‘Be seeing you, ducks,’ Moppett said in Cockney to Miss Cartell and they went out.

There followed a rather deadly little silence.

Mr Cartell addressed himself to his sister. ‘My dear Connie,’ he said, ‘I should be failing in my duty if I didn’t tell you I consider that young man to be an unspeakable bounder.’

Mr Period returned.

‘Shall we have our coffee in the drawing-room?’ he asked in the doorway.

Nicola would have dearly liked to excuse herself and go back to the study, but Mr Period took her gently by the arm and led her to the drawing-room. His fingers, she noticed, were trembling. ‘I want,’ he said, ‘to show you a newly acquired treasure.’

Piloting her into a far corner, he unfolded a brown-paper parcel. It turned out to be a landscape in water-colour: the distant view of a manor house.

‘It’s charming,’ Nicola said.

‘Thought to be an unsigned Cotman, but the real interest for me is that it’s my great-grandfather’s house at Ribblethorpe. Destroyed, alas, by fire. I came across it in a second-hand shop. Wasn’t that fun for me?’

Alfred took round the coffee tray. Nicola pretended she couldn’t hear Mr Cartell and his sister arguing. As soon as Alfred had gone, Miss Cartell tackled her brother.

‘I think you’re jolly prejudiced, Boysie,’ she said. ‘It’s the way they all talk nowadays. Moppett tells me he’s brilliantly clever. Something in the City.’

‘Too clever by half if you ask me. And what in the City?’

‘I don’t know exactly what. He’s got rather a tragic sort of background, Moppett says. The father was killed in Bangkok and the mother’s artistic.’

‘You’re a donkey, Connie. If I were you I should put a stop to the friendship. None of my business, of course. I am not,’ Mr Cartell continued with some emphasis, ‘Mary’s uncle, despite the courtesy title she is good enough to bestow upon me.’

‘You don’t understand her.’

‘I make no attempt to do so,’ he replied in a fluster.

Nicola murmured: ‘I think I ought to get back to my job.’ She said goodbye to Miss Cartell.

‘Typin’, are you?’ asked Miss Cartell. ‘P.P. tells me you’re Basil Maitland-Mayne’s gel. Used to know your father. Hunted with him.’

‘We all knew Basil,’ Mr Period said with an attempt at geniality.

‘I didn’t,’ Mr Cartell said crossly.

They glared at each other.

‘You’re very smart all of a sudden, P.P.,’ Miss Cartell remarked. ‘Private Secretary! You’ll be telling us next that you’re going to write a book.’ She laughed uproariously. Nicola returned to the study.

II