Chapter 2 London
Sir Stafford Nye’s flat was a very pleasant one. It looked out upon GreenPark. He switched on the coffee percolator and went to see what the posthad left him this morning. It did not appear to have left him anything veryinteresting. He sorted through the letters, a bill or two, a receipt and let-ters with rather uninteresting postmarks. He shuffled¹ them together andplaced them on the table where some mail was already lying, accumulat-ing from the last two days. He’d have to get down to things soon, he sup-posed. His secretary would be coming in some time or other this after-noon.
He went back to the kitchen, poured coffee into a cup and brought it tothe table. He picked up the two or three letters that he had opened late lastnight when he arrived. One of them he referred to, and smiled a little ashe read it.
‘Eleven-thirty,’ he said. ‘Quite a suitable time. I wonder now. I expect I’dbetter just think things over, and get prepared for Chetwynd.’
Somebody pushed something through the letter-box. He went out intothe hall and got the morning paper. There was very little news in the pa-per. A political crisis, an item of foreign news which might have been dis-quieting, but he didn’t think it was. It was merely a journalist letting offsteam and trying to make things rather more important than they were.
Must give the people something to read. A girl had been strangled in thepark. Girls were always being strangled. One a day, he thought callously².
No child had been kidnapped or raped³ this morning. That was a nice sur-prise. He made himself a piece of toast and drank his coffee.
Later, he went out of the building, down into the street, and walkedthrough the park in the direction of Whitehall. He was smiling to himself.
Life, he felt, was rather good this morning. He began to think about Chet-wynd. Chetwynd was a silly fool if there ever was one. A good fa?ade, im-portant-seeming, and a nicely suspicious mind. He’d rather enjoy talkingto Chetwynd.
He reached Whitehall a comfortable seven minutes late. That was onlydue to his own importance compared with that of Chetwynd, he thought.
He walked into the room. Chetwynd was sitting behind his desk and had alot of papers on it and a secretary there. He was looking properly import-ant, as he always did when he could make it.
‘Hullo, Nye,’ said Chetwynd, smiling all over his impressively handsomeface. ‘Glad to be back? How was Malaya?’

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