He held out his hand. Mr Conducis, with an expression that really might have been described as one of horror, backed away from it.

‘Before you go,’ he said, ‘I have something that may be of interest to you. You can spare a moment?’

‘Of course.’

‘It is in this room,’ Mr Conducis muttered and went to a bureau that must, Peregrine thought, be of fabulous distinction. He followed his host and watched him pull out a silky, exquisitely inlaid, drawer.

‘How lovely that is,’ he said.

‘Lovely?’ Mr Conducis echoed as he had echoed before. ‘You mean the bureau? Yes? It was found for me. I understand nothing of such matters. That is not what I wished to show you. Will you look at this? Shall we move to a table?’

He had taken from the drawer a very small wooden Victorian hand-desk, extremely shabby, much stained, and Peregrine thought, of no particular distinction. A child’s possession perhaps. He laid it on a table under a window and motioned to a chair beside it. Peregrine now felt as if he was playing a part in somebody else’s dream. ‘But I’m all right,’ he thought. ‘I’m not really drunk. I’m in that pitiable but enviable condition when all things seem to work together for good.’

He sat before the table and Mr Conducis, standing well away from him, opened the little desk, pressed inside with his white, flat thumb and revealed a false bottom. It was a commonplace device and Peregrine wondered if he was meant to exclaim at it. He saw that in the exposed cavity there was a packet no bigger than a half-herring and much the same shape. It was wrapped in discoloured yellowbrown silk and tied with a morsel of tarnished ribbon. Mr Conducis had a paper knife in his hand. ‘Everything he possesses,’ Peregrine thought, ‘is on museum-piece level. It’s stifling.’ His host used the paper knife as a sort of server, lifting the little silk packet out on its blade and, as it were, helping Peregrine to it like a waiter.

It slid from the blade and with it, falling to one side, a discoloured card upon which it had lain. Peregrine, whose vision had turned swimmy, saw that this card was a menu and bore a date some six years past. The heading: ‘The Steam Yacht Kalliope. Off Villefranche. Gala Dinner’ floated tipsily into view with a flamboyant and illegible signature that was sprawled across it above a dozen others. A short white hand swiftly covered and then removed the card.

‘That is nothing,’ Mr Conducis said. ‘It is of no consequence.’ He went to the fire. A bluish flame sprang up and turned red. Mr Conducis returned.

‘It is the packet that may be of interest. Will you open it?’ he said.

Peregrine pulled gingerly at the ribbon ends and turned back the silk wrapping.

He had exposed a glove.