Photo Finish

“It’s you,” he whispered. “You gave me a shock.”

“Wasn’t Signor Lattienzo’s pill any good?”

“No. I’ve got to get to the lavatory. I can’t wait.”

“There isn’t one along here, you must know that.”

“Oh God!” said Rupert loudly. “Lay off me, can’t you?”

“Don’t start anything here, you silly chap. Keep your voice down and come to the studio.”

“No.”

“Oh, yes, you will. Come on.”

He took him by the arm.

Down the passage, back across the landing, back past Bert Smith, back into the studio. Will this night never end? Alleyn wondered, putting down his dispatch case.

“If you really want the Usual Offices,” he said, “there’s one next door, which you know as well as I do, and I don’t mind betting there’s one in your own communicating bathroom. But you don’t want it, do you?”

“Not now.”

“Where were you bound for?”

“I’ve told you.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters, you ass. Ask yourself.”

Silence.

“Well?”

“I left something. Downstairs.”

“What?”

“The score.”

“Of The Alien Corn?”

“Yes.”

“Couldn’t it wait till daylight? Which is not far off.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I want to burn it. The score. All the parts. Everything. I woke up and kept thinking of it. There, on the hall fire, burn it, I thought.”

“The fire will probably be out.”

“I’ll blow it together,” said Rupert.

“You’re making this up as you go along. Aren’t you?”

“No. No. Honestly. I swear not. I want to burn it.”

“And anything else?”

He caught back his breath and shook his head.

“Are you sure you want to burn it?”

“How many times do I have to say!”

“Very well,” said Alleyn.

“Thank God.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No. I mean there’s no need. I won’t,” said Rupert with a wan attempt at lightness, “get up to any fu

“Such as?”

“Anything. Nothing. I just don’t want an audience. I’ve had enough of audiences,” said Rupert and contrived a laugh.

“I’ll be unobtrusive.”

“You suspect me. Don’t you?”

“I suspect a round half-dozen of you. Come on.”

Alleyn took him by the arm.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Rupert said and broke away.

“If you’re thinking I’ll go to bed and then you’ll pop down by yourself, you couldn’t be more mistaken. I’ll sit you out.”

Rupert bit his finger and stared at Alleyn. A sudden battering by the gale sent some metal object clattering across the patio down below. Still blowing great guns, thought Alleyn.

“Come along,” he said. “I’m sorry I’ve got to be bloody-minded but you might as well take it gracefully. We don’t want to do a cinematic roll down the stairs in each other’s arms, do we?”

Rupert turned on his heel and walked out of the room. They went together, quickly, to the stairs and down them to the hill

It was a descent into almost total darkness. A red glow at the far end must come from the embers of the fire, and there was a vague, scarcely perceptible luminosity filtered down from the lamp on the landing. Alleyn had put Troy’s torch in his pocket and used it. Its beam dodged down the stairs ahead of them.

“There’s your fire,” he said. “Now, I suppose, for the sacrifice.”

He guided Rupert to the back of the hall and through the double doors that opened into the concert chamber. When they were there he shut the doors and turned on the wall lamps. They stood blinking at a litter of discarded programs, the blank face of the stage curtain, the piano and the players’ chairs and music stands with their sheets of manuscript. How long, Alleyn wondered, had it taken Rupert to write them out? And then on the piano, the full score. On the cover “The Alien Corn” painstakingly lettered, “by Rupert Bartholomew.” And underneath: “Dedicated to Isabella Sommita.”

“Never mind,” Alleyn said. “This was only a begi

“Did he say so?”

“He did indeed.”

“The duet, I suppose. He did say something about the duet,” Rupert admitted.

“The duet it was.”

“I rewrote it.”

“So he said. Greatly to its advantage.”

“All the same,” Rupert muttered after a pause, “I shall burn it.”

“Sure?”

“Absolutely. I’m just going behind. There’s a spare copy; I won’t be a moment.”

“Hold on,” Alleyn said. “I’ll light you.”

“No! Don’t bother. Please. I know where the switch is.”

He made for a door in the back wall, stumbled over a music stand, and fell. While he was clambering to his feet, Alleyn ran up the apron steps and slipped through the curtains. He crossed upstage and went out by the rear exit, arriving in a back passage that ran parallel with the stage and had four doors opening off it.

Rupert was before him. The passage lights were on and a door with a silver star fixed to it was open. The reek of cosmetics flowed out of the room.

Alleyn reached the door. Rupert was in there, too late with the envelope he was trying to stuff into his pocket.

The picture he presented was stagy in the extreme. He looked like an early illustration for a Sherlock Holmes story — the young delinquent caught red-handed with the incriminating document. His eyes even started in the approved ma

He straightened up, achieved an awful little laugh, and pushed the envelope down in his pocket.

“That doesn’t look much like a spare copy of an opera,” Alleyn remarked.

“It’s a good-luck card I left for her. I — it seemed so ghastly, sitting there. Among the others. ‘Good Luck!’ You know?”

“I’m afraid I don’t. Let me see it.”

“No. I can’t. It’s private.”

“When someone has been murdered,” Alleyn said, “nothing is private.”

“You can’t make me.”

“I could, very easily,” he answered and thought: And how the hell would that look in subsequent proceedings?

“You don’t understand. It’s got nothing to do with what happened. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me,” Alleyn suggested and sat down.

“No.”

“You know you’re doing yourself no good by this,” Alleyn said. “If whatever’s in that envelope has no relevance it will not be brought into the picture. By behaving like this you suggest that it has. You make me wonder if your real object in coming down here was not to destroy your work but to regain possession of this card, if that’s what it is.”

“No. No. I am going to burn the script. I’d made up my mind.”

“Both copies?”

“What? Yes. Yes, of course. I’ve said so.”

“And where is the second copy, exactly? Not in here?”

“Another room.”

“Come now,” Alleyn said, not unkindly. “There is no second copy, is there? Show me what you have in your pocket.”

“You’d read — all sorts of things — into it.”

“I haven’t got that kind of imagination. You might ask yourself, with more cause, what I am likely to read into a persistent refusal to let me see it.”

He spared a thought for what he would in fact be able to do if Rupert did persist. With no authority to take possession forcibly, he saw himself spending the fag end of the night in Rupert’s room and the coming day until such time as the police might arrive, keeping him under ludicrous surveyance. No. His best bet was to keep the whole thing in as low a key as possible and trust to luck.

“I do wish,” he said, “that you’d just think sensibly about this. Weigh it up. Ask yourself what a refusal is bound to mean to you, and for God’s sake cough up the bloody thing and let’s go to bed for what’s left of this interminable night.”

He could see the hand working in the pocket and hear paper crumple. He wondered if Rupert tried, foolishly, to tear it. He sat out the silence, read messages of goodwill pi