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By Root 910 0

friend's secretary—her name is Millicent, Millicent Dunworthy, isn't that extraordinary—she happened to order a picnic basket and then the two people it was originally intended for, something came up, who knows, and so she had the basket out on the desk, you see, for people to help themselves, because why let good food spoil? And I'd been out all night with Poppy—you know Poppy, you help with all her parties—and we stopped off to see my friend on the way home, and here was this open basket and I was famished, absolutely raving famished, so I had this little crusty thingmabob that was really quite, quite nice, and later when I was thinking about this garden party I'm doing I said to myself, Ivy—that's my name, you see-Ivy, that crusty whatsit would be just the thing. So I doddled along to talk to you about the chance of finding out what that thingmabob was, and can we maybe order two hundred or so of them? And the rest of the baskets, of course, one for each. And if you could put some nice things like peaches and a really good fizz and perhaps quails' eggs or something?”

I blinked, waiting for him to pick his way through the fusillade of words, but he caught the idea of two hundred very expensive picnic baskets the moment it flew past him, and he smiled.

He brought out the order book, located the name Dunworthy on the Monday previous, and produced a brochure which would tell me precisely what had been in the basket: The Vegetarian Epicure, it was called.

My eye ran down the description, searching for anything that might qualify as the desired morsel, when near the bottom it caught on an item that made me blink.

“Good heavens,” I said involuntarily.

“Pardon?”

“Oh, nothing, I just…” I pulled myself together and manufactured a frown. “You know, it wasn't Monday I saw the basket and tasted the crusty widgets, I'm sure it wasn't.”

“No, madam, it was probably on Friday. The order was made on the Monday, but the lady specified that it would be picked up by her brother on the Friday.”

I looked up, startled. “Her brother?”

“Well, I assumed so. The name was Dunworthy. Perhaps I was mistaken. I thought she was considerably older than he, but then of course—”

“Oh, her brother, yes. Tall young fellow, long hair—an artistic type?”

“No,” he said slowly. “He was in his early forties, with ordinary hair. Not at all what I should call ‘artistic’ He had a scar near his eye,” he volunteered, laying a finger next to his left eye.

“Oh, him,” I said. “Her other brother. I always forget about him, I've only met him the once. Did he have his wife with him? Pretty little Chinese woman?”

“I didn't see anyone answering that description. Might I—”

But before he could ask me why I was so interested in the brothers of a friend's secretary, I said, “But if they had that basket, then what could it have been I tasted?”

He perused the list of contents before asking tentatively if it might not have been the strawberry tartlets, although clearly he'd been looking for something rather more exotic that had attracted my palate.

“Oh, exactly! You clever man, it must have been those! Thank you for reading my mind, you have saved my entire party from the touch of the bourgeois. Shall I have my secretary telephone to you with the details? Yes, that's what I'll do, she's so much better than I, and now that I know what it was that put you in mind …” To his confusion, I was still talking as I went out of the door, the brochure firmly in hand.

He might have been even more confused had he seen me come to a halt on the street outside, to look again at the brochure. Yes, I had read it aright: Included with the nut pâté and three flavours of cheese for afters was a packet of almond-and-oat biscuits, from Italy.

A biscuit packet that currently lay on the work-table in Holmes' laboratory in Sussex, awaiting his attentions.

So: A clean-cut man in his forties, with a scar beside his left eye, whose name was almost certainly not Dunworthy. Not only did this description in no way fit Damian Adler, it sounded like the man seen walking with Damian up Regent Street,