After a pause, Richard said: ‘Only that I’d like to endorse what Pinky said and to add that, as you and everybody else know, I was just as deeply involved as she. More so.’

‘Dicky, darling!’ Pinky said warmly. ‘No! Where you are now! Offer a comedy on the open market and watch the managements bay like ravenous wolves.’

‘Without Mary!’ Marchant asked of nobody in particular.

‘It’s quite true,’ Richard said, ‘that I wrote specifically for Mary.’

‘Not always. And no reason,’ Gantry intervened, ‘why you shouldn’t write now for somebody else.’ Once again he bestowed his most disarming smile on Anelida.

‘Why not indeed!’ Pinky cried warmly and laid her hand on Anelida’s.

‘Ah!’ Richard said, putting his arm about her. ‘That’s another story. Isn’t it, darling?’

Wave after wave of unconsidered gratitude flowed through Anelida. ‘These are my people,’ she thought. ‘I’m in with them for the rest of my life.’

‘The fact remains, however,’ Gantry was saying to Alleyn, ‘that Bertie, Pinky and Richard all stood to lose by Mary’s death. A point you might care to remember.’

‘Oh, lawks! ‘Bertie ejaculated. ‘Aren’t we all suddenly generous and noble-minded! Everybody loves everybody! Safety in numbers, or so they say. Or do they?’

‘In this instance,’ Alleyn said, ‘they well might.’ He turned to Marchant. ‘Would you agree that, with the exception of her husband, yourself and Colonel Warrender, Miss Bellamy issued some kind of ultimatum against each member of the group in the conservatory?’

‘Would I?’ Marchant said easily. ‘Well, yes. I think I would.’

‘To the effect that it was either they or she and you could take your choice?’

‘More or less,’ he murmured, looking at his fingernails.

Gantry rose to his enormous height and stood over Marchant.

‘It would be becoming in you, Monty,’ he said dangerously, ‘if you acknowledged that as far as I enter into the picture the question of occupational anxiety does not arise. I choose my managements: they do not choose me.’

Marchant glanced at him. ‘Nobody questions your prestige, I imagine, Timmy. I certainly don’t.’

‘Or mine, I hope,’ said Bertie, rallying. ‘The offers I’ve turned down for The Management! Well, I mean to say! Face it, Monty, dear, if Mary had bullied you into breaking off with Dicky and Timmy and Pinky and me, you’d have been in a very pretty pickle yourself.’

‘I am not,’ Marchant said, ‘a propitious subject for bullying.’

‘No,’ Bertie agreed. ‘Evidently.’ And there followed a deadly little pause. ‘I’d be obliged to everybody,’ he added rather breathlessly, ‘if they wouldn’t set about reading horrors of any sort into what was an utterly unmeaningful little observation.’

‘In common,’ Warrender remarked, ‘with the rest of your conversation.’

‘Oh, but what a catty big colonel we’ve got!’ Bertie said.