‘I’ve been thinking things over, sir. I take it your idea is to lay a trap for our joker. Whoever he is—say “he” for argument’s sake—he thinks the captain’s let the cat out of the bag about you coming up here and that you’d be off your guard and wide open to another welt on the napper? I’m to lie low, cut in at the last moment, and catch him hot.’

‘Just a second,’ said Alleyn. He pulled off his shoes and thudded to the press. ‘We’ve got to stow ourselves away.’

‘Both of us?’

‘Yes. It may be soon and it may be a hellish long wait. You’ll get in the wool-press. Into that half. The one with the door. Be ready to open the front a crack for a view. I’m going to lie alongside it. I’ll get you to cover me with these foul sacks. It sounds idiotic, but I think it’s going to work. Don’t disturb the sacks that Mr Losse was lying on. Now, then.’

Alleyn, remembering Cliff’s narrative, spread three empty sacks on the floor behind the press. He lay on them with Arthur Rubrick’s diary open under his chin. Markins dropped several more sacks over him. ‘I’ll put my torch on,’ Alleyn whispered. ‘Can you see any light?’

‘Wait a bit, sir.’ A further weight fell across Alleyn’s shoulders and head. ‘OK now, sir.’ Alleyn stretched himself like a cat and relaxed his muscles systematically until his body lay slack and resistless on its hard bed. It was abominably stuffy and there was some danger of the dusty hessian inducing a sneeze. If his nose began to tickle he’d have to plug it. Close beside him the press creaked. Markins’ foot rapped against the side. He thudded down into his nest.

‘Any good?’ Alleyn whispered.

‘I’m tying a bit of string to the side,’ said a tiny voice. ‘I can let it open then.’

‘Good. Don’t move unless I do.’

After a silence of perhaps a minute, Alleyn said, ‘Markins?’

‘Sir?’

‘Shall I tell you my bet for our visitor?’

‘If you please.’

Alleyn told him. He heard Markins give a thin ghost of a whistle. ‘Fancy!’ he whispered.

Alleyn turned his torch on the open pages of Arthur Rubrick’s diary. On closer inspection it proved to be a well-made, expensively-bound affair, with his initials stamped on the cover. On the fly-leaf was an enormous inscription: ‘Arthur with fondest love from Florence, Christmas, 1941.’

Alleyn read with some difficulty. The book was no more than five inches from his nose, and Rubrick had written a tiny and delicate script. His curiously formal style appeared in the first line and continued for many pages without interruption or any excursions into modernity. It was in this style or one more antique, Alleyn supposed, that he had written his essays.