Cliff seemed to take this question as a statement of fact. He moved towards the french window. ‘Is that right?’ Alleyn said and he nodded. ‘And you won’t tell me what you were doing with the whisky?’

‘I can’t.’

‘All right. I think I’ll just take a look at this outhouse. I can find my way. Thank you for being so nearly frank.’

Cliff blinked at him and went out.

The annexe proved to be grander than its name suggested. Fabian had told Alleyn that it had been added to the bunkhouse by Arthur Rubrick as a sort of common-room for the men. Florence, in a spurt of solicitude and public-spiritedness, had urged this upon her husband, and, on acquiring the Bechstein, had given the men her old piano and a radio set, and had turned the house out for odd pieces of furniture. ‘It was when she stood for parliament,’ Fabian explained acidly. ‘She had a photograph taken with the station hands sitting about in exquisitely self-conscious attitudes and sent it to the papers. You’ll find a framed enlargement above the mantelpiece.’

The room had an unkempt look. There was a bloom of dust on the table, the radio and the piano. A heap of old radio magazines had been stacked untidily in a corner of the room and yellowing newspapers lay about the floor. The top of the piano was piled with music; ballads, student song-books and dance tunes. Underneath these he found a number of classical works with Cliff’s name written across the top. Here at the bottom was Bach’s Art of Fugue.

Alleyn opened the piano and picked out a phrase from Cliff’s music. Two of the notes jammed. Had the Bach been full of hiatuses, then, or had the piano deteriorated so much in fifteen months? Alleyn replaced the Art of Fugue under a pile of song sheets, brushed his hands together absently, closed the door and squatted down by the heap of radio magazines in the corner.

He waded back through sixty-five weeks of wireless programmes that had been pumped into the air from all the broadcasting stations in the country. The magazines were not stacked in order and it was a tedious business. Back to February 1942: laying them down in their sequence. The second week in February, the first week in February. Alleyn’s hands were poised over the work. There were only half a dozen left. He sorted them quickly. The last week in January 1942 was missing.