A Gun for Sale

Graham Greene

A Gun for Sale

First published in 1936

Chapter 1

1

MURDER didn't mean much to Raven. It was just a new job. You had to be careful. You had to use your brains. It was not a question of hatred. He had only seen the Minister once: he had been pointed out to Raven as he walked down the new housing estate between the small lit Christmas trees, an old grubby man without friends, who was said to love humanity.

The cold wind cut Raven's face in the wide Continental street. It was a good excuse for turning the collar of his coat well above his mouth. A hare-lip was a serious handicap in his profession; it had been badly sewn in infancy, so that now the upper lip was twisted and scarred. When you carried about so easy an identification you couldn't help becoming ruthless in your methods. It had always, from the first, been necessary for Raven to eliminate a witness.

He carried an attache case. He looked like any other youngish man going home after his work; his dark overcoat had a clerical air. He moved steadily up the street like hundreds of his kind. A tram went by, lit up in the early dusk: he didn't take it. An economical young man, you might have thought, saving money for his home. Perhaps even now he was on his way to meet his girl.

But Raven had never had a girl. The hare-lip prevented that. He had learnt, when he was very young, how repulsive it was. He turned into one of the tall grey houses and climbed the stairs, a sour bitter screwed-up figure.

Outside the top flat he put down his attache case and put on gloves. He took a pair of clippers out of his pocket and cut through the telephone wire where it ran out from above the door to the lift shaft. Then he rang the bell.

He hoped to find the Minister alone. This little top-floor flat was the socialist's home; he lived in a poor bare solitary way and Raven had been told that his secretary always left him at half-past six; he was very considerate with his employees. But Raven was a minute too early and the Minister half an hour too late. A woman opened the door, an elderly woman with pince-nez and several gold teeth. She had her hat on and her coat was over her arm. She had been on the point of leaving and she was furious at being caught. She didn't allow him to speak, but snapped at him in German, 'The Minister is engaged.'

He wanted to spare her, not because he minded a killing but because his employers would prefer him not to exceed his instructions. He held the letter of introduction out to her silently; as long as she didn't hear his foreign voice or see the hare-lip she was safe. She took the letter primly and held it up close to her pince-nez. Good, he thought, she's short-sighted. 'Stay where you are,' she said, and walked back up the passage. He could hear her disapproving governess voice, then she was back in the passage saying, 'The Minister will see you. Follow me, please.' He couldn't understand the foreign speech, but he knew what she meant from her behaviour.

His eyes, like little concealed cameras, photographed the room instantaneously: the desk, the easy chair, the map on the wall, the door to the bedroom behind, the wide window above the bright cold Christmas street. A small oil-stove was all the heating, and the Minister was having it used now to boil a saucepan. A kitchen alarm-clock on the desk marked seven o'clock. A voice said, 'Emma, put in another egg.' The Minister came out from the bedroom. He had tried to tidy himself, but he had forgotten the cigarette ash on his trousers, and his fingers were ink-stained. The secretary took an egg out of one of the drawers in the desk. 'And the salt. Don't forget the salt,' the Minister said. He explained in slow English, 'It prevents the shell cracking. Sit down, my friend. Make yourself at home. Emma, you can go.'

Raven sat down and fixed his eyes on the Minister's chest. He thought: I'll give her three minutes by the alarm-clock to get well away: he kept his eyes on the Minister's chest: just there I'll shoot. He let his coat collar fall and saw with bitter rage how the old man turned away from the sight of his hare-lip.

The Minister said, 'It's years since I heard from him. But I've never forgotten him, never. I can show you his photograph in the other room. It's good of him to think of an old friend. So rich and powerful too. You must ask him when you go back if he remembers the time—' A bell began to ring furiously.

Raven thought: the telephone. I cut the wire. It shook his nerve. But it was only the alarm-clock drumming on the desk. The Minister turned it off. 'One egg's boiled,' he said and stooped for the saucepan. Raven opened his attache case: in the lid he had fixed his automatic fitted with a silencer. The Minister said: 'I'm sorry the bell made you jump. You see I like my egg just four minutes.'

Feet ran along the passage. The door opened. Raven turned furiously in his seat, his hare-lip flushed and raw. It was the secretary. He thought: my God, what a household. They won't let a man do things tidily. He forgot his lip, he was angry, he had a grievance. She came in flashing her gold teeth, prim and ingratiating. She said, 'I was just going out when I heard the telephone,' then she winced slightly, looked the other way, showed a clumsy delicacy before his deformity which he couldn't help noticing. It condemned her. He snatched the automatic out of the case and shot the Minister twice in the back.

