The day after the hung jury, Sir Impey Biggs holds a Sunday council of war with Lord Peter Wimsey and the solicitor Mr. Crofts. Wimsey explains exactly how the jury split: Miss Climpson with her militant high church conscience, a sweet shop owner who has buried her third husband and distrusts all medical evidence, and an artist who thought Philip Boyes a conceited prig. The defence has about a month before the next sessions, and Wimsey privately guarantees the costs that Harriet’s publishers and a newspaper have been carrying.

Admitted to Holloway as part of the defence team, Wimsey meets Harriet Vane across a long deal table under a warder’s eye. She tells him Boyes had tested her devotion and then offered marriage ‘as a bad conduct prize’, and that she believes he took the poison himself. Wimsey then asks her to marry him once this is over. She informs him he is proposal number forty seven. Walking away light headed, he stops at a shop window reading ‘One month only’ and realises how little time he has.

• Sir Impey Biggs’s remark that anyone who believes the Christian creeds will not boggle at adverse evidence
• Harriet describing Boyes as a man who thought great artists deserve to be kept by ordinary people
• Wimsey offering Harriet plots for her books and assuring her his brother handles the old oaks and family plate
• Their shared delight in quoting Kai Lung across the prison table
• Wimsey’s promise to change suits on every visit so she can judge him from every angle