‘You can stay and take your notes. I’ll see her in the greenroom. No, wait a bit. You stay with the others, Fox, and send young Lamprey along with her. Tell them they can change in their rooms, fan them before they go, and make sure they go singly. I don’t want them talking together. And you might try again if you can dig up anything that sounds at all off-key with Bennington over the last few days. Anything that distressed or excited him.’

‘He seems to have been rather easily excited.’

‘He does, doesn’t he, but you never know. I don’t believe it was suicide, Fox, and I’m not yet satisfied that we’ve unearthed anything that’s good enough for a motive for murder. Trip away, Foxkin. Ply your craft.’

Fox went out sedately. Alleyn crossed the passage and opened the door of Bennington’s room. Sergeant Gibson was discovered, squatting on his haunches before the dead gas-fire.

‘Anything?’ Alleyn asked.

‘There’s this bit of a stain that looks like a scorch on the hearth, sir.’

‘Yes, I saw that. Any deposit?’

‘We may have to try.’

‘The powder-pads the deceased’s dresser cleared away were in the rubbish bin on the stage where he said he put them. Nothing else in the bin. There’s this burnt paper on the floor but it’s in small flakes—powder almost.’

‘All right. Seal the room when you’ve finished. And Gibson, don’t let the mortuary van go without telling me.’

‘Very good, sir.’

Alleyn returned to the greenroom. He heard Miss Gainsford approaching under the wing of PC Lamprey. She spoke in a high grand voice that seemed to come out of a drawing-room comedy of the twenties.

‘I think you’re too intrepid,’ she was saying, ‘to start from rock bottom like this. It must be so devastatingly boring for you, though I will say it’s rather a comfort to think one is in the hands of, to coin a phrase, a gent. Two gents in fact.’

‘Chief Inspector Alleyn,’ said PC Lamprey, ‘is in the greenroom I think, Miss.’

‘My dear, you do it quite marvellously. You ought, again to coin a phrase, to go on the stage.’

Evidently Miss Gainsford lingered in the passage. Alleyn heard his subordinate murmur: ‘Shall I go first?’ His regulation boots clumped firmly to the door which he now opened.

‘Will you see Miss Gainsford, sir?’ asked PC Lamprey, who was pink in the face.

‘All right, Mike,’ Alleyn said. ‘Show her in and take notes.’

‘Will you come this way, Miss?’