The Minister fell across the oil stove; the saucepan upset and the two eggs broke on the floor. Raven shot the Minister once more in the head, leaning across the desk to make quite certain, driving the bullet hard into the base of the skull, smashing it open like a china doll's. Then he turned on the secretary; she moaned at him; she hadn't any words; the old mouth couldn't hold its saliva. He supposed she was begging him for mercy. He pressed the trigger again; she staggered under it as if she had been kicked by an animal in the side. But he had miscalculated. Her unfashionable dress, the swathes of useless material in which she hid her body, had perhaps confused his aim. And she was tough, so tough he couldn't believe his eyes; she was through the door before he could fire again, slamming it behind her.

But she couldn't lock it; the key was on his side. He twisted the handle and pushed; the elderly woman had amazing strength; it only gave two inches. She began to scream some word at the top of her voice.

There was no time to waste. He stood away from the door and shot twice through the woodwork. He could hear the pince-nez fall on the floor and break. The voice screamed again and stopped; there was a sound outside as if she were sobbing. It was her breath going out through her wounds. Raven was satisfied. He turned back to the Minister.

There was a clue he had been ordered to leave; a clue he had to remove. The letter of introduction was on the desk. He put it in his pocket and between the Minister's stiffened fingers he inserted a scrap of paper. Raven had little curiosity; he had only glanced at the introduction and the nickname at its foot conveyed nothing to him; he was a man who could be depended on. Now he looked round the small bare room to see whether there was any clue he had overlooked. The suitcase and the automatic he was to leave behind. It was all very simple.

He opened the bedroom door; his eyes again photographed the scene, the single bed, the wooden chair, the dusty chest of drawers, a photograph of a young Jew with a small scar on his chin as if he had been struck there with a club, a pair of brown wooden hairbrushes initialled J. K., everywhere cigarette ash: the home of an old lonely untidy man; the home of the Minister for War.

A low voice whispered an appeal quite distinctly through the door. Raven picked up the automatic again; who would have imagined an old woman could be so tough? It touched his nerve a little just in the same way as the bell had done, as if a ghost were interfering with a man's job. He opened the study door; he had to push it against the weight of her body. She looked dead enough, but he made quite sure with the automatic almost touching her eyes. It was time to be gone. He took the automatic with him.

They sat and shivered side by side as the dusk came down; they were borne in their bright small smoky cage above the streets; the bus rocked down to Hammersmith. The shop windows sparkled like ice and 'Look,' she said, 'it's snowing.' A few large flakes went drifting by as they crossed the bridge, falling like paper scraps into the dark Thames.

He said, 'I'm happy as long as this ride goes on.'

'We're seeing each other tomorrow—Jimmy.' She always hesitated before his name. It was a silly name for anyone of such bulk and gravity.

'It's the nights that bother me.'

She laughed, 'It's going to be wearing,' but immediately became serious, 'I'm happy too.' About happiness she was always serious; she preferred to laugh when she was miserable. She couldn't avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it. She said, 'It would be dreadful now if there was a war.'

'There won't be a war.'

'The last one started with a murder.'

'That was an Archduke. This is just an old politician.'

She said: 'Be careful. You'll break the record—Jimmy.'

'Damn the record.'

She began to hum the tune she'd bought: 'It's only Kew to you'; and the large flakes fell past the window, melted on the pavement: 'a snowflower a man brought from Greenland.'

He said, 'It's a silly song.'

She said, 'It's a lovely song—Jimmy. I simply can't call you Jimmy. You aren't Jimmy. You're outsize. Detective-sergeant Mather. You're the reason why people make jokes about policemen's boots.'

'What's wrong with "dear", anyway?'

'Dear, dear,' she tried it out on the tip of her tongue, between lips as vividly stained as a winter berry. 'Oh no,' she decided, 'I'll call you that when we've been married ten years.'

'Well—"darling"?'

'Darling, darling. I don't like it. It sounds as if I'd known you a long, long time.' The bus went up the hill past the fish-and-chip shops: a brazier glowed and they could smell the roasting chestnuts. The ride was nearly over, there were only two more streets and a turn to the left by the church, which was already visible, the spire lifted like a long icicle above the houses. The nearer they got to home the more miserable she became, the nearer they got to home the more lightly she talked. She was keeping things off and out of mind: the peeling wallpaper, the long flights to her room, cold supper with Mrs Brewer and next day the walk to the agent's, perhaps a job again in the provinces away from him.

