“Are you all right, Jer?”
“All right?”
“I thought you looked a bit poorly.”
“There’s nothing the matter with me. You look pretty sickly, yourself.”
“I daresay I do.”
Peregrine waited for a moment and then said: “When will you go to The Dolphin?”
“I’m commanded for eleven.”
“I thought I’d go over early. Alleyn will use our office and the company can sit about the circle foyer or go to their dressing-rooms.”
“They may be locked up,” Jeremy said.
“Who — the actors?”
“The dressing-rooms, half-wit.”
“I can’t imagine why, but you may be right. Routine’s what they talk about, isn’t it?”
Jeremy did not answer. Peregrine saw him wipe his hand across his mouth and briefly close his eyes. Then he stooped over his work: he was shaping a piece of balsa wood with a mounted razor blade. His hand jerked and the blade slipped. Peregrine let out an involuntary ejaculation. Jeremy swung round on his stool and faced him. “Do me a profound kindness and get the hell out of it, will you, Perry?”
“All right. See you later.”
Peregrine, perturbed and greatly puzzled, went out into the weekend emptiness of Blackfriars. An uncoordinated insistence of church bells jangled across the Sunday quietude.
He had nothing to do between now and eleven o’clock. “One might go into the church,” he thought but the idea dropped blankly on a field of inertia. “I can’t imagine why I feel like this,” he thought. “I’m used to taking decisions, to keeping on top of a situation.” But there were no decisions to take and the situation was out of his control. He couldn’t think of Superintendent Alleyn in terms of a racalcitrant actor.
He thought: “I know what I’ll do. I’ve got two hours, I’ll walk, like a character in Fielding or in Dickens, I’ll walk northwards, towards Hampstead and Emily. If I get blisters I’ll take the bus or a tube and if there’s not enough time left for that I’ll take a taxi. And Emily and I will go down to The Dolphin together.”
Having come to this decision his spirits lifted. He crossed Blackfriars Bridge and made his way through Bloomsbury towards Marylebone and Maida Vale.
His thoughts were divided between Emily, The Dolphin and Jeremy Jones.
Gertrude Bracey had a mannerism. She would glance pretty sharply at a companion but only for a second and would then, with a brusque turn of the head, look away. The effect was disconcerting and suggested not shiftiness so much as a profound distaste for her company. She smiled readily but with a derisive air and she had a sharp edge to her tongue. Alleyn, who never relied upon first impressions, supposed her to be vindictive.
He found support for this opinion in the demeanour of her associates. They sat round the office in The Dolphin on that Sunday afternoon, with all the conditioned ease of their training but with restless eyes and overtones of discretion in their beautifully controlled voices. This air of guardedness was most noticeable, because it was least disguised, in Destiny Meade. Sleek with fur, not so much dressed as gloved, she sat back in her chair and looked from time to time at Harry Grove who, on the few occasions when he caught her eye, smiled brilliantly in return. When Alleyn began to question Miss Bracey, Destiny Meade and Harry Grove exchanged one of these glances: on her part with brows raised significantly and on his with an appearance of amusement and anticipation.
Marcus Knight looked as if someone had affronted him and also as if he was afraid Miss Bracey was about to go too far in some unspecified direction.
Charles Random watched her with an expression of nervous distaste, and Emily Dunne with evident distress. Winter Meyer seemed to be ravaged by anxiety and inward speculation. He looked restlessly at Miss Bracey as if she had interrupted him in some desperate calculation. Peregrine, sitting by Emily, stared at his own clasped hands and occasionally at her. He listened carefully to Alleyn’s questions and Miss Bracey’s replies. Jeremy Jones, a little removed from the others, sat bolt upright in his chair and stared at Alleyn.
The characteristic that all these people had in common was that of extreme pallor, guessed at in the women and self-evident in the men.
Alleyn opened with a brief survey of the events in their succession, checked the order in which the members of the company had left the theatre, and was now engaged upon extracting confirmation of their movements from Gertrude Bracey, with the reactions among his hearers that have been indicated.
“Miss Bracey, I think you and Mr. Knight left the theatre together. Is that right?” They both agreed.
“And you left by the auditorium, not by the stage-door?”
“At Perry’s suggestion,” Marcus Knight said.
“To avoid the puddles,” Miss Bracey explained.
“And you went out together through the front doors?”
“No,” they said in unison, and she added: “Mr. Knight was calling on the Management.”
She didn’t actually sniff over this statement but contrived to suggest that there was something to be sneered at in the circumstance.
“I looked in at the office,” Knight loftily said, “on a matter of business.”
“This office? And to see Mr. Meyer?”
“Yes,” Winter Meyer said. Knight inclined his head in stately acquiescence.
“So you passed Jobbins on your way upstairs?”
“I — ah — yes. He was on the half-landing under the treasure.”
“I saw him up there,” Miss Bracey said.
“How was he dressed?”
As usual, they said, with evident surprise. In uniform.
“Miss Bracey, how did you leave?”
“By the pass-door in the main entrance. I let myself out and slammed it shut after me.”
“Locking it?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. As a matter of fact I—I re-opened it.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to see the time,” she said awkwardly, “by the clock in the foyer.”
“Jobbins,” Winter Meyer said, “barred and bolted this door after everyone had left.”
“When would that be?”
“Not more than ten minutes later. Marco—Mr. Knight—and I had a drink and left together. Jobbins came after us and I heard him drop the bar across and shoot the bolts. My God!” Meyer suddenly exclaimed.
“Yes?”
“The alarm! The burglar alarm. He’d switch it on when he’d locked up. Why didn’t it work?”
“Because somebody had switched it off.”
“My God!”
“May we return to Jobbins? How was he dressed when you left?”
Meyer said with an air of patience under trying circumstances, “I didn’t see him as we came down. He may have been in the men’s lavatory. I called out goodnight and he answered from up above. We stood for a moment in the portico and that’s when I heard him bolt the door.”
“When you saw him, perhaps ten minutes later, Mr. Jay, he was wearing an overcoat and slippers?”
“Yes,” said Peregrine.
“Yes. Thank you. How do you get home, Miss Bracey?”
She had a mini-car, she said, which she parked in the converted bombsite between the pub and the theatre.
“Were there other cars parked in this area belonging to the theatre people?”
“Naturally,” she said. “Since I was the first to leave.”
“You noticed and recognized them?”
“Oh, really, I suppose I noticed them. There were a number of strange cars still there but—yes, I saw—” she looked at Knight: her manner suggested a grudging alliance “—your car, Marcus.”
“What make of car is Mr. Knight’s?”