You

know, you might be surprised to learn what sort of people show up at Nigel's

parties. Alderdyce is quite a regular, for one...."

"What, not the minister?"

"One and the same. And then there's Lord Willoughby, Bob Paddington, Q. C.,

Judge Featherstone, and—"

"Old Featherstone? You're joking! And Willoughby must be nearly seventy!"

"Oh, it's usually quite a varied group," said Hastings... "Don't let his

youth

fool you, Nigel likes too assemble all sorts of interesting people and allow

them to mingle in their own way. One finds one's own depth, so to speak. Do

come, Royce. You really ought to get away for a while, get out of town. Look,

you haven't got anything on for tonight, anyway, have you? You said there

isn't

any family coming by, so you don't really have any plans, do you?"

No, in light of his son Andrew's death, Llewellyn Royce Blood had to admit

that

he certainly hadn't made plans. He had thought that perhaps he and his two

remaining sons might have a quiet family evening together, talk about what

happened, find a way to live with it, but Ian had called up to commiserate

briefly and then begged off, and he hadn't even heard from Michael, who, of

all

people, should have been the first to call. But nothing. Not a word.

Not even his own coworkers knew where Michael was'. There had been a call

from

some policeman named Shavers, who thought Michael might have been at home,

consoling his father in his grief, and it was with a great deal of

awkwardness

that Royce admitted that since Andrew's murder he hadn't even heard from

Michael. That had produced a long silence on the other end, and then a

painfully

uncomfortable, "Oh. Well, sorry to bother you, Your Lordship."

Damn them to hell, then, Royce had thought. It was the final straw. Ever

since

his wife, Emily, had died, they had all been drifting farther and farther

apart.

His sons had made no secret of their dislike for one another. He was tired of

being the only one who had any sense of family, heartbroken over Andrew's

death

and embittered by what he perceived as the failure of his children to get on

with life and with each other.

Ian was forty-two and had yet to present him with any grandchildren. AH he

seemed to care about was politics, and if he occasionally showed up at some

function or another with a woman on his arm, she was usually as dull as

dishwater, more often than not one of those university feminist intellectual

types, too old to act like the spoiled brats they were, and not old enough to

be

taken seriously. Yet Ian seemed to find them mildly amusing. Royce had a hard

time believing that his son actually could be interested in any of them.

Andrew,

at least, had shown some promise. He had always thought of Andrew as the runt

of