Its present occupants – Richard, Anelida and Warrender – were standing awkwardly in the middle of this room, overlooked by an enormous and immensely vivacious portrait in pastel of Mary Bellamy. Charles, photographed some twenty years ago, gazed mildly from the centre of an occasional table. To Alleyn there was something atrociously ironic in this circumstance.

Richard demanded at once: ‘What is it? What’s happened? Is Charles – ?’

‘Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘It’s bad news. He collapsed a few minutes ago.’

‘But …? You don’t mean …?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Richard said: ‘Anelida! It’s Charles. He means Charles has died. Doesn’t he?’

‘Why,’ she said fiercely, ‘must these things happen to you. Why!’

Dr Harkness went up to him. ‘Sorry, old boy,’ he said, ‘I tried but it was no good. It might have happened any time during the last five years, you know.’

Richard stared blankly at him. ‘My God! ‘he cried out. ‘You can’t talk like that!’

‘Steady, old chap. You’ll realize, when you think it over. Any time.’

‘I don’t believe you. It’s because of everything else. It’s because of Mary and …’ Richard turned on Alleyn. ‘You’d no right to subject him to all this. It’s killed him. You’d no right. If it hadn’t been for you it needn’t have happened.’

Alleyn said very compassionately: ‘That may be true. He was in great distress. It may even be that for him this was the best solution.’

‘How dare you say that! ‘Richard exclaimed and then: ‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t you think he’d pretty well got to the end of his tether? He’d lost the thing he most valued in life, hadn’t he?’

‘I – I want to see him.’

Alleyn remembered Charles’s face. ‘Then you shall,’ he promised, ‘presently.’

‘Yes,’ Harkness agreed quickly. ‘Presently.’

‘For the moment,’ Alleyn said, turning to Anelida, ‘I suggest that you take him up to his old room and give him a drink. Will you do that?’

‘Yes,’ Anelida said. ‘That’s the thing.’ She put her hand in Richard’s. ‘Coming?’

He looked down at her. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘what on earth I should do without you, Anelida.’

‘Come on,’ she said, and they went out together.

Alleyn nodded to Harkness and he too went out.

An affected little French clock above the fireplace cleared its throat, broke into a perfect frenzy of silvery chimes and then struck midnight. Inspector Fox came into the room and shut the door.

Alleyn looked at Maurice Warrender.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘there must be an end to equivocation. I must have the truth.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Warrender and could scarcely have sounded less convincing.