He discarded the names as they came to him one by one, and was left finally with only Chuck Lazer, the quiet American who’d been resident pianist at the old One-Spot when Garvald and Fred Manton had run it together.

But Chuck would never have stayed on, couldn’t have. He’d have gone back to the States years before, so much was obvious and yet, when Garvald looked in the phone book again, the name jumped out at him. Chuck Lazer – 15 Baron’s Court.

He reached for the telephone, hesitated, then changed his mind. This was something that would be handled better in person. He pulled on his hat and left, locking the door behind him.

At the head of the stairs he hesitated, then moved along the corridor and tried a door at the end. It opened on to a narrow flight of dark stairs and he went down quickly, a stale smell of cooking rising to meet him through the darkness. At the bottom, he found himself in a dimly lit passage facing a door. He opened it and stepped into the alley at the side of the hotel.

To save time he took a taxi from a rank in City Square. Lazer’s address was not far from the University, a district of tall, decaying Victorian houses which had, in the main, been converted into cheap boarding houses or flats.

Garvald followed a narrow path through an overgrown garden and mounted several steps to a large porch. He could hear laughter from somewhere inside and music as he examined the name cards beneath the row of bell pushes.

Chuck Lazer had Flat 5 on the third floor and Garvald opened the door and moved into the hall. As he closed it behind him, a door on his right opened, music and laughter flooding out and a young man with tousled hair and a fringe of beard emerged, carrying a crate of empty bottles.

Garvald paused at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Chuck Lazer wouldn’t happen to be in there, would he?’

‘Good God, no,’ the young man said. ‘Booze and bints, that’s all we go in for, old man. Not Chuck’s style at all. You’ll probably find him in his pit.’

He disappeared along the corridor and Garvald mounted the stairs quickly, a slight frown on his face, wondering what all that was supposed to mean.

It was strangely remote from things up there on the third floor and the music sounded faint and unreal, like something from another world. Garvald checked the card on the door, listened for a moment, then knocked. There was no reply and when he reached for the handle, the door opened to his touch.

The stench was overpowering, a compound of stale sweat, urine and cooking odours mixed with some other indefinable essence that for the moment escaped him.