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Well, he wasn't interested in Amy Robsart. He didn't care how she had fallen down stairs, or why.

But he spent a very happy afternoon with the rest of the faces. Long before he had entered the Force he had taken a delight in faces, and in his years at the Yard that interest had proved both a private entertainment and a professional advantage. He had once in his early days dropped in with his Superintendent at an identification parade. It was not his case, and they were both there on other business, but they lingered in the background and watched while a man and a woman, separately, walked down the line of twelve nondescript men, looking for the one they hoped to recognize.

'Which is Chummy, do you know?' the Super had whispered to him.

'I don't know,' Grant had said, 'but I can guess.'

'You can? Which do you make it?'

'The third from the left.'

'What is the charge?'

'I don't know. Don't know anything about it.'

His chief had cast him an amused glance. But when both the man and the woman had failed to identify anyone and had gone away, and the line broke into a chattering group, hitching collars and settling ties preparatory to going back to the street and the world of everyday from which they had been summoned to assist the Law, the one who did not move was the third man from the left. The third man from the left waited submissively for his escort and was led away to his cell again.

'Strewth!; the Superintendent had said, 'One chance out of twelve, and you mad it. That was good going, He picked your man out of the bunch,' he said in explanation to the local Inspector.

'Did you know him?' the Inspector said, a little surprised. 'He's never been in trouble before, as far as we know.'

'No, I never saw him before. I don't even know what the charge is.'

'Then what made you pick him?'

Grant had hesitated, analysing for the first time his process of selection. It had not been a matter of reasoning. He had not said: 'That man's face has this characteristic or that characteristic, therefore he is the accused person.' his choice had been almost instinctive; the reason was in his subconscious. At last, having delved into his subconscious, he blurted: 'He was the only one of the twelve with no lines on his face.'

They had laughed at that. But Grant, once he had pulled the thing into the light, saw his instinct had worked and recognized the reasoning behind it. 'It sounds silly, but it isn't,' he had said, 'The only adult entirely without face lines the idiot.'

'Freeman's no idiot, take it from me,' the Inspector broke in. 'A very wide-awake wide boy he is, believe me.'

'I didn't mean that. i mean that the idiot is irresponsible. The idiot is the standard of irresponsibility. All those twelve men in that parade were thirty-ish, but only one had an irresponsible face. So I picked him at once.'

After that it had become a mild joke at the yard that Grant could 'pick them at sight'. And the Assistant Commissioner had once said teasingly: 'Don't tell me that you believe that there is such a thing as a criminal face, Inspector.'

But Grant had said no, he wasn't as simple as that. 'If there was only one kind of crime, sir, it might be possible; but crimes being as wide as human nature, if a policeman started to put faces into categories he would be sunk. you can tell what the normal run of over-sexed women look like by a walk down Bond Street any day between five and six, and yet the most notorious nymphomaniac in London looks like a cold saint.'

'Not so saintly of late; she's drinking too much these days,' the A.C. had said, identifying the lady without difficulty; and the conversation had gone on to other things.

But Grant's interest in faces had remained and enlarged until it became a conscious study. A matter of case records and comparisons. It was, as he had said, not possible to put faces into any kind of category, but it was possible to characterize individual faces. In a reprint of a famous trial, for instance, where photographs of the principal actors in the case were displayed for the public's interest, there was never any doubt as to which was the accused and which the judge. Occasionally, one of the counsel might on looks have changed places with the prisoner in the dock - counsel were after all a mere cross-section of humanity, as liable to passion and greed as the rest of the world, but a judge had a special quality: an integrity and a detachment. So, even without a wig, one did not confuse him with the man in the dock, who had had neither integrity nor detachment.

Marta's James, having been dragged from his 'cubby hole', Had evidently enjoyed himself, and a fine selection of offenders, or their victims kept Grant entertained until The Midget brought his tea. As ht tidied the sheets together to put them away in his locker his hand came in contact with one that Had slipped off his chat and had lain all the afternoon unnoticed on the counterpane. Ht picked it up and looked at it.

