First published in 1968

To Rachel and David Cecil

A head of department, working quietly in his room in Whitehall on a summer afternoon, is not accustomed to being disturbed by the nearby and indubitable sound of a revolver shot.

At one moment a lazy fat man, a perfect sphere his loving wife called him, his name Octavian Gray, was slowly writing a witty sentence in a neat tiny hand upon creamy official paper while he inhaled from his breath the pleasant sleepy smell of an excellent lunch-time burgundy. Then came the shot.

Octavian sat up, stood up. The shot had been somewhere not far away from him in the building. There was no mistaking that sound. Octavian knew the sound well though it was many years since, as a soldier, he had last heard it. His body knew it as he stood there rigid with memory and with the sense, now so unfamiliar to him, of confronting the demands of the awful, of the utterly new.

Octavian went to the door. The hot stuffy corridor, amid the rushing murmur of London, was quite still. He wished to call out 'What is it? What has happened?' but found he could not.

He turned back into the room with an instinctive movement in the direction of his telephone, his natural lifeline and connexion with the world. Just then he heard running steps.

'Sir, Sir, something terrible has occurred!'

The office messenger, McGrath, a pale-blue-eyed ginger= haired man with a white face and a pink mouth, stood shuddering in the doorway.

'Get out.' Richard Biranne, one of Octavian's Under Secretaries, pushed past McGrath, propelled McGrath out of the door, closed the door.

'What on earth is it?' said Octavian.

Biranne leaned back against the door. He breathed deeply a little to see his face. They might find my fingerprints on it!'

'Thanks, but I'd better stay myself. Poor devil, I wonder why he did it.'

'I don't know.'

'He was a pretty odd man. All that conjuring with spirits.'

'I don't know,' said Biranne.

'Or perhaps – Of course, there was that awful business with his wife. Someone told me he hadn't been the same since she died. I thought myself he was getting very depressed. You remember, that terrible accident last year '

'Yes,' said Biranne. He laughed his high-pitched little laugh, like an animal's yelp. 'Isn't it just like Radeechy's damn bad taste to go and shoot himself in the office!'

'Kate, darling.' Octavian was on the telephone to his wife in Dorset.

'Darling, hello. Are you all right?'

'I'm fine,' said Octavian, 'but something's happened in the office and I won't be able to get down till tomorrow morning.'

'Oh dear! Then you won't be here for Barbie's first evening home!' Barbara was their daughter and only child, aged four teen.

'I know, it's maddening and I'm very sorry, but I've just got to stay. We've got the police here and there's a terrible to-do.'