“We came to that conclusion. Liversidge filled you up with that tarradiddle, didn’t he? Yes, I thought so. Were you afraid we’d find that out?”

“Yes.”

“I see. So you postponed the evil hour by running away?”

“It was pretty bloody waiting in that room. Hour after hour. It was cold.”

His eyes dilated. Suddenly he looked like a frightened schoolboy.

“I’ve never seen anyone—dead—before,” said Gordon.

Alleyn looked at him thoughtfully.

“Yes,” he said at last “it was pretty foul, wasn’t it? Given you the horrors?”

Gordon nodded. “A bit.”

“That’s bad luck,” said Alleyn. “It’ll wear off in time. I don’t want to nag, you know, but alcohol’s no good at all. Makes it worse. So you eluded Mr. Cass because you’d got the jim-jams while you were waiting in the wardrobe-room?”

“It was so quiet. And outside there—on the stage—getting cold and stiff—”

“God bless my soul!” exclaimed Alleyn. “They took him away long before that, you silly fellow. Now tell me, what did Liversidge say to you when you left the scene of the disaster?”

“Frankie?”

“Yes. In the dressing-room passage, before you went to the wardrobe-room?”

“He—he—I think he said something about—did I remember what we’d said.”

“What did he mean?”

“About Courtney and the money.”

“Now think carefully and answer me truthfully. It’s important. Who first made the suggestion that Broadhead might have taken that money—you or Mr. Liversidge?”

“He did, of course,” said Gordon at once.

“Ah, yes,” said Alleyn.

He sat down on the end of the bed and again he contemplated Gordon. It seemed to him that after all the boy was not so intolerably sophisticated. “His sophistication is no more than a spurious glaze over his half-baked adolescence,” thought Alleyn. “Under the stress of this affair it has already begun to crack. Perhaps he may even read detective stories.” And suddenly he asked Gordon:

“Are you at all interested in my sort of job?”

“I was, rather, in the abstract,” said Gordon.

“I’m puzzled by your reactions to this affair. Last night, you know, you were so very alert and cock-a-hoop. Your attack on Broadhead! It was most determined.”

“I hadn’t had time to think. It didn’t seem real then. None of it seemed real. Just rather exciting.”

“I know. Perhaps you are one of the people that ricochet from a shock, as a bullet does from an impenetrable surface. You fly off at an uncalculated angle, but do not at once lose speed.”

“Perhaps I am,” agreed Gordon, cheered by the delicious promise of self-analysis. “Yes, I think I am like that. I—”