There was something, other than the thought of Phoebe Griffin, that he had been circling round in nervous antici pation since he had come home an hour ago. Now he sat down on the sofa and opened his briefcase and took out a small, plain rectangular cardboard box and set it on the kidney-shaped coffee table in front of him – Scandinavian furniture was another of Marguerite’s enthusiasms. As he lifted the lid of the box and folded back the tissue paper inside, he savoured also the almost fleshy fragrance of fresh machine oil. He laid the tissue paper aside and lifted out of the box, with the fingers of both hands, the short, shiny, deadly little weapon.

It was a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson police special, very compact and neat. It sat snugly in his hand, a sort of lethal toy. He had got it from a chap in the Pearse Street firearms department, whose name was Balfe. The thing had been done on a semi-official basis. Strafford had signed for it, as he was required to do, but Balfe had put the chit away at the bottom of a drawer under a pile of outdated documentation.

The gun came with a shoulder holster, which was the next thing he took out of his briefcase. He removed his jacket and put his arm through the complicated leather strap, and did up the buckle at the back. Then he put on his jacket again, and fitted the gun into the holster, and went into the downstairs bathroom and looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. There was only a slight bulge beside his heart, barely noticeable. He drew back his shoulders to stretch the cloth over the holster, but still it hardly showed.

He took out the gun again, and again let it rest in the palm of his hand. He was unashamedly delighted with it, which should have made him feel foolish, but did not.