‘We’ll have to go delicately with Carrados. I wonder if the obscure lady will be there. The lady that nobody noticed but who, since she did not dance very much, may have fulfilled the traditional office of the onlooker. Then there’s the Halcut-Hackett game. We’ll have to get on with that as soon as possible. It links up with Withers.’

‘What sort of a lady is Mrs Halcut-Hackett? She came and saw you at the Yard, didn’t she, about the blackmail business?’

‘Yes, Fox, she did. She played the old, old game of pretending to be the friend of the victim. Still she had the pluck to come. That visit of hers marked the beginning of the whole miserable affair. You may be sure that I do not forget this. I asked Bunchy to help us find the blackmailer. If I hadn’t done that he’d be alive now, I suppose, unless … unless, my God! Donald killed his uncle for what he’d get out of it. If blackmail’s at the bottom of the murder, I’m directly responsible.’

‘Well, sir, if you’ll excuse me, I don’t think that’s a remark to get you or anyone else much further. Lord Robert wouldn’t have thanked you for it and that’s a fact. We don’t feel obliged to warn everybody who helps in a blackmail case that it’s liable to turn to murder. And why?’ continued Fox with the nearest approach to animation that Alleyn had ever seen in him. ‘Because up to now it never has.’

‘All right, Brer Fox,’ said Alleyn. ‘I’ll pipe down.’

And for the rest of the way to Marsdon House they were both silent.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Simple Soldier-man

MARSDON HOUSE had been put into a sort of cold-storage by the police. Dimitri’s men had done a certain amount of clearing up before Alleyn’s men arrived, but for the most part the great house seemed to be suffering from a severe form of carry-over. It smelt of stale cigarette butts. They were everywhere, bent double, stained red, stained brown, in ash-trays, fireplaces and waste-paper boxes; ground into the ballroom floor, dropped behind chairs, lurking in dirty cups and floating in a miserable state of disintegration among the stalks of dying flowers. Upstairs in the ladies’ dressing-room they lay in drifts of spilt powder, and in the green boudoir someone had allowed a cigarette to eat a charred track across the margin of a pie-crust table.

Alleyn and Fox stood in the green boudoir and looked at the telephone.