AARON ALWAYS TOOK HIS days off because they were his right and you used your rights at work, but he didn’t have much to do with them. He generally went to stay with his sister in Sheffield, or had her little family descend on his flat in Lisson Grove, but he’d heard just the day before that his niece had come down with scarlet fever. He therefore occupied the first morning by purchasing a variety of books, toys, chocolates, and whisky in Debenhams for the benefit of the whole family and getting it all shipped up. Then he went to the dentist, then to the cinema, and with all his avenues of entertainment now exhausted, he turned his thoughts to Joel Wildsmith.

He’d been too busy to consider the graphologist for a while, but now he was at leisure, the problem nagged at his mind. He simply couldn’t see how Wildsmith could have found out as much as he had.

He bought a book on graphology. It assured him he could come to a full understanding of a person’s character simply by considering the differences in writing styles:

Some of pressure (strong, weak, irregular, decreasing in the downward direction, sudden dot-like pressure), differences in the degree of legibility, regularity, connection, size, width, fullness, extension upwards and downwards, differences of the writing angle (slant to the right, upward angle, slant to the left), of the speed between the movements, differences between good and bad spacing, between angles and curves, between a rising and sinking tendency of the letter basis...

“Makes perfect sense,” he muttered to himself, and flipped randomly to a later page, which informed him that writing the date rarely expressed the writer’s libido as thoroughly as other numerals could.

Sod this. He put the book on the table, although he felt like throwing it across the room, and headed off to Pentonville. He didn’t make an appointment. If he had to hang around for a while, he would: it was worth it to retain the element of surprise.

In the event, the char said Mr. Wildsmith was home, and let him in. He knocked at the door. A handsome man answered.

Aaron stared. Wildsmith, sans ghastly moustache, stared back at him.

It made all the difference. Without the foliage he had a lovely mouth, with a perfectly curved upper lip and a full lower one. He had a good nose, come to that, and his strikingly light eyes under the thick reddish brows were an intriguing, even dominating feature when the moustache wasn’t demanding all the attention.

“You shaved,” Aaron said, like a fool.

“Of course I shaved. Would you wear that thing longer than you had to?”

“Had to?”