I knew they had been stolen. And I knew the name of the thief. But still I searched each drawer of the wardrobe, and then I went to the washstand and cast out his shaving tackle and his sweet-smelling soaps. His toilet water and the soft muslin cloth which he used to sponge his face. Everything I cast on the floor so that I could pull out the drawer and see if the deeds were safely hidden there.

Nothing.

I went to his writing desk, in the corner by the window. It was packed with papers, writing of every kind. I carried one drawer after another and heaped them on the centre of the bed. Small pasteboard calling cards, snippets of paper torn from dinner menus, sheets from notebooks, hot-pressed letter paper, a little mountain of papers and every one of them a note of gambling debts, written in Perry’s careless drunken scrawl. A score of them, a hundred of them, a thousand of them.

I moved the candelabra to the bedside table and lit the two new candles so that I might see better, then I smoothed the paper into a pile and sat amongst them, at the head of the bed. I drew the candles closer and lifted the first piece of paper, smoothed it out, and lifted it close to my eyes so that I could read. I spelled out the word carefully, whispering under my breath: ‘Ten guineas George Caterham’. Then I laid it on a pile and reached for the next.

Minutes I sat there, taking one paper after another, smoothing it, struggling with the words, placing it with the others. All the time my brain was working, calculating, adding and adding until all the little pieces were in a pile and I knew Perry owed two and a half thousand pounds in gambling debts to his friends.