Lord Peter Wimsey drives to Tweedling Parva to see the Reverend Arthur Boyes, a faded, gentle clergyman who admits he never met Harriet Vane and has grave doubts she is guilty. He shows Wimsey his son’s letters: one cheerfully announcing that he would ‘regularize the situation’ at a registrar’s office, the next reporting that the wedding was off and that Harriet had made a fool of herself and him. Boyes had mentioned a Barbados voyage from Harlech, and his will, made during the Welsh trip, left his copyrights to Ryland Vaughan, replacing an earlier one in Harriet’s favour.

There was no family money, no insurance, and barely fifty pounds a year from the books. Yet at the publishers Grimsby and Cole, Mr. Cole cheerfully explains that Boyes could not have done better than get murdered: every copy sold out after the exhumation and a memorial edition at a guinea is coming. Harriet’s agent reports a similar boom, with her new book selling seven thousand before publication, though he fears a slump once she is freed. Wimsey leaves with the galleys of her arsenic novel, Death in the Pot.

• The father’s refusal to inherit his son’s copyrights because he disapproved of the books
• His mention of an old relative, well over 90, whom the family has not seen in over fifty years
• Wimsey doubling back to stuff treasury notes into the church expenses box
• Printers working night and day to reprint Boyes’s early volumes for the libraries
• The agent’s warning to read any Grimsby and Cole contract very carefully