to

sleep, and now he was having a drink to help him get started in the morning.

Not

a good sign. Not a good sign at all. To hell with it, he thought, and tossed

back the Scotch. It felt like fire going down. He held up the empty glass and

looked at it with a wry grimace.

"Be careful, Michael," he said to himself. "You like this evil stuff too

damned

much, you keep this up and it'll be your undoing." He put down the glass and

filled it up again. He raised it. "Well, sod it, here's to my undoing."

The second one went down more smoothly than the first. He walked over to the

window and raised the shade. The sky was getting gray over the city. The

phone

rang.

He flinched, and his hand involuntarily squeezed so hard that the glass

shattered in his grasp. "Damn," he said, opening one of the bureau drawers

and

fumbling for a fresh handkerchief while the telephone kept ringing. He

wrapped

the handkerchief around his bleeding hand and picked up the phone.

"Yes, yes, what is it?"

"Sorry to wake you, Chief Inspector, but I'm afraid we've got another one."

He closed his eyes. "Oh, bloody hell," he said.

"Yes, sir. It certainly is that."

At twenty, Andrew Lloyd Blood was overweight, weak-chinned, and rather pasty,

but he made close to ten times the money that his older brother Michael made

as

Chief Inspector. He was in training for the family business, which meant that

he

was learning to become a shark, and he was an astonishingly quick study. He

was

not quite ready for the subtle world of investment banking yet, because those

polished predators took carefully selective bites and sheared the flesh off

very

neatly, whereas Andrew had a tendency to chomp at everything in sight as if in

a

blood-crazed feeding frenzy. So, appropriately, he had become a stockbroker.

Occasionally he even made some money for his clients. However, that was not

his

chief concern. Andrew was chiefly concerned with making enough money to

support

his hobby, which was self-gratification. Consequently he was eagerly looking

forward to the evening's entertainment, and especially to meeting the

mysterious

Lord Carfax.

It seemed that everyone who was anyone was talking about him, but no one

really

seemed to know just who he was. It was impossible to trace the fellow's

lineage,

which was a pity, Andrew thought. There was no help from anything like