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sleep it off first?’
    This extremely offensive remark brought Mrs Grinton into action.
    ‘Sir John,’ she said, ‘is the best person to decide about that. John, ought we to get the police at once?’
    ‘Certainly.’
    ‘There really can’t be – well, some sort of mistake?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘It does sound peculiar.’
    ‘It is peculiar, Dolly. And so are certain other circumstances for which I can vouch.’
    ‘Perhaps we ought to have another look in the library ourselves, John?’
    ‘The police ought to be the first people to go in there now. And somewhere else, as well. There really is a mystery to clear up, and a dead man really does figure in it. Just conceivably, no major crime is involved. I can’t yet say whether that’s my own conjecture.’
    ‘Denver, is it?’ Mrs Grinton said, and rose and left the room.
     
    Among the four men, left to themselves, there was a brief silence which was broken by Hillam.
    ‘I hope you didn’t mind my little joke,’ Hillam said.
    Honeybath, feeling that this form of words need not be construed as an apology, said nothing. Grinton looked uncomfortable – indeed, oddly ill at ease. Conceivably he was thinking that Hillam must be all right, since Dolly had brought him along, but that he wasn’t quite one’s own sort, all the same. Honeybath, on the other hand, was at least out of the right stable, although daubing paint on to canvas was an odd manner of life. About Appleby he wasn’t at all sure. He had married one of those Ravens, who had been a crazy crowd for ages, and before that people had probably never heard of him. He had drive – Grinton had great respect for drive provided it didn’t take a man too close to the heels of the pack – and had been very high up in whatever he had been high up in. This was the sum total of Terence Grinton’s knowledge about Appleby. He was a man of limited curiosities.
    Honeybath was trying to remember something about the opprobrious Hillam. He had never met him before, and his name was unfamiliar. Hallam Hillam – an infelicitous combination, because awkward on the tongue. Might he be some kind of art boffin? The Courtauld? The Tate? The V and A? More probably some minor provincial place.
    Appleby was telling himself not to start asking questions. He had no personal interest in any of the people at Grinton. He was here at all only because Judith had a notion that one ought ‘occasionally to move among’ one’s quite remote connections. No doubt he had taken on the doctrine when, long ago, he had taken on the wife – and he had to admit that it had yielded interest and amusement from time to time. But a large social circle was something which neither his earliest years nor his later intellectual habit had taught him to rejoice in. Familiarity with a wide diversity of human types no doubt broadened the mind, but his professional career had provided him with quite enough of that. Pottering around the old home – really Judith’s old home – and listening to his clever children’s odd modish persuasions and reading this and that in order to mitigate his immense ignorance in various fields of knowledge: these were the proper employments for an ageing man. Certainly not going fishing and inquiring over casually encountered petty mystifications.
    ‘Grinton,’ he suddenly heard himself asking, ‘does your library contain much, or anything, of major interest or high value?’
    ‘My dear chap!’
    Terence Grinton seemed so astonished by this weird question – behaviour, indeed – on the part of his guest that he forgot either to roar with laughter or to bristle with indignation.
    ‘Ask me another,’ he said. ‘People have turned up from time to time wanting to poke about in it for one crackpot reason or another. It’s because of something running in my family, you know. Like drink or lunacy or chasing ceaselessly after wenches. Respectable in its own way, no doubt, among people of the appropriate sort. Not that such