‘Did you find any prints?’

Gently handed the pictures to Stephens. The young man examined them with a painstaking thoroughness.

‘Only hers, on the handbag. Chummie must have been wearing gloves. The handle hadn’t been wiped, it just didn’t have anything on it. There were some contusions on the throat which the Doc says were made before death, so it looks as though he were taking care that she didn’t scream when she got the knife. Anyway, nobody heard her scream, and there would have been enough people about. According to the Doc she was killed between ten p.m. and midnight.’

‘What time did she leave this artists’ meeting?’

‘Some time after ten-thirty, say twenty to eleven. She stayed talking outside with Mallows and maybe some of the others, then went off alone in the direction of her bus stop.’

‘That’s the one beside the car park?’

‘Yes, the City Hall stop. It can’t be more than a couple of hundred yards from the George III. You go up a flight of steps and then along the front of the City Hall, then turn left into St Saviour’s, and there’s the stop, nearly under the clock-tower. The bus she went after was an eighty-eight, which leaves that stop at ten to eleven.’

‘But she didn’t catch it, of course.’

‘Yeah — so we narrow things down to ten minutes.’

‘Were there no witnesses in the car park?’

‘Two we’ve got, and they didn’t see a sausage.’

The Super put in: ‘It just missed the theatre turn-out. It’s the patrons of the Playhouse who mostly use that park of an evening. Only half an hour earlier and the place would have been crowded, but they’ve all got away by twenty to eleven.’

‘What about people using the bus stop?’

Hansom extended a pair of none-too-clean hands.