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hurt. From the pocket of the dressing gown he took a fork, which he wiped up and down on his lapel.
    Gulliford said, “I’ve only got one question I want to ask you.” He placed his hands on the table and positioned himself in front of Caspar, where he couldn’t be ignored.
    “Why do you do it?” he said.
    The jar contained something pickled in murky liquid. Caspar sprang open the clips that sealed on the lid, and poked around inside with his fork.
    “Do what?” he said.
    “We’re a humble company,” Gulliford said. “I can understand if you despise your place in it. But you act as if you despise the very profession we’re in.”
    Caspar speared a morsel of something that resembled a small, dark sausage. “My head hurts,” he said. “Go away.”
    “You’re going to hear what I have to say.”
    “Great wisdom from the company’s Low Comedian?”
    “That’s a role, sonny boy, it’s not a rank. You don’t seem to know the difference. I’ve forgotten more about the stage than you will ever know. You never match your business and you pick up your cues the same way you catch your trains. Well, I’ve seen through you and I know what your game is.”
    Caspar stopped munching. He became very quiet and wary.
    Gulliford said, “We both know there’s no other occupation where you can rise from the gutter to the very top of society. And from you, my friend, for all your French cologne and your high manners and your one good set of clothes, from you I get the definite whiff of the gutter. You’ve no love of the stage. You just like playacting.”
    Caspar sniffed. “If you’re unhappy with my work,” he said, “talk to Edmund.”
    “Edmund to you. Mister Whitlock to the rest of us. Don’t think it hasn’t been noticed.”
    “There’s nothing to notice. No man has hold over me. Nor I on any man.”
    “No. But there’s something in it for both of you.” Gulliford reached over and took the new morsel from the end of Caspar’s fork, right under his nose.
    “I don’t know what the bargain is,” he said, “and I don’t care. What I want you to remember is this. The rest of us aren’t your steppingstones. This is more than our living. This is our life.”
    So saying, he flipped the morsel into his mouth.
    It was horrible. He was thrown. After trying to contend with it for a moment, he had to spit it into his hand and place it on the table.
    “Sack the chef,” he said and, still wincing at the taste, moved to the door.
    “Anything else?” Caspar said.
    “I’ve said my piece,” the Low Comedian said. “I’ll see you at the matinee.”
    Caspar was left contemplating the spat-out and abandoned morsel. He speared it with his fork.
    To the otherwise empty room he said, “I’m heading for places you can never imagine, my friend.”
    And then he popped the appalling pickle into his own mouth, crunching it up as if such was the most natural thing in the world.

NINE
    S ebastian traveled back with Turner-Smith in the superintendent’s own carriage. Once the ride was under way, he was eager to explain his suspicions and to share some of the conclusions that he’d half-thought through.
    But Turner-Smith sat with his bad leg outstretched and his cane across his knees, looking out of the side window as the streets of the town unrolled past it, and said, “How is your mother these days, Sebastian? Is she well?”
    The question was a surprise. Sebastian was not sure how to respond, so he simply answered, “She is, sir,” and then “I was not aware that you knew her.”
    “We’ve never actually met,” Turner-Smith said. “But she wrote to me upon your promotion.”
    “She did?”
    Turner-Smith looked at him then, half amused as if he already knew the answers to anything he might ask, and all of his pleasure was in seeing the younger man’s reaction.
    “She disapproves of your choice of profession and holds me personally responsible for your safety.”
    “I apologize,” Sebastian said. “I