Killer Dolphin

SEVEN Sunday Morning

“I didn’t knock you up when I came in,” Peregrine said. “There seemed no point. It was getting light. I just thought I’d leave the note to wake me at seven. And oddly enough I did sleep. Heavily.”

Jeremy stood with his back to Peregrine, looking out of the bedroom window. “Is that all?” he asked.

“All?”

“That happened?”

“I should have thought it was enough, my God!”

“I know,” Jeremy said without turning. “I only meant: did you look at the glove?”

“I saw it, I told you: the Sergeant brought it to Alleyn with the two documents and afterwards Alleyn laid them out on Winty’s desk.”

“I wondered if it was damaged.”

“I don’t think so. I didn’t examine it. I wouldn’t have been let. Fingerprints and all that. It seems they really do fuss away about fingerprints.”

“What’ll they do with the things?”

“I don’t know. Lock them up at the Yard, I imagine, until they’ve finished with them and then return them to Conducis.”

“To Conducis. Yes.”

“I must get up, Jer. I’ve got to ring Winty and the cast and the understudy and find out about the boy’s condition. Look, you know the man who did the carpets. Could you ring him up at wherever he lives and tell him he simply must send men in, first thing tomorrow or if necessary tonight, to replace about two or three square yards of carpet on the half-landing. We’ll pay overtime and time again and whatever.”

“The half-landing?”

Peregrine said very rapidly in a high-pitched voice: “Yes. The carpet. On the half-landing. It’s got Jobbins’s blood and brains all over it. The carpet.”

Jeremy turned gray and said: “I’m sorry. I’ll do that thing,” and walked out of the room.

When Peregrine had bathed and shaved he swallowed with loathing two raw eggs in Worcestershire sauce and addressed himself to the telephone. The time was now twenty past seven.

On the South Bank in the borough, of Southwark, Superintendent Alleyn, having left Inspector Fox to arrange the day’s business, drove over Blackfriars Bridge to St. Terence’s Hospital and was conducted to a ward where Trevor Vere, screened from general view and deeply sighing, lay absorbed in the enigma of unconsciousness. At his bedside sat a uniformed constable with his helmet under his chair and a notebook in his hand. Alleyn was escorted by the ward sister and a house-surgeon.

“As you see, he’s deeply concussed,” said the house-surgeon. “He fell on his feet and drove his spine into the base of his head and probably crashed the back of a seat. As far as we can tell there’s no profound injury internally. Right femur and two ribs broken. Extensive bruising. You may say he was bloody lucky. A twenty foot fall, I understand.”

“The bruise on his jaw?”

“That’s a bit of a puzzle. It doesn’t look like the back or arm of a seat. It’s got all the characteristics of a nice hook to the jaw. I wouldn’t care to say definitely, of course. Sir James has seen him.” (Sir James Curtis was the Home Office pathologist.) “He thinks it looks like a punch.”

“Ah. Yes, so he said. It’s no use my asking, of course, when the boy may recover consciousness? Or how much he will remember?”

“The usual thing is complete loss of memory for events occurring just before the accident.”

“Alas.”

“What? Oh, quite. You must find that sort of thing very frustrating.”

“Very. I wonder if it would be possible to take the boy’s height and length of his arms, would it?”

“He can’t be disturbed.”

“I know. But if he might he uncovered for a moment. It really is important.”

The young house-surgeon thought for a moment and then nodded to the sister, who folded back the bed-clothes.

“I’m very much obliged to you,” Alleyn said three minutes later and replaced the clothes.

“Well, if that’s all—?”

“Yes. Thank you very much. I mustn’t keep you. Thank you, Sister. I’ll just have a word with the constable, here, before I go.”

The constable had withdrawn to the far side of the bed.

“You’re the chap who came here with the ambulance, aren’t you?” Alleyn asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“You should have been relieved. You heard about instructions from Mr. Fox concerning the boy’s fingernails?”

“Yes, I did, sir, but only after he’d been cleaned up.”

Alleyn swore in a whisper.

“But I’d happened to notice—” The constable — wooden-faced — produced from a pocket in his tunic a folded paper. “It was in the ambulance, sir. While they were putting a blanket over him. They were going to tuck his hands under and I noticed they were a bit dirty like a boy’s often are but the fingernails had been manicured. Colourless varnish and all. And then I saw two were broken back and the others kind of choked up with red fluff and I cleaned them out with my penknife.” He modestly proffered his little folded paper.

“What’s your name?” Alleyn asked.

“Grantley, sir.”

“Want to move out of the uniformed arm?”

“I’d like to.”

“Yes. Well, come and see me if you apply for a transfer.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Trevor Vere sighed lengthily in his breathing. Alleyn looked at the not-quite-closed eyes, the long lashes and the full mouth that had smirked so unpleasingly at him that morning in The Dolphin. It was merely childish now. He touched the forehead which was cool and dampish.

“Where’s his mother?” Alleyn asked.

“They say, on her way.”

“She’s difficult, I’m told. Don’t leave the boy before you’re relieved. If he speaks: get it.”

“They say he’s not likely to speak, sir.”

“I know. I know.”

A nurse approached with a covered object. “All right,” Alleyn said, “I’m off.”

He went to the Yard, treating himself to coffee and bacon and eggs on the way.

Fox, he was told, had come in. He arrived in Alleyn’s office looking, as always, neat, reasonable, solid and extremely clean. He made a succinct report. Jobbins appeared to have no near relations, but the landlady at The Wharfinger’s Friend had heard him mention a cousin who was lockkeeper near Marlow. The stage-crew and front-of-house people had been checked and were out of the picture. The routine search before locking up seemed to have been extremely thorough.

Bailey and Thompson had finished at the theatre, where nothing of much significance had emerged. The dressing-rooms had yielded little beyond a note from Harry Grove that Destiny Meade had carelessly tucked into her make-up box.

“Very frank affair,” Mr. Fox said primly.

“Frank about what?”

“Sex.”

“Oh. No joy for us?”

“Not in the way you mean, Mr. Alleyn.”

“What about the boy’s room?”

“He shares with Mr. Charles Random. A lot of horror comics including some of the American type that come within the meaning of the act respecting the importation of juvenile reading. One strip was about a well-developed female character called Slash who’s really a vampire. She carves up Olympic athletes and leaves her mark on them — ‘Slash,’ in blood. It seems the lad was quite struck with this. He’s scrawled ‘Slash’ across the dressing-room looking-glass with red greasepaint and we found the same thing on the front-of-house lavatory mirrors and on the wall of one of the upstairs boxes. The one on the audience’s left.”

