After an early breakfast, Victor Leeming bestowed a farewell kiss on his wife and two children and gave each of them a warm hug. He set off for another day's work, uncertain if he would be returning home that night. His first port of call was the house in which Hugh Kellow had rented a room. When he found the address given him by Leonard Voke, he realised why the landlady would not have admitted him after dark. Mrs Jennings was embarrassingly nervous. She was a short, flat-faced, bosomy woman in her fifties with badly dyed hair and a look of permanent suspicion in her eyes. She questioned him on the doorstep for a long time before she agreed to let him into the house.

'My husband is at home,' she said, vibrating with tension, 'and so are two of my lodgers.'

What she did not mention was the fact that her husband was a bedridden invalid or that the lodgers were elderly females. Leeming could see how edgy she was. Telling him that she was not alone was a means of warning him that help could be summoned in the event of any physical threat to her. His unbecoming features clearly worried the landlady. It was a three-storeyed terraced house in urgent need of repair and there was a prevailing mustiness. Mrs Jennings showed him into a cluttered room with fading wallpaper and a threadbare carpet. She invited him to sit down and he perched on a chair beside an enormous aspidistra. She sat opposite him.