Mather said heavily, 'You don't care for me like I care for you. It's nearly twenty-four hours before I see you again.'

'It'll be more than that if I get a job.'

'You don't care. You simply don't care.'

She clutched his arm. 'Look. Look at that poster.' But it was gone before he could see it through the steamy pane. 'Europe Mobilizing' lay like a weight on her heart.

'What was it?'

'Oh, just the same old murder again.'

'You've got that murder on your mind. It's a week old now. It's got nothing to do with us.'

'No, it hasn't, has it?'

'If it had happened here, we'd have caught him by now.'

'I wonder why he did it.'

'Politics. Patriotism.'

'Well. Here we are. It might be a good thing to get off. Don't look so miserable. I thought you said you were happy.'

'That was five minutes ago.'

'Oh,' she said out of her light and heavy heart, 'one lives quickly these days.' They kissed under the lamp; she had to stretch to reach him; he was comforting like a large dog, even when he was sullen and stupid, but one didn't have to send away a dog alone in the cold dark night.

'Anne,' he said, 'we'll be married, won't we, after Christmas?'

'We haven't a penny,' she said, 'you know. Not a penny—Jimmy.'

'I'll get a rise.'

'You'll be late for duty.'

'Damn it, you don't care.'

She jeered at him, 'Not a scrap—dear,' and walked away from him up the street to No .54, praying let me get some money quick, let this go on this time; she hadn't any faith in herself. A man passed her going up the road; he looked cold and strung-up, as he passed in his black overcoat; he had a hare-lip. Poor devil, she thought, and forgot him, opening the door of 54, climbing the long flights to the top floor, the carpet stopped on the first. She put on the new record, hugging to her heart the silly senseless words, the slow sleepy tune: 'It's only Kew To you, But to me It's Paradise.

They are just blue

Petunias to you,

But to me

They are your eyes.'

The man with the hare-lip came back down the street; fast walking hadn't made him warm; like Kay in The Snow Queen he bore the cold within him as he walked. The flakes went on falling, melting into slush on the pavement, the words of a song dropped from the lit room on the third floor, the scrape of a used needle.

'They say that's a snowflower A man brought from Greenland.

I say it's the lightness, the coolness, the whiteness Of your hand.'

The man hardly paused; he went on down the street, walking fast; he felt no pain from the chip of ice in his breast.

3

Raven sat at an empty table in the Corner House near a marble pillar. He stared with distaste at the long list of sweet iced drinks, of parfaits and sundaes and coupes and splits. Somebody at the next table was eating brown bread and butter and drinking Horlick's. He wilted under Raven's gaze and put up his newspaper. One word 'Ultimatum' ran across the top line.

Mr Cholmondeley picked his way between the tables. He was fat and wore an emerald ring. His wide square face fell in folds over his collar. He looked like a realestate man, or perhaps a man more than usually successful in selling women's belts. He sat down at Raven's table and said, 'Good evening.'

Raven said, 'I thought you were never coming, Mr Chol-mon-deley,' pronouncing every syllable.

'Chumley, my dear man, Chumley,' Mr Cholmondeley corrected him.

'It doesn't matter how it's pronounced. I don't suppose it's your own name.'

'After all I chose it,' Mr Cholmondeley said. His ring flashed under the great inverted bowls of light as he turned the pages of the menu. 'Have a parfait.'

'It's odd wanting to eat ice in this weather. You've only got to stay outside if you're hot. I don't want to waste any time, Mr Chol-mon-deley. Have you brought the money? I'm broke.'

Mr Cholmondeley said: 'They do a very good Maiden's Dream. Not to speak of Alpine Glow. Or the Knickerbocker Glory.'

'I haven't had a thing since Calais.'

'Give me the letter,' Mr Cholmondeley said. 'Thank you.' He told the waitress, 'I'll have an Alpine Glow with a glass of kümmel over it.'

'The money,' Raven said.

'Here in this case.'

'They are all fivers.'

'You can't expect to be paid two hundred in small change. And it's nothing to do with me,' Mr Cholmondeley said, 'I'm merely the agent.' His eyes softened as they rested on a Raspberry Split at the next table. He confessed wistfully to Raven, 'I've got a sweet tooth.'

'Don't you want to hear about it?' Raven said. 'The old woman...'

'Please, please,' Mr Cholmondeley said, 'I want to hear nothing. I'm just an agent. I take no responsibility. My clients...'