“Poor little swine.”

“The landlady at The Wharfinger’s Friend reckons he’ll come to no good and blames the mother, who plays the steel guitar at that strip-tease joint behind Magpie Alley. Half the time she doesn’t pick the kid up after his show and he gets round the place till all hours, Mrs. Jancy says.”

“Mrs.—?”

“Jancy. The landlady. Nice woman. The Blewitts don’t live far off as it happens. Somewhere behind Tabard Street at the back of the Borough.”

“Anything more?”

“Well—dabs. Nothing very startling. Bailey’s been able to pick up some nice, clean, control specimens from the dressing-rooms. The top of the pedestal’s a mess of the public’s prints, half dusted off by the cleaners.”

“Nothing to the purpose?”

“Not really. And you would expect,” Fox said with his customary air of placid good sense, “if the boy acted vindictively, to find his dabs — two palms together where he pushed the thing over. Nothing of the kind, however, nice shiny surface and all. The carpet’s hopeless, of course. Our chaps have taken up the soiled area. Is anything the matter, Mr. AUeyn?”

“Nothing, Br’er Fox, except the word ‘soiled.’ ”

“It’s not too strong,” Fox said, contemplating it with surprise.

“No. It’s dreadfully moderate.”

“Well,” Fox said, after a moment’s consideration, “you have a feeling for words, of course.”

“Which gives me no excuse to talk like a pompous ass. Can you do some telephoning? And, by the way, have you had any breakfast? Don’t tell me. The landlady of The Wharfinger’s Friend stuffed you full of new-laid eggs.”

“Mrs. Jancy was obliging enough to make the offer.”

“In that case here is the cast and management list with telephone numbers. You take the first half and I’ll do the rest. Ask them with all your celebrated tact to come to the theatre at eleven. I think we’ll find that Peregrine Jay has already warned them.”

But Peregrine had not warned Jeremy because it had not occurred to him that Alleyn would want to see him. When the telephone rang it was Jeremy who,answered it; Peregrine saw his face bleach. He thought, “How extraordinary: I believe his pupils have contracted.” And he felt within himself a cold sliding sensation which he refused to acknowledge.

Jeremy said: “Yes, of course. Yes,” and put the receiver down. “It seems they want me to go to the theatre, too,” he said.

“I don’t know why. You weren’t there last night.”

“No. I was here. Working.” .

“Perhaps they want you to check that the glove’s all right.”

Jeremy made a slight movement, almost as if a nerve had been flicked. He pursed his lips and raised his sandy brows. “Perhaps,” he said and returned to his work-table at the far end of the room.

Peregrine, with some difficulty, got Mrs. Blewitt on the telephone and was subjected to a tirade in which speculation and avid cupidity were but thinly disguised under a mask of sorrow. She suffered, unmistakably from a formidable hangover. He arranged for a meeting, told her what the hospital had told him and assured her that everything possible would be done for the boy.

“Will they catch whoever done it?”

“It may have been an accident, Mrs. Blewitt.”

“If it was, the Management’s responsible,” she said, “and don’t forget it.”

They rang off.

Peregrine turned to Jeremy, who was bent over his table but did not seem to be working.

“Are you all right, Jer?”

“All right?”

“I thought you looked a bit poorly.”

“There’s nothing the matter with me. You look pretty sickly, yourself.”

“I daresay I do.”

Peregrine waited for a moment and then said: “When will you go to The Dolphin?”

“I’m commanded for eleven.”

“I thought I’d go over early. Alleyn will use our office and the company can sit about the circle foyer or go to their dressing-rooms.”

“They may be locked up,” Jeremy said.

“Who — the actors?”

“The dressing-rooms, half-wit.”

“I can’t imagine why, but you may be right. Routine’s what they talk about, isn’t it?”

Jeremy did not answer. Peregrine saw him wipe his hand across his mouth and briefly close his eyes. Then he stooped over his work: he was shaping a piece of balsa wood with a mounted razor blade. His hand jerked and the blade slipped. Peregrine let out an involuntary ejaculation. Jeremy swung round on his stool and faced him. “Do me a profound kindness and get the hell out of it, will you, Perry?”

“All right. See you later.”

Peregrine, perturbed and greatly puzzled, went out into the weekend emptiness of Blackfriars. An uncoordinated insistence of church bells jangled across the Sunday quietude.

He had nothing to do between now and eleven o’clock. “One might go into the church,” he thought but the idea dropped blankly on a field of inertia. “I can’t imagine why I feel like this,” he thought. “I’m used to taking decisions, to keeping on top of a situation.” But there were no decisions to take and the situation was out of his control. He couldn’t think of Superintendent Alleyn in terms of a racalcitrant actor.

He thought: “I know what I’ll do. I’ve got two hours, I’ll walk, like a character in Fielding or in Dickens, I’ll walk northwards, towards Hampstead and Emily. If I get blisters I’ll take the bus or a tube and if there’s not enough time left for that I’ll take a taxi. And Emily and I will go down to The Dolphin together.”

Having come to this decision his spirits lifted. He crossed Blackfriars Bridge and made his way through Bloomsbury towards Marylebone and Maida Vale.

His thoughts were divided between Emily, The Dolphin and Jeremy Jones.

Gertrude Bracey had a mannerism. She would glance pretty sharply at a companion but only for a second and would then, with a brusque turn of the head, look away. The effect was disconcerting and suggested not shiftiness so much as a profound distaste for her company. She smiled readily but with a derisive air and she had a sharp edge to her tongue. Alleyn, who never relied upon first impressions, supposed her to be vindictive.

He found support for this opinion in the demeanour of her associates. They sat round the office in The Dolphin on that Sunday afternoon, with all the conditioned ease of their training but with restless eyes and overtones of discretion in their beautifully controlled voices. This air of guardedness was most noticeable, because it was least disguised, in Destiny Meade. Sleek with fur, not so much dressed as gloved, she sat back in her chair and looked from time to time at Harry Grove who, on the few occasions when he caught her eye, smiled brilliantly in return. When Alleyn began to question Miss Bracey, Destiny Meade and Harry Grove exchanged one of these glances: on her part with brows raised significantly and on his with an appearance of amusement and anticipation.

