‘He wouldn’t say anything more. I felt awfully bored with all this, but I followed him up.’

‘To Miss Orrincourt’s room?’ Alleyn suggested as Thomas’s eyes had glazed again.

‘That’s it. How did you guess? And there were Pauline and Milly and Dessy. I must tell you,’ said Thomas delicately, ‘that Sonia has a little sort of suite of rooms near Papa’s for convenience. It wasn’t called anything, because Papa had run out of famous actresses’ names. So he had a new label done with “Orrincourt” on it, and that really infuriated everybody, because Sonia, whatever anybody may care to say to the contrary, is a very naughty actress. Well, not an actress at all, really. Absolutely dire, you might say.’

‘You found your sisters and Mrs Henry Ancred in these rooms?’

‘Yes. I must tell you that Sonia’s suite is in a tower. Like the tower your wife had, only Sonia’s tower is higher, because the architect who build Ancreton believed in quaintness. So Sonia has got a bedroom on top and then a bathroom, and at the bottom a boudoir. The bedroom’s particularly quaint, with a little door and steps up into the pepper-pot roof which makes a box-room. They are milling about in this box-room and Dessy had found the rat poison in one of Sonia’s boxes. It’s a preparation of arsenic. It says so on the label. Well!’

‘What have you done with it?’

‘So awkward!’ said Thomas crossly. ‘They made me take it. To keep, they said, in case of evidence being needed. Cedric was very particular about it, having read detective books, and he wrapped it up in one of my handkerchiefs. So I’ve got it in my rooms here in London if you really want to see it.’

‘We’ll take possession of it, I think,’ said Alleyn with a glance at Fox. Fox made a slight affirmative rumble. ‘If it’s convenient, Mr Ancred,’ Alleyn went on, ‘Fox or I will drop you at your rooms and collect this tin.’

‘I hope I can find it,’ Thomas said gloomily.

‘Find it?’

‘One does mislay things so. Only the other day—’ Thomas fell into one of his trances and this time Alleyn waited for something to break through. ‘I was just thinking, you know,’ Thomas began rather loudly. ‘There we all were in her room and I looked out of the window. It was raining. And away down below, like something out of a Noah’s Ark, was the governess-cart creeping up the drive, and Sonia, in her fur coat, flapping the reins, I suppose, in the way she has. And when you come to think of it, there, according to Pauline and Dessy and Cedric and Milly, went Papa’s murderess.’