“Hell!”

“I think you must have known much earlier that Ricky was kidnapped, didn’t you?”

“Look here, sir, I don’t know what to say.”

“I’ll tell you. If you want me to help you with this child, Ginny, and I believe you do, you will answer, fully and truthfully, specific questions that I shall put to you. If you don’t want to answer, we’ll say goodnight and forget we had this conversation. But don’t lie. I shall know,” Alley said mildly, “if you lie.”

Robin waited fora moment and then said: “Please go ahead.”

“Right. What precisely do you expect to happen at this party?”

A car came down the square. Its headlights shone momentarily on Robin’s face. It looked very young and frightened, like the face of a sixth-form boy in serious trouble with his tutor. The car turned and they were in the dark again.

Robin said: “It’s a regular thing. They have it on Thursday nights. It’s a sort of cult. They call it the Rites of the Children of the Sun in the Outer and Oberon’s the sort of high priest. You have to swear not to talk about it. I’ve sworn. I can’t talk. But it ends pretty hectically. And tomorrow Ginny — I’ve heard them — Ginny’s cast for — the leading part.”

“And beforehand?”

“Well — it’s different from ordinary nights. There’s no dinner. We go to our rooms until the Rites begin at eleven. We’re meant not to speak to each other or anything.”

“Oh, there are drinks. And so on.”

“What does ‘so on’ mean?” Robin was silent. “Do you take drugs? Reefers? Snow?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Come on. Which is it?”

“Reefers mostly. There’s food when we smoke. There has to be. I don’t know if they are the usual kind. Oberon doesn’t smoke. I don’t think Baradi does.”

“Are they traffickers?”

“I don’t know much about them.”

“Do you know that much?”

“I should think they might be.”

“Have they asked you to take a hand?”

“Look,” Robin said, “I’m sorry but I’ve got to say it. I don’t know much about you either, sir. I mean, I don’t know that you won’t—” He had turned his head and Alleyn knew he was peering at him.

“Inform the police?” Alleyn suggested.

“Well — you might.”

“Come: you don’t, as you say, know me. Yet you’ve elected to ask me to rescue this wretched child from the clutches of your friends. You can’t have it both ways.”

“You don’t know,” Robin said. “You don’t know how tricky it all is. If they thought I’d talked to you!”

“What would they do?”

“Nothing!” Robin cried in a hurry. “Nothing! Only I’ve accepted, as one says, their hospitality.”

“You have got your values muddled, haven’t you?”

“Have I? I daresay I have.”

“Tell me this. Has anything happened recently — I mean within the last twenty-four hours — to precipitate the situation?”

Robin said: “Who are you?”

“My dear chap, I don’t need to be a thought-reader to see there’s a certain urgency behind all this preamble.”

“I suppose not. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I can’t answer any more questions. Only — only, for God’s sake, sir, will you do something about Ginny?”

“I’ll make a bargain with you. I gather that you want to remove the child without giving a previous warning to the house party.”

“That’s it, sir. Yes.”

“All right. Can you persuade her, in fact, to drive into Roqueville at six o’clock?”

“I don’t know. I was gambling on it. If he’s not about, I might. She — I think she is quite fond of me,” Robin said humbly, “when he’s not there to bitch it all up.”

“Failing a drive, could you get her to walk down to the car park?”

“I might do that. She wants to buy one of old Marie’s silver goats.”

“Would it help to tell her we had rung up and asked if she would choose a set of the figures for Ricky? Aren’t there groups of them for Christmas? Cribs?”

“That might work. She’d like to do that.”

“All right. Have your car waiting and get her to walk on to the park. Suggest you drive down to our hotel with the figures.”

“You know, sir, I believe that’d do it.”

“Good. Having got her in the car it’s up to you to keep her away from the Château. Take her to see Troy by all means. But I doubt if you’ll get her to stay to dinner. You may have to stage a breakdown on a lonely road. I don’t know. Use your initiative. Block up the air vent in your petrol cap. One thing more. Baradi, or someone, said something about a uniform of sorts that you all wear on occasion.”

“That’s right. It’s called the mantle of the sun. We wear them about the house and — and always on Thursday nights.”

“Is it the white thing Oberon had on this morning?”

“Yes. A sort of glorified monk’s affair with a hood.”

“Could you bring two of them with you?”

Robin turned his head and peered at Alleyn in astonishment. “I suppose I could.”

“Put them in your car during the day.”

“I don’t see—”

“I’m sure you don’t. Two of your own will do, if you have two. You needn’t worry about bringing Miss Taylor’s gown specifically.”

“Hers!” Robin cried out. “Bring hers! But that’s the whole thing! Tomorrow night they’ll make Ginny wear the Black Robe.”

“Then you must bring a black robe,” Alleyn said.

ii

On Thursday evening the Côte d’Azur, inclined always to the theatrical, became melodramatic and, true to the weather report, staged a thunderstorm.

“It’s going to rain,” a voice croaked from the balustrade of the Chèvre d’Argent. “Listen! Thunder!”

Far to southward the heavens muttered an affirmative.

Carbury Glande looked at the brilliantly-clad figure perched, knees to chin, on the balustrade. It mingled with a hanging swag of bougainvillea. “One sees a voice rather than a person. You look like some fabulous bird, dear Sati,” he said. “If I didn’t feel so ghastly I’d like to paint you.”

“Rumble, mumble, jumble and clatter,” said the other, absorbed in delighted anticipation. “And then the rains. That’s the way it goes.” She pursed her lips out and, drawing in air with the smoke, took a long puff at an attenuated cigarette.

Baradi walked over to her and removed the cigarette. “Against the rules,” he said. “Everything in its appointed time. You’re over-excited.” He threw the cigarette away and returned to his chair.

A whiteness flickered above the horizon and was followed after a pause by a tinny rattle.

“We do this sort of thing much better at the Comédie Française,” Annabella Wells paraphrased, twisting her mouth in self-contempt.

Baradi leaned forward until his nose was placed in surrealistic association with her ear. Beneath the nose his moustache shifted as if it had a life of its own and beneath the moustache his lips pouted and writhed in almost soundless articulation. Annabella Wells’s expression did not change. She nodded slightly. His face hung for a moment above her neck and then he leaned back in his chair.

Above the blacked Mediterranean the sky splintered with forked lightning.

“One. Two. Three. Four,” the hoarse voice counted to an accompaniment of clapping hands. The other guests ejaculated under a canopy of thunder.

“You always have to count,” the voice explained when it could be heard again.

“The thing I really hate,” Ginny Taylor said rapidly, “is not the thunder or lightning but the pauses between bouts. Like this one.”

“Come indoors,” Robin Herrington said. “You don’t have to stay out here.”

“It’s a kind of dare I have with myself.”

“Learning to be brave?” Annabella Wells asked with a curious inflexion in her voice.

“Ginny will have the courage of a lioness,” said Baradi, “and the fire of a phoenix.”

Annabella got up with an abrupt expert movement and walked over to the balustrade. Baradi followed her. Ginny pushed her hair back from her forehead and looked quickly at Robin and away again. He moved nearer to her. She turned away to the far end of the roof-garden. Robin hovered uncertainly. The other four guests had drawn closer together. Carbury Glande half-closed his eyes and peered at the cloud-blocked sky and dismal sea. “Gloriously ominous,” he said, “and quite un-paintable. Which is such a good thing.”