Marcus Knight looked as if someone had affronted him and also as if he was afraid Miss Bracey was about to go too far in some unspecified direction.

Charles Random watched her with an expression of nervous distaste, and Emily Dunne with evident distress. Winter Meyer seemed to be ravaged by anxiety and inward speculation. He looked restlessly at Miss Bracey as if she had interrupted him in some desperate calculation. Peregrine, sitting by Emily, stared at his own clasped hands and occasionally at her. He listened carefully to Alleyn’s questions and Miss Bracey’s replies. Jeremy Jones, a little removed from the others, sat bolt upright in his chair and stared at Alleyn.

The characteristic that all these people had in common was that of extreme pallor, guessed at in the women and self-evident in the men.

Alleyn opened with a brief survey of the events in their succession, checked the order in which the members of the company had left the theatre, and was now engaged upon extracting confirmation of their movements from Gertrude Bracey, with the reactions among his hearers that have been indicated.

“Miss Bracey, I think you and Mr. Knight left the theatre together. Is that right?” They both agreed.

“And you left by the auditorium, not by the stage-door?”

“At Perry’s suggestion,” Marcus Knight said.

“To avoid the puddles,” Miss Bracey explained.

“And you went out together through the front doors?”

“No,” they said in unison, and she added: “Mr. Knight was calling on the Management.”

She didn’t actually sniff over this statement but contrived to suggest that there was something to be sneered at in the circumstance.

“I looked in at the office,” Knight loftily said, “on a matter of business.”

“This office? And to see Mr. Meyer?”

“Yes,” Winter Meyer said. Knight inclined his head in stately acquiescence.

“So you passed Jobbins on your way upstairs?”

“I — ah — yes. He was on the half-landing under the treasure.”

“I saw him up there,” Miss Bracey said.

“How was he dressed?”

As usual, they said, with evident surprise. In uniform.

“Miss Bracey, how did you leave?”

“By the pass-door in the main entrance. I let myself out and slammed it shut after me.”

“Locking it?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. As a matter of fact I—I re-opened it.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to see the time,” she said awkwardly, “by the clock in the foyer.”

“Jobbins,” Winter Meyer said, “barred and bolted this door after everyone had left.”

“When would that be?”

“Not more than ten minutes later. Marco—Mr. Knight—and I had a drink and left together. Jobbins came after us and I heard him drop the bar across and shoot the bolts. My God!” Meyer suddenly exclaimed.

“Yes?”

“The alarm! The burglar alarm. He’d switch it on when he’d locked up. Why didn’t it work?”

“Because somebody had switched it off.”

“My God!”

“May we return to Jobbins? How was he dressed when you left?”

Meyer said with an air of patience under trying circumstances, “I didn’t see him as we came down. He may have been in the men’s lavatory. I called out goodnight and he answered from up above. We stood for a moment in the portico and that’s when I heard him bolt the door.”

“When you saw him, perhaps ten minutes later, Mr. Jay, he was wearing an overcoat and slippers?”

“Yes,” said Peregrine.

“Yes. Thank you. How do you get home, Miss Bracey?”

She had a mini-car, she said, which she parked in the converted bombsite between the pub and the theatre.

“Were there other cars parked in this area belonging to the theatre people?”

“Naturally,” she said. “Since I was the first to leave.”

“You noticed and recognized them?”

“Oh, really, I suppose I noticed them. There were a number of strange cars still there but—yes, I saw—” she looked at Knight: her manner suggested a grudging alliance “—your car, Marcus.”

“What make of car is Mr. Knight’s?”

“I’ve no idea. What is it, dear?”

“A Jag, dear,” said Knight

“Any others?” Alleyn persisted.

“I really don’t know. I think I noticed — yours, Charles,” she said, glancing at Random. “Yes. I did, because it is rather conspicuous.”

“What is it?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“A very, very old, old, old souped-up Morris sports,” said Random. “Painted scarlet.”

“And Miss Meade’s car?”

Destiny Meade opened her eyes very wide and raised her elegantly gloved and braceleted hands to her furs. She gently shook her head. The gesture suggested utter bewilderment. Before she could speak Gertrude Bracey gave her small, contemptuous laugh.

“Oh, that,” she said. “Yes, indeed. Drawn up in glossy state under the portico. As for Royalty.”

She did not look at Destiny.

Harry Grove said: “Destiny uses a hire-service, don’t you, love?” His manner, gay and proprietary, had an immediate effect upon Marcus Knight and Gertrude Bracey, who both stared lividly at nothing.

“Any other cars, Miss Bracey? Mr. Meyer’s?”

“I don’t remember. I didn’t go peering about for cars. I don’t notice them.”

“It was there,” Winter Meyer said. “Parked at the back and rather in the dark.”

“When you left, Mr. Meyer, were there any other cars apart from your own and Mr. Knight’s?”

“I really don’t know. There might have been. Do you remember, Marco?”

“No,” he said, widely and vaguely. “No, I don’t remember. As you say: it was dark.”

“I had an idea I saw your mini, Gertie,” Meyer said, “but I suppose I couldn’t have. You’d gone by then, of course.”

Gertrude Bracey darted a glance at Alleyn.

“I can’t swear to all this sort of thing,” she said angrily. “I — I didn’t notice the cars and I had—” She stopped and made a sharp movement with her hands. “I had other things to think of,” she said.

“I understand,” Alleyn said, “that Miss Dunne and Mr. Jay didn’t have cars at the theatre?”

“That’s right,” Emily said. “I haven’t got one anyway.”

“I left mine at home,” said Peregrine.

“Where it remained?” Alleyn remarked. “Unless Mr. Jones took it out?”

“Which I didn’t,” Jeremy said. “I was at home, working, all the evening.”

“Alone?”

“Entirely.”

“As far as cars are concerned that leaves only Mr. Grove. Did you by any chance notice Mr. Grove’s car in the bombsite, Miss Bracey?”

“Oh, yes!” she said loudly and threw him one of her brief, disfavoring looks. “I saw that one.”

“What is it?”

“A Panther ’55,” she said instantly. “An open sports car.”

“You know it quite well,” Alleyn lightly observed.

“Know it? Oh, yes,” Gertrude Bracey repeated with a sharp cackle. “I know it. Or you may say I used to.”

“You don’t think well, perhaps, of Mr. Grove’s Panther?”

