The lift at Messrs Heme & Illingworth in Bedford Square was almost as ancient as the house itself, a monument both to the firm's obstinate adherence to a bygone elegance and to a slightly eccentric inefficiency behind which a more thrustful policy was taking shape. As he was borne upwards in a series of disconcerting jerks Dalgliesh reflected that success, although admittedly more agreeable than failure, has its concomitant disadvantages. One of them, in the person of Bill Costello, Publicity Director, was waiting for him in the claustrophobic fourth-floor office above.

The change in his own poetic fortunes had coincided with changes in the firm. Heme & Illingworth still existed in so far as their names were printed or embossed on book covers under the firm's ancient and elegant colophon, but the house was now part of a multinational corporation which had recently added books to canned goods, sugar and textiles. Old Sebastian Heme had sold one of London's few remaining individual publishing houses for eight and a half million and had promptly married an extremely pretty publicity assistant who was only waiting for the deal to be concluded before, with some misgivings but a prudent regard for her future, relinquishing the status of newly acquired mistress for that of wife. Heme had died within three months, provoking much ribald comment but few regrets. Throughout his life Sebastian Heme had been a cautious, conventional man who reserved eccentricity, imagination and occasional risk-taking for his publishing. For thirty years he had lived as a faithful, if unimaginative husband and Dalgliesh reflected that if a man lives for nearly seventy years in comparatively blameless conventionality that is probably what his nature requires. Heme had died less of sexual exhaustion, assuming that to be as medically credible as puritans would like to believe, than from a fatal exposure to the contagion of fashionable sexual morality.