‘And you advised him to remedy this? You even looked into his room to make sure?’

‘Yes,’ Jacko agreed after a pause, ‘I did.’

‘So when you had gone he sat at his dressing-table and carefully furbished up his repellent make-up as if for the curtain call. And then gassed himself?’

‘The impulse perhaps came very suddenly.’ Jacko half-closed his eyes and looked through their sandy lashes at his cigarette smoke. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said softly. ‘Listen. He repairs his face. He has a last look at himself. He is about to get up when his attention sharpens. He continues to stare. He sees the ruin of his face. He was once a coarsely handsome fellow, was Ben, with a bold rake-helly air. The coarseness has increased but where, he asks himself, are the looks? Pouches, grooves, veins, yellow eyeballs and all emphasized most hideously by the make-up. This is what he has become, he thinks, he has become the man he has been playing. And his heart descends into his belly. He knows despair and he makes up his mind. There is hardly time to do it. In a minute or two he will be called. So quickly, quickly he lies on the floor, with trembling hands he pulls his coat over his head and puts the end of the gas-tube in his mouth.’

‘You knew how he was found then?’

‘Clem told me. I envisaged everything. He enters a world of whirling dreams. And in a little while he is dead. I see it very clearly.’

‘Almost as if you’d been there,’ Alleyn said lightly. ‘Is this, do you argue, his sole motive? What about the quarrels that had been going on? The change of cast at the last moment? The handing over of Miss Gainsford’s part to Miss Tarne? He was very much upset by that, wasn’t he?’

Jacko doubled himself up like an ungainly animal and squatted on a stool. ‘Too much has been made of the change of casting,’ he said. ‘He accepted it in the end. He made a friendly gesture. On thinking it over I have decided we were all wrong to lay so much emphasis on this controversy.’ He peered sideways at Alleyn. ‘It was the disintegration of his artistic integrity that did it,’ he said. ‘I now consider the change of casting to be of no significance.’

Alleyn looked him very hard in the eye. ‘And that,’ he said, ‘is where we disagree. I consider it to be of the most complete significance: the key, in fact, to the whole puzzle of his death.’

‘I cannot agree,’ said Jacko. ‘I am sorry.’

Alleyn waited for a moment and then—and for the last time—asked the now familiar question.

‘Do you know anything about a man called Otto Brod?’

There was a long silence. Jacko’s back was bent and his head almost between his knees.

‘I have heard of him,’ he said at last.