“Ideas?”

“One. Lunatic going round dropping a pinch of cyanide into tea-cups. There’s only one common denominator in the two cases. Both men were bachelors. Makes the set-up all the more screwy.”

“Makes it a little less ‘screwy’,” argued Bony. “There’s another common denominator. Both men were elderly. They weren’t friends, I suppose?”

“No. And they weren’t related or belonged to the same club. One was a Jew, the other a Gentile. One was poor, the other rich. One had been a miner, the other a shop-keeper. They had nothing in common excepting age and single blessedness. There’s no sense, reason, no anything.”

“Do we get a cup of tea in this place?”

“Eh!” The expression of bewilderment on Crome’s face caused Bony to chuckle. “Tea! Yes. The girl brings it round.”

“If by a quarter to four we are not supplied with refreshment, Crome, we go out to a cafe. Without morning and afternoon tea, the civil servant cannot be civil. When a civil servant snarls at me, I say, silently, of course: ‘What, no tea?’ ”

Crome stuffed tobacco into his pipe as though plugging a hole in a ship, and Bony went on softly:

“Homicide is a common occurrence in any community, and we grow weary of stepping from the corpse to the murderer and showing him the utterly childish fool he is. But sometimes, and rarely, we are presented with a murder committed by an artist, and then all boredom created by the fool amateur is vanquished. It is so with this murderer of yours who pops a pinch of cyanide into a tea-cup. Why, we don’t know. When we do know, we shall have to return to our amateurs who couldn’t leave more clues if they sat up all night for a week thinking them out. Surely this is an occasion for rejoicing. Have you ever met an artist in murder before?… No? Now that you most certainly will, you should be happy. I am.”