Back at Holloway, Lord Peter Wimsey asks Harriet Vane whether Philip Boyes ever made a will. She says he did, in her favour, while they lived together, mostly to name a literary executor, and adds that she was earning four times what he did. Wimsey then floats a ‘plot’ for a detective story: a crime novelist kills her writer friend with the method from her latest book so both their works become bestsellers. Harriet plays along with dancing eyes, adding a twist in which the murderess signs a deed of gift so a loved one profits after she is hanged.

Wimsey goes to question Norman Urquhart in Woburn Square but finds him called away to a sick relative. The cook explains that if the old lady dies he will be busy settling her estate, and that everyone ate from Boyes’s dinner. At the Bedford Row office an elderly clerk supplies the address, care of Mrs. Wrayburn at Appleford, Windle, Westmorland, and grumbles that his lady typist has just left to get married. Wimsey rushes to a phone box and has Miss Climpson send candidates to fill the vacancy.

• Why Harriet assumed Boyes had changed his will after they parted
• The legal snag that a murderer cannot profit from the crime, and how a deed of gift gets around it
• Wimsey’s quip that he knows who gets most of Boyes’s profits, and it is not a beloved object
• The cook’s relief that she, Hannah, and the master all ate the same food
• Wimsey’s order for a steady typist with no heavy face powder and skirts four inches below the knee