Not very far away, however, was a different, unhappier scene. Near Savile Row a solitary man was sitting in a small but sumptuous apartment, decorated with gold clocks and hunting prints and bearing all the signs of bachelorhood that long tenancy can bestow on a set of rooms. A pair of mended trousers sat next to a half-full wineglass on the table before Winston Carruthers, writer and London editor of the conservative newspaper the Daily Telegraph. He was a short, fat, red man, wheezy and ill looking. Ignoring his landlady, who came in to rake the coals and shot him a look of hatred as she departed-a look not unusual for her countenance but more intense than usual, perhaps because it was Christmas Day-Carruthers wrote furiously on a large sheet of paper, turning and folding it again and again to fit all he had to say.

They would be the final words the journalist wrote.

“… iniquity not seen in this age or several since,” he scrawled and then with a great gesture of finality laid down his pen, blotted the paper, and leaned back in his chair to read it. He held the document very close to his face and several times just pulled it back in time to avoid covering it with his wet cough.

“Damn draft,” he said, looking about disagreeably. “Martha? Is that you?”

There was no reply to his question, however, and he went back to reading, occasionally pausing to sip the hot negus that had gone lukewarm as he worked. Nearing the end of the sheet he began a short addendum.

It was as he wrote this that he heard a footstep behind him, and before he could turn he felt a sharp, rending pierce in the back of his neck. Futilely he clutched his throat. In an instant he had fallen to the floor.