It was characteristic of him that after a general greeting he should concentrate on Nigel, the least of his guests.

“I’m so glad you’ve been able to come, Bathgate,” he said. “Angela tells me she fetched you from the station. Ghastly experience, isn’t it? Charles should have warned you.”

“My dear, he was too intrepid,” shouted Mrs. Wilde. “Angela took and threw him into her squalid little tumbril, and he flashed past us with set green lips and eyes that had gazed upon stark death. Charles is so proud of his relative… aren’t you, Charles?”

“He’s a Pukka Sahib,” agreed Rankin solemnly.

“Are we really going to play the Murder Game?” asked Rosamund Grant. “Angela ought to win it.”

“We are going to play A Murder Game… a special brand of your own, isn’t it, Uncle Hubert?”

“I’ll explain my plans,” said Handesley, “when everyone has got a cocktail. People always imagine one is so much more amusing after one has given them something to drink. Will you ring for Vassily, Angela?”

“A gam’ of murderings?” said Doctor Tokareff, who had been examining one of the knives. The firelight gleamed on his large spectacles, and he looked, as Mrs. Wilde murmured to Rankin, “too grimly sinister.”… “A gam’ of murderings? That should be sush a good fun. I am ignorant of this gam’.”

“In its cruder form it is very popular at the moment,” said Wilde, “but I feel sure Handesley has invented subtleties that will completely transform it.”

A door on the left of the stairs opened, and through it came an elderly Slav carrying a cocktail shaker. He was greeted enthusiastically.

“Vassily Vassilyevitch,” began Mrs. Wilde in Anglo-Russian of comic opera vintage. “Little father! Be good enough to bestow upon this unworthy hand a mouthful of your talented concoction.”