‘Only Reeve Baker. The novelist, you know.’ I gave them his address. ‘But he’s away on holiday, has been for three weeks. He’s not coming home till tomorrow.’

What happened after that I know from the evidence given at Reeve’s trial, his trial for the murder of my wife. The police called on him on Saturday morning. I don’t think they suspected him at all at first. My reading of crime fiction has taught me they would have asked him for any information he could give about our private life.

Unfortunately for him, they had already talked to some of his neighbours. Reeve had led all these people to think he had really gone away. The milkman and the paper boy were both certain he had been away. So when the police questioned him about that, and he knew just why they were questioning him, he got into a panic. He didn’t dare say he’d been in France. They could have shown that to be false without the least trouble. Instead, he told the truth and said he’d been lying low to escape the attentions of a woman. Which woman? He wouldn’t say, but the woman in the flat upstairs would. Time and time again she had seen Gwendolen visit him in the afternoons, had heard them quarrelling, Gwendolen protesting her love for him and he shouting that he wouldn’t be controlled, that he’d do anything to escape her possessiveness.

He had, of course, no alibi for the Wednesday night. But the judge and the jury could see he’d done his best to arrange one. Novelists are apt to let their imaginations run away with them; they don’t realize how astute and thorough the police are. And there was firmer evidence of his guilt even than that. Three main exhibits were produced in the court: Reeve’s blazer with a button missing from the sleeve; that very button; a cluster of his hairs. The button had been found by Gwendolen’s body and the hairs on her coat . . .

My reading of detective stories hadn’t been in vain, though I haven’t read one since then. People don’t, I suppose, after a thing like that.

A Bad Heart

THEY HAD BEEN very pressing and at last, on the third time of asking, he had accepted. Resignedly, almost fatalistically, he had agreed to dine with them. But as he began the long drive out of London, he thought petulantly that they ought to have had the tact to drop the acquaintance altogether. No other employee he had sacked had ever made such approaches to him. Threats, yes. Several had threatened him and one had tried blackmail, but no one had ever had the effrontery to invite him to dinner. It wasn’t done. A discreet man wouldn’t have done it. But of course Hugo Crouch wasn’t a discreet man and that, among other things, was why he had been sacked.

He knew why they had asked him. They wanted to hold a court of enquiry, to have the whole thing out. Knowing this, he had suggested they meet in a restaurant and at his expense. They couldn’t harangue a man in a public restaurant and he wouldn’t be at their mercy. But they had insisted he come to their house and in the end he had given way. He was an elderly man with a heart condition; it was sixteen miles slow driving from his flat to their house – monstrous on a filthy February night – but he would show them he could take it, he would be one too many for them. The chairman of Frasers would show them he wasn’t to be intimidated by a bumptious do-gooder like Hugo Crouch, and he would cope with the situation just as he had coped in the past with the blackmailer.