‘Have they kept in touch, do you know?’

‘Oddly enough, Ben said a few days ago that he’d heard from Otto. I think he’d written from time to time for news of his play but I don’t suppose Ben answered.’ She pressed her thumb and fingers on her eyes. ‘If you want to see the letter,’ she said, ‘it’s in his coat.’

Alleyn said carefully: ‘You mean the jacket he wore to the theatre? Or his overcoat?’

‘The jacket. He was always taking my cigarette-case in mistake for his own. He took it out of his breast-pocket when he was leaving for the theatre and the letter was with it.’ She waited for a moment and then said: ‘He was rather odd about it.’

‘In what way?’ Alleyn asked. She had used Martyn’s very phrase and now when she spoke again it was with the uncanny precision of a delayed echo: ‘He was rather strange in his manner. He held the letter out with the cigarette-case and drew my attention to it. He said, I think, “That’s my trump card.” He seemed to be pleased in a not very attractive way. I took my case. He put the letter back in his pocket and went straight out.’

‘Did you get the impression he meant it was a trump card he could use against somebody?’

‘Yes. I think I did.’

‘And did you form any idea who that person could be?’

She leant forward and cupped her face in her hands. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘It seemed to me that it was I myself he meant. Or Adam. Or both of us. It sounded like a threat.’ She looked up at Alleyn. ‘We’ve both got alibis, haven’t we? If it was murder.’

‘You have, undoubtedly,’ Alleyn said and she looked frightened.

He asked her why she thought her husband had meant that the letter was a threat to herself or to Poole but she evaded this question, saying vaguely that she had felt it to be so.

‘You didn’t come down to the theatre with your husband?’ Alleyn said.

‘No. He was ready before I was. And in any case—’ She made a slight expressive gesture and didn’t complete her sentence.

Alleyn said: ‘I think I must tell you that I know something of what happened this afternoon.’

The colour that flooded her face ebbed painfully and left it very white. She said: ‘How do you know that? You can’t know.’ She stopped and seemed to listen. They could just hear Poole in the next room. He sounded as if he was moving about irresolutely. She caught her breath and after a moment she said loudly: ‘Was it Jacko? No, no, it was never Jacko.’