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lasts? I'll leave films to you, you leave medicine to me. Any first year medical student could tell you-well, never mind. Does she know what kind of tablets she's taken today and how many-not that it could have been all that many or she'd have been unconscious by now."
        “I should imagine so."
        I pushed back my chair. "She'll be asleep in fifteen minutes.”
        “Are you sure? I mean-”
        “Which is her room?”
        “First on the right in the passageway.”
        “And yours?" I asked the Count.
        "First left."
        I nodded, rose, left, knocked on the first door on the right and went inside in response to a barely heard murmur. Judith Haynes was sitting propped up in her bed with, as Conrad had predicted, a dog on either side of her-two rather beautiful and beautifully groomed cocker spaniels: I could not, however, catch any trace of smelling salts. She blinked at me with her rather splendid green eyes and gave me a wan smile, at once tremulous and brave. My heart stayed where it was.
        "It was kind of you to come, Doctor." She had one of those dark molasses voices, as effective at close personal quarters as it was in a darkened cinema. She was wearing a pink quilted bedjacket which clashed violently with the colour of her hair and, high round her Deck, a green chiffon scarf, which didn't. Her face was alabaster white. "Michael said you couldn't help.”
        “Mr. Stryker was being overcautious." I sat down on the edge of the mattress and took her wrist. The cocker spaniel next me growled deep in its throat and bared its teeth. "If that dog bites me, I'll clobber it.”
        “Rufus wouldn't harm a fly, would you, Rufus, darling?" It wasn't flies I was worried about but I kept silence and she went on with a sad smile: "Are you allergic to dogs, Dr. Marlowe?”
        “I'm allergic to dog bites."
        The smile faded until her face was just sad. I knew nothing about Judith Haynes except what I'd heard at secondhand and as all I'd heard had been from her colleagues in the industry I heavily discounted about ninety percent of what had been told me: the only thing I had so far learnt with any certainty about the film world was that back-biting, hypocrisy, double-dealing, innuendo, and character assassination formed so integral a part of its conversational fabric that it was quite impossible to know where the truth ended and falsehood began. The only safe guide, I'd discovered, was to assume that the truth ended almost immediately.
        Miss Haynes, it was said, claimed to be twenty-four and had been, on the best authority, for the past fourteen years. This, it was said darkly, explained her predilection for chiffon scarves, for it was there that the missing years showed: equally, she may just have liked chiffon scarves. With equal authority it was stated that she was a complete bitch, her only redeeming quality being her total devotion to her two cocker spaniels and even this backhanded compliment was qualified by the observation that as a human being she had to have something or somebody to love, something or somebody to return her affection. She had tried cats, it was said, but that hadn't worked: the cats, apparently, didn't love her back. But one thing was indisputable. Tall, slender, with wonderful Titian hair and classically beautiful in the sculptured Greek fashion, Miss Haynes, it was universally conceded, couldn't act for toffee. Nonetheless, she was a very hot box office attraction indeed: the combination of the wistfully regal expression, which was her trademark, and the startling contrast of her lurid private life saw to that. Nor was her career in any way noticeably hindered by the facts that she was the daughter of Otto Gerran, whom she was said to despise, the wife of Michael Stryker, whom she was said to hate, and a full partner in the Olympus Productions company.
        There was nothing much wrong with her physical condition that I could