My nostrils were suddenly filled with her scent: the odor of jasmine.

It had probably been concocted in some perfumery, I thought, from phenol and acetic acid. Phenol, or “benzanol,” I recalled, had been discovered in the mid-seventeenth century by a German chemist named Johann Rudolf Glauber, although it was not actually isolated until nearly two hundred years later by one of his countrymen, Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, who extracted it from coal tar and christened it “carbolic acid.” I had synthesized the extremely poisonous stuff myself by a process which involved the incomplete oxidation of benzene, and I remembered with pleasure that it was the most powerful embalming agent known to mankind: the stuff that is used whenever a body is required to last, and last, and last.

It was also to be found in certain of the Scotch whiskies.

Phyllis Wyvern had swept past me into the foyer and was now spinning round in a delighted circle.

“What a gloomy old place!” she said, clapping her hands together. “It’s perfect! Absolutely perfect!”

By now, the chauffeur had brought the luggage and was piling it inside the door.

“Just leave it there, Anthony,” she said. “Someone will see to it.”

“Yes, Miss Wyvern,” he replied, making a great show of coming to attention. He almost clicked his heels.

There was something vaguely familiar about him, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, think what.

He stood there for a long moment, perfectly still, as if he were expecting a tip—or was he waiting to be asked in for a drink and a cigar?

“You may go,” she announced rather abruptly and the spell was broken. In an instant he was no more than a member of the chorus in The Chocolate Soldier.

“Yes, Miss Wyvern,” he said, and as he turned away from her towards the door, I saw on his face a look of—what was it?—contempt?

• THREE •