The Paragon is a Bath address whose importance in the novel comes not from a single dramatic landmark but from the private houses and decisive encounters attached to it. It is where Peter Diamond visits Polly Wycherley while investigating Sid Towers’s murder, where Miss Chilmark’s personal history comes into view, and where Diamond later waits in the basement for an expected visitor. The address gathers domestic security, concealed vulnerability, and police pursuit into the same compact geography.

Domestic interiors and first impressions

At Polly Wycherley’s house, the approach to the interior is carefully guarded. Peter Diamond and Julie Hargreaves hear slippered footsteps after ringing the bell, then the drawing of bolts; the door opens only as far as its safety chain allows. Polly asks who is there, and Diamond identifies himself and presents his identification through the narrow opening. Even after she confirms her identity, the exchange has established a boundary that must be deliberately released before the visitors can enter.

The hall complicates Polly’s expressed anxiety about feeling safe at home. Its walls display a Zulu shield, crossed assegais, a leopard-skin, a war drum, and what appears to be a witch doctor’s mask. The living room initially offers relief from this martial display: it is mainly filled with bookshelves, and each volume is protected by a transparent wrapper. But the titles—among them Kiss Me Deadly, The Beast Must Die, Blood Money, and The Body in the Billiard Room—extend the atmosphere of violence into her reading. A box of dueling pistols reinforces the impression. Peter Diamond notices the contrast between the silver-haired woman who bolts her door against danger and the weapons and murder stories gathered within it; he also observes that order prevails, even if he prefers the clutter at Shirley-Ann’s home. The room makes domestic protection feel inseparable from an orderly, curated familiarity with violence.

An address within the murder inquiry

The house also functions as a place where an alibi is tested rather than simply accepted. Asked where she was between nine and midnight on the evening Sid Towers was killed, Polly says she was at home for most of the time and had driven back directly after a meeting. She points out that she gave this account in a statement to the sergeant who called. Her qualification is important: she had spoken briefly with Miss Chilmark, whom she thanked for supporting her against the Young Turks in their club. The Paragon therefore holds both the ordinary domestic version of Polly’s movements and the detail that complicates it. The conversation gives Diamond a specific connection between the house, the meeting, and the people under inquiry, without itself resolving the question of opportunity.

Miss Chilmark’s past and return

The address carries a different kind of private history through Miss Chilmark. Recalling the completion of probate, she describes going to dinner with her solicitor at the Hole in the Wall, then walking back with him to the Paragon in the rain beneath his umbrella. Near the house, he said he had further papers for her to sign; she understood that this was an excuse to come inside and wanted to accept it. She later describes their intimacy as willing, while also recalling the guilt she felt the next morning and the social standards of the period. Her account attaches the house not only to present-day investigation but to a remembered threshold at which professional business gave way to a personal encounter.

In the present investigation, the same residence becomes a place of absence and return. An elderly resident upstairs tells police that Miss Chilmark may have gone away and had been seen the previous evening getting into a black cab with a small suitcase. The report makes the house’s apparent security suddenly uncertain: its occupant may have left, and her whereabouts are not immediately known. Later, an inquiry that has gone cold is redirected when police find her installed at the Paragon again. She has been crying, but has cheered up on returning; a note from someone promising to call later has helped lift her spirits. The note’s promised visit gives the address a new and urgent significance.

The basement as a point of arrest

When Peter Diamond learns that the expected caller may be the extortionist who has Miss Chilmark in thrall, he races to the Paragon. It is ten to four, and he drives there under acute pressure, leaving his car in a way that creates a major tailback in the homeward traffic. He runs across the pavement and down the basement steps. Miss Chilmark has changed into a high-necked oriental dress and reapplied her makeup; the scene suggests that she is preparing for the visitor whose arrival Diamond fears. Diamond tells her he will wait inside and positions himself beside the door, partly hidden behind a tall benjamina and the frosted glass.

The basement steps turn the house’s threshold into an ambush point. A uniformed constable arrives first, apparently to question Diamond about his badly parked car. Miss Chilmark, hearing the arrival, comes from the kitchen in alarm; Diamond pulls the officer inside and tells her to give him the cakes she has obtained. The interruption briefly threatens to expose the waiting plan before its intended target appears. When A.J. arrives and sees Diamond, he turns and bolts upstairs. Diamond reaches through the iron railing, catches his leg, and pulls him off balance; A.J. falls heavily and cuts his hand on the bottom step. Diamond arrests him there. The arrest transforms the Paragon from a private refuge and repository of old memories into the scene where a concealed threat is physically stopped. Its significance lies in this repeated crossing of boundaries: guarded entrance, remembered return, anticipated visitor, and finally the flight that ends at the basement stair.