“There’s nothing the matter with the car.”

Harry Grove said: “Darling, what an infallible ear you have for inflection. Did you go to R.A.D.A.?”

Destiny Meade let out half a cascade of her celebrated laughter and then appeared to swallow the remainder. Meyer gave a repressed snort.

Marcus Knight said, “This is the wrong occasion, in my opinion, for mistimed comedy.”

“Of course,” Grove said warmly. “I do so agree. But when is the right occasion?”

“If I am to be publicly insulted—” Miss Bracey began on a high note. Peregrine cut in.

“Look,” he said. “Shouldn’t we all remember this is a police inquiry into something that may turn out to be murder?”

They gazed at him as if he’d committed a social enormity.

“Mr. Alleyn,” Peregrine went on, “tells us he’s decided to cover the first stages as a sort of company call: everybody who was in the theatre last night and left immediately, or not long before the event. That’s right isn’t it?” he asked Alleyn.

“Certainly,” Alleyn agreed and reflected sourly that Peregrine, possibly with the best will in the world, had effectually choked what might have been a useful and revealing dust-up. He must make the best of it

“This procedure,” he said, “if satisfactorily conducted, should save a great deal of checking and counter-checking and reduce the amount of your time taken up by the police. The alternative is to ask you all to wait in the foyer while I see each of you separately.”

There was a brief pause broken by Winter Meyer.

“Fair enough,” Meyer said and there was a slight murmur of agreement from the company. “Don’t let’s start throwing temperaments right and left, chaps,” Mr. Meyer added. “It’s not the time for it.”

Alleyn could have kicked him. “How right you are,” he said. “Shall we press on? I’m sure you all see the point of this car business. It’s essential that we make out when and in what order you left the theatre and whether any of you could have returned within the crucial time. Yes, Miss Meade?”

“I don’t want to interrupt,” Destiny Meade said. She caught her underlip between her teeth and gazed helplessly at Alleyn. “Only: I don’t quite understand.”

“Please go on.”

“May I? Well, you see, it’s just that everybody says Trevor, who is generally admitted to be rather a beastly little boy, stole the treasure and then killed poor Jobbins. I do admit he’s got some rather awful ways with him and of course one never knows so one wonders why, that being the case, it matters where we all went or what sort of cars we went in.”

Alleyn said carefully that so far no hard and fast conclusion could be drawn and that he hoped they would all welcome the opportunity of proving that they were away from the theatre during the crucial period, which was between eleven o’clock, when Peregrine and Emily left the theatre, and about five past twelve, when Hawkins came running down the stage-door alleyway and told them of his discovery.

“So far,” Alleyn said, “we’ve only got as far as learning that when Miss Bracey left the theatre the rest of you were still inside it.”

“Not I,” Jeremy said. “I’ve told you, I think, that I was at home.”

“So you have,” Alleyn agreed. “It would help if you could substantiate the statement. Did anyone ring you up, for instance?”

“If they did, I don’t remember.”

“I see,” said Alleyn.

He plodded back through the order of departure until it was established beyond question that Gertrude and Marcus had been followed by Charles Random, who had driven to a pub on the South Bank where he was living for the duration of the play. He had been given his usual late supper. He was followed by Destiny Meade and her friends, all of whom left by the stage-door and spent about an hour at The Younger Dolphin and then drove to her flat in Cheyne Walk where they were joined, she said, by dozens of vague chums, and by Harry Grove, who left the theatre at the same time as they did, fetched his guitar from his own flat in Canonbury, and then joined them in Chelsea. It appeared that Harry Grove was celebrated for a song sequence in, which, Destiny said, obviously quoting someone else, he sent the sacred cows up so high that they remained in orbit forevermore.

“Quite a loss to the nightclubs,” Marcus Knight said to nobody in particular. “One wonders why the legitimate theatre should still attract.”

“I assure you, Marco dear,” Grove rejoined, “only the Lord Chamberlain stands between me and untold affluence.”

“Or you might call it dirty-pay,” said Knight. It was Miss Bracey’s turn to laugh very musically.

“Did any of you,” Alleyn went on, “at any time after the fall of curtain see or speak to Trevor Vere?”

“I did, of course,” Charles Random said. He had an impatient, rather injured manner which it would have been going too far to call feminine. “He dresses with me. And without wanting to appear utterly brutal I must say it would take nothing less than a twenty foot drop into the stalls to stop him talking.”

“Does he write on the looking-glass?”

Random looked surprised. “No,” he said. “Write what? Graffiti?”

“Not precisely. The word ‘Slash.’ In red greasepaint.”

“He’s always shrieking ‘Slash.’ Making a great mouthful of it. Something to do with his horror comics, one imagines.”

“Does he ever talk about the treasure?”

“Well, yes,” Random said uneasily. “He flaunts away about how—well, about how any fool could pinch it and—and: no, it’s of no importance.”

“Suppose we just hear about it?”

“He was simply putting on his act but he did say anyone with any sense could guess the combination of the lock.”

“Intimating that he had, in fact, guessed it?”

“Well — actually — yes.”

“And did he divulge what it was??’

Random was of a sanguine complexion. He now lost something of his colour. “He did not,” Random said, “and if he had, I should have paid no attention. I don’t believe for a moment he knew the combination.”

“And you ought to know, dear, oughtn’t you?” Destiny said with the gracious condescension of stardom to bit-part competence. “Always doing those ghastly puzzles in your intellectual papers. Right up your alleyway.”

This observation brought about its own reaction of discomfort and silence.

Alleyn said to Winter Meyer, “I remember I suggested that you would be well advised to make the five-letter key group rather less predictable. Was it in fact changed?”

Winter Meyer raised his eyebrows, wagged his head and his hands and said: “I was always going to. And then when we knew they were to go—one of those things.” He covered his face for a moment. “One of those things,” he repeated, and everybody looked deeply uncomfortable.

Alleyn said, “On that morning, besides yourself and the boy, there were present, I think, everybody who is here now except Miss Bracey, Mr. Random and Mr. Grove. Is that right? Miss Bracey?”

“Oh, yes,” she said with predictable acidity. “It was a photograph call, I believe. I was not required.”

“It was just for two pictures, dear,” little Meyer said. “Destiny and Marco with the glove. You know?”

“Oh, quite. Quite.”

“And the kid turned up so they used him.”

