Syce followed this suggestion. Little gales of whisky were wafted from him and his hands were unsteady, but he achieved his change with the economy of movement practised by sailors. He folded up the garments as they were discarded, passed a line of cord round them, made an appropriate knot and gave the bundle to Fox who wrote out a receipt for it.

Syce tied his dressing-gown cord with a savage jerk.

‘No return,’ Alleyn remarked, ‘of the ailment?’

Syce did not reply.

Alleyn said: ‘Why not tell me about it? You must know damn’ well that I can’t cut all this background stuff dead. Why the devil did you pretend to have lumbago last evening? Was it for the love of a lady?’

It would be inaccurate to say that Commander Syce blushed since his face, throughout the interview, had been suffused. But at this juncture it certainly darkened to an alarming degree.

‘Well, was it?’ Alleyn insisted on a note of exasperation. Fox clapped the bundle of clothes down on a table.

‘I know what it’s like,’ Commander Syce began incomprehensibly. He waved his hand in the direction of Hammer Farm. ‘Lonely as hell. Poor little Kit. Suppose she wanted security. Natural. Ever seen that play? I believe they put it on again a year or two ago. I don’t go in for poodle-faking but it was damn’ true. In the end she pitched herself out of a top window, poor thing. Frozen out. County.’

‘Can you mean The Second Mrs Tanqueray?’

‘I dare say. And they’d better change their course or she’ll do the same thing. Lonely. I know what it’s like.’

His gaze travelled to a corner cupboard. ‘You have to do something,’ he said, and then eyed the tumbler on his luncheon table. ‘No good offering you a drink,’ he mumbled.

‘None in the world, worse luck.’

‘Well,’ Syce said. He added something that sounded like: ‘luck,’ and suddenly drained the tumbler.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I’m thinking of giving it up myself. Alcohol.’

‘It’s a “good familiar creature,”’ Alleyn quoted, ‘“if it be well us’d.”’

‘That’s all right as far as it goes, but what sort of a perisher,’ Syce surprisingly observed, ‘took the bearings? A nasty little man and a beastly liar into the bargain.’

‘True enough. But we’re not, after all, discussing Iago and alcohol, but you and lumbago. Why –’

‘All right, I heard you before. I’m just thinking what to say.’

He went to the corner cupboard and returned with a half-empty bottle of whisky. ‘I’ve got to think,’ he said. ‘It’s damn’ ticklish, I’d have you know.’ He helped himself to a treble whisky.

‘In that case wouldn’t you do better without that snorter you’ve just poured out?’

‘Think so?’

Fox, with his masterly command of the totally unexpected, said: ‘She would.’

‘Who?’ shouted Commander Syce, looking terrified. He drank half his whisky.

‘Miss Kettle.’

‘She would what?’

‘Think you’d be better without it, sir.’