But Inspector Hackett, of course, was out at Brooklands. Like Clancy, he was not in a good mood. He had just finished his Sunday dinner-a nice leg of lamb-and was getting ready to go down to Wicklow for a bit of fishing when the phone rang. A phone call on a Sunday afternoon had to be either from his sister-in-law, threatening a visit with her brood, or from the station. Today, somehow, just by listening to the bell shrilling, he had known which one it was, and that the matter was going to be a weighty one. The new fellow, Jenkins, had picked him up in a squad car; he had heard the yowling of the siren from three streets away. His wife had made him a sandwich from the leftover lamb-May’s main task in life nowadays seemed to be to keep him fed-and the warmish wad of bread and meat wrapped in greaseproof paper and making his jacket pocket sag was an annoyance to him. He would have thrown it out of the window of the squad car when they got into the country except that he would have felt disloyal.

Jenkins was in a state of high excitement. This was the first serious job he had taken part in since he had been assigned to work with Detective Inspector Hackett, and serious it certainly promised to be. Although initial reports from Brooklands had suggested that Richard Jewell had killed himself, Hackett was skeptical, and suspected foul play. Jenkins did not understand how the Inspector was managing to be so calm-even with all his years of service he could not have dealt with more than a handful of murder cases, and certainly not with one as sensational as this, if murder it was.