“I seem to remember,” Harry Grove observed, “that Trevor was quoted in the daily journals as saying that the glove made him feel kinda funny like he wanted to cry.”

“Am I wrong,” Marcus Knight suddenly demanded of no one in particular, “in believing that this boy is in a Critical Condition and May Die? Mr. — ah — Superintendent — ah — Alleyn?”

“He is still on the danger list,” Alleyn said.

“Thank you. Has anybody else got something funny to say about the boy?” Knight demanded. “Or has the fount of comedy dried at its source?”

“If,” Grove rejoined, without rancour, “you mean me, it’s dry as a bone. No more jokes.”

Marcus Knight folded his arms.

Alleyn said, “Miss Meade, Miss Dunne, Mr. Knight, Mr. Jay and Mr. Jones—and the boy of course—were all present when the matter of the lock was discussed. Not for the first time, I understand. The safe had been installed for some days and the locking system had been widely canvassed among you. You had heard from Mr. Meyer that it carried a five-number combination and that this was based on a five-letter key word and a very commonplace code. Mr. Meyer also said, before I stopped him, that an obvious key word had been suggested by Mr. Conducis. Had any of you already speculated upon what this word might be? Or discussed the matter?”

There was a long silence.

Destiny Meade said plaintively: “Naturally we discussed it. The men seemed to know what it was all about. The alphabet and numbers and not enough numbers for all the letters or something. And anyway it wasn’t as if any of us were going to do anything, was it? But everyone thought—”

“What everyone thought—” Marcus Knight began, but she looked coldly upon him and said: “Please don’t butt in, Marco. You’ve got such a way of butting in. Do you mind?”

“My God!” he said with all the repose of an unexploded land mine.

“Everyone thought,” Destiny continued, gazing at Alleyn, “that this obvious five-letter word would be ‘glove.’ But as far as I could see that didn’t get one any nearer to a five-figure number.”

Harry Grove burst out laughing. “Darling!” he said. “I adore you better than life itself.” He picked up her gloved hand and kissed it, peeled back the gauntlet, kissed the inside of her wrist and then remarked to the company in general that he wouldn’t exchange her for a wilderness of monkeys. Gertrude Bracey violently re-crossed her legs. Marcus Knight rose, turned his face to the wall and with frightful disengagement made as if to examine a framed drawing of The Dolphin in the days of Adolphus Ruby. A pulse beat rapidly under his empurpled cheek.

“Very well,” Alleyn said. “You all thought that ‘glove’ was a likely word and so indeed it was. Did anyone arrive at the code and produce the combination?”

“Dilly, dilly, dilly, come and be killed,” cried Harry.

“Not at all,” Alleyn rejoined, “Unless (the security aspect of this affair being evidently laughable) you formed yourselves into a syndicate for robbery. If anyone did arrive at the combination it seems highly unlikely that he or she kept it to himself. Yes, Mr. Random?”

Charles Random had made an indeterminate sound. He looked up quickly at Alleyn, hesitated and then said rapidly, “As a matter of fact, I did. I’ve always been mildly interested in codes and I heard everybody muttering away about the lock on the safe and how the word might be ‘glove.’ I have to do a lot of waiting about in my dressing-room and thought I’d try to work it out. I thought it might be one of the sorts where you write down numerals from 1 to 0 in three rows one under another and put in succession under each row the letters of the alphabet, adding an extra A B C D to make up the last line. Then you can read the numbers off from the letters. Each number has three equivalent letters.”

“Quite so. And you got—? From the word ‘glove’?”

“Seven-two-five-two-five, or, if the alphabet was written from right to left, four-nine-six-nine-six.”

“And if the alphabet ran from right to left and then, at K, from left to right and finally, at U, from right to left again?”

“Four-two-five-nine-six, which seemed to me more likely as there are no repeated figures.”

“Fancy you remembering them like that!” Destiny ejaculated, and appealed to the company. “I mean—isn’t it? I can’t so much as remember anyone’s telephone number—scarcely even my own.”

Winter Meyer moved his hands, palms up, and looked at Alleyn. “But, of course,” Random said, “there are any number of variants in this type of code. I might have been all wrong.”

“Tell me,” Alleyn said, “are you and the boy on in the same scenes? I seem to remember that you are.”

“Yes,” Peregrine and Random said together, and Random added: “I didn’t leave any notes about that Trevor could have read. He tried to pump me. I thought it would be extremely unwise to tell him.”

“Did you, in fact, tell anybody of your solutions?”

“No,” Random said, looking straight in front of him. “I discussed the code with nobody.” He looked at his fellow players. “You can all bear me out in this,” he said.

“Well, I must say!” Gertrude Bracey remarked, and laughed.

“A wise decision,” Alleyn murmured, and Random glanced at him.

“I wonder,” he said, fretfully.

“I think there’s something else you have to tell me, isn’t there?”

In the interval that followed Destiny said with an air of discovery: “No, but you must all admit it’s terribly clever of Charles.”

Random said, “Perhaps it’s unnecessary to point out that if I had tried to steal the treasure I would certainly not have told you what I have told you; still less what I’m going to tell you.”

Another pause was broken by Inspector Fox, who sat by the door and had contrived to be forgotten. “Fair enough,” he said.

“Thank you,” said Random, startled.

“What are you going to tell us, Mr. Random?”

“That, whatever the combination may be, Trevor didn’t know it. He’s not really as sharp as he sounds. It was all bluff. When he kept on about how easy it was I got irritated — I find him extremely tiresome, that boy — and I said I’d give him a pound if he could tell me and he did a sort of ‘Yah-yah-yah, I’m not going to be caught like that’ act.” Random made a slight, rather finicky movement of his shoulders and his voice became petulant. “He’d been helping himself to my make-up and I was livid with him. It blew up into quite a thing and—well, it doesn’t matter but in the end I shook him and he blurted out a number—five-five-five-three-one. Then we were called for the opening.”

“When was this?”

“Before last night’s show.” Random turned to Miss Bracey. “Gertie dresses next door to me,” he said. “I daresay she heard the ongoings.”

“I certainly did. Not very helpful when one is making one’s preparation which I, at any rate, like to do.”

“Method in her madness. Or is it,” Harry Grove asked, “madness in her Method?”

“That will do, Harry.”

“Dear Perry. Of course.”

“You told us a moment ago, Mr. Random,” Alleyn said, “that the boy didn’t reveal the number.”

