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effect.
    When they’d gone, Annette Adams and I stood in the passage and looked at each other.
    “What do I do?” she said. “Are we still in business?”
    I didn’t like to tell her that I hadn’t the foggiest notion. I said, “Did Greville have an office?”
    “That’s where most of the mess is,” she said, turning away and retracing her steps to a large corner room near the entrance lobby. “In here.”
    I followed her and saw what she meant about mess. The contents of every wide-open drawer seemed to be out on the floor, most of it paper. Pictures had been removed from the walls and dropped. One filing cabinet lay on its side like a fallen soldier. The desk top was a shambles.
    “The police said the burglar was looking behind the pictures for a safe. But there isn’t one ... just the vault.” She sighed unhappily. “It’s all so pointless.”
    I looked around. “How many people work here altogether?” I said.
    “Six of us. And Mr. Franklin, of course.” She swallowed. “Oh, dear.”
    “Mm,” I agreed. “Is there anywhere I can meet everyone?”
    She nodded mutely and led the way into another large office where three of the others were already gathered, wide-eyed and rudderless. Another two came when called; four women and two men, all worried and uncertain and looking to me for decisions.
    Greville, I perceived, hadn’t chosen potential leaders to work around him. Annette Adams herself was no aggressive waiting-in-the-wings manager but a true second-in-command, skilled at carrying out orders, incapable of initiating them. Not so good, all things considered.
    I introduced myself and described what had happened to Greville.
    They had liked him, I was glad to see. There were tears on his behalf. I said that I needed their help because there were people I ought to notify about his death, like his lawyer and his accountant, for instance, and his closest friends, and I didn’t know who they were. I would like, I said, to make a list, and sat beside one of the desks, arming myself with paper and pen.
    Annette said she would fetch Greville’s address book from his office but after a while returned in frustration: in all the mess she couldn’t find it.
    “There must be other records,” I said. “What about that computer?” I pointed across the room. “Do you have addresses in that?”
    The girl who had brought the tea brightened a good deal and informed me that this was the stock control room, and the computer in question was programmed to record “stock in,” “stock out,” statements, invoices and accounts. But, she said encouragingly, in her other domain across the corridor there was another computer which she used for letters. She was out of the door by the end of the sentence and Annette remarked that June was a whirl-wind always.
    June, blonde, long-legged, flat-chested, came back with a fast print-out of Greville’s ten most frequent correspondents (ignoring customers), which included not only the lawyers and the accountants but also the bank, a stockbroker and an insurance company.
    “Terrific,” I said. “Can you now get through to the big credit card companies, and see if Greville was a customer of theirs and say his cards have been stolen, and he’s dead.”
    I then asked if any of them knew the make and number of Greville’s car. They all did. It seemed they saw it every day in the yard. He came to work in a ten-year-old Rover 3500 without radio or cassette player because the Porsche he’d owned before had been broken into twice and finally stolen altogether.
    “That old car’s still bursting with gadgets, though,” the younger of the two men said, “but he keeps them all locked in the trunk.”
    Greville had always been a sucker for gadgets, full of enthusiasm for the latest fidgety way of performing an ordinary task. He’d told me more about those toys of his, when we’d met, than ever about his own human relationships.
    “Why did you ask about his car?” the young