On Saturday I played golf, and although the game finished late, I wanted to take a swim in the club pool before I went home. There was no one at the pool but Tom Maitland. He is a dark-skinned and nice-looking man, very rich, but quiet. He seems withdrawn. His wife is the fattest woman in Shady Hill, and nobody much likes his children, and I think he is the kind of man whose parties and friendship and affairs in love and business all rest like an intricate superstructure – a tower of matchsticks – on the melancholy of his early youth. A breath could bring the whole thing down. It was nearly dark when I had finished swimming; the clubhouse was lighted and you could hear the sounds of dinner on the porch. Maitland was sitting at the edge of the pool dabbling his feet in the bright-blue water, with its Dead Sea smell of chlorine. I was drying myself off, and as I passed him, I asked if he wasn’t going in. ‘I don’t know how to swim,’ he said. He smiled and looked away from me then to the still, polished water of the pool, in the dark landscape. ‘We used to have a pool at home,’ he said, ‘but I never got the chance to swim in it. I was always studying the violin.’ There he was, forty-five years old and at least a millionaire, and he couldn’t even float, and I don’t suppose he had many occasions to speak as honestly as he had just spoken. While I was getting dressed, the idea settled in my head – with no help from me – that the Maitlands would be my next victims.