‘He wouldn’t hand it over until I promised. He’d have got the sack and might have got gaoled. A year before, one of the chaps on the place pinched some liquor. They searched his room and found it. She got the police on to him and he did a week in gaol. Albie was a bit tight when he took it. I told him he was crazy.’

‘I see.’

‘I told you it hadn’t anything to do with the case,’ Cliff muttered.

‘But hasn’t it? We’ll go on to the following night, the night Mrs Rubrick was murdered, the night when you, dog-tired after your sixteen-mile tramp, were supposed to have played difficult music very well for an hour on a wreck of a piano.’

‘They all heard me,’ Cliff cried out. ‘I can show you the music.’

‘What happened to that week’s instalment of the published radio programmes?’

As Cliff’s agitation mounted, he seemed to grow younger. His eyes widened and his lips trembled like a small boy’s.

‘Did you burn it?’ Alleyn asked.

Cliff did not answer.

‘You knew, of course, that the Art of Fugue was to be broadcast, followed by a Chopin Polonaise. You had started to work at the Bach and perhaps, while you waited for the programme to begin at 8.05 p.m., played the opening passages. You saw him playing, Markins, didn’t you?’

‘Yes sir,’ said Markins, still writing. Cliff started violently at the sound of his voice.

‘But at 8.05 you stopped and turned up the radio, which was probably already tuned to the station you wanted. From then, until just before your mother came, when you began to play again, the radio didn’t stop. But at some time during that fifty minutes you went to the wool-shed. It was almost dark when you came out. Albert Black saw you. He was drunk, but he remembered and when three weeks later Mrs Rubrick’s body was found and the police inquiry began, he used his knowledge for blackmail. He was afraid that when the whisky incident came to light, you would speak the truth. He drove a bargain with you. Now. Why did you go down to the wool-shed?’

‘I didn’t touch her. I didn’t plan anything. I didn’t know she was going to the shed. It just happened.’