‘Did you know him?’

‘I have never met him. Never.’

‘Perhaps you have seen some of his work?’

Jacko was silent.

‘Können Sie Deutsch lesen?’

Fox looked up from his notes with an expression of blank surprise. They heard a car turn in from Carpet Street and come up the side lane with a chime of bells. It stopped and a door slammed.

‘Jawohl,’ Jacko whispered.

The outside doors of the dock were rolled back. The sound resembled stage-thunder. Then the inner and nearer doors opened heavily and someone walked round the back of the set. Young Lamprey came through the prompt entrance. ‘The mortuary van, sir,’ he said.

‘All right. They can go ahead.’

He went out again. There was a sound of voices and of boots on concrete. A cold draught of night air blew in from the dock and set the borders creaking. A rope tapped against canvas and a sighing breath wandered about the grid. The doors were rolled together. The engine started up and, to another chime of bells, Bennington made his final exit from the Vulcan. The theatre settled back into its night-watch.

Jacko’s cigarette had burnt his lips. He spat it out and got slowly to his feet.

‘You have been very clever,’ he said. He spoke as if his lips were stiff with cold.

‘Did Bennington tell you how he would, if necessary, play his trump card?’

‘Not until after he had decided to play it.’

‘But you had recognized the possibility?’

‘Yes.’

Alleyn nodded to Fox who shut his note-book, removed his spectacles and went out.

‘What now?’ Jacko asked.

‘All on,’ Alleyn said. ‘A company call. This is the curtain speech, Mr Doré.’

Lamprey had called them and then retired. They found an empty stage awaiting them. It was from force of habit, Martyn supposed, that they took up, for the last time, their after-rehearsal positions on the stage. Helena lay back in her deep chair with Jacko on the floor at her feet. When he settled himself there, she touched his cheek and he turned his lips to her hand. Martyn wondered if he was ill. He saw that she looked at him and made his clown’s grimace. She supposed that, like everybody else, he was merely exhausted. Darcey and Gay Gainsford sat together on the small settee and Parry Percival on his upright chair behind them. At the back, Dr Rutherford lay on the sofa with a newspaper spread over his face. Martyn had returned to her old seat near the prompt corner and Poole to his central chair facing the group. ‘We have come out of our rooms,’ Martyn thought, ‘like rabbits from their burrows.’ Through the prompt entrance she could see Fred Badger, lurking anxiously in the shadows.