‘The usual routine and a very tedious affair it’s likely to prove. There may be useful prints on the pedestal or the dolphin itself but I’m inclined to think that the best we can hope for there is negative evidence. There may be prints on the safe but so far Sergeant Bailey has found none. The injuries to the boy’s face are interesting.’

‘If he recovers consciousness,’ Peregrine said, ‘he’ll tell the whole story.’

‘Not if he’s responsible,’ Mr Greenslade said obstinately.

‘Concussion,’ Alleyn said, ‘can be extremely tricky. In the meantime, of course, we’ll have to find out about all the members of the company and the front-of-house staff and so on.’

‘Find out?’

‘Their movements for one thing. You may be able to help us here,’ Alleyn said to Peregrine. ‘It seems that apart from the boy, you and Miss Dunne were the last to leave the theatre. Unless, of course, somebody lay doggo until you’d gone. Which may well be the case. Can you tell us anything about how and when and by what door the other members of the cast went out?’

‘I think I can,’ Peregrine said. He was now invested with the kind of haggard vivacity that follows emotional exhaustion: a febrile alertness such as he had often felt after some hideously protracted dress-rehearsal. He described the precautions taken at the close of every performance to ensure that nobody was left on the premises. A thorough search of the house was made by backstage and front-of-house staff. He was certain it would have been quite impossible for anybody in the audience to hide anywhere in the theatre.

He related rapidly and accurately how the stage-crew left the theatre in a bunch and how Gertrude Bracey and Marcus Knight went out together through the auditorium to escape the wet. They had been followed by Charles Random, who was alone and used the stage-door and then by Emily who stayed offstage with Peregrine.

‘And then,’ Peregrine said, ‘Destiny Meade and Harry Grove came out with a clutch of friends. They were evidently going on to a party. They went down the stage-door alley and I heard Harry call out that he’d fetch something or another and Destiny tell him not to be too long. And it was then – I’d come back from having a look at the weather – it was then that I fancied – ’ He stopped.

‘Yes?’

‘I thought that the pass-door from stage to front-of-house moved. It was out of the tail of my eye, sort of. If I’m right and I think I am, it must have been that wretched kid, I suppose.’

‘But you never saw him?’

‘Never. No. Only heard him.’ And Peregrine described how he had gone out to the front and his subsequent interview with Jobbins. Alleyn took him over this again because, so he said, he wanted to make sure he’d got it right. ‘You shaped up to chasing the boy, did you? After you heard him catcall and slam the stage-door?’