The shop was very small. There were mahogany-and-glass showcases on all sides, crammed with rings and pendants and silver perfume-holders — lower middle-class jewellery, the kind of jewellery that a jobbing clerk might give to his lady-love at Christmas, or a shopkeeper buy for his wife on their wedding anniversary. There was a smell of dust and silver polish and jeweller’s rouge.

From a door at the back of the shop came a man as lanky as a tailor, with blond hair which flopped over his right eye. ‘My dear fellow!’ he said, as soon as he saw it was Peter. ‘What a complete surprise!’

Peter held out his hand. ‘How are you, Samuel? You’re not getting any plumper.’

‘Not for want of eating, though,’ said Samuel. ‘Business has never been so brisk. Have you come down for anything special, or just for a jaw?’

Samuel Kellogg had been a schoolfriend of Peter’s in Kennington, although when Samuel’s father had died of consumption he had moved to Bloomsbury to live with his Uncle Max, and help in the family jewellery business. Still, the friends had kept in touch from time to time, even when Peter went to Southport, and only last summer they had met for supper in Oxford Street, at Runcorn’s Chop House.

‘My mother passed away,’ said Peter. ‘I’ve been down in Kennington clearing up the house.’

‘My dear chap,’ said Samuel, sympathetically.

‘She was frailer than I thought,’ Peter told him. ‘I suppose she never really was cut out for the British climate. She always used to suffer from colds, and the influenza.’

‘All the same, I’m very sorry,’ said Samuel.

‘Thanks,’ said Peter, trying to brighten up.

‘Won’t you come through to the back?’ asked Samuel. ‘I have some tea left in the pot, and some capital veal pie.’

He lifted the mahogany flap of the counter, and Peter followed him through into a dark back room, where there was a badly dilapidated sofa, a fireplace still clogged with last winter’s ashes, and a jeweller’s workbench, cluttered with silver wire and forceps and soldering irons. On the wall was a saucy calendar of a naked theatre girl with plumes of ostrich feathers in her hair and strings of pearls around her ankles.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen anything of Walter,’ said Samuel, taking the lid off the teapot and peering into it suspiciously.

‘Not a peek. I heard he went off to Malaya to plant rubber.’

‘He always did have the look of a rubber-planter, I must admit.’

Peter moved four or five tattered copies of The London Illustrated News from the sofa, and sat down. ‘I don’t know. What does a rubber-planter look like?’

Samuel shrugged. ‘Rubbery, I suppose. Shall I brew some fresh?’

‘Don’t bother. What I really came about was more in the line of business.’