THIRTY-SEVENCatherine Welby got off the bus in the Market Square at Lenton and took the narrow cut called Friar’s Row. The Friary has been gone for so long that only the name survives, but there are some old houses lurking behind modern shop windows in Main Street. In one of these Mr. Holderness had his office. The bookseller’s shop on the ground floor had changed hands more than once, but the firm of Stanway, Stanway, Fulpurse and Holderness has occupied the upper storeys for a hundred and fifty years. There was only one Stanway now, an invalid whose appearances at the office had become few and far between. A nephew of the name would in due course be admitted to the firm. He was at the moment completing his military service. Dark portraits of ancestral Stanways showed them shrewd-eyed, ha