“Nor did he. Not the correct number.” Random said quickly.

Destiny Meade said: “Yes, but why were you so sure it was the wrong number?”

“It’s the Dolphin telephone number, darling,” Grove said. “Five-five-five-three-one. Remember?”

“Is it? Oh, yes. Of course it is.”

“First thing to enter his head in his fright, I suppose,” Random said.

“You really frightened him?” asked Alleyn.

“Yes, I did. Little horror. He’d have told me if he’d known.” Random added loudly: “He didn’t know the combination and he couldn’t have opened the lock.”

“He was forever badgering me to drop a hint,” Winter Meyer said. “Needless to say, I didn’t.”

“Precisely,” said Random.

Peregrine said: “I don’t see how you can be so sure, Charlie. He might simply have been holding out on you.”

“If he knew the combination and meant to commit the theft,” Knight said, flinging himself down into his chair again, “he certainly wouldn’t tell you what it was.”

There was a general murmur of fervent agreement. “And after all,” Harry Grove pointed out, “you couldn’t have been absolutely sure, could you, Charles, that you hit on the right number yourself or even the right type of code? Or could you?” He grinned at Random. “Did you try?” he asked. “Did you prove it, Charles? Did you have a little twiddle? Before the treasure went in?”

For a moment Random looked as if he would like to hit him but he tucked in his lips, gave himself time and then spoke exclusively to Alleyn.

He said: “I do not believe that Trevor opened the safe and consequently I’m absolutely certain he didn’t kill Henry Jobbins.” He settled his shoulders and looked defiant.

Winter Meyer said: “I suppose you realize the implication of what you’re saying, Charles?”

“I think so.”

“Then I must say you’ve an odd notion of loyalty to your colleagues.”

“It doesn’t arise.”

“Doesn’t it!” Meyer cried and looked restively at Alleyn.

Alleyn made no answer to this. He sat with his long hands linked together on Peregrine’s desk.

The superb voice of Marcus Knight broke the silence.

“I may be very dense,” he said, collecting his audience, “but I cannot see where this pronouncement of Charles’s leads us. If, as the investigation seems to establish, the boy never left the theatre and if the theatre was locked up and only Hawkins had the key to the stage-door: then how the hell did a third person get in?”

“Might he have been someone in the audience who stayed behind?” Destiny asked, brightly. “You know? Lurked?”

Peregrine said, “The ushers, the commissionaire, Jobbins and the A.S.M. did a thorough search front and back after every performance.”

“Well, then, perhaps Hawkins is the murderer,” she said, exactly as if a mystery-story were under discussion. “Has anyone thought of that?” She appealed to Alleyn, who thought it better to disregard her.

“Well, I don’t know,” Destiny rambled on. “Who could it be if it’s not Trevor? That’s what we’ve got to ask ourselves. Perhaps, though I’m sure I can’t think why, and say what you like motive is important—” She broke off and made an enchanting little grimace at Harry Grove. “Now don’t you laugh,” she said. “But for all that just suppose. Just suppose—It was Mr. Conducis.”

“My dear girl—”

“Destiny, honestly.”

“Oh for God’s sake, darling—”

“I know it sounds silly,” Destiny said, “but nobody seems to have any other suggestion and after all he was there.”

The silence that followed Destiny’s remark was so profound that Alleyn heard Fox’s pencil skate over a page in his notebook.

He said, “You mean, Miss Meade, that Mr. Conducis was in the audience? Not backstage?”

“That’s right. In front. In the upstairs O.P. box. I noticed him when I made my first entrance. I mentioned it to you, Charles, didn’t I, when you were holding me up. ‘There’s God,’ I said, ‘in the O.P. box.’ ”

“Mr. Meyer, did you know Mr. Conducis was in front?”

“No, I didn’t. But he’s got the O.P. box forever,” Meyer said. “It’s his whenever he likes to use it. He lends it to friends and for all I know occasionally slips in himself. He doesn’t let us know if he’s coming. He doesn’t like a fuss.”

“Nobody saw him come or go?”

“Not that I know.”

Gertrude Bracey said loudly: “I thought our mysterious Mr. W.H. was supposed to be particularly favoured by Our Patron. Quite a Shakespearean situation or so one hears. Perhaps he can shed light.”

“My dear Gertie,” Harry Grove said cheerfully, “you really should try to keep a splenetic fancy within reasonable bounds. Miss Bracey,” he said, turning to Alleyn, “refers, I think, to the undoubted fact that Mr. Conducis very kindly recommended me to the Management. I did him a slight service once upon a time and he is obliging enough to be obliged. I had no idea he was in front, Gertie dear, until I heard you hissing away about it as you lay on the King Dolphin’s bosom at the end of Act I.”

“Mr. Knight,” Alleyn asked, “did you know Mr. Conducis was there?”

Knight looked straight in front of him and said with exaggerated clarity as if voicing an affront, “It became evident.”

Destiny Meade, also looking neither to left nor right and speaking clearly, remarked: “The less said about that the better.”

“Undoubtedly,” Knight savagely agreed.

She laughed.

Winter Meyer said: “Yes, but—” and stopped short. “It’s nothing,” he said. “As you were.”

“But in any case it can be of no conceivable significance,” Jeremy Jones said impatiently. He had been silent for so long that his intervention caused a minor stir.

Alleyn rose to his considerable height and moved out into the room, “I think,” he said, “that we’ve gone as far as we can, satisfactorily, in a joint discussion. I’m going to ask Inspector Fox to read over his notes. If there is anything any of you wishes to amend will you say so?”

Fox read his notes in a cosy voice and nobody objected to a word of them. When he had finished Alleyn said to Peregrine: “I daresay you’ll want to make your own arrangements with the company.”

“May I?” said Peregrine. “Thank you.”

Alleyn and Fox withdrew to the distant end of the office and conferred together. The company, far from concerning themselves with the proximity of the police, orientated as one man upon Peregrine, who explained that Trevor Vere’s understudy would carry on and that his scenes would be rehearsed in the morning. “Everybody concerned, please, at ten o’clock,” Peregrine said. “And look: about the press. We’ve got to be very careful with this one, haven’t we, Winty?”

Winter Meyer joined him, assuming at once his occupational manner of knowing how to be tactful with actors. They didn’t, any of them, did they, he asked, want the wrong kind of stories to get into the press. There was no doubt they would be badgered. He himself had been rung up repeatedly. The line was regret and no comment. “You’d all gone,” Meyer said. “You weren’t there. You’ve heard about it, of course, but you’ve no ideas.” Here everybody looked at Destiny.

