Lord Peter Wimsey sits down to tea with Miss Climpson in the office of what looks like a typing bureau. Upstairs, a staff of spinsters, widows, retired schoolteachers, and out of work actresses answer advertisements from matrimonial swindlers and shady financiers, and the frauds tend to end up before a magistrate. The bureau has a private telephone line to Scotland Yard and runs on Wimsey’s money; he calls it his Cattery. Over teacakes he sorts the possible motives for killing Philip Boyes: passion, money through robbery, insurance, or inheritance, blackmail, and suicide.

Every line seems to lead nowhere, and Wimsey admits suicide is his favourite theory, if only someone could find the bottle. He calculates the deadline: the Michaelmas term ends on the 21st and the Hilary term begins January 12. At Scotland Yard, Chief Inspector Parker teases him about going ‘goopy’ over the girl, then realises Wimsey is serious. Wimsey asks the police to trace any arsenic Boyes owned, any pub he entered near Doughty Street that night, and any bottle or paper discarded there.

• Miss Climpson’s grim story of a young man who joked about shooting himself and then did so by accident
• Her suggestion that Boyes might have met an enemy in a public house during the missing ten minutes
• Wimsey’s worry that Urquhart could have poisoned the soup, and the snag that he ate it himself
• Wimsey comparing himself to Jack Point from The Yeomen of the Guard
• His tip that police should search the bushes of the Mecklenburg Square garden