‘And you didn’t tell him.’ Alleyn walked up to him and looked him full in the face. ‘She told him,’ he said. ‘Didn’t she? Without consulting you, without any consideration for you or the boy. Because she was in one of those tantrums that have become less and less controllable. She made you spray that unspeakable scent over her in his presence, I suppose to irritate him. You went out and left them together. And she broke the silence of thirty years and told him.’

‘You can’t possibly know.’

‘When she left the room a minute or two later she shouted 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.” Florence had gone. You had gone. She was speaking to her husband. Did she tell you?’

‘Tell me! What the hell …’

‘Did she tell you what she’d said to Templeton?’

Warrender turned away to the fireplace, leant his arm on the shelf and hid his face.

‘All right!’ he stammered. ‘All right! What does it matter, now. All right.’

‘Was it during the party?’

He made some kind of sound, apparently in assent.

‘Before or after the row in the conservatory?’

‘After.’ He didn’t raise his head and his voice sounded as if it didn’t belong to him. ‘I tried to stop her attacking the girl.’

‘And that turned her against you? Yes, I see.’

‘I was following them, the girl and her uncle, and she whispered it. “Charles knows about Dicky.” It was quite dreadful to see her look like that. I – I simply walked out – I …’ He raised his head and looked at Alleyn. ‘It was indescribable.’

‘And your great fear after that was that she would tell the boy?’

He said nothing.

‘As, of course, she did. Her demon was let loose. She took him up to her room and told him. They were, I dare say, the last words she spoke.’

Warrender said: ‘You assume – you say these things – you …’ And was unable to go on. His eyes were wet and bloodshot and his face grey. He looked quite old. ‘I don’t know what’s come over me,’ he said.

Alleyn thought he knew.

‘It’s not much cop,’ he said, ‘when a life’s preoccupation turns out to have been misplaced. It seems to me that a man in such a position would rather see the woman dead than watch her turning into a monster.’

‘Why do you say these things to me? Why!’

‘Isn’t it so?’

With a strange parody of his habitual mannerism he raised a shaking hand to his tie and pulled at it.

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘You’ve been very clever, I suppose.’

‘Not very, I’m afraid.’

Warrender looked up at the beaming portrait of Mary Bellamy. ‘There’s nothing left,’ he said. ‘Nothing. What do you want me to do?’