‘I see. You mean, of course, the difference of opinion with Mrs Rubrick, and her murder. Do you really believe that you’ll be worse off for these horrors? I’ve always had a notion that, if his craft has a sound core, an artist should ripen with experience, however beastly the experience may be at the time. But perhaps that’s a layman’s idea. Perhaps you had two remedies: your music and’—he looked out of the windows—‘all this. You chose the landscape. Is that it?’

‘They wouldn’t have me for the army.’

‘You aren’t yet eighteen, are you?’

‘They wouldn’t have me. Eyes and feet,’ said Cliff, as if the naming of these members was an offence against decency. ‘I can see as well as anybody, and I can muster the high country for three days without noticing my feet. That’s the army for you.’

‘So you mean to carry on mustering the high country and seeing as far through a brick wall as the next fellow?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Do you ever lend a hand at wool-sorting, or try to learn about it?’

‘I keep outside the shed. Always have.’

‘It’s a profitable job, isn’t it?’

‘Doesn’t appeal to me. I’d rather go up the hill on a muster.’

‘And—no music?’

Cliff shuffled his feet.

‘Why?’ Alleyn persisted. Cliff rubbed his hands across his face and shook his head. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I told you I can’t.’

‘Not since the evening in the annexe? When you played for an hour or more on a very disreputable old instrument. That was the night following the incident over the bottle of whisky, wasn’t it?’

More than at anything else, Alleyn thought, more than at the reminder of Florence Rubrick’s death, even, Cliff sickened at the memory of this incident. It had been a serio-comic episode. Markins indignant at the window, the crash of a bursting bottle and the reek of spirits. Alleyn remembered that the tragedies of adolescence were felt most often in the self-esteem, and he said: ‘I want you to explain this whisky story, but, before you do, you might just remind yourself that there isn’t a creature living who doesn’t carry within him the memory of some particular shabbiness of which he’s much more ashamed than he would be of a major crime. Also that there’s probably not a boy in the world who hasn’t at some time or other committed petty larceny. I may add that I personally don’t give a damn whether you were silly enough to pinch Mr Rubrick’s whisky or not. But I am concerned to find out whether you told the truth when you said you didn’t pinch it, and why, if this was so, you wouldn’t explain what you were up to in the cellarage.’