He found his way along the dressing-room passage and, guided by the murmur of voices, knocked at the last door. It was opened by Detective-Sergeant Packer, who came half through the door. He was a fine specimen, was Packer; tall, magnificently built, with a good head on him. When he saw Alleyn he came to attention.

“Sergeant Packer,” said Alleyn, “your inspector tells me I may come in here if I behave nicely. That all right?”

“Certainly, Chief Inspector,” said Packer smartly.

Alleyn looked at him.

“We won’t bother about the ‘Chief Inspector,’ ” he murmured. “Can you come outside for a second?”

Packer at once stepped out and closed the door.

“Look here,” said Alleyn, “do those people in there realise I’m from the Yard?”

“I don’t think they do, sir. I heard them mention your name, but they didn’t seem to know.”

“Good. Leave ’em in outer darkness. Just any old Allen. I asked Inspector Wade to warn you, but I suppose he hasn’t had a chance. Miss Dacres, Miss Max, and Mr. Hambledon know, but they’ll keep quiet, I hope. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Splendid. Then just let me loose among ’em, Packer. I’ll do no harm, I promise you.”

“Harm, sir? I should say not. If you’ll excuse me mentioning it, sir, I’ve just read—”

“Have you? I’ll give you a copy for yourself. Now usher me in. And chidingly, Packer. Be severe with me.”

Detective-Sergeant Packer was a young officer. He looked at the tall figure of Chief-Inspector Alleyn and developed instant and acute hero-worship. “He looks like one of those swells in the English flicks,” he afterwards confided to his girl, “and he talks with a corker sort of voice. Not queeny, but just corker. I reckon he’s all right. Gosh, I reckon he’s a humdinger.”

Under a fearful oath of secrecy, long after there was any need for discretion, Packer described to his best girl the scene in the wardrobe-room.

“He said to me, kind of laughing — and he’s got a corking sort of laugh — he said: ‘Be severe with me, Packer.’ So I opened the door and, as he walked through, I said: ‘Move along in there, if you please, sir. And kindly obey instructions.’ Very stiff. And he walked in and he said: ‘Frightfully sorry, officer,’ in a real dude voice. ‘Frightfullah sorrah, officah’—only it sounded decent the way he said it. Not unnatural. Just English. ‘Frightfulla sorra—’ I can’t seem to get it.”

“And then what?” asked Packer’s best girl.

“Well, and then he walked in. And I stayed on the outside of the door. He didn’t tell me to, but I reckoned if I stayed out he’d get them to talk. I left the door a crack open and I walked noisily away and then quiet back again. I dunno what old Sam Wade would ’uv said if he’d come along. He’d ’uv gone horribly crook at me for not staying inside. Well, as soon as the Chief walks in they all start in squealing. ‘Oh, Mr. Alleyn, what’s happening? Oh, Mr. Alleyn, what’s the matter?’ The girl Gaynes — Valerie Gaynes. You know—”

“She’s the one that wore that corking dress in the play. I think she’s lovely.”

“She makes me tired. She started squealing about the disgraceful way she’d been treated, and how she’d write to her old man and complain, and how they’d never dream of shutting her up like this in England, and how she reckoned the police in this country didn’t know the way to behave. Give you a pain in the neck, dinkum, she would. Well, as I was telling you—”

Packer told his girl many times of this scene. The fact of the matter was that Alleyn got an unpleasant shock when he walked into the wardrobe-room. He suddenly remembered that, during that night in the train, Carolyn had told Valerie Gaynes he was a C.I.D. official, and here was Valerie Gaynes rushing at him with complaints about the New Zealand police, about the way she was being treated. Any moment she might give the show away. He glanced at Carolyn. She called Miss Gaynes, murmured something in her ear, and drew her down beside her.

“Oh!” said Valerie Gaynes flatly. “Well, I think—”

“Of course you do,” said Carolyn quickly, “but if you could manage not to talk quite so much, darling, it would be such a good idea.”