Raven twisted his hare-lip at him with sour contempt. 'That's a fine name for them.'

'How long the waitress is with my parfait,' Mr Cholmondeley complained. 'My clients are really quite the best people. The acts of violence—they regard them as war.'

'And I and the old man...' Raven said.

'Are in the front trench.' He began to laugh softly at his own humour; his great white open face was like a curtain on which you can throw grotesque images: a rabbit, a man with horns. His small eyes twinkled with pleasure at the mass of iced cream which was borne towards him in a tall glass. He said, 'You did your work very well, very neatly. They are quite satisfied with you. You'll be able to take a long holiday now.' He was fat, he was vulgar, he was false, but he gave an impression of great power as he sat there with the cream dripping from his mouth. He was prosperity, he was one of those who possessed things, but Raven possessed nothing but the contents of the wallet, the clothes he stood up in, the hare-lip, the automatic he should have left behind. He said, 'I'll be moving.'

'Good-bye, my man, good-bye,' Mr Cholmondeley said, sucking through a straw.

Raven rose and went. Dark and thin and made for destruction, he wasn't at ease among the little tables, among the bright fruit drinks. He went out into the Circus and up Shaftesbury Avenue. The shop windows were full of tinsel and hard red Christmas berries. It maddened him, the sentiment of it. His hands clenched in his pockets. He leant his face against a modiste's window and jeered silently through the glass. A girl with a neat curved figure bent over a dummy. He fed his eyes contemptuously on her legs and hips; so much flesh, he thought, on sale in the Christmas window.

A kind of subdued cruelty drove him into the shop. He let his hare-lip loose on the girl when she came towards him with the same pleasure that he might have felt in turning a machine-gun on a picture gallery. He said, 'That dress in the window. How much?'

She said, 'Five guineas.' She wouldn't 'sir' him. His lip was like a badge of class. It revealed the poverty of parents who couldn't afford a clever surgeon. He said, 'It's pretty, isn't it?'

She lisped at him genteelly, 'It's been vewwy much admired.'

'Soft. Thin. You'd have to take care of a dress like that, eh? Do for someone pretty and well off?'

She lied without interest, 'It's a model.' She was a woman, she knew all about it, she knew how cheap and vulgar the little shop really was. 'It's got class, eh?'

'Oh yes,' she said, catching the eye of a dago in a purple suit through the pane, 'it's got class.'

'All right,' he said. 'I'll give you five pounds for it.' He took a note from Mr Cholmondeley's wallet. 'Shall I pack it up?'

'No,' he said. 'The girl'll fetch it.' He grinned at her with his raw lip.' You see, she's class. This the best dress you have?' and when she nodded and took the note away he said, 'It'll just suit Alice then.'

And so out into the Avenue with a little of his scorn expressed, out into Frith Street and round the corner into the German café where he kept a room. A shock awaited him there, a little fir tree in a tub hung with coloured glass, a crib. He said to the old man who owned the café, 'You believe in this? This junk?'

'Is there going to be war again?' the old man said. 'It's terrible what you read.'

'All this business of no room in the inn. They used to give us plum pudding. A decree from Caesar Augustus. You see I know the stuff, I'm educated. They used to read it us once a year.'

'I have seen one war.'

'I hate the sentiment.'

'Well,' the old man said, 'it's good for business.'

Raven picked up the bambino. The cradle came with it all of a piece: cheap painted plaster. 'They put him on the spot, eh? You see I know the whole story. I'm educated.'

He went upstairs to his room. It hadn't been seen to: there was still dirty water in the basin and the ewer was empty. He remembered the fat man saying, 'Chumley, my man, Chum-ley. It's pronounced Chumley,' flashing his emerald ring. He called furiously, 'Alice,' over the banisters.

She came out of the next room, a slattern, one shoulder too high, with wisps of fair bleached hair over her face. She said, 'You needn't shout.'

He said, 'It's a pigsty in there. You can't treat me like that. Go in and clean it.' He hit her on the side of the head and she cringed away from him, not daring to say anything but, 'Who do you think you are?'

'Get on,' he said, 'you humpbacked bitch.' He began to laugh at her when she crouched over the bed. 'I've bought you a Christmas dress, Alice. Here's the receipt. Go and fetch it. It's a lovely dress. It'll suit you.'

'You think you're funny,' she said.

