“All right, Jack,” Alleyn said. “Over to you.”

Wrayburn produced the fur-lined boot — an incongruous and somehow rather piteous object — from under his cape and consulted with the handlers. The front doors were opened, letting in the uproar of the Nor’east Buster and letting out the search parties. Fractured torch beams zigzagged across the rain. Alleyn shut out the scene and said to Hilary, “And now, if you please, I’ll talk to the staff.”

“Yes. All right. I’ll ring —”

“Are they in their own quarters — the staff common-room, you call it, don’t you?”

“Yes. I think so. Yes, yes, they are.”

“I’ll see them there.”

“Shall I come?”

“No need. Better not, I think.”

“Alleyn: I do beg that you won’t — won’t —”

“I shall talk to them exactly as I shall talk to any one of you. With no foregone conclusions and without prejudice.”

“Oh. Oh, I see. Yes. Well, good. But — look here, don’t let’s beat about the bush. I mean, you do think — don’t you? — that there’s been — violence?”

“When one finds blood and hair on the business end of a poker, the thought does occur, doesn’t it?”

“Oh Lord!” said Hilary. “Oh Lord, Lord, Lord, what a bore it all is! What a disgusting, devastating bore!”

“That’s one way of putting it. The staff-room’s at the back through there, isn’t it? I’ll find my own way.”

“I’ll wait in the study, then.”

“Do.”

Beyond the traditional green baize door was a passage running behind the hall, from the chapel, at the rear of the east wing, to the serveries and kitchen at the rear of the dining room in the west wing. Alleyn, guided by a subdued murmur of voices, tapped on a central door and opened it.

“May I come in?” he asked.

It was a large, comfortable room with an open fire, a television and a radio. On the walls hung reproductions of post-impressionist paintings, chosen, Alleyn felt sure, by Hilary. There were bookshelves lined with reading matter that proclaimed Hilary’s hopes for the intellectual stimulation of his employees. On a central table was scattered a heterogeneous company of magazines that perhaps reflected, more accurately, their natural inclination.

The apple-cheeked boy was watching television, the five members of the regular staff sat round the fire, their chairs close together. As Alleyn came in they got to their feet with the air of men who have been caught offside. Blore moved towards him and then stood still.

Alleyn said, “I thought it would be easier if we talked this business over here where we won’t be interrupted. May we sit down?”

Blore, with a quick look at the others, pulled back the central chair. Alleyn thanked him and took it. The men shuffled their feet. A slightly distorted voice at the other end of the room shouted, “What you guys waitin’ for? Less go.”

“Turn that off,” Blore commanded in his great voice, “and come over here.”

The rosy boy switched off the television set and slouched, blushing, towards them.

“Sit down, all of you,” Alleyn said. “I won’t keep you long.”

They sat down and he got a square look at them. At Blore: once a headwaiter, who had knifed his wife’s lover in the hanging days and narrowly escaped the rope, swarthy, fattish, baldish and with an air of consequence about him. At Mervyn, the ex-signwriter, booby-trap expert, a dark, pale man who stooped and looked sidelong. At Cooke, nicknamed Kittiwee, whose mouth wore the shadow of a smirk, who loved cats and had bashed a warder to death. At Slyboots and Smartypants, who lay along his ample thighs, fast asleep. At Nigel, pallid as uncooked pastry, almost an albino, possibly a lapsed religious maniac, who had done a sinful lady. Finally at Vincent, now seen by Alleyn for the first time at Halberds and instantly recognized since he himself had arrested him when, as gardener to an offensive old lady, he had shut her up in a greenhouse heavy with arsenical spray. His appeal, based on the argument that she had been concealed by a date palm and that he was unaware of her presence, was successful and he was released. At the time Alleyn had been rather glad of it. Vincent was a bit ferrety in the face and gnarled as to the hands.

They none of them looked at Alleyn.

“The first thing I have to say,” he said, “is this. You know that I know who you are and that you’ve all been inside and what the convictions were. You,” he said to Vincent, “may say you’re in a different position from the others, having been put in the clear, but where this business is concerned and at this stage of the inquiry, you’re all in the clear. By this I mean that your past records, as far as I can see at the moment, are of no interest and they’ll go on being uninteresting unless anything crops up to make me think otherwise. A man has disappeared. We don’t know why, how, when or where and we’ve got to find him. To use the stock phrase, alive or dead. If I say I hope one or more or all of you can help us, I don’t mean, repeat don’t mean, that one or more or all of you is or are suspected of having had anything to do with his disappearance. I mean what I say: I’m here to see if you can think of anything at all, however trivial, that will give us a lead, however slight. In this respect you’re on an equal footing with every other member of the household. Is that understood?”

The silence was long enough to make him wonder if there was to be no response. At last Blore said, “It’s understood, sir, I suppose, by all of us.”

“But not necessarily believed? Is that it?”

This time the silence was unbroken. “Well,” he said, “I can’t blame you. It’s a natural reaction. I can only hope you will come to accept the proposition.”

He turned to the boy, who stood apart looking guarded. “You’re a local chap, aren’t you?” Alleyn said.

He extracted with some difficulty that the boy, whose name was Thomas Appleby, was a farmer’s son engaged for the festive season. He had never spoken to Moult, had with the other servants come into the drawing-room for the Christmas tree, had had no idea who the Druid was, had received his present, and had returned to his kitchen and outhouse duties as soon as the ceremony ended and had nothing whatever to offer in the way of information. Alleyn said he could go off to bed, an invitation he seemed to accept with some reluctance.

When he had gone Alleyn told the men what he had learnt about their movements at the time of the Christmas tree: that they too had seen the Druid, failed to recognize him, received their gifts, and returned to their duties. “I understand,” he said, “that you, Cooke, with the extra women helpers, completed the arrangements for the children’s supper and that you saw Miss Tottenham return to the drawing-room but didn’t see anything of Moult. Is that right?”

“Yes, it is,” said Kittiwee, setting his dimples. “And I was concerned with, my own business, if I may put it that way, sir, and couldn’t be expected to be anything else.”

“Quite so. And you,” Alleyn said to Vincent, “did exactly what it had been arranged you should do in respect of the tree. At half-past seven you stationed yourself round the corner of the east wing. Right?”

Vincent nodded.

“Tell me, while you were there did anyone throw open a window in the east frontage and look out? Do you remember?”

“ ‘Course I remember,” said Vincent, who had an indeterminate accent and a bronchial voice. “He did. To see if I was there like he said he would. At seven-thirty.”

“The Colonel? Or Moult?”

“I wouldn’t know, would I? I took him for the Colonel because I expected him to be the Colonel, see?”

“Was he wearing his beard?”

“I never took no notice. He was black-like against the light.”

“Did he wave or signal in any way?”

“I waved according, giving him the office to come down. According. Now they was all in the drawing-room. And he wove back, see, and I went round to the front. According.”