Conducis? Conducis! It was as if Mawson had said ‘Mr Onassis’. Could this possibly be Mr Vassily Conducis? The more Peregrine thought about it the more he decided that it could. But what in the wide world would Mr Vassily Conducis be up to in a derelict theatre on the South Bank at half past ten in the morning when he ought to have been abominably lolling on his yacht in the Aegean? And what was he, Peregrine, up to in Mr Conducis’s house which (it now dawned upon him) was on a scale of insolently quiet grandeur such as he had never expected to encounter outside the sort of book which, in any case, he never read.

Peregrine looked round the room and felt he ought to curl his lip at it. After all he did read his New Statesman. He then looked at the clothes on the bed and found them to be on an equal footing with what, being a man of the theatre, he thought of as the décor. Absently, he picked up a gayish tie that was laid out beside a heavy silk shirt. ‘Charvet’ said the label. Where had he read of Charvet?

‘I don’t want any part of this,’ he thought. He sat on the bed and dialled several numbers without success. The theatre didn’t answer. He put on the clothes and saw that though they were conservative in style he looked startlingly presentable in them. Even the shoes fitted.

He rehearsed a short speech and went downstairs where he found Mawson waiting for him.

He said: ‘Did you say: Mr Conducis?’

‘Yes, sir, Mr Vassily Conducis. Will you step this way, sir?’

Mr Conducis stood in front of his library fire and Peregrine wondered how on earth he had failed to recognize a face that had been so widely publicized with, it was reported, such determined opposition from its owner. Mr Conducis had an olive, indeed a swarthy complexion and unexpectedly pale eyes. These were merely facial adjuncts and might, Peregrine afterwards thought, have been mass produced for all the speculation they inspired. The mouth, however, was disturbing, being, or so Peregrine thought, both ruthless and vulnerable. The chin was heavy. Mr Conducis had curly black hair going predictably grey at the temples. He looked, by and large, enormously expensive.

‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Yes. Come in.’ His voice was a light tenor. Was there a faintly foreign inflection? A slight lisp, perhaps.

As Peregrine approached, Mr Conducis looked fixedly at his guest’s hands.

‘You are well?’ he asked. ‘Recovered?’

‘Yes, indeed. I can’t thank you enough, sir. As for – well, as for lending me these things – I really do feel – !’

‘Do they fit?’

‘Yes. Very well.’

‘That is all that is necessary.’

‘Except that after all they are yours,’ Peregrine said and tried a light laugh in order not to sound pompous.