‘Come back to my flat for an hour, Maggie,’ said Dougal. ‘It’s too lovely a night to go home on.’

‘No, thank you, Dougal. I’m tired and hungry and I’ve ordered a car and here it is. Good night.’

Peregrine saw them all go their ways. Still whistling, he walked downhill and only then noticed that a little derelict shed on the waterfront lay in a heap of rubble.

I hadn’t realized it had been demolished, he thought.

Next morning, a workman operating a scoop-lift pointed to a black scar on one of the stones.

‘See that,’ he said cheerfully to Peregrine. ‘That’s the mark of the Devil’s thumb, that is. You don’t often see it. Not nowadays you don’t.’

‘The Devil’s thumb?’

‘That’s right, Squire. Lightning.’

II

Simon Morten had taken the part of Macduff by storm. His dark good looks and dashing, easy mockery of the porter on his first entrance with Lennox, his assertion of his hereditary right to wake his king, his cheerful run up the stairs whistling as he went into the bloodied chamber while Lennox warmed himself at the fire and talked cosily about the wild intemperance of the night, all gave him an easy ascendancy.

Macbeth listened, but not to him.

The door opened. Macduff stumbled on stage, incoherent, ashen-faced, the former man wiped out as if by the sweep of the murderer’s hand. The stirred-up havoc, the alarum bell, the place alive suddenly with the horror of assassination. The courtyard filled with men roused from their sleep, nightgowns hastily pulled on, wild and dishevelled. The bell jangling madly.

The scene ends with the flight of the King’s sons. Thereafter, in a short final scene, Macduff, already suspicious, decides not to attend Macbeth’s coronation but to retire to his own headquarters at Fife. It is here that he will make his fatal decision to turn south to England, where he will learn of the murder of his wife and children. From then on he will be a man with a single object: to return to Scotland, find Macbeth and kill him.

Once Banquo has been murdered, Macduff moves forward and the end is now inevitable.

Morten had now become enamoured of the fight, which he continued to rehearse with Dougal. At Gaston’s suggestion they both began to exercise vigorously, apart from the actual combat, and became expert in the handling of their weapons, twirling and slashing with alarming dexterity. The steel replicas were ready and they used them.

Peregrine came down to the theatre early one morning for a discussion on costumes and found them hard at it. Blue sparks flew, the claymores whistled. The actors leapt nimbly from spot to spot. Occasionally they grunted. Their shields were tightly strapped to their left forearms, leaving the hand free for the double-handed weapon. Peregrine gazed upon them with considerable alarm.

‘Nimble, aren’t they?’ asked Gaston, looming up behind him.