‘Did I? I don’t remember. It’s what they were, I suppose. Isn’t it?’

‘Two extremely realistic severed heads? A pretty case-hardened schoolboy. Had you one in mind?’

‘Oh no. No.’

‘Not the one in Mr Winter Morris’s “co.” for instance?’

There was a pause. Barrabell’s lips moved, repeating the words, but no sound came from them. He shook his head slightly. ‘There was somebody,’ Alleyn went on, ‘a victim, in the Harcourt-Smith case. Her name was Muriel Barrabell, a bank clerk.’ He waited. Somewhere along the corridor a door banged and a man’s voice called out: ‘In the greenroom, dear.’

‘Was she your sister?’

Silence.

‘Your wife?’

‘No comment.’

‘Did you want the boy to get the sack?’

‘No comment.’

‘He was supposed to have perpetrated these tricks. And all to do with severed heads. Like his father’s crimes. Even the rat’s head. A mad boy, we were meant to think. Like his father. Get rid of him, he’s mad, like his father. It’s inherited.’

There was another long silence.

‘She was my wife,’ said Barrabell. ‘I never knew at the time what happened. I didn’t get their letter. He was charged with another woman’s murder. Caught red-handed. I was doing a long tour of Russia with the Leftist Players. It was all over when I got back. She was so beautiful, you can’t think. And he did that to her. I made them tell me. They didn’t want to but I kept on and on until they did.’

‘And you took it out on this perfectly sane small boy?’

‘How do you know he’s perfectly sane? Could you expect me to be in the same company with him? I wanted this part. I wanted to work for the Dolphin. But do you imagine I could do so with that murderer’s brat in the cast? Not bloody likely,’ said Barrabell and contrived a sort of laugh.

‘So you came to the crisis. All the elaborate attempts to incriminate young William came to nothing. And then suddenly, inexplicably, there was the real, the horrible crime of Sir Dougal’s decapitation. How do you explain that?’

‘I don’t,’ he said at once. ‘I know nothing about it. Nothing. Apart from his vanity and his accepting that silly title, he was harmless enough. A typical bourgeois hero, which maybe is why he excelled as Macbeth.’

‘You see the play as an anti-heroic exposure of the bourgeois way of life, do you? Is that it? Can that be it?’

‘Certainly. If you choose to put it like that. It’s the Macbeths’ motive. Their final desperate gesture. And they both break under the strain.’

‘You really believe that, don’t you?’