‘Why,’ Alleyn asked, as soon as the door was shut, ‘did you take violets to Mrs Templeton?’

Octavius blushed. ‘A man with a handcart,’ he said, ‘went past the window. They came from the Channel Islands.’

‘I don’t give a damn where they came from. It’s where they went to that matters. When did the cart go past?’

Octavius, disconcerted and rather huffy, was bustled into telling his story. Anelida had sent him downstairs while she got ready for the party. He was fretful because they’d been asked for half-past six and it was now twenty-five to seven and he didn’t believe her story of the need to arrive late. He saw the handcart with the Parma violets and remembered that in his youth these flowers had been considered appropriate adjuncts to ladies of the theatre. So he went out and bought some. He then, Alleyn gathered, felt shy about presenting them in front of Anelida. The door of Miss Bellamy’s house was open. The butler was discernible in the hall. Octavius mounted the steps. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘one preferred to give her the opportunity of attaching them in advance if she chose to do so.’

He was in the act of handing them over to Gracefield when he heard a commotion on the first landing and a moment later Miss Bellamy shouted out at the top of her voice: ‘Which only shows how wrong you were. You can get out whenever you like, my friend, and the sooner the better.’

For a moment Octavius was extremely flustered, imagining that he himself was thus addressed but the next second she appeared above him on the stairs. She stopped short and gazed down at him in astonishment. ‘A vision,’ Octavius said. ‘Rose-coloured or more accurately, geranium, but with the air, I must confess, of a Fury.’

This impression, however, was almost at once dissipated. Miss Bellamy seemed to hesitate, Gracefield murmured an explanation which Octavius himself elaborated. ‘And then, you know,’ he said, ‘suddenly she was all graciousness. Overwhelmingly so. She’ – he blushed again – ‘asked me to come up and I went. I presented my little votive offering. And then, in point of fact, she invited me into her room: a pleasing and Gallic informality. I was not unmoved by it. She laid the flowers on her dressing-table and told me she had just given an old bore the sack. Those were her words. I gathered that it was somebody who had been in her service for a long period. What did you say?’

‘Nothing. Go on. You interest me strangely.’

‘Do I? Well. At that juncture there were sounds of voices downstairs – the door, naturally, remained open – and she said, “Wait a moment, will you?” And left me.’

‘Well?’ Alleyn said after a pause.

‘Well, I did wait. Nothing happened. I bethought me of Nelly, who would surely be ready by now. Rightly or wrongly,’ Octavius said, with a sidelong look at Alleyn,