Oliphant nodded and napped, on the journey home. He dreamed, as he often did, of an omniscient Eye in whose infinite perspectives might be sorted every least mystery. Upon arrival, he found, to his ill-concealed chagrin, that Bligh had drawn a bath for him in the collapsible rubber tub recently prescribed by Dr. McNeile. In robe and nightshirt, slippered in embroidered moleskin, Oliphant examined the thing with resigned distaste. It stood, steaming, before the perfectly good and perfectly empty tub of white porcelain which dominated his bath-room. It was Swiss, the rubber bath, its slack black trough gone taut and bulbous with the volume of water it presently contained. Supported by an elaborately hinged frame of black-enameled teak, it was connected to the geyser with a worm-like hose and several ceramic petcocks. Removing his robe, and then his nightshirt, he stepped from his slippers, then from the chill of octagonal marble tiles, into the soft, warm maw. It very nearly overturned as he struggled to sit. The elastic material, supported on all sides by the frame, gave distressingly beneath one’s feet. And was, he discovered, quite horrid in its embrace of one’s buttocks. He was, according to McNeile’s prescription, to recline for a quarter-hour, his head supported on the small pneumatic pillow of rubberized canvas supplied for this purpose by the manufacturer. McNeile maintained that the cast-iron body of a porcelain tub confused the spine’s natural attempts to return to its correct magnetic polarity. Oliphant shifted slightly, grimacing at the obscene sensation of the clinging rubber. Bligh had arranged a sponge, pumice, and a fresh bar of French-milled soap in the little bamboo basket attached to the side of the tub. Bamboo, Oliphant supposed, must also lack magnetic properties. He groaned, then took up sponge and soap and began to wash himself. Released from the pressing business of the day, Oliphant, as he often did, undertook a detailed and systematic act of recollection. He had a natural gift for memory, greatly aided in youth by the educational doctrines of his father, whose ardent interest in mesmerism and the tricks of stage-magic had introduced his son to the arcane disciplines of mnemonics. Such accomplishments had been of great use to Oliphant in later life, and he practiced them now with a regularity he had once devoted to prayer. Almost a year had passed since his search through the effects of Michael Radley, in Room 37, Grand’s Hotel. Radley had owned a modern steamer-trunk of the sort that, upended and opened, served as a compact combination of wardrobe and bureau. This, along with a scuffed leather hat-case and a brass-framed Jacquard satchel, constituted the whole of the publicist’s luggage. Oliphant had found the intricacy of the trunk’s fittings depressing. All these hinges, runners, hooks, nickeled catches, and leather tabs — they spoke of a dead man’s anticipation of journeys that were never to be. Equally pathetic were the three gross of fancily stippled cartes-de-viste, with Radley’s Manchester telegraph-number arranged in the French manner, still wrapped in printer’s-tissue. He began by unpacking each section in turn, laying Radley’s clothing out on the hotel bed with a valet’s precision. The publicist had entertained a fondness for silk nightshirts. As he worked, Oliphant examined maker’s labels and laundry-marks, turning out pockets and running his fingers over seams and linings. Radley’s toilet articles were secured in a removable envelope of water-proofed silk. Oliphant examined the contents, handling each object in turn: a badger shaving-brush, a self-stropping safety-razor, a toothbrush, a tin of tooth-powder, a sponge-bag . . . He rapped the ivory handle of the brush against the foot of the bedstead. He opened the razor’s leatherette case: nickel-plate gleamed against a bed of violet velour. He emptied the toothpowder out on a sheet of Grand’s engraved stationery. He looked in the sponge-bag — and found a sponge. The glitter of the razor drew his eye. Dumping its various components atop the starched bib of an evening-shirt, he used the penknife on his watch-chain to pry the fitted velour nest from the case. It came away easily, revealing a tightly folded sheet of foolscap. Upon this sheet, in pencil, quite smudged with frequent erasure and re-erasure, was written what appeared to be the start of a draft letter. Undated, lacking any term of address, it was unsigned: