The Prompter

Holmes took the pin and held it close to the lantern, breathing in. "Not blood, and not rouge. Red lead—the red they mix in the paint room for a sunset on the river. A quarter of an hour dry, no more."

Mrs Crane's hands were shaking, yet her fingertips were perfectly clean. "I went back to the dressing room for my shawl. It was stuck in the frame of my mirror, with this beneath it." She held out half a page of a prompt book—the missing half of that very page from Act Two.

In the margin Watson saw a line in small writing: "Scene five. Lamp out. A man in the water." The hand was not Crane's.

Holt stared at it, and at last finished what he had begun. "Marlowe. Marlowe the prompter. In the whole company, only he holds the complete book."

At that moment a fourth lamp lit on the wharf downstream. Then a police whistle sounded in the fog—once, and again—coming towards the steps.

❦ To be continued.