“But, Miss Dacres—”

“Yes, darling, but do you know, I think if I were you, I should just go all muted — like you did over your money, do you remember, when Mr. Alleyn offered to look at your note-case.”

Valerie Gaynes suddenly sat down.

“That’s right, darling,” said Carolyn jerkily. “Come and sit down, Mr. Alleyn. It seems we are all to be shut up in here while they find out whether my poor Pooh was — whether it was all an accident or not.”

Her voice was pitched a note too high and her hands moved restlessly in her lap. “That’s the idea, I believe,” said Alleyn.

“What are they doing out there?” asked little Ackroyd peevishly.

“How much longer—”

“Mr. Alleyn, can you tell us—”

They all began again.

“I know no more than you do,” said Alleyn, at large. “I believe they propose to interview us all, singly. I’ve just had my dose. I got ticked off for loitering.”

“What did they ask you?” demanded young Palmer.

“My name and address,” said Alleyn shortly. He dragged forward a small packing-case, sat on it, and surveyed the company.

The wardrobe-room at the Royal was simply a very large dressing-room, occupied by the chorus when musical-comedy companies visited Middleton. The Dacres Company used it to store the wardrobes for their second and third productions. An ironing-table stood at one end, an odd length of stage-cloth carpeted the floor, and a number of chairs, covered with dust-cloths, were ranged round the walls. It served the company as a sort of common-room — an improvised version of the old-fashioned green-room. Carolyn tried to create something of the long-vanished atmosphere of the actor-manager’s touring company. She was old enough to have served her apprenticeship in one of the last of these schools and remembered well the homely, knit-together feeling of back-stage, the feeling that the troupe was a little world of its own, moving compactly about a larger world. With Meyer’s help she had tried, so far as she was able, to keep the same players about her for all her productions. She used to beg Meyer to look for what she called useful actors and actresses, by which she meant adaptable people who could pour themselves into the mould of a part and who did not depend upon individual tricks. “Give me actors, Pooh darling, not types.” Perhaps that was why, with the exception of Valerie Gaynes and Courtney Broadhead, none of her company was very young. Valerie she had suffered only after a struggle, and, she confided in Hambledon, because she was afraid they might all begin to think she was jealous of young and good-looking women. Courtney came of an old acting family and took his work seriously. The rest — Ackroyd, Gascoigne, Liversidge, Vernon, Hambledon and Susan Max, were all over forty. They were, as Hambledon would have said, “old troupers,” used to each other’s ways, and to the sound of each other’s voices. There is a kind of fortuitous intimacy among the members of such companies. It would be difficult to say how well they really know each other, but they often speak of themselves as “a happy family.” As he looked from, one face to another Alleyn was aware of this corporate feeling in the Dacres Company. “How are they taking it?” he wondered. He asked himself the inevitable question: “Which? Which of these?” And one by one he watched them.

Hambledon had moved away from Carolyn and sat opposite her and beside George Mason. They were both very pale and silent. Mason’s undistinguished face was blotched, as if he had been crying. He looked apprehensive and miserable and rather ill. Hambledon’s magnificent head was bent forward. He held one long-fingered hand over his eyes, as though the light bothered him. Old Brandon Vernon sat with his arms folded and his heavy eyebrows drawn down. He had the peculiar raffish look of a certain type of elderly actor. His face was pale, as if it had taken on the texture of grease-paint, his mobile mouth seemed always about to widen into a sardonic grin; his eyes, lack-lustre, had an impertinent look. There were traces of No. 9 in the hair on his temples and his chin was blueish. He played polished old men-of-the-world with great skill. When Alleyn came in Vernon was deep in conversation with little Ackroyd, with whom he seemed to be annoyed. Ackroyd, whose amusing face was so untrustworthy a guide to his character, listened irritably. He grimaced and fidgeted, glancing under his eyelids at Carolyn.