Vassily nodded his head and smiled genially. He opened the cocktail shaker, and with an air of superb and exaggerated concentration poured out a clear yellowish mixture.

“What do you think of it, Nigel?” asked Rankin. “It’s Vassily’s own recipe. Marjorie calls it the Soviet Repression.”

“Not much repression about it,” murmured Arthur Wilde.

Nigel, sipping gingerly at his portion, was inclined to agree.

He watched the old Russian fussing delightedly among the guests. Angela told him that Vassily had been in her uncle’s service ever since he was a young attaché at Petersburg. Nigel’s eyes followed him as he moved amongst that little group of human molecules with whom, had he but known it, he himself was to become so closely and so horribly associated.

He saw his cousin, Charles Rankin, of whom, he reflected, he knew actually so little. He sensed some sort of emotional link between Charles and Rosamund Grant. She was watching Rankin now as he leant, with something of the conventional philanderer in his pose, towards Marjorie Wilde. “Mrs. Wilde is more his affair, really, than Rosamund,” thought Nigel. “Rosamund is too intense. Charles likes to be comfortable.” He looked at Arthur Wilde, who was talking earnestly with their host. Wilde had none of Handesley’s spectacular looks, but his thin face was interesting and to Nigel attractive. There was quality in the form of the skull and jaw, and a sensitive elusiveness about the set of the lips.

He wondered how two such widely diverging types as this middle-aged student and his fashionable wife could ever have attracted each other. Beyond them, half in the shadow, stood the Russian doctor, his head inclined forward, his body erect and immobile.

“What does he make of us?” wondered Nigel.

“You look very grim,” said Angela at his elbow. “Are you concocting a snappy bit for your gossip page, or thinking out a system for the Murder Game?”