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the thought of it. When he opened them again it was to find that he was no longer alone.
    Standing beside him, in fact, was Mr Spackman of the Department of Antiquities in a large provincial museum. Spackman was well known to Meredith – indeed, they had been at college together – and a meeting with him was always mildly embarrassing. For Spackman, unfortunately, was never quite sober; with a man who is never quite sober learned conversation is virtually impracticable; and for conversation other than learned and impersonal Meredith had, with Spackman, no list at all. Civilities, however, must always be exchanged – and so Meredith, suspending for a moment the puzzling speculations into which his situation had led him, took off his hat. Meredith took off his hat (since this was a good academic custom and not to be abrogated even in a thieves’ kitchen) and said pleasantly: ‘Good afternoon, Spackman. How are you?’
    But Spackman, who was muttering angrily to himself, appeared unaware of the greeting. He had been shambling forward and now stopped by a table where he proceeded to thrust into a Gladstone bag a massive and shiny object which Meredith at once identified as a something worse than mediocre Graeco-Roman bust. Spackman was trembling with irritation; the hinges of the bag kept shutting on his fingers; he swore under his breath in a fashion which Meredith found extremely distasteful. Nevertheless, Meredith advanced and took hold of the bag. ‘Let me hold it while you get the thing in,’ he said.
    Spackman swung round scowling; then, as he recognized who it was that had addressed him, his expression turned to consternation and fear. The spectacle was far from pleasing; from an inebriate red, the man’s complexion turned to something like a cadaver blue – but Meredith viewed it with much the satisfaction of a chemist who achieves similar results with a scrap of litmus paper. For here was what might be termed experimental verification of a working hypothesis – to wit, that this underground retreat was the business premises of some particularly enterprising receiver of stolen goods. And Meredith tapped pleasantly on the Gladstone bag which Spackman had now shut with a snap. ‘Turned down?’ he said interrogatively. ‘Not a sufficiently high-class crib?’
    This easy command of the jargon of larceny looked like being finally unnerving to Spackman. His mouth fell open and he swayed like one about to sag nastily at the knees. But suddenly his gaze fixed itself rigidly on a spot beneath Meredith’s left shoulder; he threw back his head and uttered a shrill, unsteady laugh; the laugh was followed by what could only be described as a confidential leer; he then picked up his rejected burden with an effort and staggered off down a side corridor which Meredith had not until this moment observed. With a nasty shock Meredith realized that what had arrested the attention of this old reprobate was his dispatch-case. Spackman had supposed it to be performing the same function as his own Gladstone bag.
    And a yet nastier reflection followed. This abominable catacomb was fast becoming a sort of illicit annex of what is known in Nottinghamshire as the Dukeries. For there against the wall was the Duke of Horton’s Venus , plainly filched from its proper métier of affording a refined aesthetic delectation to an aristocratic few. And here, in this same luckless dispatch-case, was the Duke of Nesfield’s famous Juvenal manuscript, which a former Duke of Nesfield had astutely stolen from a monastic library in the Levant, and which appeared in the most present danger of being stolen anew. For Meredith was now aware of certain yet more disturbing facts of environment. He stood just where his corridor opened out into a species of lobby or ante-chamber scattered about which – and on chromium and plywood chairs which nicely combined a hint of opulence with the still dominant antisepsis – sat various displeasing persons