"It's quite all right," I told her. "It's far worse than that actually, but I don't like to talk about it."

I saw the faraway look come into her eyes: the look of an adult floundering desperately to find common ground with someone younger.

"But what do you do with yourself?" she asked. "Don't you have any interests ... or hobbies?"

"I'm keen on chemistry," I said, "and I enjoy making scrapbooks."

"Do you really?" she enthused. "Fancy that! So did I, at your age. Cigarette cards and pressed flowers: pansies, mignonettes, foxgloves, delphiniums; old buttons, valentines, poems about Granny's spinning wheel from The Girl's Own Annual ... what jolly good fun it was!"

My own scrapbooks consisted of three fat purple volumes of clippings from the tide of ancient magazines and newspapers that had overflowed, and then flooded, the library and the drawing room at Buckshaw, spilling over into disused bedrooms and lumber rooms before being carted off at last to languish in damp, moldering stacks in a crypt in the cellars. From their pages, I had carefully clipped everything I could find on poisons and poisoners, until my scrapbooks were bursting at the seams with the likes of Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the amateur gardener and solicitor, who dispatched his wife with lovingly prepared concoctions of arsenious weed-killer; Thomas Neill Cream, Hawley Harvey Crippen, and George Chapman (remarkable, isn't it, that so many of the great poisoners' names begin with the letter C?), who with strychnine, hyoscine, and antimony respectively, sent a veritable army of wives and other women marching to their graves; Mary Ann Cotton (see what I mean?) who, after several successful trial runs on pigs, went on to poison seventeen people with arsenic; Daisy de Melker, the South African woman with a passion for poisoning plumbers: She would first marry them, and then divorce them with a dose of strychnine.