“Was and is,” Alleyn agreed.

He found Mr. Whipplestone himself rather off-beat as he sat primly on his desk chair in his perfectly tailored suit, with his Trumper-style hair-cut, his discreet necktie, his elegant cufflinks, his eyeglass and, pounding away at his impeccable waistcoat, his little black cat.

“About Chubb,” he said anxiously. “I’m awfully bothered about Chubb. You see, I don’t know — and he hasn’t said anything — and I must say Mrs. Chubb looks too ghastly for words.”

“He hasn’t told you the black waiter attacked him?”

“He hasn’t told me anything. I felt it was not advisable for me to make any approach.”

“What’s your opinion of Chubb? What sort of impression have you formed, by and large, since the Chubbs have been looking after you?”

Mr. Whipplestone had some difficulty in expressing himself, but it emerged that from his point of view the Chubbs were as near perfection as made no difference. In fact, Mr. Whipplestone said wistfully, one had thought they no longer existed except perhaps in the employment of millionaires.

“I’ve sometimes wondered if they were too good to be true. Ominous foreboding!” he said.

“Didn’t you say Chubb seemed to have taken a scunner on blacks?”

“Well, yes. I rather fancied so. It was when I looked over this house. We were in the room upstairs and — oh, Lord, it was the poor old boy himself — the Ambassador — walked down the street. The Chubbs were near the window and saw him. It was nothing, really. They stared. My dear Alleyn, you won’t take from this any grotesque suggestion that Chubb — well, no, of course you won’t.”

“I only thought a prejudice of that sort might colour any statement he offered. He certainly made no bones about his dislike when we talked to him.”

“Not surprising when you tell me one of them had half-strangled him!”

“He told me that.”

“Don’t you believe him?”

“I don’t know,” Alleyn said with an odd twist in his voice. “Perhaps. But with misgivings.”

“Surely,” Mr. Whipplestone said, “it can be a very straightforward affair, after all. For whatever motive, the Ng’ombwanan guard and the waiter conspire to murder either the Ambassador or the President. At the crucial moment the servant finds Chubb in the way and doubles him up, leaving the guard free to commit the crime. The guard kills the Ambassador. To the President he professes himself to be what my poor Chubb calls clobbered.”

“Yes,” Alleyn said. “As neat as a new pin — almost.”

“So you see — you see!” cried Mr. Whipplestone, stroking the cat.

“And the pistol shot?”

“Part of the conspiracy — I don’t know — yes. That awful lady says it was a black person, doesn’t she? Well, then!”

“Whoever it was probably fired a blank.”

“Indeed? There you are, then. A diversion. A red-herring calculated to attract the attention of all of you away from the pavilion and to bring the President to his feet.”

“As I said,” Alleyn conceded. “New pins aren’t in it.”

“Then—why—?”

“My dear man, I don’t know. I promise you, I don’t know. It’s by the pricking of my thumbs or some other intimation not admissible in the police manuals. It just all seems to me to be a bit too much of a good thing. Like those fish in aspic that ocean-going cruisers display in the tropics and never serve.”

“Oh, come!”

“Still, there are more tenable queries to be raised. Item. Mrs. C.-M.’s black thug with a stocking over his head. Seen dimly against the loo window, unseen during the assault in the dressing-room. Rushed out of the ladies’ into the entrance hall — there’s no other exit — where there were four of Gibson’s men, one of them hard-by the door. They all had torches. None of them got any impression of anybody emerging precipitately into the hall. Incidentally, there was another S.B. man near the master-switch in the rear passage who killed the blackout about ten seconds after he heard the pistol shot. In those ten seconds the murder was done.”

“Well?”

“Well, our girlfriend has it that after the shot her assailant, having chucked her out of the loo, emerged still in the blackout, kicked her about a bit and then bolted, leaving her prone and in the dark. And then, she says, the loo-ladies, including your blushing sergeant, emerged and fell about all over her. Still in the dark. The loo-ladies, on the other hand, maintain they erupted into the anteroom immediately after the shot.”

“They were confused, no doubt.”

“The sergeant wasn’t.”

“Drat!” said Mr. Whipplestone. “What’s all this got to do with my wretched Chubb?”

“I’ve not the remotest idea. But it tempts me to suspect that when it comes to equivocation your black candidates have nothing on Mrs. Cockburn-Montfort.”

Mr. Whipplestone thought this over. Lucy tapped his chin with her paw and then fell asleep.

“Do I take it,” he asked at last, “that you think Mrs. C.-M. lied extensively about the black man with the stocking over his head?”

“I think she invented him.”

“Then who the devil fired the shot?”

“Oh,” Alleyn said. “No difficulty with that one, I fancy. She did.”

Mr. Whipplestone was much taken aback by this pronouncement. He gave himself time to digest its implications. He detached his cat and placed her on the floor, where with an affronted and ostentatious air she set about cleaning herself. He brushed his waistcoat, crossed his legs, joined his fingertips and finally said: “How very intriguing.” After a further pause he asked Alleyn if he had any more specific material to support his startling view of Mrs. Cockburn-Montfort’s activities.

Not specific, perhaps, Alleyn conceded. But be pointed out that a black male person planning to fire the pistol, whether or not it was loaded with a blank, would have been much better advised to do so from the men’s lavatory, where his presence would not be noticed, than from the women’s, where it extravagantly would. In the men’s he would be taken for an attendant if he was in livery and for a guest if he was not.

“Really,” Alleyn said, “it would be the height of dottiness for him to muscle in to the female offices, where he might — as indeed according to Mrs. C.-M. he did—disturb a lady already in situ.”

“True,” said Mr. Whipplestone moodily. “True. True. True.”

“Moreover,” Alleyn continued, “the sergeant, who, however naughty her lapse, displayed a certain expertise in the sequel, is persuaded that no rumpus beyond the shot and subsequent screams of Mrs. C.-M. disturbed the seclusion of those premises.”

“I see.”

“As for the weapon, an examination of the barrel, made by an expert this morning, confirms that the solitary round was probably a blank. There are no finger-prints. This is negative evidence except that the sergeant, supported by the two orthodox attendants, says that Mrs. C.-M. was wearing shoulder-length gloves. The normal practice under these circumstances is for such gloves to be peeled off the hand from the wrist. The glove is then tucked back into the arm-piece, which remains undisturbed. But the lady was fully gloved and buttoned, and according to her own account certainly had no chance to effect this readjustment. She would hardly sit on the floor putting on gloves and yelling pen-and-ink.”

“All very plausible,” said Mr. Whipplestone. Alleyn thought that he was hurriedly rearranging his thoughts to accommodate this new development.

“I fancy,” Alleyn said, “it’s a bit better than that. I can’t for the life of me think of any other explanation that will accommodate all the discrepancies in the lady’s tarradiddle. And what’s more she was taking dirty great sniffs at her own smelling salts to make herself cry. At any rate I’m going to call upon her.”

“When!” quite shouted Mr. Whipplestone.

“When I leave you. Why? What’s up?”

“Nothing,” he said in a hurry, “nothing really. Except that you’ll probably be admitted by Chubb.”