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for histrionics had passed. Leila Dragon was holding the wrist of her right hand in her left. I said to James Dragon: “I think at this stage it would be best if you would come down to the station with me, for further questioning…”
    ‘I expected an uproar and there was an uproar. More waste of time. But now, you see,’ said the old man, looking cunningly round the table, ‘I knew—didn’t I? Waiting for something? Or postponing something? Now, you see, I knew.’
    ‘At any rate, you took him down to the station?’ said Cockie, sickened by all this gratuitous mystificating. ‘On the strength of what the girl had suggested?’
    ‘What that was is, of course, quite clear to you ?’
    ‘Well, of course,’ said Cockie.
    ‘Of course, of course,’ said the old man angrily. He shrugged. ‘At any rate—it served as an excuse. It meant that I could take him, and probably hold him there, on a reasonable suspicion: it did him out of the alibi, you see. So off he went, at last, with a couple of my men; and, after a moment, I followed. But before I went, I collected something—something from his dressing-room.’ Another of his moments had come; but this time he addressed himself only to Inspector Cockrill. ‘No doubt what that was is also clear to you?’
    ‘Well, a pot of theatrical cleansing cream, I suppose,’ said Inspector Cockrill; almost apologetically.
    The old man, as has been said, was something of an actor himself. He affected to give up. ‘As you know it so well, Inspector, you had better explain to our audience and save me my breath.’ He gave to the words ‘our audience’ an ironic significance quite shattering in its effect; and hugged to himself a secret white rabbit to be sprung, to the undoing of this tiresome little man, when all seemed over, out of a secret top hat.
    Inspector Cockrill in his turn affected surprise, affected diffidence, affected reluctant acceptance. ‘Oh, well, all right.’ He embarked upon it in his grumbling voice. ‘It was the slap across the girl, Bianca’s, face. Our friend, no doubt, will tell you that he paid very little attention to whatever it was she said to him in the corridor.’ (A little more attention, he privately reflected, would have been to advantage; but still…) ‘He was looking, instead, at the weal on her face: glancing in through the door, perhaps, to where Leila Dragon sat unconsciously clasping her stinging right hand with her left. He was thinking of another hand he had recently seen, with a pink mark across the palm. He knew now, as he says. He knew why they had been so appalled when, forgetting herself, she had slapped the girl’s face: because it might suggest to his mind that there had been another such incident that night. He knew. He knew what they all had been waiting for, why they had been marking time. He knew why they had scrambled back into stage costume, they had done it so that there might be no particularity if James Dragon appeared in the dark make-up of Othello the Moor. They were waiting till under the stain, another stain should fade—the mark of Glenda Croy’s hand across her murderer’s cheek.’ He looked into the Great Detective’s face. ‘I think that’s the way your mind worked?’
    The great one bowed. ‘Very neatly thought out. Very creditable.’ He shrugged. ‘Yes, that’s how it was. So we took him down to the station and without more delay we cleaned the dark paint off his face. And under the stain—what do you think we found?’
    ‘Nothing,’ said Inspector Cockrill.
    ‘Exactly,’ said the old man, crossly.
    ‘You can’t have found anything; because, after all, he was free to play Othello for the next three weeks,’ said Cockie, simply. ‘You couldn’t detain him—there was nothing to detain him on. The girl’s story wasn’t enough to stand alone, without the mark of the slap: and now, if it had ever been there, it had faded. Their delaying tactics had worked. You had to let him