'I've paid a fiver for this joke. Hurry, Alice, or the shop'll be shut.' But she got her own back calling up the stairs, 'I won't look worse than what you do with that split lip.' Everyone in the house could hear her, the old man in the café, his wife in the parlour, the customers at the counter. He imagined their smiles. 'Go it, Alice, what an ugly pair you are.' He didn't really suffer; he had been fed the poison from boyhood drop by drop: he hardly noticed its bitterness now.

He went to the window and opened it and scratched on the sill. The kitten came to him, making little rushes along the drain pipe, feinting at his hand. 'You little bitch,' he said, 'you little bitch.' He took a small twopenny carton of cream out of his overcoat pocket and spilt it in his soap-dish. She stopped playing and rushed at him with a tiny cry. He picked her up by the scruff and put her on top of his chest of drawers with the cream. She wriggled from his hand, she was no larger than the rat he'd trained in the home, but softer. He scratched her behind the ear and she struck back at him in a preoccupied way. Her tongue quivered on the surface of the milk.

Dinner-time, he told himself. With all that money he could go anywhere. He could have a slap-up meal at Simpson's with the business men; cut off the joint and any number of veg.

When he got by the public call-box in the dark corner below the stairs he caught his name 'Raven'. The old man said, 'He always has a room here. He's been away.'

'You,' a strange voice said, 'what's your name—Alice—show me his room. Keep an eye on the door, Saunders.'

Raven went on his knees inside the telephone-box. He left the door ajar because he never liked to be shut in. He couldn't see out, but he had no need to see the owner of the voice to recognize: police, plain clothes, the Yard accent. The man was so near that the floor of the box vibrated to his tread. Then he came down again. 'There's no one there. He's taken his hat and coat. He must have gone out.'

'He might have,' the old man said. 'He's a soft-walking sort of fellow.'

The stranger began to question them. 'What's he like?'

The old man and the girl both said in a breath, 'A hare-lip.'

'That's useful,' the detective said. 'Don't touch his room. I'll be sending a man round to take his fingerprints. What sort of a fellow is he?'

Raven could hear every word. He couldn't imagine what they were after. He knew he'd left no clues; he wasn't a man who imagined things; he knew. He carried the picture of that room and flat in his brain as clearly as if he had the photographs. They had nothing against him. It had been against orders to keep the automatic, but he could feel it now safe under his armpit. Besides, if they had picked up any clue they'd have stopped him at Dover. He listened to the voices with a dull anger; he wanted his dinner; he hadn't had a square meal for twenty-four hours, and now with two hundred pounds in his pocket he could buy anything, anything.

'I can believe it,' the old man said. 'Why, tonight he even made fun of my poor wife's crib.'

'A bloody bully,' the girl said. 'I shan't be sorry when you've locked him up.'

He told himself with surprise: they hate me.

She said, 'He's ugly through and through. That lip of his. It gives you the creeps.'

'An ugly customer all right.'

'I wouldn't have him in the house,' the old man said. 'But he pays. You can't turn away someone who pays. Not in these days.'

'Has he friends?'

'You make me laugh,' Alice said. 'Him friends. What would he do with friends?'

He began to laugh quietly to himself on the floor of the little dark box: that's me they're talking about, me: staring up at the pane of glass with his hand on his automatic.

'You seem kind of bitter? What's he been doing to you? He was going to give you a dress, wasn't he?'

'Just his dirty joke.'

'You were going to take it, though.'

'You bet I wasn't. Do you think I'd take a present from him? I was going to sell it back to them and show him the money, and wasn't I going to laugh?'

He thought again with bitter interest: they hate me. If they open this door, I'll shoot the lot.

'I'd like to take a swipe at that lip of his. I'd laugh. I'd say I'd laugh.'

'I'll put a man,' the strange voice said, 'across the road. Tip him the wink if our man comes in.' The café door closed.

'Oh,' the old man said,' I wish my wife was here. She would not miss this for ten shillings.'

'I'll give her a ring,' Alice said. 'She'll be chatting at Mason's. She can come right over and bring Mrs Mason too.

Let 'em all join in the fun. It was only a week ago Mrs Mason said she didn't want to see his ugly face in her shop again.'

'Yes, be a good girl, Alice. Give her a ring.'

Raven reached up his hand and took the bulb out of the fitment; he stood up and flattened himself against the wall of the box. Alice opened the door and shut herself in with him. He put his hand over her mouth before she had time to cry. He said, 'Don't you put the pennies in the box. I'll shoot if you do. I'll shoot if you call out. Do what I say.' He whispered in her ear. They were as close together as if they were in a single bed. He could feel her crooked shoulder pressed against his chest. He said, 'Lift the receiver. Pretend you're talking to the old woman. Go on. I don't care a damn if I shoot you. Say, hello, Frau Groener.'

