‘I got rid of it.’ Richard raised his voice. ‘I hope it’s destroyed. It had nothing whatever to do with all this. I’ve told you it was private.’

‘If that’s true I can promise you it will remain so. Will you tell me – in private – what it was about?’

Richard looked at him, hesitated, and then said: ‘I’m sorry. I can’t.’

Alleyn drew a folded paper from his pocket. ‘Will you read this, if you please? Perhaps you would rather take it to the light.’

‘I can … All right,’ Richard said. He took the paper, left the table and moved over to a wall-lamp. The paper rustled as he opened it. He glanced at it, crushed it in his hand, strode to the far end of the table and flung it down in front of Warrender.

‘Did you have to do this?’ he said. ‘My God, what sort of a man are you!’ He went back to his place beside Anelida.

Warrender, opening and closing his hands, sheet-white and speaking in an unrecognizable voice, said: ‘I don’t understand. I’ve done nothing. What do you mean?’

His hand moved shakily towards the inside pocket of his coat. ‘No! It’s not … It can’t be.’

‘Colonel Warrender,’ Alleyn said to Richard, ‘has not shown me the letter. I came by its content in an entirely different way. The thing I have shown you is a transcription. The original, I imagine, is still in his pocket.’

Warrender and Richard wouldn’t look at each other. Warrender said: ‘Then how the hell …’ And stopped.

‘Evidently,’ Alleyn said, ‘the transcription is near enough to the original. I don’t propose at the moment to make it generally known. I will only put it to you that when you, Mr Dakers, returned the second time, you went to your study, wrote the original of this letter and subsequently, when you were lying on the sofa in the drawing-room, passed it to Colonel Warrender, saying, for my benefit, that you had forgotten to post it for him. Do you agree?’

‘Yes.’

‘I suggest that it refers to whatever passed between you and Mrs Templeton when you were alone with her in her room a few minutes before she died and that you wished to make Colonel Warrender read it. I’m still ready to listen to any statement you may care to make to me in private.’

To Anelida the silence seemed interminable.

‘Very well,’ Alleyn said. ‘We shall have to leave it for the time being.’

None of them looked at Richard. Anelida suddenly and horribly remembered something she had once heard Alleyn tell her uncle. ‘You always know, in a capital charge, if the jury are going to bring in a verdict of guilty: they never look at the accused when they come back.’ With a sense of doing something momentous she turned, looked Richard full in the face and found she could smile at him.