The next moment the figures animated. The window was shut and fastened and Chubb turned to Mr. Whipplestone with a serviceable smile.

“Shall I show the way, sir?” asked Chubb.

The upstairs flat was neat, clean and decent. The little parlour was a perfectly respectable and rather colourless room except perhaps for an enlarged photograph of a round-faced girl of about sixteen which attracted attention through being festooned in black ribbon and flanked on the table beneath it by two vases of dyed immortelles. Some kind of china medallion hung from the bottom edge of the frame. Another enlarged photograph, of Chubb in uniform and Mrs. Chubb in bridal array, hung on the wall.

All the appointments on this floor, it transpired, were the property of the Chubbs. Mr. Whipplestone was conscious that they watched him anxiously. Mrs. Chubb said: “It’s home to us. We’re settled like. It’s such a nice part, the Capricorns.” For an unnerving moment he thought she was going to cry.

He left the Chubbs precipitately, followed by the youth. It was a struggle not to re-enter the drawing-room but he triumphed, and shot out of the front door to be immediately involved in another confrontation.

“Good morning,” said a man on the area steps. “You’ve been looking at my house, I think? My name is Sheridan.”

There was nothing remarkable about him at first sight unless it was his almost total baldness and his extreme pallor. He was of middle height, unexceptionably dressed and well-spoken. His hair, when he had it, must have been dark, since his eyes and brows and the wires on the backs of his pale hands were black. Mr. Whipplestone had a faint, fleeting and oddly uneasy impression of having seen him before. He came up the area steps and through the gate and faced Mr. Whipplestone, who in politeness couldn’t do anything but stop where he was.

“Good morning,” Mr. Whipplestone said. “I just happened to be passing. An impulse.”