It was the portrait of a man. A man dressed in the velvet cap and slashed doublet of the lathe fifteenth century. A maxi about thirty-five or thirty-six years old, lean anti clean shaven. He wore a rich jewelled collar, anti was in the act of putting a ring on the little linger of his right hand. But be was not looking at the ring. He was looking off into space.

Of all the portraits Grant had seen this afternoon this was tilt most individual. It was as if the artist had striven to put on canvas something that his talent was not sufficient to translate into paint. Tilt expression in the eyes - that most arresting and individual expression - had defeated him. So had the mouth: he Had not known how to make lips so thin and so wide look mobile, so the mouth was wooden and a failure. What he had bat succeeded in was in the bone structure of the face: the strong cheekbones, the hollows below them, the chin too large for strength.

Grant paused in the act of turning the thing over, to consider the face a moment longer. A judge? A soldier? A prince? Someone used to great responsibility, and responsible his authority. Someone too-conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist A maxi at ease in a large design, but anxious over details. A candidate for gastric ulcer. Some-on; too, who had suffered ill-health as a child. He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it; less positive than the look on a cripple's face, but as inescapable. This the artist had both

understood and translated into terms of paint. The slight fullness of the lower eyelid, like a child that has slept too heavily; the texture of the skin; the old-man look in a young face.

He turned the portrait over to look for a caption

On the back was printed: Richard the Third. From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery Artist Unknown.

Richard the Third.

So that was who it was. Richard the Third. Crouchback. The monster of nursery stories. The destroyer of innocence. A synonym for villainy.

He turned the paper over and looked again. Was that what the artist had tried to convey when lie had painted those eyes? Had what he had seen in those eyes been the look of a man haunted?

He lay a long time looking at that face; at those extra

ordinary eyes. They were long eyes, set close under. tilt brows; the brows slightly drawn in that worried, over conscientious frown. At first glance they appeared the be peering; but as one looked one found tint they were in fact withdrawn, almost absent-minded.

When The Midget came back for us tray he was still staring at the portrait. Noting like this had come his way for years. It made La Gioconda look like a poster.

The Midget examined his virgin teacup, put a. practised hand against the teapot's tepid cheek, and pouted. She had better tings to do, she conveyed, tan bring him trays for him w ignore.

He pushed tilt portrait at her.

What did she think of it? If tint man were her patient what, would be her verdict?

'Liver,' she said crisply, and bore away the tray in heel-tapping protest, all starch and blonde curls.

But the surgeon, strolling in against her -draught, kindly and casual, had other views. He looked at the portrait, as invited, and said after a moment's interested scrutiny:

'Poliomyelitis.'

'Infantile paralysis? Grant said; and remembered all of a sudden that Richard III had a withered arm.

'Who is it?' the surgeon asked.

'Richard the Third.'

'Really? That's interesting.'

'Did you know that he had a withered arm?'

'Had he? I didn't remember that. I thought he was a hunchback.'

'So he was.'

'What I do remember is that he was born with a full set of teeth and ate live frogs. Well, my diagnosis seems to be abnormally accurate.'

'Uncanny. What made you choose polio?'

'I don't quite know, now tat you ask me to be definitive. Just the look of the face, I suppose. It's the look one sees on the face of a cripple child. If he was born hunchbacked that probably accounts for it and not polio. I notice the artist bas left out the hump.'

'Yes. Court painters have to have a modicum of tact. It wasn't until Cromwell that sitters asked for "watts and all".'

