A solicitor, Mr Mayherne, interviews his latest client in his office: Leonard Vole is a young man who has been arrested on the capital charge of the murder of an old lady, Miss Emily French. Vole tells how he met Miss French when he helped her to pick up some parcels she dropped in Oxford Street and, by coincidence, he met her again that night at a party in Cricklewood. She asked him to call at her house and he was ribbed by his friends, who joked that he had made a conquest of a rich, lonely old lady.