Norman Urquhart answers Wimsey’s letter and comes to the flat, where Bunter serves Turkish coffee and a box of Turkish Delight. Watching the clock, Wimsey takes over an hour to review Philip Boyes’s death and Mrs. Wrayburn’s will, then works through the fatal dinner course by course: the water bottle, the sherry, soup, fish and casserole. That leaves the omelette, and the cracked egg Urquhart bought himself and asked to have used, an easy vessel for powdered arsenic.

Wimsey explains how Styrian peasants build up a tolerance to solid arsenic, and says Urquhart’s complexion, his sleek hair, his refusal to drink at dinner, a packet from a foreign chemist, and his hair and nail clippings all point the same way. Then he claims the Turkish Delight was smothered in arsenic an hour and a half earlier. Urquhart makes no attempt to be sick and bolts, only to be caught by Parker and Bunter and handcuffed. Wimsey admits he never poisoned the sweets at all.

• Urquhart gorging on the Turkish Delight while Wimsey drinks black coffee and old brandy
• Wimsey sketching a noose in the air and saying ‘hemp, Mr. Urquhart, hemp’
• The experiment of loading a cracked egg with arsenic through a small glass tube
• Urquhart blaming a medicine prescribed by Dr. Granger for the arsenic traces
• Wimsey doubting the poet’s line that Mithridates died old