“With my left hand because I had a Hornby signal in my right.”

“Good. Go on.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

“Well, I stepped over the rails. Giggle was fitting two curved bits together. I said I wouldn’t be a jiffy and he said ‘All Right, Master Mike.’ And I walked down the passage past the curtain of Robin’s room. Robin’s room is generally a sort of hall in 26 but Mummy had the curtains put there to make a room and a passage. Is this the right way, sir?”

“Yes.”

“The curtains were shut. They’re a kind of blue woolly stuff. The door at the end of the passage was shut. I opened it and went onto the landing.”

“Did you shut the door?”

“I don’t think so,” said Mike simply. “I hardly ever do. No, I didn’t, because I heard Giggle winding up the engine of the Hornby and I looked back at him.”

“Good. Then?”

“Well, I crossed the landing.”

“Was the lift up?”

“Yes, it was. You can see the light through the glass in the tops of the doors. There wasn’t anybody on the landing or outside the lift. Not standing up, anyway. So I went into the hall of No. 25 and I don’t suppose I shut the door. I’m afraid I’ll be a bit feeble if you say I’ve got to describe the hall because there were all the things the others had had for their charade. They’d just sort of bished them into the cupboard and they were bulging out and there were coats lying on the table and…” Mike stopped and screwed up his eyes.

“What is it?”

“Well, sir, I’m just sort of trying to see.”

“That’s right,” said Alleyn quietly. “You know your brain is really rather like a camera. It takes a photograph of everything you see, only very often you never develop the photograph. Try to develop the photograph your brain took of the hall.”

Nanny said: “The boy’s getting flushed.”

“I’m not,” said Mike, without opening his eyes. “Honestly, Nanny. Well, in my photograph the light is sort of coming through the window in front of me. Into my eyes. So everything has got its shadow coming my way. There’s a thing of flowers on the round table and a bowler. I think it was Uncle G.’s bowler. And I saw Henry’s gloves. And a scarf and some race glasses and one of those hats people wear in hot places. Wait a bit, sir. There’s something else. It’s sort of on the edge of the picture. Not quite developed, like you said.”

“Yes?”

“I’ll get it in a jiffy, all right. It’s a shining kind of thing. Not ’zackly big but long and bright.”

Nanny uttered a brusque exclamation and made an anxious gesture with her hands as though she fended something away from herself and from Mike.

“Wait a bit,” Mike repeated impatiently. “Don’t tell me. Long and thin and bright.”

He opened his eyes and stared triumphantly at Alleyn. “I’ve got it,” he said. “It was on the edge of the table. One of those long pointed things they keep in the sideboard drawer. A skewer. That’s what it was, sir. A skewer.”