He continued in this vein and it became evident that this able, essentially kind little man was at considerable pains to stop short of the suggestion that, properly controlled, the disaster, from a box-office angle, might turn out to be no such thing. “But we don’t need it,” he said unguardedly and embarrassed himself and most of his hearers. Harry Grove, however, gave one of his little chuckles.

“Well, that’s all perfectly splendid,” he said. “Everybody happy. We’ve no need of bloody murder to boost our door sales and wee Trevor can recover his wits as slowly as he likes. Grand.” He placed his arm about Destiny Meade, who gave him a mock-reproachful look, tapped his hand and freed herself.

“Darling, do be good,” she said. She moved away from him, caught Gertrude Bracey’s baleful eye and said with extreme graciousness: “Isn’t he too frightful?” Miss Bracey was speechless.

“I can see I’ve fallen under the imperial displeasure,” Grove murmured in a too-audible aside. “The Great King Dolphin looks as if it’s going to combust...”

Knight walked across the office and confronted Grove, who was some three inches shorter than himself. Alleyn was uncannily reminded of a scene between them in Peregrine’s play when the man of Stratford confronted the man of fashion while the Dark Lady, so very much more subtle than the actress who beautifully portrayed her, watched catlike in the shadow.

“You really are,” Marcus Knight announced, magnificently inflecting, “the most objectionable person—I will not honour you by calling you an actor—with whom it has been my deep, deep misfortune to appear in any production.”

“Well,” Grove remarked with perfect good humour, “it’s nice to head the dishonours list, isn’t it? Not having prospects in the other direction. Unlike yourself, Mr. Knight. Mr. Knight,” he continued, beaming at Destiny. “A contradiction in terms when one comes to think of it. Never mind: it simply must turn into Sir M. Knight (Knight) before many more New Years have passed.”

Peregrine said: “I am sick of telling you to apologize, Harry, for grossly unprofessional behaviour and begin to think you must be an amateur, after all. Please wait outside in the foyer until Mr. Alleyn wants you. No. Not another word. Out.”

Harry looked at Destiny, made a rueful grimace and walked off.

Peregrine went to Alleyn: “I’m sorry,” he muttered, “about that little dust-up. We’ve finished. What would you like us to do?”

“I’d like the women and Random to take themselves off and the rest of the men to wait outside on the landing.”

“Me included?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Of course not.”

“As a sort of control.”

“In the chemical sense?”

“Well—”

“O.K.,” Peregrine said. “What’s the form?”

“Just that.” Alleyn returned to the group of players. “If you wouldn’t mind moving out to the circle foyer,” he said. “Mr. Jay will explain the procedure.”

Peregrine marshalled them out.

They stood in a knot in front of the shuttered bar and they tried not to look down in the direction of the half-landing. The lowest of the three steps from the foyer to the half-landing, and the area where Jobbins had lain, were stripped of carpet. The police had put down canvas sheeting. The steel doors of the wall safe above the landing were shut. Between the back of the landing and the wall, three steps led up to a narrow strip of floor connecting the two halves of the foyer, each with its own door into the circle.

Destiny Meade said, “I’m not going down those stairs.”

“We can walk across the back to the other flight,” Emily suggested.

“I’d still have to set foot on the landing. I can’t do it. Harry!” She turned with her air of expecting everyone to be where she required them and found that Harry Grove had not heard her. He stood with his hands in his pockets contemplating the shut door of the office.

Marcus Knight, flushed and angry, said: “Perhaps you’d like me to take you down,” and laughed very unpleasantly.

She looked coolly at him. “Sweet of you,” she said. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” and turned away to find herself face-to-face with Jeremy Jones. His freckled face was pink and anxious and his manner diffident “There’s the circle,” he said, “and the pass-door. Could I—?”

“Jeremy, darling. Yes — please, please. I know I’m a fool but, well, it’s just how one’s made, isn’t it? Thank you, my angel.” She slipped her arm into his.

They went into the circle and could be heard moving round the back towards the Prompt-side box.

Charles Random said, “Well, I’ll be off,” hesitated for a moment, and then ran down the canvas-covered steps, turned on the landing and descended to the ground floor. Gertrude Bracey stood at the top near the remaining bronze dolphin. She looked at it and then at the mark in the carpet where its companion had stood. She compressed her lips, lifted her head and walked down with perfect deliberation.

All this was observed by Peregrine Jay.

He stopped Emily, who had made as if to follow. “Are you all right, Emily?”

“Yes, quite all right. You?”

“All the better for seeing you. Shall we take lunch together? But I don’t know how long I’ll be. Were you thinking of lunch later on?”

“I can’t say I’m wolfishly ravenous.”

“One must eat.”

Emily said, “You can’t possibly tell when you’ll get off. The pub’s no good, nor is The Younger Dolphin. They’ll both be seething with curiosity and reporters. I’ll buy some ham rolls and go down to the wharf below Phipps Passage. There’s a bit of a wall one can sit on.”

“I’ll join you if I can. Don’t bolt your rolls and hurry away. It’s a golden day on the river.”

“Look,” Emily said. “What’s Harry up to now!”

Harry was tapping on the office door. Apparently in answer to a summons he opened it and went in.

Emily left the theatre by the circle and pass-door. Peregrine joined a smouldering Marcus Knight and an anxious Winter Meyer. Presently Jeremy returned, obviously flown with gratification.

On the far side of the office door Harry Grove confronted Alleyn.

His manner quite changed. He was quiet and direct and spoke without affectation.

“I daresay,” he said, “I haven’t commended myself to you as a maker of statements, but a minute or two ago—after I had been sent out in disgrace, you know — I remembered something. It may have no bearing on the case whatever but I think perhaps I ought to leave it to you to decide.”

“That,” Alleyn said, “by and large, is the general idea we like to establish.”

Harry smiled. “Well then,” he said, “here goes. It’s rumoured that when the night watchman, whatever he’s called—”

“Hawkins.”

“That when Hawkins found Jobbins and, I suppose, when you saw him, he was wearing a light overcoat.”

“Yes.”

“Was it a rather large brown and white check with an overcheck of black?”

“It was.”

“Loudish, one might say?”

“One might, indeed.”

