the most authoritative of whom was referred to by the sergeant as the Div-Super and addressed as Mr Gibson. Peregrine and Emily heard him taking a statement from Hawkins who cried very much and said it wasn’t a fair go.