Few of the dons at Oxford were familiar with the kitchen quarters of their own homes-many of them had never penetrated past the swing-ing doors that separated the servants' portions of the house from those in which the owners lived. Asher had made it his business to know not only the precise layout of the place-he could have passed through it blindfolded without touching a single piece of furniture, as he could indeed have passed through any room in the house or in his College- but to know exactly where everything was kept. Knowing such things was hardly a conscious effort anymore, merely one of the things he had picked up over the years and had never quite dared to put down. He found the drawer in which Mrs. Grimes kept her carving knives-the hideout he kept in his boot was a small one, for emergencies-then moved on to the archway just past the stove which separated kitchen from pantry, all the while aware that someone, somewhere in the house, listened for his slightest footfall.

Mrs. Grimes, Ellen, and the girl Sylvie were all there. They sat around the table, a slumped tableau like something from the Chamber of Horrors at Mme. Tussaud's, somehow shocking in the even, vaguely flickering light from the steel fishtail burner by the stove. All they needed was a poison bottle on the table between them, Asher thought with wry grimness, and a placard:

THE MAD POISONER STRIKES.

Only there was no bottle, no used teacups, no evidence in fact of anything eaten or drunk. The only thing on the table at all was a bowl of half-shelled peas.