“Well run up now, like a good fellow, Hailey, and tell her not to bother about this call if she doesn’t feel up to it.”

“All right,” said Hambledon.

“Would you mind giving her this note?” asked Alleyn, suddenly. “It’s just a suggestion that if she’d like to get away from the pub for a bit of fresh air—she’ll explain. Thank you so much.”

“Yes—certainly.” Hambledon looked sharply at Alleyn and then made for the lift.

“This is a difficult situation for you, Mr. Mason,” said Alleyn.

“Difficult! It’s a bit more than difficult. We don’t know what’s to happen. Here we are with the tour booked up—the advance is down in Wellington and has put all the stuff out. We’re due to open there in six days and God knows if the police will let us go, and if they do God knows if Carolyn will be able to play. And without her—!”

“Who’s her understudy?”

“Gaynes. I ask you! Flop! The Australian kid would have to take Gaynes’s bits. Of course if Carolyn does play—”

“But, after this! She’s had a terrible shock.”

“It’s different in the business,” said Mason. “Always has been. The show must go on. Doesn’t mean we’re callous but—well Alf would have felt the same. The show must go on. It’s always been like that.”

“I suppose it has. But surely—”

“I’ve seen people go on who would have been sent off to hospital in any other business. Fact I was born off-stage twenty minutes after my mother took her last call. It was a costume piece, of course—crinolines. It’s a funny old game, ours.”

“Yes,” said Alleyn. Suddenly he was aware of a kind of nostalgia, a feeling of intense sympathy and kinship with the stage. “A drab enough story to have aroused it,” he thought “A theme that has been thrashed to death in every back-stage plot from Pagliacci downwards. The show must go on!”

“Of course,” Mason was saying, “Carolyn may feel differently. I’m not sure about it myself. The public might not like it. Besides suppose it’s—one of us. Everybody would be wondering which of the cast is a bloody murderer. That’s so, isn’t it?”

“I suppose there would be a certain amount of conjecture.”

“Not the sort of advertisement the Firm wants,” said Mason moodily. “Undignified.”

To this magnificent illustration of a meiosis, Alleyn could only reply: “Quite so.”