'I'm called in.'

He'd taken to wearing glasses recently and his dull brown eyes wandered around the edge of my face as if he was trying to find the middle.

'Oh yes. Why don't we go upstairs?'

In the corridor I asked: 'What were the voice-prints?'

'Ah. Well they'll be working on those.'

So I shut up and we took the main stairs because the lift in this building gets jammed between floors twice a week and we just can't afford the time.

Egerton had possibly been an owl in a previous life because he'd picked a room on the top floor and turned it into a sort of nest, lined comfortably with maps and books and posters of Edwardian bicycle advertisements, furnishing the rest of it with cherished objects — a skull, an abacus, a bulb-horn, that kind of thing, possibly flying through the small high dormer window with them in the dead of night.

'Make yourself at home,' he said, and draped his body behind the desk like a pile of bones. 'When did you get back?'

'Where from?'

'Cyprus, wasn't it?'

'I haven't been out,' I said slowly, 'for close on two months.'

He reached over and dropped a folder on to his desk and said absolutely nothing for three minutes. I threw my trench-coat across the fire-guard he used in winter and sat down on the Louis Quinze chair that years ago had been filled with stuffing. The phone rang and Egerton answered it.

'Well?'

There were streaks of rain on the window and the glow from the street sent their shadows trickling on Egerton's face as if he were quietly crying, and it suited him, I thought. They said his wife had committed suicide at some boarding-house on the south coast, not so long ago; but nobody know if he was miserable because she'd done it or if she'd done it because he was miserable.

'Has Mildmay seen him yet?'