'If you asked me,' the surgeon said, absent-mindedly considering the splint on Grant's leg, 'Cromwell started that inverted snobbery from which we are all suffering today. "I'm a plain maxi, I am; no nonsense about me." And no manners, grace, or generosity, either.' He pinched Grant's toe wit detached interest. 'It's a raging disease. A horrible perversion. In some parts of the States, I understand, it's as much as a man's political life is worth to go to some constituencies wit his tie tied and his coat on. That's being stuffed-shirt. The beau ideal is to be one of the boys. That's looking very healthy,' lie added, referring to Grant's big toe, and came back of his own accord to the portrait lying on the counterpane.

'Interesting,' he said, 'that about the polio. Perhaps it really us polio, and that accounts for the shrunken arm.' He went on. considering it, making no movement to go.'

'Interesting, anyhow. Portrait of a murderer. Does he run to type, would you say?'

.'There isn't a murderer type. People murder for too many different reasons. But I can't remember any murderer, either in my own experience, or in case-histories, who resembled him.'

'Of course he was hors concours in his class, wasn't he. He couldn't have known the meaning of scruple.'

'No.'

'I once saw Olivier play him. The most dazzling exhibition of sheer evil, it was. Always on the verge of toppling over into the grotesque, and never doing it'

'When I showed you the portrait,' Grant said, 'before you knew who it was, did you think of villainy?"

'No,' said the surgeon, 'no, I thought of illness.'

'It's odd, isn't it. I didn't think of villainy either. And now that I know who it was, now that I've read the name on the back, I can't think of it as anything but villainous'

'I suppose villainy, like beauty, is in the eye of beholder. Well, I'll look in again towards the end of the week. No pain to speak of now?'

And he went away, kindly and casual as he had come.

It was only after he had given the portrait further puzzled consideration (it piqued him to have mistaken one of the most notorious murderers of all time for a judge; to have transferred a subject from the dock to the' bench was a shocking piece of ineptitude) that it occurred to Grant that the portrait Had been provided as the illustration to a piece of detection.

What mystery was there about Richard III?

And then lie remembered. Richard had murdered his two boy nephews, but no one knew how. They had merely disappeared. They had disappeared, if he remembered rightly, while Richard was away from London. Richard had sent someone to do the deed. But the mystery of the children's actual fate never been solved. Two skeletons had turned up - under some stairs? - in Charles II's day, and had been buried. It was taken for granted that the skeletons were the remains of the young princes, but nothing had ever been proved.

It was shocking how little history remained with one after a good education. All he knew about Richard III was that he was the younger brother of Edward IV. That Edward was a blond six-footer with remarkable good looks and a still more remarkable way with women; and that Richard was a hunchback who usurped the throne on his brother's death in please of the boy heir, and arranged the death of that heir and his small brother to save himself any further trouble. He also knew that Richard had died at the battle of Bosworth yelling for a horse, and that he was the last of his line. The last Plantagenet.

Every schoolboy turned over the final page of Richard III with relief, because now at last the Wars of the Roses were over and they could get on to the Tudors, who were dull but easy to follow.

When The Midget came to tidy him up for the night Grant said: 'You don't happen o have a history book, by any chance, do you?'

'A history book? No. What would I be doing with a history book.' It was not a question, so Grant did not try to provide an answer. His silence seemed to fret her.

'If you really want a history book,' she said presently, 'you could ask Nurse Darroll when she brings your supper. She has all her school-books on a shelf in her room and it's quite possible she has a history among them.'

How like The Amazon to keep her school books! He that. She was still homesick for school as she was homesick for Gloucestershire every time the daffodils bloomed. When she lumbered into the room, bearing his cheese pudding and stewed rhubarb, he looked at her with a tolerance that bordered on the benevolent. She ceased to be a large female who breathed like a suction-pump and became a potential dispenser of delight.

Oh yes, she had a history book, she said. Indeed, she rather thought that she had two. She had kept all her school books because she had loved school.

It was on the tip of Grant's tongue to ask her if she had kept her dolls, but he stopped himself in time.

'And of course I loved history,' she said. 'It was my favourite subject. Richard the Lionheart was my hero.'