At Scotland Yard, Chief Inspector Parker introduces Lord Peter Wimsey to Mrs. Bulfinch, once Miss Montague of the saloon bar at the Nine Rings in Gray’s Inn Road. Around the longest day, at about five past ten by a clock kept fast, a white faced young man stumbled in, asked for a double brandy, said he had had a shock that upset his gastric trouble, and stirred a white powder into water with a fountain pen. He left the packet behind, its label torn off. She put it on a shelf behind the bar, and now nobody can find it.

Mr. Crofts is furious that Wimsey let the police hear it first, and Wimsey snaps that he wants Harriet cleared, not acquitted by a fluke. At Bedford Row, where the Cattery’s Miss Murchison now types, Norman Urquhart proves remarkably helpful. He confirms that the rich great aunt is Mrs. Wrayburn, once the actress Cremorna Garden, now over 90, and that he is her sole legatee for an estate of seventy or eighty thousand pounds. He adds that Boyes once asked about it and was told he had no chance, then fumbles a search for the will’s draft.

• Mrs. Bulfinch’s husband worrying that going to the Yard will spoil the pub’s respectable name
• Her fear that the powder might be poison or ‘snow’, which is why she never tasted it
• Crofts’s worry that the police will now find or fake a harmless powder
• The small freckles on Urquhart’s pale, clear skin that Wimsey notices up close
• Urquhart’s suggestion that old people should be put out of their misery like a favourite animal