He stood aside to let me into a little inner office, and shut the door behind me.

The man who rose to his feet was small for a policeman, thick-set, dark, and in his late thirties. He looked more of a fighter than a thinker, but I found later that his brain matched his physique. His desk was littered with papers and heavy-looking law books. The gas fire had made a comfortable warm fug, and his ashtray was overflowing. He, too, was spending his Sunday afternoon reading up crime.

'Good afternoon. I am Inspector Lodge,' he said. He gestured to a chair facing his desk, asking me to sit down. He sat down again himself, and began to shape his papers into neat piles.

'You have come about a death?' My own words, repeated, sounded foolish, but his tone was matter-of-fact.

'It's about a Major Davidson-' I began.

'Oh yes. We had a report. He died in the hospital last night after a fall at the races.' He waited politely for me to go on.

'That fall was engineered,' I said bluntly.

Inspector Lodge looked at me steadily, then drew a sheet of paper out of a drawer, unscrewed his fountain pen, and wrote, I could see, the date and the time. A methodical man.

'I think we had better start at the beginning,' he said. 'What is your name?'

'Alan York.'

Age?'

'Twenty-four.'

Address?'

I gave Davidson's address, explaining whose it was, and that I lived there a good deal.

'Where is your own home?'

'In Southern Rhodesia,' I said. 'On a cattle station near a village called Induna, about fifteen miles from Bulawayo.'

'Occupation?'

'I represent my father in his London office.'

'And your father's business?'

'The Bailey York Trading Company.'

'What do you trade in?' asked Lodge.

'Copper, lead, cattle. Anything and everything. We're transporters mainly,' I said.

He wrote it all down, in quick distinctive script.