‘Yes, thank you. Mr Barrabell is very kindly dropping me. I’m on his way home.’

‘Ah yes. I’m afraid all this has been very tiring and confusing for you. The Scots play coming home with a vengeance, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, if only you believed it! There’s so much, so many indications. It’s so clearly that. You know?’ she asked. ‘They none of them want to face up to it. But I know. Sign after sign. Warning after warning. All to do with heads. If only they’d listened to me.’

Barrabell was behind her. He put his head on one side and made a long comic face. ‘Come along, dear,’ he said, ‘you’ll feel better when you’ve had a nice sleep, won’t you?’

‘How do I know I’ll get a nice sleep? I’m terrified.’

‘Do you live alone, Miss Gaythorne?’ Alleyn asked.

‘Yes, I do. Quite alone.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you what to do. When you get home have a very hot bath, make yourself a very hot drink with lots of alcohol in it, get into bed and take two aspirins. Start to write an account of all the warning signs in their right order and exact time and place and I bet you a pound you’ll drop off before you’ve finished. Do you take me?’

She looked at him with a kind of dim relish.

‘You’re not much like a copper, are you?’ she said doubtfully, and then: ‘I always enjoy a little flutter. Yes. I take you.’

‘Splendid. Fox is our witness. Away you go. Good night and God bless.’

‘Oh! Thank you. God bless,’ she said carefully.

‘Here we go!’ said Barrabell in his beautiful voice. He put their keys on the table and then his arm round Nina. ‘Come along, Ninie,’ he fluted and for the first time he sounded well off-key. ‘Beddy-byes.’

The stage door closed behind them.

‘That’s the last of them, isn’t it, Fox?’ Alleyn asked.

‘The last,’ said Mr Fox.

‘What’s emerged definitely from it all?’

They opened their notebooks. Alleyn also opened his programme.

‘We can wipe out most of the smaller parts,’ he said. ‘They were too active. All the fighting men. When they were offstage they were yelling and bashing away at each other like nobody’s business.’

‘I stood over by the dark corner and I’ll take my oath none of them got within coo-ee of it,’ Fox said.

‘Yes. They were very well-drilled and supposing one of them got out-of-step-on-purpose, the others would have known and been down on him at once. It may have looked like an Irishman’s picnic but they were worked out in inches.’

‘You can scratch the lot,’ said Fox.

‘Gladly,’ said Alleyn, and did so.

‘Who’s left?’ he asked.