‘Oh, good! Well, and then as he would keep talking about when he was Gone, I tried to buck him up a bit and had quite a success. He turned mysterious and talked about there being surprises in store for everybody. And upon that Sonia Orrincourt burst in and said they were all plotting against her and she was frightened.’

‘And that’s all?’ Alleyn said after a pause.

‘No—no, it isn’t. There was something else he said. Rory, I can’t remember what it was, but there was something else.’

‘That was on Saturday the seventeenth, wasn’t it?’

‘Let me see. I got there on the sixteenth. Yes. Yes, it was the next day. But I wish,’ Troy said slowly, ‘I do wish I could remember the other thing he talked about.’

‘Don’t try. It may come back suddenly.’

‘Perhaps Miss Able could screw it out of me,’ said Troy with a grin. ‘In any case we’ll call it a day.’

As they moved away she linked her arm through his. ‘First instalment of the new system,’ she said. ‘It’s gone off tolerably quietly, hasn’t it?’

‘It has, my love. Thank you.’

‘One of the things I like about you,’ Troy said, ‘is your nice manners.’

The next day was a busy one. The Assistant Commissioner after a brisk interview with Alleyn, decided to apply for an exhumation order. ‘Sooner the better, I suppose. I was talking to the Home Secretary yesterday and told him we might be on his tracks. You’d better go right ahead.’

‘Tomorrow then, sir, if possible,’ Alleyn said. ‘I’ll see Dr Curtis.’

‘Do.’ And as Alleyn turned away: ‘By the way, Rory, if it’s at all difficult for Mrs Alleyn—’

‘Thank you very much sir, but at the moment she’s taking it in her stride.’

‘Splendid. Damn’ rum go—what?’

‘Damn’ rum,’ Alleyn agreed politely, and went to call on Mr Rattisbon.

Mr Rattisbon’s offices in the Strand had survived the pressure of the years, the blitz and the flying bomb. They were, as Alleyn remembered them on the occasion of his first official visit before the war, a discreetly active memorial to the style of Charles Dickens, with the character of Mr Rattisbon himself written across them like an inscription. Here was the same clerk with his trick of slowly raising his head and looking dimly at the inquirer, the same break-neck stairs, the same dark smell of antiquity. And here, at last, shrined in leather, varnish and age was Mr Rattisbon, that elderly legal bird, perched at his desk.

‘Ah, yes, Chief Inspector,’ Mr Rattisbon gabbled, extending a claw at a modish angle, ‘come in, come in, sit down, sit down. Glad to see yer. M-m-maah!’ And when Alleyn was seated Mr Rattisbon darted the old glance at him, sharp as the point of a fine nib. ‘No trouble, I hope?’ he said.