The envelope was a stout one, tightly packed. The contents would not come out when the top was slit, and so he slit one side and took out two pieces of thin cardboard, fastened together with gummed tape—the cardboard was almost the same size as the envelope. He cut the tape and took the pieces apart. There, face downwards, was what appeared to be a cabinet-size photograph.

Rollison looked up at Jolly.

“This looks like a family joke,” he said, “of the kind that would seem funny to one of my less responsible relatives. Or” —he grinned— “it might be from Lady Matilda. I sent her some rouge, lipstick and powder for her seventeenth birthday, and I knew she would revenge herself sooner or later.”

“Supposing you looked at the other side, sir,” suggested Jolly.

“I’m in the mood for a guessing game. My first is Lady Matilda. What’s yours?”

“If you insist, sir, I would say that it is perhaps a photograph of some film star, who chooses such a method of advertisement.”

“What! With no photographer’s studio emblazoned on the back? Never! As a matter of fact it looks like a newspaper print.” Rollison turned it slowly, and Jolly leaned forward to get a better view.

Neither of them made any comment.

It was the portrait of a woman. Rollison, studying it carefully, judged her to be in the early thirties. She was not beautiful by any accepted standard, but there was a quality about her which might loosely be termed “lovely”. The photograph itself was perfect. The woman seemed to be there in the flesh, looking up at him with narrowed, slightly oblique eyes under long, curved lashes. Her face was rather broad and her cheekbones a shade higher than those of most English women. Her mouth, wide and full, curved a little at the corners, as if she knew this was a joke and was getting great enjoyment from it. About her neck was a rope of pearls, three strings, close-fitting like a collar. The sweep of her neck into her shoulders was loveliness itself.