‘I’ve only one excuse and logically you’ll say it’s no excuse. Books about CID men will tell you that running a murderer to earth is just a job to us, as copping a pickpocket is to the ordinary PC. It’s not. Because of its termination it’s unlike any other job in existence. When I was twenty-two I faced its implications and took it on, but I don’t think I fully realized them for another fifteen years and that was when I fell most deeply in love, my love, with you.’

‘I’ve faced its implications, too, and once for all, over this Ancred business. Before you came in I even decided that it would be good for both of us if, by some freak, it turned out that I had a piece of information somewhere in the back of my memory that’s of vital importance.’

‘You’d got as far as that?’

‘Yes. And the queer thing is,’ Troy said, driving her fingers through her hair, ‘I’ve got the most extraordinary conviction that somewhere in the back of my memory it is there, waiting to come out.’

‘I want you,’ Alleyn said, ‘to tell me again, as fully as you possibly can, about your conversation with Sir Henry after he’d found the writing on the looking-glass and the grease-paint on the cat’s whiskers. If you’ve forgotten how it went at any particular stage, say so. But, for the love of Mike, darling, don’t elaborate. Can you remember?’

‘I think so. Quite a lot, anyway. He was furious with Panty, of course.’

‘He hadn’t a suspicion of the egregious Cedric?’

‘None. Did Cedric—?’

‘He did. He’s lisped out an admission.’

‘Little devil,’ said Troy. ‘So it was grease-paint on his fingernail.’

‘And Sir Henry—?’

‘He just went on and on about how much he’d doted on Panty and how she’d grieved him. I tried to persuade him she hadn’t done it, but he only made their family noise at me: “T’uh!” you know?’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘Then he started to talk about marriages between first cousins and how he disapproved of them, and this got mixed up in no time with a most depressing account of how he was’—Troy swallowed and went on quickly—‘was going to be embalmed. We actually mentioned the book. Then I think he sniffed a bit at Cedric as his heir, and said he’d never have children and that poor Thomas wouldn’t marry.’

‘He was wrong there, I fancy.’

‘No! Who?’

‘The psychiatrist, or should it be “psychiatriste”?’

‘Miss Able?’

‘She thinks he’s quite satisfactorily sublimated his libido or something.’