He released her hands and pressed the palms of his own to his eyes. ‘She was laughing,’ he said.

‘Laughing? They’ll want to know why, won’t they? What you both said to make her laugh.’

‘Never!’ he said violently. ‘Never!’

‘But – they’ll ask you.’

‘They can ask and ask and ask again. Never!’

‘You must!’ she said desperately. ‘Think! It’s what one always reads – that innocent people hold out on the police and muddle everything up and put themselves in the wrong. Richard, think what they’ll find out anyway! That she spoke as she did to me, that you were angry, that you said you’d never forgive her. Everyone in the hall heard you. Colonel Warrender …’

‘He!’ Richard said bitterly. ‘He won’t talk. He daren’t.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Oh!’ she cried out. ‘You are frightening me! What’s going to happen when they ask you about it? What’ll they think when you won’t tell them!’

‘They can think what they like.’ He got up and began to walk about the room. ‘Too much has happened. I can’t get it into perspective. You don’t know what it’s like. I’ve no right to load it on to you.’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ Anelida said desperately. ‘I love you. It’s my right to share.’

‘You’re so young.’

‘I’ve got all the sense I’m ever likely to have.’

‘Darling!’

‘Never mind about me! You needn’t tell me anything you don’t want to. It’s what you’re going to say to them that matters.’

‘I will tell you – soon – when I can.’

‘If it clears you they won’t make any further to-do about it. That’s all they’ll worry about. Clearing it up. You must tell them what happened. Everything.’

‘I can’t.’

‘My God, why?’

‘Have you any doubts about me? Have you!’

She went to him. ‘You must know I haven’t.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can see that.’

They stared at each other. He gave an inarticulate cry and suddenly she was in his arms.

Gracefield came through the folding doors from the dining-room.

‘Supper is served, sir,’ he said.

Alleyn rose from his uncomfortable seclusion behind the screen, slipped through the door into the hall, shut it soundlessly behind him and went up to their office.

II

‘I’ve been talking,’ Mr Fox remarked, ‘to a Press photographer and the servants.’

‘And I.’ Alleyn said sourly, ‘have been eavesdropping on a pair of lovers. How low can you get? Next stop, with Polonius behind the arras in a bedroom.’

‘All for their good, I dare say,’ Fox observed comfortably.

‘There is that. Fox, that blasted playwright is holding out on us. And on his girl for a matter of that. But I’m damned if I like him as a suspect.’

‘He seems,’ Fox considered, ‘a very pleasant young fellow.’