Bunter turns a delivered note into a tea invitation and sits in Norman Urquhart’s kitchen toasting crumpets with the cook Mrs. Pettican and the parlourmaid Hannah Westlock. They relive Philip Boyes’s final illness: the hot water bottles, the greenish colour, the agonising cramps that Nurse Williams said she had seen only once before. Hannah remembers pins and needles in his hands and feet during his spring attacks, which Bunter notes were signs of arsenic given over time.

The women describe how Urquhart went over the dinner with them the next morning, asking whether the eggs were fresh and what became of the chicken. Hannah recalls he told her to cork the Burgundy and seal it with sticking plaster bearing her initials, which proved lucky when the police came. Then the talk turns to Mrs. Wrayburn of Windle, the rich, childish old woman Urquhart keeps visiting: a former actress Queen Victoria would not allow to perform before the royal family, whose two children died of cholera.

• The eggs bought by Urquhart himself from a shop on the corner of Lamb’s Conduit Street, one of them cracked
• The casserole chicken finished entirely by the maids, except a piece given to the cat
• Mrs. Pettican’s theory that a bash on the head in temper is understandable but slow poisoning is the work of a fiend
• Philip Boyes’s cynical verdict on his great aunt’s fortune: ‘The devil took care of his own’
• Bunter’s farewell promise to spend Christmas at Duke’s Denver