Spider's Web

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COPPLESTONE COURT, the elegant, eighteenth-century country home of Henry and Clarissa Hailsham-Brown, set in gently undulating hilly country in Kent, looked especially attractive in the moonlight which illuminated its facade on a clear, chilly evening in March. Inside the house, in a tastefully furnished ground-floor drawing-room whose French windows overlooked the garden, two men stood near a console table on which there was a tray with three glasses of port, each marked with a sticky label, one, two and three. Also on the table were a pencil and sheet of paper.

Sir Rowland Delahaye, a distinguished-looking man in his early fifties with a charming and cultivated manner, moved away to sit on the arm of a comfortable chair, and allowed his companion, Hugo Birch, to blindfold him. Birch, a man of about sixty and inclined to be somewhat irascible in manner, then placed in Sir Rowland's hand one of the glasses from the table. Raising the glass to his lips, Sir Rowland sipped, considered for a moment, and then said, "I should think – yes – definitely – yes, this is the Dow 'forty-two."

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