Anyway, she had diverted his attention and explained her exhausted look. No adage was truer than the old nursery one about the tangled web. Still, hers was almost completed now, for this was the week of half-term; and this year October the thirty-first fell upon a Saturday. She would have Friday to do all the things she had to do in the way of preparation; Saturday would see action. Beyond Saturday she would not look. Except to reflect that if things went wrong, she would not be under the necessity of providing herself with a pair of plain-lensed glasses for the Canon’s benefit.

Find Emily Baines, find Emily Baines, the train began to chant as it pulled out of Selbury station; then it quickened and changed rhythm, Find Emily Baines, find Emily Baines.

At the Liverpool Street Hotel she was given, as timid, inexperienced-looking travellers always were, a room on the station side, which was a blessing, because it helped her to believe that it was the noise, not her own anxiety, which kept her awake.

The office of the Certain Future Assurance Company, at the address stamped on their enyelopes, was on the first floor of an office block in Holborn. Miss Mayfield rode up in the lift because she could see no stairs, and was ejected on to a carpeted landing the size of a hearthrug. There was a door straight ahead of her which was labelled ‘Bivco Engineering’, one to the right which announced that it gave upon the premises of A. Schmidt, Practical Furrier, and to the left were the words she was looking for. Opening the door, she stepped into a cage of glass and mahogany in which, behind a desk, sat a good-looking, rather hard-faced blonde woman about thirty years old.

They exchanged perfunctory good mornings, and then it was Miss Mayfield’s turn to state her business, which she found easier to do than she had expected, because of the privacy. She had been imagining a large open room full of people who would raise their heads and listen.

She had, in the lift, taken from her handbag the envelope in which Mrs Baines’s letter had arrived. She now held it so that the blonde could see it.

‘I’m extremely sorry to be driven to bother you like this,’ she said, sounding humble and pathetic. ‘My sister sent me this letter, and she must have written it here. I think she did it purposely, because, you see, she’s not supposed to write to me at all. Father is very angry with her and said that we were not to correspond. But I mustn’t bother you with all that. . . . The point is that she did write to me, and I wrote to her, at this address, but the letter came back, and I’m terribly worried about her.’

‘What was the name?’

‘My sister’s? Baines. Emily Baines.’

‘There’s no one here of that name.’