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shorthand.'
    She took one of the firm's catalogues from her desk drawer, handed Mandy a notebook, moved her chair beside her and began reading in a low voice, hardly moving her almost bloodless lips. Mandy's fingers automatically formed the familiar hieroglyphics but her mind took in few of the details of the forthcoming non-fiction list. From time to time Miss Blackett's voice faltered and Mandy knew that she too was listening to the sounds outside. After the initial sinister silence, they could now hear footsteps, half-imagined whispering, and then louder footfalls echoing on the marble and confident masculine voices.
    Miss Blackett, her eyes on the door, said tonelessly: 'Perhaps you'd read it back now?'
    Mandy read back her shorthand faultlessly. Again there was a silence. Then the door opened and Miss Etienne came in. She said: 'The police have arrived. They are just waiting for the police surgeon and then they'll be taking Miss Clements away. You'd better stay here until it's all clear.' She looked at Miss Blackett. 'Have you finished the test?'
    'Yes, Miss Claudia.'
    Mandy handed up her typed lists. Miss Etienne glanced at them dismissively and said: 'Right, the job is yours if you want it. Start tomorrow at nine-thirty.'
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    Ten days after Sonia Clements' suicide and exactly three weeks before the first of the Innocent House murders, Adam Dalgliesh lunched with Conrad Ackroyd at the Cadaver Club. It was at Ackroyd's invitation, given by telephone with that conspiratorial and slightly portentous air with which all Conrad's invitations were invested. Even a duty dinner party given to pay off outstanding social obligations promised mystery, cabals, secrets to be imparted to the privileged few. The date suggested was not really convenient and Dalgliesh rearranged his diary with some reluctance while reflecting that one of the disadvantages of advancing age was an increasing disinclination for social engagements combined with an inability to summon the wit or energy to circumvent them. The friendship between them - he supposed the word was appropriate enough; they were certainly not mere acquaintances - was based on the use each occasionally made of the other. Since both acknowledged the fact, neither could see that it needed justification or excuse. Conrad, one of the most notorious and reliable gossips in London, had often been useful to him, notably in the Berowne case. On this occasion Dalgliesh would obviously be expected to confer the benefit, but the demand in whatever form it came would probably be more irritating than onerous, the food at the Cadaver was excellent and Ackroyd, although he could be facetious, was seldom dull.
    Later he was to see all the horrors that followed as emanating from that perfectly ordinary luncheon, and would find himself thinking: if this were fiction and I were a novelist, that's where it would all begin.
    The Cadaver Club is not among the most prestigious of London's private clubs but its coterie of members find it among the most convenient. Built in the 8oos, it was originally the house of a wealthy if not particularly successful barrister who, in 892, bequeathed it, suitably endowed, to a private club formed some five years earlier which had regularly met in his drawing-room. The club was and remains exclusively masculine, the main qualification for membership being a professional interest in murder. Now, as then, it lists among
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    the members a few retired senior police officers, practising and retired barristers, nearly all of the most distinguished professional and amateur criminologists, crime reporters, and a few eminent crime-novelists, all male and there on sufferance since the club takes the view that, where murder is concerned, fiction cannot compete with real life. The club had recently been in danger of moving from the category of eccentric to the dangerous one of fashionable, a risk which the committee had promptly countered by blackballing the next six applicants