‘Calling my officers about me in my branched velvet gown,’ he shouted, ‘having come from a day-bed where I left Miss Gainsford sleeping, I present myself as a brand for the constabular burning. What’s cooking, my hearties?’

He stood there, puffing and blowing, and eyed them with an expression of extreme impertinence. If he had been an actor, Alleyn thought, he would have been cast, and cast ideally, for Falstaff. He fished under his shirt tail, produced his snuff-box, and helped himself, with a parody of regency deportment, to a generous pinch. ‘Speak!’ he said. ‘Propound! I am all ears.’

‘I have nothing, I’m afraid, to propound,’ Alleyn said cheerfully, ‘and am therefore unable to pronounce. As for speaking, I hope you’ll do most of that yourself, Dr Rutherford. Will you sit down?’

Dr Rutherford, with his usual precipitancy, hurled himself into the nearest armchair. As an afterthought he spread his shirt tail with ridiculous finicking movements across his lap. ‘I am a thought down-gyved,’ he observed. ‘My points are untrussed. Forgive me.’

‘Tell me,’ Alleyn said. ‘Do you think Bennington was murdered?’

The doctor opened his eyes very wide, folded his hands on his stomach, revolved his thumbs and said: ‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘We do.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ll come to that when I’m quite sure you may be put into the impossible class.’

‘Am I a suspect, by all that’s pettifogging?’

‘Not if you can prove yourself otherwise.’

‘By God!’ said Dr Rutherford deeply, ‘if I’d thought I could get away with it, be damned if I wouldn’t have had a shot. He was an unconscionable rogue, was Ben.’

‘In what way?’

‘In every way, by Janus. A drunkard. A wife-terrorist. An exhibitionist. And what’s more,’ he went on with rising intensity, ‘a damned wrecker of plays. A yeaforsooth knavish pander, by heaven! I tell you this, and I tell you plainly, if I, sitting in my OP box, could have persuaded the Lord to stoop out of the firmament and drop a tidy thunderbolt on Ben, I would have done it with bells on. Joyously!’

‘A thunderbolt,’ Alleyn said, ‘is one of the few means of dispatch that we have not seriously considered. Would you mind telling me where you were between the time when he made his last exit and the time when you appeared before the audience?’

‘Brief let me be. In my box. On the stairs. Off-stage. On the stage.’

‘Can you tell me exactly when you left your box?’

‘While they were making their initial mops and mows at the audience.’

‘Did you meet anyone or notice anything at all remarkable during this period?’

‘Nothing, and nobody whatever.’

‘From which side did you enter for your own call?’

‘The OP, which is actors’ right.’

‘So you merely emerged from the stairs that lead from the box to the stage and found yourself hard by the entrance?’

‘Precisely.’

‘Have you any witness to all this, sir?’