“Yes. Well, I gave him that coat on Friday evening.”

“Your name is still on the inside pocket tag.”

Harry’s jaw dropped. “The wind,” he said, “to coin a phrase, has departed from my sails. I’d better chug off under my own steam. I’m sorry, Mr. Alleyn. Exit actor, looking crestfallen.”

“No, wait a bit, as you are here. I’d like to know what bearing you think this might have on the case. Sit down. Confide in us.”

“May I?” Harry said, surprised. “Thank you, I’d like to.”

He sat down and looked fully at Alleyn. “I don’t always mean to behave as badly as in fact I do,” he said and went on quickly: “About the coat. I don’t think I attached any great importance to it. But just now you did rather seem to make a point of what he was wearing. I couldn’t quite see what the point was but it seemed to me I’d better tell you that until Friday evening the coat had been mine.”

“Why on earth didn’t you say so there and then?”

Harry flushed scarlet. His chin lifted and he spoke rapidly as if by compulsion. “Everybody,” he said, “was fabulously amusing about my coat. In the hearty, public-school manner, you know. Frightfully nice chaps. Jolly good show. I need not, of course, tell you that I am not even a prodnct of one of our Dear Old Minor Public Schools. Or, if it comes to that, of a county school like the Great King Dolphin.”

“Knight?”

“That’s right but it’s slipped his memory.”

“You do dislike him, don’t you?”

“Not half as heartily as he dislikes me,” Harry said and gave a short laugh. “I know I sound disagreeable. You see before you, Superintendent, yet another slum kid with a chip like a Yule log on his shoulder. I take it out in clowning.”

“But,” Alleyn said mildly, “is your profession absolutely riddled with old Etonians?”

Harry grinned. “Well, no,” he said. “But I assure you there are enough more striking and less illustrious O.B. ties to strangle all the extras in a battle scene for Armageddon. As a rank outsider I find the network nauseating. Sorry. No doubt you’re a product yourself. Of Eton, I mean.”

“So you’re a post-Angry at heart? Is that it?”

“Only sometimes. I compensate. They’re afraid of my tongue, or I like to think they are.”

He waited for a moment and then said: “None of this, by the way and for what it’s worth, applies to Peregrine Jay. I’ve no complaints about him: he has not roused my lower-middle-class rancour and I do not try to score off him. He’s a gifted playwright, a good producer and a very decent citizen. Perry’s all right.”

“Good. Let’s get back to the others. They were arrogant about your coat, you considered?”

“The comedy line was relentlessly pursued. Charles affected to have the dazzles. Gertrude, dear girl, shuddered like a castanet. There were lots of asides. And even the lady of my heart professed distaste and begged me to shuffle off my checkered career-coat. So I did. Henry Jobbins was wheezing away at the stage-door saying his chubes were chronic and believe it or not I did a sort of your-need-is-greater-than-mine thing, which I could, of course, perfectly well afford. I took it off there and then and gave it to him. There was,” Harry said loudly, “and is, absolutely no merit in this gesture. I simply off-loaded an irksome vulgar mistaken choice on somebody who happened to find it acceptable. He was a good bloke, was old Henry. A good bloke.”

“Did anyone know of this spontaneous gift?”

“No. Oh, I suppose the man that relieved him did. Hawkins. Henry Jobbins told me this chap had been struck all of a heap by the overcoat when he came in on Friday night.”

“But nobody else, you think, knew of the exchange?”

“I asked Jobbins not to say anything. I really could not have stomached the recrudescence of comedy that the incident would have evoked.” Harry looked sidelong at Alleyn. “You’re a dangerous man, Superintendent. You’ve missed your vocation. You’d have been a wow on the receiving side of the confessional grille.”

“No comment,” said Alleyn and they both laughed.

Alleyn said, “Look here. Would anyone expect to find you in the realm of the front foyer after the show?”

“I suppose so,” he said. “Immediately after. Winty Meyer for one. I’ve been working in a T.V. show and there’s been a lot of carry-on about calls. In the event of any last-minute changes I arranged for them to ring this theatre and I’ve been looking in at the office after the show in case there was a message.”

“Yes, I see.”

“Last night, though, I didn’t go round because the telly thing’s finished. And anyway I was bound for Dessy Meade’s party. She commanded me, as you’ve heard, to fetch my guitar and I lit off for Canonbury to get it.”

“Did you arrive at Miss Meade’s flat in Cheyne Walk before or after she and her other guests did?”

“Almost a dead heat. I was parking when they arrived. They’d been to the little joint in Wharfingers Lane, I understand.”

“Anyone hear or see you at your own flat in Canonbury?”

“The man in the flat overhead may have heard me. He complains that I wake him up every night. The telephone rang while I was in the loo. That would be round about eleven. Wrong number. I daresay it woke him but I don’t know. I was only there long enough to give myself a drink, have a wash, pick up the guitar and out.”

“What’s this other flatter’s name?”

Harry gave it. “Well,” he said cheerfully. “I hope I did wake him, poor bugger.”

“We’ll find out, shall we? Fox?”

Mr. Fox telephoned Harry’s neighbour, explaining that he was a telephone operative checking a faulty line. He extracted the information that Harry’s telephone had indeed rung just as the neighbour had turned his light off at eleven o’clock.

“Well, God bless him, anyway,” said Harry.

“To go back to your overcoat. Was there a yellow silk scarf in the pocket?”

“There was indeed. With an elegant H embroidered by a devoted if slightly witchlike and acquisitive hand. The initial was appropriate at least. Henry J. was as pleased as punch, poor old donkey.”

“You liked him very much, didn’t you?”

“As I said, he was a good bloke. We used to have a pint at the pub and he’d talk about his days on the river. Oddly enough I think he rather liked me.”

“Why should that be so odd?”

“Oh,” Harry said. “I’m hideously unpopular, you know. I really am disliked. I have a talent for arousing extremes of antipathy, I promise you. Even Mr. Conducis,” Harry said, opening his eyes very wide, “although he feels obliged to be helpful, quite hates my guts, I assure you.”

“Have you seen him lately?”

“Friday afternoon,” Harry said promptly.

“Really?”

“Yes. I call on him from time to time as a matter of duty. After all, he got me this job. Did I mention that we are distantly related? Repeat: distantly.”

“No.”

“No. I don’t mention it very much. Even I,” Harry said, “draw the line somewhere, you know.”