‘I told you,’ she said. ‘I think it killed him. People talked about the shock of her death, but he was worn out before she died. I tried to stop it happening but it was no good. Night after night we would sit up working on the notes she handed over to him. She gave him no credit for that.’

She spoke rapidly and with more colour in her voice. Hallo! Alleyn thought, she’s off.

‘His own work died of it, too,’ she said.

‘What on earth do you mean, Terry?’ asked Fabian. ‘What work?’

‘His essays. He’d started a group of six essays on the pastoral element in Elizabethan poetry. Before that, he wrote a descriptive poem treating the plateau in the Elizabethan mode. That was the best thing he did, we thought. He wrote very lucidly.’

‘Terry,’ said Fabian, ‘you bewilder me with these revelations. I knew his taste in reading, of course. It was surprisingly austere. But—essays? I wonder why he never told me.’

‘He was sensitive about them. He didn’t want to talk about them until they were complete. They were really very good.’

‘I should have liked to know,’ said Fabian gently. ‘I wish he had felt he could tell me.’

‘I suppose he had to have a hobby,’ said Douglas. ‘He couldn’t play games, of course. There’s nothing much in that, just doing a bit of writing, I mean.’

‘ “Scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr Gibbon,”’ Alleyn muttered. Terence and Fabian looked quickly at him and Fabian grinned.

‘They were never finished,’ said Terence. ‘I tried to help by taking down at his dictation and then by typing, but he got so tired and there were always other things.’

‘Terry,’ said Fabian suddenly, ‘have I by any chance done you rather a bloody injustice?’

Alleyn saw the oval shape of Terence’s face lift attentively. It was the colour of a Staffordshire shepherdess, a cool cream. The brows and eyes were dark accents, the mouth a firm red brush stroke. It was an enigmatic face, a mask framed neatly in its sleek cap of black hair.

She said, ‘I tried very hard not to complicate things.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Fabian. She raised her hands a little way and let them fall into her lap.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, ‘in the very least. It’s all over. I didn’t altogether succeed.’

‘You people!’ Fabian said, bending a look of tenderness and pain upon Ursula. ‘You rather make for complications.’

‘We people?’ she said. ‘Terry and me?’

‘Both of you, it seems,’ he agreed.

Douglas suddenly raised his cry of, ‘I don’t know what all this is about.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Terence repeated. ‘It’s over.’

‘Poor Terry,’ said Fabian, but it seemed that Miss Lynne did not respond easily to sympathy. She took up her work again and the needles clicked.