‘But I’m all right!’ she persisted. ‘I’m sure I’m right. Why else should he know about the sink-room?’ She looked about her with an air of terrified complacency.

‘And last time,’ she pointed out, ‘it was Murder.’

‘Climax,’ said Jacko. ‘Picture and Slow Curtain! Put your hands together, ladies and gentlemen, for this clever little artiste.’ He went out with his eyes turned up.

‘Jacko’s terribly hard, isn’t he?’ Gay said to Darcey. ‘After all Uncle Ben was my uncle.’ She caught sight of Helena Hamilton. ‘And your husband,’ she said hurriedly, ‘of course, darling.’

The stage-hands had set up in the dock one of the trestle-tables used for properties. They had laid Clark Bennington’s body on it and had covered it with a sheet from the wardrobe-room. The dock was a tall echoing place, concrete floored, with stacks of old flats leaning against the walls. A solitary unprotected lamp bulb, dust-encrusted, hung above the table.

A group of four men in dark overcoats and hats stood beside this improvised bier and it so chanced they had taken up their places at the four corners and looked therefore as if they kept guard over it. Their hats shadowed their faces and they stood in pools of shadow. A fifth man, bareheaded, stood at the foot of the bier and a little removed from it. When the tallest of the men reached out to the margin of the sheet, his arm cast a black bar over its white and eloquent form. His gloved hand dragged down the sheet and exposed a rigid gaping face encrusted with greasepaint. He uncovered his head and the other three, a little awkwardly, followed his example.

‘Well, Curtis?’ he asked.

Dr Curtis, the police-surgeon, bent over the head, blotting it out with his shadow. He took a flashlamp from his pocket and the face, in this changed light, started out with an altered look as if it had secretly rearranged its expression.

‘God!’ Curtis muttered. ‘He looks pretty ghastly doesn’t he. What an atrocious make-up.’

From his removed position Dr Rutherford said loudly: ‘My dear man, the make-up was required for My Play. It should, in point of fact, be a damn sight more repellent. But vanitas vanitatum. Also: Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens. I didn’t let them fix him up at all. Thought you’d prefer not.’ His voice echoed coldly round the dock.

‘Quite so,’ Curtis murmured. ‘Much better not.’

‘Smell very noticeable still,’ a thick-set grizzled man observed. ‘Always hangs about in these cases,’ rejoined the sergeant, ‘doesn’t it, Mr Fox?’

‘We worked damn hard on him,’ Dr Rutherford said. ‘It never looked like it from the start. Not a hope.’

‘Well,’ said Curtis, drawing back, ‘it all seems straightforward enough, Alleyn. It doesn’t call for a very extensive autopsy but of course we’ll do the usual things.’