“No!” The orange-boxes crashed down into the van by way of emphasis.

“Ah, I thought not. I just wanted to make sure. Good day!”

Crabtree scratched his head, now relieved of its burden, and informed the world in general that he, Crabtree, was several unprintable things; by which he was quite correctly understood by his friends to mean that he was rather more than mildly surprised.

Mallett meanwhile was making the best of his way towards Bramston’s Inn, the address of the only one of Ballantine’s concerns outside the offices of the “Twelve Apostles” in Lothbury. It is not very far from Covent Garden as the crow flies. As the Londoner walks, it is apt to be a tedious and tiresome journey, punctuated by the exploration of blind alleys and vain appeals for directions addressed to passers-by, who invariably prove to be themselves “strangers in these parts”. Mallett, who enjoyed nothing so much as threading with secure knowledge the by-ways of London—his “Forty-two routes from the Old Bailey to Scotland Yard” was a minor classic in police literature—covered the distance speedily enough. His way led across Kingsway, through the pleasant spaces of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, through Old Square and out into Chancery Lane under the archway on which Ben Jonson is said to have toiled as a bricklayer. Then he plunged into the network of narrow streets that lies between Fleet Street and Holborn. It is a region dominated by great printing works, its tortuous ways clogged by newspaper vans and horse-drawn drays, hiding in odd corners shy little chop-houses beloved of journalists, a house or two where history has been made and not merely recorded, and what must surely be the last row of cottage-gardens in Central London. Somewhere East of Fetter Lane the inspector turned sharply down an alley to his right, ducked under the nose of a carthorse in a warehouse entry, directed two lost Americans to Gough Square, turned to his left through a passage that seemed no more than a slit in the wall, veered right once more and finally came to a standstill facing the short row of early Georgian houses that bears the name of Bramston’s Inn.