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finished.”
    “And is there another client?”
    “Well, not just at present but there very well could be.” She went on quickly: “We have a fair-play clause. If I decide at any stage of the investigation that I’d rather not go on with it, you are entitled to any information I have gained up to that point. If I decide to withhold it from you, then I make no charge for the work already done.”
    That had been one of Bernie’s principles. He had been a great man for principles. Even when there hadn’t been a case for a week, he could happily discuss the extent to which they would be justified in telling a client less than the full truth, the point at which the police ought to be brought into an inquiry, the ethics of deception or lying in the service of truth. “But no bugging,” Bernie would say. “I set my face firmly against bugging. And we don’t touch industrial sabotage.”
    The temptation to either wasn’t great. They had no bugging equipment and wouldn’t have known how to use it if they had, and at no time had Bernie been invited to touch industrial sabotage.
    Sir Ronald said: “That sounds reasonable but I don’t think this case will present you with any crisis of conscience. It is comparatively simple. Eighteen days ago my son hanged himself. I want you to find out why. Can you do that?”
    “I should like to try, Sir Ronald.”
    “I realize that you need certain basic information aboutMark. Miss Leaming will type it out for you, then you can read it through and let us know what else you require.”
    Cordelia said: “I should like you to tell me yourself, please.”
    “Is that necessary?”
    “It would be helpful to me.”
    He settled again into his chair and picked up a stub of pencil, twisting it in his hands. After a minute he slipped it absent-mindedly into his pocket. Without looking at her, he began to speak.
    “My son, Mark, was twenty-one on the 25th April this year. He was at Cambridge reading history at my old college and was in his final year. Five weeks ago and without warning, he left the university and took a job as gardener with a Major Markland, who lives in a house called Summertrees outside Duxford. Mark gave me no explanation of this action either then or later. He lived alone in a cottage in Major Markland’s grounds. Eighteen days later he was found by his employer’s sister hanging by the neck from a strap knotted to a hook in the sitting-room ceiling. The verdict at the inquest was that he took his life while the balance of his mind was disturbed. I know little of my son’s mind but I reject that comfortable euphemism. He was a rational person. He had a reason for his action. I want to know what it was.”
    Miss Leaming, who had been looking out of the French windows to the garden, turned and said with sudden vehemence: “This lust always to know! It’s only prying. If he’d wanted us to know, he’d have told us.”
    Sir Ronald said: “I’m not prepared to go on in this uncertainty. My son is dead.
My
son. If I am in some way responsible, I’d prefer to know. If anyone else is responsible, I want to know that too.”
    Cordelia looked from one to the other. She asked: “Did he leave a note?”
    “He left a note but not an explanation. It was found in his typewriter.”
    Quietly Miss Leaming began to speak: “Down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way, till a void boundless as the nether sky appeared beneath us, and we held by the roots of trees and hung over this immensity; but I said: ‘if you please we will commit ourselves to this void and see whether providence is here also.’ ”
    The husky, curiously deep voice came to an end. They were silent. Then Sir Ronald said: “You claim to be a detective, Miss Gray. What do you deduce from that?”
    “That your son read William Blake. Isn’t it a passage from
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell?”
    Sir Ronald and Miss Leaming glanced at each other. Sir Ronald said: “So I am told.”
    Cordelia thought