‘But did he?’ Richard cried out. ‘Maurice, did he think that?’

‘She’d – let him assume it.’

‘I see. And in those days, as you’ve told us, he believed everything she said. I understand, now,’ Richard said to Alleyn, ‘why you agreed that there was no need to tell him about me. He already knew, didn’t he?’

‘She herself,’ Alleyn went on, ‘told Colonel Warrender, after the flare-up in the conservatory, that she had disillusioned her husband.’

‘Did Charles,’ Richard asked Warrender, ‘say anything to you, afterwards? Did he?’

‘When we were boxed up together in the study. He hated my being there. It came out. He was …’ Warrender seemed to search for an appropriate phrase. ‘I’ve never seen a man so angry,’ he said at last. ‘So sick with anger.’

‘Oh, God! ‘Richard said.

‘And then,’ Alleyn continued, ‘there was the row over the scent. He asked her not to use it. She made you, Colonel Warrender, spray it lavishly over her, in her husband’s presence. You left the room. You felt, didn’t you, that there was going to be a scene?’

‘I shouldn’t have done it. She could always make me do what she would,’ Warrender said. ‘I knew at the time but – isn’t it?’

‘Never mind,’ Richard said, and to Alleyn: ‘Was it then she told him?’

‘I think it was at the climax of this scene. As he went out she was heard to shout after him: “Which only shows how wrong you were. You can get out whenever you like, my friend, and the sooner the better.” She was not, as the hearer supposed, giving a servant the sack: she was giving it to him.’

‘And half an hour later,’ Richard said to Anelida, ‘there he was – standing beside her, shaking hands with her friends. I thought, when I was telephoning, he looked ill. I told you. He wouldn’t speak.’

‘And then,’ Anelida said to Alleyn, ‘came the scene in the conservatory.’

‘Exactly. And, you see, he knew she had the power to make good her threats. Hard on the heels of the blow she had dealt him, he had to stand by and listen to her saying what she did say to all of you.’

‘Richard,’ Anelida said, ‘can you see? He’d loved her and he was watching her disintegrate. Anything to stop it!’

‘I can see, darling, but I can’t accept it. Not that.’

‘To put it very brutally,’ Alleyn said, ‘the treasured possession was not only hideously flawed, but possessed of a devil. She reeked of the scent he’d asked her not to wear. I don’t think it would be too much to say that at that moment it symbolized for him the full horror of his feeling for her.’

‘D’you mean it was then that he did it?’ Warrender asked.