When he took a cab to his club that evening, the first person Captain Golightly met was a man he’d once put forward for membership. Stephen Quine had been the doctor in Golightly’s old regiment and the two had become firm friends. After leaving the army, the doctor had been given a series of promotions and was now in charge of the most urgent post-mortems carried out in the city. His cheerful disposition was unusual in a surgeon but he always claimed that the dissection of the human body was an uplifting and educative experience and that he felt privileged to be involved in medical science.

Ordinarily, he rarely talked about his work when at the club because most of its members found a discussion of death to be far too morbid a subject over a companionable brandy. Golightly was the single exception. Having witnessed carnage on the battlefield, he had developed a thick skin. Quine was delighted to know someone to whom he could pass on what he felt was a significant discovery.

Once they’d ordered drinks, they sat side by side in armchairs.

‘How is life treating you?’ asked Golightly.

‘Very well,’ replied the other, ‘but death – that’s been giving me the real excitement of late. However, you may not be in the mood for tales from the morgue. Please stop me if you find the subject inappropriate.’

‘That depends what the subject is.’

‘Guns.’

‘In that case,’ said Golightly, ‘talk as long as you like. Guns and rifles have saved my life on more than one occasion. I regard them as friends.’

‘You wouldn’t find this particular gun friendly.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s in the wrong hands.’

‘Could you be more precise?’

‘I stumbled on an extraordinary coincidence.’

‘Then please let me hear about it …’

His visit to Robert Vane’s lodging had been profitable. In addition to giving in to the opportunity to wreak his revenge on a man who’d tried to kill him, the assassin had recovered much of the money taken from his own lodging and was able to confiscate Vane’s small collection of weapons. There was an even greater bonus. Sifting through a pile of correspondence, he found a letter from the man who’d actually hired him to murder Mellanby. It gave details of how and when he himself was to be disposed of in St James’s Park. Unlike the missives he’d received from the same man, this one had an address. It put him one step closer to the person who had originally devised the plot to have Mellanby shot dead.