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to lock the flat behind her - she wanted no more unscheduled visits - Jemima set forth rather gingerly down the first flight of stairs. After the airy brightness of the penthouse, the light was dim.
    'Tiger - Puss, Puss, Puss—' Her voice echoed rather queerly in the well of the stairs, occupied by the lifeless lift cage.
    There was no other sound. It was Saturday, and the rest of the building was of course quite empty. Even the noise of the traffic from Adelaide Square and its echo from the Tottenham Court Road was subdued.
    It was as Jemima was passing the door of the third-floor flat - a substantial mahogany door, preserved no doubt from the original house, set incongruously into the concrete - that she heard quite distinctly the mew of a cat.

5
    The Lion's Den
    Jemima called and the cat mewed again.
    She banged heavily and tried to turn the handle. It was ornamental. The cat began to cry quite plaintively, that odd infant's cry she had remarked as a curiosity before. Now it drove her frantic. She banged harder.
    'Is anyone there?' she shouted.
    Absolute silence from whatever lay behind the polished darkness of the mahogany. Then further mewing. This was the moment for those powers of reasoning first praised, if warily, by the nuns at her convent school, more enthusiastically by her tutors at Cambridge, finally lavishly admired by her public, as well as treasured by Megalith Television; that logical faculty, in short, incarnated in the title which Kevin John Athlone so much despised - Jemima Shore, Investigator.
    But it did not in fact need supreme detective gifts to work it out. The cat could only have passed through the door it the door was open; ergo the door had opened. It was unimaginable that such a door should have blown open, flown open, and unlikely that it had been left open (she would certainly have noticed on her way in; Chloe on her way out, and Kevin John, lurking, could hardly have missed it). Therefore some human agency had opened it, and moreover had done so in the comparatively short time since Tiger had been shut out of the top-floor flat.
    The only other possibility was that Tiger had after all tried to scale the outside of the house, and miscalculating, had entered an open window on the third floor. That raised the question of why he didn't depart by the same window on finding the flat empty - if indeed he had found it empty. In any case, if Tiger had after all already accustomed  himself to climbing the heights of Adelaide Square, during Chloe's short tenancy of the flat, why did he not of his own accord return to his natural home in the top flat?
    Nevertheless the point could be quickly established by inspecting the majestic facade of the house for an open window. It might be worth looking at the back of the building too; the third-floor flat must also be connected with the fire escape.
    She called encouragingly: 'Puss, Puss, Puss' and decided to give the mahogany door one more bang, partly to keep contact with the cat inside, partly to make quite sure that it had not actually jammed. After that she foresaw a routine with the police - and firemen - if no visible window presented itself.
    As a loving cat-owner of many years' standing, Jemima had had her share of such experiences. Blanche, the disdainful white cat who had preceded Colette, had had the capacity of a feckless aristocrat for getting herself into scrapes and then expecting other people to busy themselves rescuing her. Jemima had a vision of Blanche, white and fluffy like some garment which had come to rest high up in a tree, gazing at the firemen hired to rescue her with implacable condescension. Life with Blanche had been an expensive and demanding business; life with Tiger and his mistress Chloe was so far proving equally demanding. Yet unlike the erring Chloe, Tiger could not be consigned to his fate over the weekend.
    Jemima gave the door one last bang and almost fell over as it swung open silently at her blow.
    As Tiger, a golden