‘That blasted rat. Where did it come from?’

‘Oh God!’

‘Have we been using traps?’

‘And who sets them? All right. Props. He put one up a narrow passage where Henry couldn’t squeeze in.’ (Henry was the theatre cat.) ‘Props told me so himself. He was proud of his cunning.’

Rangi said: ‘We’ll have to look at it.’

He opened the bag and turned it upside down. The rat’s forequarters fell with a soft plop on the floor.

‘There’s the mark of the bar across its neck. It’s deep. And wet. Its neck’s broken. It’s bled,’ said Rangi. ‘It doesn’t smell. It’s recently killed.’

‘We’ll have to keep it.’

‘Why?’

Peregrine was taken aback. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Upon my word I don’t know. I’m treating it like evidence for a crime and there’s no crime of that sort. Nor any sort, really. All the same…Wait a bit.’

Peregrine went to a rubbish bin backstage, found a discarded brown paper bag and turned it inside out. He brought it back and held it open. Rangi picked the rat up by the ear and dropped it in. Peregrine tied it up.

‘Horrible beast,’ he said.

‘We’d better – Ssh!’

A padded footfall and the swish of a broom sounded in the passage.

‘Ernie!’ Peregrine called. ‘Props!’

The door opened and he came in. How many years, Peregrine asked himself, had Ernie been Props at the Dolphin. Ten? Twenty? Dependable always. A cockney with an odd quirky sense of the ridiculous and an over-sensitive reaction to an imagined slight. Thin, sharp face. Quick. Sidelong grin.

‘Hello, guv,’ he said. ‘Fought you’d of gawn be now.’

‘Just going. Caught any rats?’

‘I never looked. ‘Old on.’

He went to the back of the room behind a packing case. A pause and then Props’s voice. ‘’Ullo! What’s this, then?’ A scuffling and he appeared with a rat-trap on a long string.

‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘I don’t get it. The bait’s gawn. So’s the rat’s head. There’s been a rat. Fur and gore and hindquarters all over the trap. Killed. Somebody’s been and taken it. Must of.’

‘Henry?’ asked Peregrine.

‘Nah! Cats don’t eat rats. Just kill ‘em. And ‘Enery couldn’t get up that narrer passage. Nah! It’s been a man. ‘E’s pulled out the trap, lifted the bar and taken the rat’s forequarters!’

‘The caretaker?’

‘Not ‘im. They give ‘im the willies, rats do. It ought to be ‘im that sets the trap, not me, but ‘e won’t.’

‘When did you set it then, Ernie?’

‘Yesterday morning. They was all collected in ‘ere waiting for rehearsal, wasn’t they?’

‘Yes. We did the crowd scenes,’ said Peregrine. He looked at Rangi. ‘You weren’t here,’ he said.

‘No. First I’ve heard of it.’