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legal correspondence, you will understand, but with the usual more personal postscripts and so on which it is customary and courteous to add in such circumstances. He mentioned your call. He said that it came within an ace of being a celebration.’ Rood paused. ‘Does that strike you as entirely enigmatical?’
    ‘I’m not sure that’s a question to answer out of hand.’ Appleby made this reply almost automatically. Where his official activities were in question it was a second nature to him to ask far more questions than he answered.
    ‘I thought it possible that he might have mentioned to you the name of a certain member of a noble family in Verona.’
    ‘We certainly had some talk about a lady living somewhere near Venice – and also, I think, about a foreigner of some distinction naturalized there. I don’t know about Verona. My memory’s rather vague. But I think it possible, as a matter of fact, that there was some mention of a couple of families in that city. And noble families, no doubt – although with domestic habits rather on the bourgeois side.’
    For a moment Rood looked offended. This nonsense plainly disconcerted him and that was something he didn’t like. Then he produced a short mirthless laugh. ‘Montagues and Capulets,’ he said. ‘Very good…ha-ha! Poor Packford would certainly not keep away from Shakespeare for long. But my reference was to – um – a living gentleman of Verona. An impoverished aristocrat, Sir John, from whom Packford was in the expectation of buying something. But this, mark you, is only inference on my part. Packford was accustomed to being very close in matters of that sort. Or perhaps I ought to say that he was accustomed simultaneously to being very close and to dropping small tantalizing clues to his activities. Possibly “clues” is too technical a word, and trespasses on your own preserves. But, since you knew Packford, you will understand me.’
    Appleby certainly did understand. It had been Packford’s habit to stimulate curiosity by carefully dropped hints of coming discoveries – hints which were vague at first and then gained in definition as the moment for actually springing his next surprise on the learned world grew imminent. ‘Did you discover,’ he asked, ‘just what it was that Packford hoped to get hold of on this occasion?’
    ‘Far from it. I might have known nothing at all about it, had not Packford been in need of money.’ Rood hesitated, as if conscious of the extreme gravity of thus beginning to divulge certain of his late client’s private affairs. ‘Not in the least a large sum of money, having regard to Packford’s ample means. The difficulty was simply over obtaining foreign exchange for a purpose which he wasn’t at all willing to declare. His banker had felt obliged to raise some objection to putting the matter through. He called upon me to arrange it, which I did. In a perfectly legal manner, I need hardly say.’
    ‘I wonder what you mean by “not in the least a large sum of money”? To a modest traveller like myself, such an expression would cover anything up to about fifty pounds.’
    ‘Quite so, Sir John. And it would be so with myself, precisely. In this instance, it was a thousand pounds. Packford required that, apart from the normal expenses of his summer’s sojourn in Italy.’
    ‘With which to buy something from an impoverished nobleman of Verona? I suppose there are such people?’
    Rood laughed – this time with something like genuine enjoyment. ‘It is exactly the question I asked myself, my dear Sir John. He sounded uncommonly shadowy, not to say fictitious. And Packford was – um – nothing if not vague about the whole thing. In another man, his attitude might fairly have been called shifty. But in Packford one could not disapprove of it. His temperament is no doubt known to you. He took great joy in his manner of going to work so as to astonish the learned. He had an instinct, you might say, for