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the woman in the flat upstairs would. Time and time again she had seen Gwendolen visit him in the afternoons, had heard them quarrelling, Gwendolen protesting her love for him and he shouting that he wouldn’t be controlled, that he’d do anything to escape her possessiveness.
    He had, of course, no alibi for the Wednesday night. But the judge and the jury could see he’d done his best to arrange one. Novelists are apt to let their imaginations run away with them; they don’t realise how astute and thorough the police are. And there was firmer evidence of his guilt even than that. Three main exhibits were produced in the court: Reeve’s blazer with a button missing from the sleeve; that very button; a cluster ofhis hairs. The button had been found beside Gwendolen’s body and the hairs on her coat….
    My reading of detective stories hadn’t been in vain, though I haven’t read one since then. People don’t, I suppose, after a thing like that.

A Bad Heart
     

    They had been very pressing and at last, on the third time of asking, he had accepted. Resignedly, almost fatalistically, he had agreed to dine with them. But as he began the long drive out of London, he thought petulantly that they ought to have had the tact to drop the acquaintance altogether. No other employee he had sacked had ever made such approaches to him. Threats, yes. Several had threatened him and one had tried blackmail, but no one had ever had the effrontery to invite him to dinner. It wasn’t done. A discreet man wouldn’t have done it. But of course Hugo Crouch wasn’t a discreet man and that, among other things, was why he had been sacked.
    He knew why they had asked him. They wanted to hold a court of enquiry, to have the whole thing out. Knowing this, he had suggested they meet in a restaurant and at his expense. They couldn’t harangue a man in a public restaurant and he wouldn’t be at their mercy. But they had insisted he come to their house and in the end he had given way. He was an elderly man with a heart condition; it was sixteen miles slow driving from his flat to their house—monstrous on a filthy February night—but he would show them he could take it, he would be one too many for them. The chairman of Frasers would show them he wasn’t to be intimidated by a bumptious dogooder like Hugo Crouch, and he would cope with the situation just as he had coped in the past with the blackmailer.
    By the time he reached the outskirts of the Forest, the rain was coming down so hard that he had to put his windscreen wipers on to top speed, and he felt more than ever thankful that he had got this new car with all its efficient gadgets. Certainly the firm wouldn’t have been able to run to it if he had kept Hugo Crouch on a day longer. If he had agreed to all Hugo’s demands, he would still be stuck with that old Daimler and he would never have managed that winter cruise. Hugo had been a real thorn in his flesh what with his extravagance and his choosing to live in a house in the middle of EppingForest. And it was in the middle, totally isolated, not even on the edge of one of the Forest villages. The general manager of Frasers had to be within reach, on call. Burying oneself out here was ridiculous.
    The car’s powerful headlights showed a dark, winding lane ahead, the grey tree trunks making it appear like some sombre, pillared corridor. And this picture was cut off every few seconds by a curtain of rain, to reappear with the sweep of the wipers. Fortunately, he had been there once before, otherwise he might have passed the high brick wall and the wooden gates behind which stood the Crouch house, the peak-roofed Victorian villa, drab, shabby, and to his eyes quite hideous. Anyone who put a demolition order on that would be doing a service to the environment, he thought, and then he drove in through the gates.
    There wasn’t a single light showing. He remembered that they lived in the back, but they might have put a light on to greet