‘Oh, do. Please consider this house your own. Perhaps you would like to buy it. In any case I do hope you’ll stay to dinner. And your own particular silent friend. What is his name?’

‘Thank you so much, but Fox and I,’ Alleyn said, ‘are dining out.’

‘Then in that case,’ Cedric murmured, sidling towards the door, ‘I shall leave Aunt Pauline to divert you with tales of Panty’s innocence in the matter of cheese-dishes, and her own incapability of writing anonymous letters.’

He was prevented from getting to the door by Pauline. With a movement of whose swiftness Alleyn would have thought her incapable, she got there first, and there she stood in a splendid attitude, the palms of her hands against the door, her head thrown back. ‘Wait!’ she said breathlessly. ‘Wait!’

Cedric turned with a smile to Alleyn. ‘As I hinted,’ he said, ‘Lady Macduff. With all her pretty chickens concentrated in the persons of Panty and Paul. The hen (or isn’t it oddly enough “dam”?) at bay.’

‘Mr Alleyn,’ said Pauline, ‘I was going to say nothing of this to anybody. We are an ancient family—’

‘On my knees,’ said Cedric, ‘on my knees, Aunt Pauline, not the Sieur d’Ancred.’

‘—and perhaps wrongly, we take some pride in our antiquity. Until today no breath of dishonour has ever smirched our name. Cedric is now Head of the Family. For that reason and for the sake of my father’s memory I would have spared him. But now, when he does nothing but hurt and insult me and try to throw suspicion on my child, now when I have no one to protect me—’ Pauline stopped as if for some important peroration. But something happened to her. Her face crinkled and reminded Alleyn instantly of her daughter’s. Tears gathered in her eyes. ‘I have reason to believe,’ she began and stopped short, looking terrified. ‘I don’t care,’ she said, and her voice cracked piteously. ‘I never could bear people to be unkind to me.’ She nodded her head at Cedric. ‘Ask him,’ she said, ‘what he was doing in Sonia Orrincourt’s rooms that night. Ask him.’

She burst into tears and stumbled out of the room.

‘Oh, bloody hell!’ Cedric ejaculated shrilly and darted after her.

Alleyn, left alone, whistled disconsolately, and after wandering about the cold and darkening room went to the windows and there made a series of notes in his pocket-book. He was still at this employment when Fox came in.

‘They said I’d find you here,’ Fox said. ‘Have you done any good, Mr Alleyn?’

‘If stirring up a hive and finding foul-brood can be called good. What about you?’

‘I’ve got the medicine bottle and three of the envelopes. I’ve had a cup of tea in Mr Barker’s room.’

‘That’s more than I’ve had in the library.’