She looked genuinely surprised. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Adam and Jacko, anyway. I mean Uncle Ben appeared to have a sort of nationwide hook-up idea about it but even if he didn’t mention it, she’d naturally tell Adam, wouldn’t you think? And Jacko, because everybody tells Jacko everything. And he was doing dresser for her. Yes, I’d certainly think she’d tell Jacko.’

‘I see. Thank you, Miss Gainsford. That’s all.’

‘Really?’ She was on her feet. ‘I can go home?’

Alleyn answered her as he had answered J.G. ‘I’m sorry: not yet. Not just yet.’

PC Lamprey opened the door. Inevitably, she paused on the threshold. ‘Never tell me there’s nothing in atmosphere,’ she said. ‘I knew when I came into this theatre. As if the very walls screamed it at me. I knew.’

She went out.

‘Tell me, Mike,’ Alleyn said, ‘are many young women of your generation like that?’

‘Well, no sir. She’s what one might call a composite picture, don’t you think?’

‘I do, indeed. And I fancy she’s got her genres a bit confused.’

‘She tells me she’s been playing in Private Lives, The Second Mrs Tanqueray and Sleeping Partners in the provinces.’

‘That may account for it,’ said Alleyn.

An agitated voice—Parry Percival’s—was raised in the passage to be answered in a more subdued manner by Sergeant Gibson’s. ‘Go and see what it is, Mike,’ Alleyn said.

But before Lamprey could reach the door it was flung open and Parry burst in, slamming it in Gibson’s affronted face. He addressed himself instantly and breathlessly to Alleyn.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I’ve just remembered something. I’ve been so hideously upset, I just simply never gave it a thought. It was when I smelt gas. When I went back to my room I smelt gas and I turned off my fire. I ought to have told you. I’ve just realized.’

‘I think perhaps what you have just realized,’ Alleyn said, ‘is the probability of our testing your gas-fire for fingerprints and finding your own.’

CHAPTER NINE

The Shadow of Otto Brod

PARRY STOOD inside the door and pinched his lips as if he realized they were white and hoped to restore their colour.

‘I don’t know anything about fingerprints,’ he said. ‘I never read about crime. I don’t know anything about it. When I came off after my final exit I went to my room. I was just going back for the call when I smelt gas. We’re all nervous about gas in this theatre and anyway the room was frightfully hot. I turned the thing off. That’s all.’

‘This was after Bennington tripped you up?’

‘I’ve told you. It was after my last exit and before the call. It wasn’t—’