‘Of course,’ said Bridget thoughtfully, ‘it’ll be different now. We could get married quite soon, even if he was at a hospital or something all day. He will have some money.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Alleyn, ‘yes.’

‘I mean I don’t want to be heartless,’ continued Bridget looking at him quite frankly, ‘but naturally one can’t help thinking of that. We’re terribly, terribly sorry about Bunchy. We couldn’t be sorrier. But he wasn’t young like us.’

Into Alleyn’s mind came suddenly the memory of a thinning head, leant sideways, of fat hands, of small feet turned inwards.

‘No,’ he said, ‘he wasn’t young like you.’

‘I think he was stupid and tiresome over Donald,’ Bridget went on in a high voice, ‘and I’m not going to pretend I don’t, although I am sorry I wasn’t friends with him last night. But all the same I don’t believe he’d have minded us thinking about the difference the money would make. I believe he would have understood that.’

‘I’m sure he would have understood.’

‘Well then, don’t look as if you’re thinking I’m hard and beastly.’

‘I don’t think you’re beastly and I don’t believe you are really very hard.’

‘Thank you for nothing,’ said Bridget and added immediately: ‘Oh, damn, I’m sorry.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Alleyn. ‘Good-bye.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Well?’

‘Nothing. Only, you make me feel shabby and it’s not fair. If there was anything I could do for Bunchy I’d do it. So would Donald, of course. But he’s dead. You can’t do anything for dead people.’

‘If they have been murdered you can try to catch the man that killed them.’

‘“An eye for an eye.” It doesn’t do them any good. It’s only savagery.’

‘Let the murderer asphyxiate someone else if it’s going to suit his book,’ said Alleyn. ‘Is that the idea?’

‘If there was any real thing we could do—’

‘How about Donald doing what his uncle wanted so much? Taking his medical? That is,’ said Alleyn quickly, ‘unless he really has got a genuine ambition in another direction. Not by way of Captain Withers’s night clubs.’

‘I’ve just said he might be a doctor, now, haven’t I?’

‘Yes,’ said Alleyn, ‘you have. So we’re talking in circles.’ His hand was on the door-knob.

‘I should have thought,’ said Bridget, ‘that as a detective you would have wanted to make me talk.’

Alleyn laughed outright.