Lacklander made a small gaping movement with his lips and an ineffectual gesture with his hands. Then, with some appearance of boldness, he said: ‘Naturally, I don’t do anything of the sort. I did it by – at the desire of his family. The keys seemed to be lost and there were certain things that had to be done – people to be told and all that. She didn’t even know the name of his solicitors. And there were people to ring up. They thought his address book might be there.’

‘In the locked drawer? The address book?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was it there?’

He boggled for a moment, and then said: ‘No.’

‘And you did this job before we arrived?’

‘Yes.’

‘At Mrs Cartarette’s request?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Miss Cartarette? Was she in the search party?’

‘No.’

‘Was there, in fact, anything in the drawer?’

‘No,’ George said hardily. ‘There wasn’t.’ His face had begun to look coarse and blank.

‘I put it to you that you did not break open the drawer at Mrs Cartarette’s request. It was you, I suggest, who insisted upon doing it because you were in a muck-sweat wanting to find out where the amended Chapter 7 of your father’s memoirs might be. I put it to you that your relationship with Mrs Cartarette is such that you were in a position to dictate this manoeuvre.’

‘No. You have no right, damn you –’

‘I suggest that you are very well aware of the fact that your father wrote an amended version of Chapter 7 which was in effect a confession. In this version he stated firstly, that he himself was responsible for young Ludovic Phinn’s suicide and secondly, that he himself had traitorously conspired against his own government with certain elements in the German Government. This chapter, if it were published, would throw such opprobrium upon your father’s name that in order to stop its being made public, I suggest, you were prepared to go to the lengths to which you have, in fact, gone. You are an immensely vain man with a confused, indeed a fanatical sense of your family prestige. Have you anything to say to all this?’

A tremor had begun to develop in George Lacklander’s hands. He glanced down at them and with an air of covering up a social blunder, thrust them into his pockets. Most unexpectedly he began to laugh, an awkward rocketing sound made on the intake of breath, harsh as a hacksaw.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ he gasped, hunching his shoulder and bending at the waist in a spasm that parodied an ecstasy of amusement. ‘No, honestly, it’s too much!’

‘Why,’ Alleyn asked sedately, ‘are you laughing?’