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“And if you want to know what we were discussing, we were discussing my wife.”
    ‘ “She had been Carrying On,” said Mrs. Dragon in a voice of theatrical doom.
    ‘ “She had for some time been carrying on a love affair, as my mother says. We were afraid the affair would develop, would get out of hand, that she wouldn’t want to come away on our American tour and it would upset our arrangements. We were taking out As You Like It . She was to have played Rosalind.”
    ‘ “And then?”
    ‘ “We heard footsteps along the corridor. Someone knocked at her door. We thought nothing of it till one of us glanced up and saw the shadows on her blind. There was a man with her in there. We supposed it was the lover.”
    ‘ “Who was this lover?” I asked. If such a man existed, I had better send out after him, on the offchance.
    ‘But none of them, they said, knew who he was. “She was too clever for that,” said Mrs. Dragon in her tragedy voice.
    ‘ “How could he have got into the theatre? The stage door-man didn’t see him.”
    ‘They did not know. No doubt there might have been some earlier arrangement between them…
    ‘And not the only “arrangement” that had been come to that night. They began a sort of point counterpoint recital which I could have sworn had been rehearsed. Iago (or it may have been Cassio): “Then we saw that they were quarrelling…” Emilia : “To our great satisfaction!” Clown : “That would have solved all our problems, you see.” Othello : “Not all our problems. It would not have solved mine.” Emilia , quoting: “Was this fair paper, this most goodly book, Made to write ‘whore’ upon…?” Mrs . Dragon : “Leila, James, be careful” (sotto voce, and glancing at me). Clown , hastily as though to cover up: “And then, sir, he seemed to pounce down upon her as far as, from the distorted shadows, we could see. A moment later he moved across the room and then suddenly the lights went out and we heard the sound of a window violently thrown up. My son, James, came to his senses first. He rushed out and we saw the lights come on again. We followed him. He was bending over her…”
    ‘ “She was dead,” said James; and struck an attitude against the Green-room mantelpiece, his dark-stained face heavy with grief, resting his forehead on his dark-stained hand. People said later, as I’ve told you, that he aged twenty years in as many days; I remember thinking at the time in fact he had aged twenty years in as many minutes: and that that was not an act.
    ‘A window had been found swinging open, giving on to a narrow lane behind the theatre. I did not need to ask how the lover was supposed to have made his get-away. “And all this time,” I said, “none of you left the Green-room?”
    ‘ “No one,” they repeated: and this time were careful not to glance at James.
    ‘You must appreciate,’ said the Great Detective, pouring himself another glass of port, ‘that I did not then know all I have explained to you. If I was to believe what I was told, I knew only this: that the door-keeper had seen a man strangling the woman, repeating the words of the Othello death-scene—which, however, amount largely to calling the lady a strumpet; that apparently the lady was a strumpet, in as far as she had been entertaining a lover; and that six people, of whom three were merely members of his company, agreed that they had seen the murder committed while James Dragon was sitting innocently in the room with them. I had to take the story of the lover at its face value: I could not then know, as I knew later, that Glenda Croy had avoided such entanglements. But it raised, nevertheless, certain questions in my mind.’ It was his custom to pause at this moment, smiling benignly round on his audience, and invite them to guess what those questions had been.
    No one seemed very ready with suggestions. He was relaxing complacently in his chair, as also was his custom for no one ever