Amos tapped the side of his booze-blossomed nose. ‘Shan’t ask any questions, flower. Now then. You look all in. Can I offer you a cup of tea. Or p’raps,’ he grinned again, exposing tombstone teeth, ‘summat stronger?’

*

Alas, I must report that all my efforts to interest the authorities in the strange case of my brother’s demise led nowhere. I was shuttled from pillar to post, from the local constabulary to the hospital for tropical diseases (some obscure foreign malady being the favoured cause of death). In vain did I protest that Edmund’s weird symptoms augured something far more mysterious and unsettling.

My return to London brought no respite from this catalogue of dismay. Scotland Yard – in the person of an asinine desk sergeant with a face like a boiled pudding – almost laughed in my face. After that, I worked my way through a list of private enquiry agents that seemed to comprise one set of squalid rooms after another. I had almost given up hope when a chance encounter in the Criterion bar changed everything.

I sat at the end of the long bar, drowning my sorrows in brandy when I felt a friendly hand clap me on the shoulder. I turned.

‘Why! It’s young Dimple!’ I cried at once.

‘Hullo, Thursday, old man. How the devil are you?’

Dimple and I had been at school together. In fact he had fagged for me, though he was always rather rotten at it. I came to regard unpressed trousers and the cremation of my muffins as de rigueur. But he was a stout chap and we soon became fast friends. I had seen little of him in some years but heard vaguely that he had drifted into publishing.

Seeing my somewhat ashen countenance, he made enquiries as to my health and I at once apprised him of my situation. Dimple looked grim and shook his head.

‘Poor old Edmund,’ he said at last. ‘And you’ve got nowhere with this … investigation of yours?’

‘Every door slammed, every hope vanished,’ I said, gazing mournfully into my glass.

Dimple’s face broadened into a smile. ‘Perhaps not every hope. I say!’ He shuffled forward on his stool and took my hand earnestly. ‘You must go and see Fetch!’

‘Fetch?’