Godfrey Kettering

Godfrey Kettering is 53 and teaches accounting at a technical college in Leicester. Tall and stooped, with a long, pale face, thin gray hair combed to the side and thick tortoiseshell glasses, he is pedantic and polite, corrects other people's grammar and keeps citing dates. He teaches accounting to boys who can't add, he says, and quiz shows are his only vice, unfortunately not his talent.

He lives in a red brick semi-detached house, in a quiet Leicester neighborhood, with a windowless study where the desk is as clean as a ledger and the shelves hold atlases, encyclopedias and binders organized by color. He takes tea at four sharp, in a fine china cup, and keeps in a folder the clippings from every program he has taken part in. He has a folder full of them, and doesn't like to talk about its contents.

He wears a brown corduroy jacket with elbow patches, over a plaid shirt, with a green knitted tie. He speaks with his hands behind his back, like a teacher in a corridor, and rarely smiles with his teeth. When he is wrong, he admits it quickly and elegantly, and soon changes the subject.

About tonight, his account is that of an old contestant: after the captain, he got to sixteen thousand pounds and missed a question about Russian rivers. Always the rivers, he sighs. Nobody coughed for him, if that is what the detective wants to know.

When the question suggests he fed the answers to the captain, Godfrey answers that this is slander, and that slander is a crime, and warns that he will speak only before his union's lawyer. He corrects the grammar of the question itself before refusing it, cites two dates though nobody asked and clasps his hands behind his back, like someone ending a lesson. Even so, the doubt remains over how to read so much composure: the pride of a teacher with a clean reputation or pedantry serving as a shield? The detective will have to hear him out to know.