Basil West had turned green. All his good looks had vanished. He looked like a trapped rat.

‘Damn you,’ he snarled. ‘So you know all about it. You damned interfering Nosey Parker.’

Mr Parker Pyne was saved from physical violence by the appearance of the witnesses he had thoughtfully arranged to have listening outside the half-closed door.

Mr Parker Pyne was again discussing the case with his friend the high official.

‘And I hadn’t a shred of evidence! Only an almost indecipherable fragment, with ‘Burn this!’ on it. I deduced the whole story and tried it on him. It worked. I’d stumbled on the truth. The letters did it. Lady Grayle had burned every scrap he wrote, but he didn’t know that.

‘She was really a very unusual woman. I was puzzled when she came to me. What she wanted was for me to tell her that her husband was poisoning her. In that case, she meant to go off with young West. But she wanted to act fairly. Curious character.’

‘That poor little girl is going to suffer,’ said the other.

‘She’ll get over it,’ said Mr Parker Pyne callously. ‘She’s young. I’m anxious that Sir George should get a little enjoyment before it’s too late. He’s been treated like a worm for ten years. Now, Elsie MacNaughton will be very kind to him.’

He beamed. Then he sighed. ‘I am thinking of going incognito to Greece. I really must have a holiday!’

Harlequin’s Lane

Mr Satterthwaite was never quite sure what took him to stay with the Denmans. They were not of his kind—that is to say, they belonged neither to the great world, nor to the more interesting artistic circles. They were Philistines, and dull Philistines at that. Mr Satterthwaite had met them first at Biarritz, had accepted an invitation to stay with them, had come, had been bored, and yet strangely enough had come again and yet again.

Why? He was asking himself that question on this twenty-first of June, as he sped out of London in his Rolls Royce.

John Denman was a man of forty, a solid well-established figure respected in the business world. His friends were not Mr Satterthwaite’s friends, his ideas even less so. He was a man clever in his own line but devoid of imagination outside it.

Why am I doing this thing? Mr Satterthwaite asked himself once more—and the only answer that came seemed to him so vague and so inherently preposterous that he almost put it aside. For the only reason that presented itself was the fact that one of the rooms in the house (a comfortable well-appointed house) stirred his curiosity. That room was Mrs Denman’s own sitting-room.