The butler admitted them and contrived to suggest with next to no expenditure of behaviour that Alleyn was a friend of the family and Fox completely invisible. Sir George, he said, was still at luncheon. If Alleyn would step this way he would inform Sir George. Alleyn, followed by the unmoved Fox, was shown into George Lacklander’s study: the last of the studies they were to visit. It still bore, Alleyn recognized, the imprint of Sir Harold Lacklander’s personality and he looked with interest at a framed caricaturé of his erstwhile chief made a quarter of a century ago when Alleyn was a promising young man in the Foreign Service. The drawing revived his memories of Sir Harold Lacklander: of his professional charm, his conformation to type, his sudden flashes of wit and his extreme sensitiveness to criticism. There was a large photograph of George on the desk and it was strange to see in it, as Alleyn fancied he could, these elements adulterated and transformed by the addition of something that was either stupidity or indifference. Stupidity? Was George, after all, such an ass? It depended, as usual, on ‘what one meant’ by an ass.

At this point in Alleyn’s meditations, George himself, looking huffily post-prandial, walked in. His expression was truculent.

‘I should have thought, I must say, Alleyn,’ he said, ‘that one’s luncheon hour at least might be left to one.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Alleyn said, ‘I thought you’d finished. Do you smoke between the courses, perhaps?’

Lacklander angrily pitched his cigarette into the fireplace. ‘I wasn’t hungry,’ he said.

‘In that case I am relieved that I didn’t, after all, interrupt you.’

‘What are you driving at? I’m damned if I like your tone, Alleyn. What do you want?’

‘I want,’ Alleyn said, ‘the truth. I want the truth about what you did yesterday evening. I want the truth about what you did when you went to Hammer Farm last night. I want the truth, and I think I have it, about Chapter 7 of your father’s memoirs. A man has been murdered. I am a policeman, and I want facts.’

‘None of these matters has anything to do with Cartarette’s death,’ Lacklander said, and wet his lips.

‘You won’t persuade me of that by refusing to discuss them.’

‘Have I said that I refuse to discuss them?’

‘All right,’ Alleyn sighed. ‘Without more ado then, did you expect to find a copy of Chapter 7 when you broke open the drawer in Colonel Cartarette’s desk last night?’

‘You’re deliberately insulting me, by God!’

‘Do you deny that you broke open the drawer?’