Erasmus Symes’s Antiques Shop

“It is a. . . wonky, rickety antiques shop in a slightly more down-market part of Ransom. . . .  It’s a two-storey building. The upper windows on the top floor. . . have a chain across them. . . . [O]n the ground floor there is a door. There is a little bell at the top of the door. . . .” The glass is “extremely dirty”.

“It has a lowish ceiling. The. . . walls are all. . . disjointed. . . . [T]here are. . . rows and rows and rows of jumbled-up, piled-up. . . antiques — nothing that looks especially valuable.”

“. . . [A]t the far end there is a desk behind which sits,. . . hunched over. . .in a very old cramped, looking-chair, a rather miserable old fellow who is stroking a really ratty white cat — a really. . . scraggly thing.”