‘The final departures? No, she didn’t. She simply bore out everything we’d already been told.’

‘She’s an observant little lady, isn’t she?’ said Fox.

‘Yes, Fox, she’s no fool, for all her tender qualms. And now we have a delightful job ahead of us. We’ve got to try to bamboozle, cajole, or bully Mrs Halcut-Hackett into giving away her best young man. A charming occupation.’

‘Will we be seeing the General, too? I suppose we’ll have to. I don’t think the other chaps will have tackled him. I told them not to touch any of our lot.’

‘Quite right,’ said Alleyn, with a sigh. ‘We shall be seeing the General. And here we are at Halkin Street. The Halcut-Hacketts of Halkin Street! An important collection of aspirates and rending consonants. The General first, I suppose.’

The General was expecting them. They walked through a hall which, though it had no tongue, yet it did speak of the most expensive and most fashionable house decorator in London. They were shown into a study smelling of leather and cigars and decorated with that pleasant sequence of prints of the Nightcap Steeplechase. Alleyn wondered if the General had stood with his cavalry sabre on the threshold of this room, daring the fashionable decorator to come on and see what he would get. Or possibly Mrs Halcut-Hackett, being an American, caused her husband’s study to be aggressively British. Alleyn and Fox waited for five minutes before they heard a very firm step and a loud cough. General Halcut-Hackett walked into the room.

‘Hullo! Afternoon! What!’ he shouted.

His face was terra-cotta, his moustache formidable, his eyes china blue. He was the original ramrod brass-hat, the subject of all army jokes kindly or malicious. It was impossible to believe his mind was as blank as his face would seem to confess. So true to type was he that he would have seemed unreal, a two-dimensional figure that had stepped from a coloured cartoon of a regimental dinner, had it not been for a certain air of solidity and a kind of childlike constancy that was rather appealing. Alleyn thought: ‘Now, he really is a simple soldier-man.’

‘Sit down,’ said General Halcut-Hackett. ‘Bad business! Damn blackguardly killer. Place is getting no better than Chicago. What are you fellows doing about it? What? Going to get the feller? What?’

‘I hope so, sir,’ said Alleyn.

‘Hope so! By Gad, I should hope you hope so. Well, what can I do for you?’

‘Answer one or two questions, if you will, sir.’

‘’Course I will. Bloody outrage. The country’s going to pieces in my opinion and this is only another proof of it. Men like Robert Gospell can’t take a cab without gettin’ the life choked out of them. What it amounts to. Well?’