Jenny watched him go down the corridor.

'Had a nice time?' asked Helen. 'Oh yes,' said Jenny noncommittally as she closed the door. She hoped she had done the right thing. "The time is ten minutes past eleven,' said the announcer with evident relief. 'You are watching…' Alice Fernie switched him off in mid-sentence and yawned.

'Well, I'm off to bed. Coming?'

Behind her, her husband stood in the small bay of the window looking out into the front garden.

'No, dear. You go on. I'll be up in a minute.'

'What are you looking at?' 'Nothing. I thought I saw that bloody black and white cat from next door digging up my lawn. Off you go.'

'All right, then. Good night.'

'Good night.' And over the road, Sam Connon stood pale-faced and trembling in the darkened hall of his house, the telephone in his hand. Behind him in the lounge, stretched out in the highbacked chair he would never want to call his own again, was his wife.

She was quite, quite dead.

Chapter 2.

Superintendent Andrew Dalziel was a big man. When he took his jacket off and dropped it over the back of a chair it was like a Bedouin pitching camp. He had a big head, greying now; big eyes, short-sighted, but losing nothing of their penetrating force behind a pair of solidframed spectacles; and he blew his big nose into a khaki handkerchief a foot-and-a-half square. He had been a vicious lock forward in his time, which had been a time before speed and dexterity were placed higher in the list of a pack's qualities than sheer indestructibility. The same order of priorities had brought him to his present office. He was a man not difficult to mock. But it was dangerous sport.