As I came up the stairs on the afternoon of the murder I could hear the telephone in my furnished flat ringing like mad, and when I lifted the receiver a voice I’d never heard before cried deperately, ‘Listen! Tell him it’s no use. I haven’t got it. He’ll have to wait.’

This is the beginning of Anthony Gilbert’s new story of blackmail and murder, which is laid in and around a rather seedy pub called the Admiral Box.

Who was the owner of that desperate voice and why did she ring Simon Crete, the narrator and a man whom she had never seen?

This is one of the questions asked and eventually answered by Arthur Crook (Where there’s Crook there’s Crime) in Anthony Gilbert’s most ingenious story, where nothing is quite what it appears on the surface, and which leads to an astonishing but thoroughly satisfying climax.