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oblige.’
    Unavoidably, Mr Honeybath obliged – and thus found himself alone with Denver in no time at all.
    ‘A difficult man,’ Denver said.
    ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘Mr Grinton. A tetchy chap.’
    Honeybath found he didn’t at all know how to respond to this familiar note. It was scarcely proper to concur enthusiastically in such a verdict upon one’s host. On the other hand, ‘tetchy’ was an expressive English word of which he approved, and there could be no doubt whatever as to its applicability.
    ‘True enough,’ he said. ‘And something I have to take an interest in. I’m here to paint his portrait.’
    ‘Quite so, sir.’ Denver opened his notebook and brought out his pen, as if formal proceedings were now to begin. ‘Mr Charles Honeybath,’ he said – and appeared to write down the name. ‘RA, I think it would be?’
    ‘Yes.’ Honeybath, whose boyhood had been lived amid dreams of artistic glory, took no particular pride in the indubitable distinction of being a Royal Academician.
    ‘Interesting. They say, you know, that the Grintons are uncommonly hard up. Vanity, would you say?’
    It took Honeybath a moment to catch on to the sense of this. It was simply that Terence Grinton’s financial situation was such as to render a portrait an injudicious luxury, and that vanity was perhaps the explanation. Honeybath was quite clear that it would be wholly improper to volunteer the information that the portrait was to be paid for by subscription – a fact which couldn’t possibly be of any relevance to the messsy business of the vanishing corpse.
    ‘I don’t think I’d call Mr Grinton vain,’ he said briefly. But he did wonder whether it might be true that the family was short of money. Terence couldn’t conceivably be earning money; the company didn’t exist that would pay him a fee to sit on its board. And there was no positive reason to suppose that behind him there any longer stood substantial inherited wealth. He probably blundered along as a landowner, and that was it. But here again was something irrelevant to that corpse.
    ‘And now to get down to it,’ Denver said comfortably. ‘It seems to me, sir, that we are on rather surer ground through that dummy door than we are here in the library. It’s not that I don’t judge your evidence to be reliable in every way. But you were on your own when you came upon this seemingly dead man. And you came away fairly quickly. I can imagine you in a witness box, Mr Honeybath, being cross-examined by counsel defending some villain or other. He might get some way in persuading a jury that there wasn’t all that evidence that the dead man wasn’t presently able to get up and walk. But it’s different when we get through that fake door. Sir John Appleby is with you when you are on the other side of it. Of course it’s quite irrelevant that Sir John has been the Metropolitan Commissioner.’ Denver said this positively airily. ‘It’s simply that two are better than one when a witness box is in prospect. I hope, sir, you follow me.’
    ‘Of course I follow you.’ Honeybath wondered whether ‘testy’ could fairly be applied to his manner of saying this.
    ‘Well, sir, your statement needn’t take us five minutes. I’ve a very fair notion of its content already. But I do wonder whether you have formed any impression about the whole thing.’
    ‘I have been thinking about it, of course.’ Honeybath recalled Appleby’s advice to refrain from conjectures. ‘But not, I’m afraid, to any effect worth recording. I’m entirely in the dark. Probably a good deal more than you are.’
    ‘Well, sir, I don’t mind admitting that, for a start, I’d like a little more light on that dead body. You are convinced that it was a dead body, and would maintain that in court. Right?’
    ‘Certainly.’ Honeybath hesitated. ‘But you might call that my rational conviction. It has been dawning on me that, in a position like mine, it isn’t easy to be