‘I wasn’t taking it,’ Cliff muttered. ‘I hadn’t taken it.’

‘Bible oath before a beak?’

‘Yes. Before anybody.’ Cliff looked quickly at him. ‘I don’t know how to make it sound true. I don’t expect you to believe me.’

‘I’m doing my best, but it would be a hell of a lot easier if you’d tell me what in the world you were up to.’

Cliff was silent.

‘Not anything in the heroic line?’ Alleyn asked mildly.

Cliff opened his mouth and shut it again.

‘Because,’ Alleyn went on, ‘there are moments when the heroic line is no more than a spanner in the works of justice. I mean, if you didn’t kill Mrs Rubrick, you’re deliberately, for some fetish of your own, muddling the trail. The whisky may be completely irrelevant but we can’t tell. It’s a question of tidying up. Of course, if you did kill her, you may be wise to hold your tongue. I don’t know.’

‘But you know I didn’t,’ Cliff said, and his voice faded on a note of bewilderment. ‘I’ve got an alibi. I played.’

‘What was it you played?’

‘Bach’s Art of Fugue.’

‘Difficult?’ Alleyn asked and had to wait for a long time for his answer. Cliff made two false starts, checking his voice before it was articulate. ‘I’d worked at it,’ he said at last. ‘Now why,’ Alleyn wondered, ‘does he jib at telling me it was difficult?’

‘It must be disheartening work, slogging away at a bad instrument,’ he said. ‘It is bad, isn’t it?’

Again Cliff was unaccountably reluctant. ‘Not as bad as all that,’ he muttered and, with a sudden spurt: ‘A friend of mine in a music shop in town came out for a couple of days and tuned it for me. It wasn’t so bad.’

‘But nothing like the Bechstein in the drawing-room, for instance?’

‘It wasn’t so bad,’ he persisted. ‘It’s a good make. It used to be in the house here before—before she got the Bechstein.’

‘You must have missed playing the Bechstein.’

‘You can’t have everything,’ Cliff said.

‘Honour?’ Alleyn suggested lightly, ‘or concert grands? Is that it?’

He grinned unexpectedly. ‘Something of the sort,’ he said.

‘See here,’ said Alleyn. ‘Will you, without further ado and without me plodding round the by-ways of indirect attack—will you tell me the whole story of your falling out with Mrs Rubrick? You needn’t, of course. You can refuse to speak, as you did with my colleagues, and force me to behave as they did: listen to other people’s versions of the quarrel. Do you know that the police files devote two foolscap pages to hearsay accounts of the relationship between you and Mrs Rubrick?’

‘I can imagine it,’ said Cliff savagely. ‘Gestapo methods.’