“Do you, by Gad! All right, all right. See them in here. In my room. I’d better know the worst at once, I suppose.” He scowled at Alleyn. “This goes a bit close to you, doesn’t it? Lord Robert was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?”

“He was, sir, yes.”

“Ugh! He was a nice little chap. I understand the FO is making tender enquiries. In case a foreign power remembers him pottering about twenty years ago and has decided to assassinate him. Silly asses. Well, I’m sorry you’ve had this knock, Rory. It doesn’t seem to have cramped your style. Quick work, if it’s accurate.”

“If!” said Alleyn. “I hope to Heaven we haven’t gone wrong.”

“What time’s the dénouement tonight?”

“Nine o’clock, sir.”

“All right. Trot ’em along here. Thank you, Rory.”

“Thank you, sir.”

On his return to his own room he found Fox was waiting for him.

“Lady Carrados is downstairs, sir.”

“Go and bring her up, Fox, will you?”

Fox turned in the doorway.

“I’ve got on to The Times,” he said. “They were a bit dignified about it but I know one of the chaps who deals with the agony-column notices and got hold of him. He told me the Childie Darling thing came by mail with a postal order for double rates and a request that it should appear, very particular, in this morning’s edition. The note said the advertiser would call to collect the change, if any, and was signed W.A.K. Smith, address GPO, Erith.”

“Postmark?”

“They’d lost the envelope but he’ll look for it. The writing,” said Fox, “was in script on common notepaper.”

“Was it indeed?” murmured Alleyn.

“There’s one other thing,” said Fox. “The reports have come through from the post offices. A clerk at the Main Western District says that during the rush hour yesterday someone left a parcel on the counter. He found it later on in the day. It was soft, about the right weight and had five bob in tuppenny stamps on it, one and fivepence more than was necessary. He remembers the address was to somewhere in China and it was written in script. So my Private Hoo Flung Dung may have been a fair guess. We’ve got on to Mount Pleasant and it’s too late. A parcels post went out to China this afternoon.”

“Blast!” said Alleyn.

“I’ll be off,” said Fox, “and get her ladyship.”

While he waited for Lady Carrados, Alleyn cut the little notice out of The Times. After a moment’s consideration he unlocked a drawer in his desk and took out Mrs Halcut-Hackett’s gold cigarette-case. He opened it and neatly gummed the notice inside the lid.

Fox showed Lady Carrados in and went away.

“I’m so sorry, Evelyn,” said Alleyn. “I’ve been closeted with my superior. Have you been here long?”

“No. What is it now, please, Roderick?”

“It’s this. I want you to allow what may seem a rather drastic step. I want you to give me permission to talk to your husband, in front of you, about Paddy O’Brien.”

“You mean — tell him that we were not married?”

“If it seems necessary.”

“I can’t.”

“I shouldn’t do it if it wasn’t vitally necessary. I do not believe, Evelyn, that he would” — Alleyn hesitated — “that he would be as shocked as you imagine.”

“But I know he would be terribly shocked. Of course he would.”

“I think I can promise you that you have nothing to fear from this decision. I mean that Carrados’s attitude to yourself and Bridget will not be materially affected by it.”

“I cannot believe that. I cannot believe that he will not be dreadfully wounded. Even violent.”

“I promise you that I honestly believe that it may help you both to a better understanding.”

“If only I could think that!”

“It will certainly help us to see justice done on your blackmailer. Evelyn, I don’t want to be intolerably priggish, but I do believe it is your duty to do this.”

“I had almost made up my mind to tell him.”

“All the better. Come now. Look at me! Will you let me deal with it?”

She looked at him. Quite deliberately he used the whole force of that thing people call personality and of which he knew — how could he not know? — he had his share. He imposed his will on hers as surely as if it was a tangible instrument. And he saw her give way.

She raised her hands and let them fall limply back on her lap.

“Very well, I’m so bemused and puzzled, I don’t know, I give up. My house is falling about my ears. I’ll do whatever you think best, Roderick.”

“You need say very little.” He went into details. She listened attentively and repeated his instructions. When that was over he rose and looked down at her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s no good my trying to make light of this. It is a very upsetting business for you. But take heart of grace. Bridget need not know, although I think if I were you I should tell her. She’s got plenty of courage and the moderns don’t make nearly such heavy weather of that sort of thing as we did. My niece Sarah prattles away about people born in and out of wedlock as if it was a fifty-fifty chance. Upon my word, Evelyn, I wouldn’t be surprised if your daughter found a certain amount of romantic satisfaction in the story you have been at such pains to hide from her.”

“That would be almost funny, wouldn’t it?” Lady Carrados looked into Alleyn’s compassionate eyes. She reached out her hand and he took it firmly between both of his.

“Roderick,” she said, “how old are you?”

“Forty-three, my dear.”

“I’m nearly forty,” and absent-mindedly she added, as women do: “Isn’t it awful?”

“Dreadful,” agreed Alleyn, smiling at her.

“Why haven’t you married?”

“My mother says she tried to make a match of it between you and me. But Paddy O’Brien came along and I hadn’t a chance.”

“That seems odd, now, doesn’t it? If it’s true. I don’t remember that you ever paid me any particular attention.”

He saw that she had reached the lull in the sensibilities that sometimes follows extreme emotional tension. She spoke idly with an echo of her customary gentle gaiety. She sounded as if her mind had gone as limp as the thin hand he still held.

“You ought to marry,” she said vaguely and added: “I must go.”

“I’m coming down. I’ll see you to your car.”

As she drove away he stood looking after her for a second or two, and then shook his head doubtfully and set out for Cheyne Walk.

Alleyn wondered if it was only because he knew the body of his friend had come home that he felt its presence. Perhaps the house was not more quiet than it had been that morning. Perhaps the dead did not in truth cast about them so deep a spell. And then he smelt lilies and all the hushed chill of ceremonial death closed about his heart. He turned to Bunchy’s old butler who was in the condition so often found in the faithful retainers of Victorian melodrama. He had been weeping. His eyes were red and his face blotted with tears, and his lips trembled. He showed Alleyn into Mildred’s sitting-room. When she came forward in her lustreless black clothes, he found in her face the same unlovely reflection of sorrow. Mildred wore the customary expression of bereavement, and though he knew it to be the stamp of sincere grief, he felt a kind of impatience. He felt a profound loathing of the formalities of death. A dead body was nothing, nothing but an intolerable caricature of something someone had loved. It was a reminder of unspeakable indignities, and yet people surrounded their dead with owlish circumstances, asked you, as Mildred was asking him now, in a special muted voice, to look at them. “I know you’d like to see him, Roderick.” He followed her into a room on the ground floor. The merciless scent of flowers was so heavy here that it hung like mist on the cold air. The room was crowded with flowers. In the centre, on three shrouded trestles, Robert Gospell’s body lay in its coffin. It was the face of an elderly baby, dignified by the possession of some terrific secret. Alleyn was not troubled by the face. All dead faces looked like that. But the small fat hands, which in life had moved with staccato emphasis, were obediently folded, and when he saw these his eyes were blinded by tears. He groped in his overcoat pocket for a handkerchief and his fingers found the bunch of rosemary from Mr Harris’s garden. The grey-green spikes were crisp and unsentimental and they smelt of the sun. When Mildred turned aside, he gave them to the dead.