‘I’m sorry, sir. I’ve only just taken this job myself and I don’t know the members by sight. If you ask at the office, sir, they’ll tell you.’

With a silent anathema on this ill chance Alleyn thanked the man and looked for the box-office. He found it beneath a large sunflower and surrounded by richer folds of silk. Alleyn peered into it and saw a young man in a beautiful dinner-jacket, morosely picking his teeth.

‘Good evening,’ said Alleyn.

The young man abandoned the toothpick with lightning sleight-of-hand.

‘Good evening, sir,’ he said brightly in a cultured voice.

‘May I speak to you for a moment—Mr—?’

The young man instantly looked very wary.

‘Well—ah—I am the manager. My name is Cuthbert.’

Alleyn slid his card through the peep-hole. The young man looked at it, turned even more wary, and said:

‘Perhaps if you wouldn’t mind walking round to the side door, Mr—Oh!—Inspector—ah!—Alleyn. Simmons!’

A cloakroom attendant appeared. On the way to the side door Alleyn tried his story again but neither the cloakroom attendant nor the commissionaire, who was recalled, knew Withers by sight. The attendant conducted Alleyn by devious ways into a little dim room behind the box-office. Here he found the manager.

‘It’s nothing very momentous,’ said Alleyn. ‘I want you to tell me, if you can, about what time Captain Maurice Withers arrived at this club last night—or rather this morning?’

He saw Mr Cuthbert glance quickly at an evening paper on which appeared a quarter-page photograph of Robert Gospell. During the second or two that elapsed before he replied, Alleyn heard again that heavy insistent thudding of the band.

‘I’m afraid I have no idea at all,’ said Mr Cuthbert at last.

‘That’s a pity,’ said Alleyn. ‘If you can’t tell me I suppose I’ll have to make rather a business of it. I’ll have to ask all your guests if they saw him and when and so on. I’m afraid I shall have to insist on seeing the book. I’m sorry. What a bore for you!’

Mr Cuthbert looked at him with the liveliest distaste.

‘You can understand,’ he began, ‘that in our position we have to be extremely tactful. Our guests expect it of us.’

‘Oh, rather,’ agreed Alleyn. ‘But there’s not going to be nearly such a fluster if you give me the information I want quietly, as there will be if I have to start asking all sorts of people all sorts of questions.’

Mr Cuthbert stared at his first finger-nail and then bit it savagely.

‘But if I don’t know,’ he said peevishly.

‘Then we’re just out of luck. I’ll try your commissionaire and—Simmons, is it? If that fails we’ll have to start on the guests.’

‘Oh, damn!’ ejaculated Mr Cuthbert. ‘Well, he came in late. I do remember that.’

‘How do you remember that, please?’

‘Because we had a crowd of people who came from—from the Marsdon House Ball at about half-past three or a quarter to four. And then there was a bit of a lull.’