'Hello, Frau Groener.'

'Spill the whole story.'

'They are after Raven.'

'Why?'

'That five-pound note. They were waiting at the shop.'

'What do you mean?'

'They'd got its number. It was stolen.'

He'd been double-crossed. His mind worked with mechanical accuracy like a ready-reckoner. You only had to supply it with the figures and it gave you the answer. He was possessed by a deep sullen rage. If Mr Cholmondeley had been in the box with him, he would have shot him: he wouldn't have cared a damn.

'Stolen from where?'

'You ought to know that.'

'Don't give me any lip. Where from?'

He didn't even know who Cholmondeley's employers were. It was obvious what had happened: they hadn't trusted him. They had arranged this so that he might be put away. A newsboy went by outside calling, 'Ultimatum. Ultimatum.' His mind registered the fact, but no more: it seemed to have nothing to do with him. He repeated. 'Where from?'

'I don't know. I don't remember.'

With the automatic stuck against her back he even tried to plead with her. 'Remember, can't you? It's important. I didn't do it.'

'I bet you didn't,' she said bitterly into the unconnected 'phone.

'Give me a break. All I want you to do is remember.'

She said, 'On your life I won't.'

'I gave you that dress, didn't I?'

'You didn't. You tried to plant your money, that's all. You didn't know they'd circulated the numbers to every shop in town. We've even got them in the café.'

'If I'd done it, why should I want to know where they came from?'

'It'll be a bigger laugh than ever if you get jugged for something you didn't do.'

'Alice,' the old man called from the café, 'is she coming?'

'I'll give you ten pounds.'

'Phoney notes. No thank you, Mr Generosity.'

'Alice,' the old man called again; they could hear him coming along the passage.

'Justice,' he said bitterly, jabbing her between the ribs with the automatic.

'You don't need to talk about justice,' she said. 'Driving me like I was in prison. Hitting me when you feel like it. Spilling ash all over the floor. I've got enough to do with your slops. Milk in the soap-dish. Don't talk about justice.'

Pressed against him in the tiny dark box she suddenly came alive to him. He was so astonished that he forgot the old man till he had the door of the box open. He whispered passionately out of the dark, 'Don't say a word or I'll plug you.' He had them both out of the box in front of him. He said, 'Understand this. They aren't going to get me. I'm not going to prison. I don't care a damn if I plug one of you. I don't care if I hang. My father hanged... what's good enough for him... Get along in front of me up to my room. There's hell coming to somebody for this.'

When he had them there he locked the door. A customer was ringing the café bell over and over again. He turned on them. 'I've got a good mind to plug you. Telling them about my hare-lip. Why can't you play fair?' He went to the window; he knew there was an easy way down—that was why he had chosen the room. The kitten caught his eye, prowling like a toy tiger in a cage up and down the edge of the chest of drawers, afraid to jump. He lifted her up and threw her on his bed; she tried to bite his finger as she went; then he got through on to the leads. The clouds were massing up across the moon, and the earth seemed to move with them, an icy barren globe, through the vast darkness.

4

Anne Crowder walked up and down the small room in her heavy tweed coat; she didn't want to waste a shilling on the gas meter, because she wouldn't get her shilling's worth before morning. She told herself, I'm lucky to have got that job. I'm glad to be going off to work again, but she wasn't convinced. It was eight now; they would have four hours together till midnight. She would have to deceive him and tell him she was catching the nine o'clock, not the five o'clock train, or he would be sending her back to bed early. He was like that. No romance. She smiled with tenderness and blew on her fingers.

The telephone at the bottom of the house was ringing. She thought it was the doorbell and ran to the mirror in the wardrobe. There wasn't enough light from the dull globe to tell her if her make-up would stand the brilliance of the Astoria Dance Hall. She began making up all over again; if she was pale he would take her home early.

The landlady stuck her head in at the door and said, 'It's your gentleman. On the 'phone.'

'On the 'phone?'

'Yes,' the landlady said, sidling in for a good chat, 'he sounded all of a jump. Impatient, I should say. Half barked my head off when I wished him good evening.'

'Oh,' she said despairingly, 'it's only his way. You mustn't mind him.'

'He's going to call off the evening, I suppose,' the landlady said. 'It's always the same. You girls who go travelling round never get a square deal. You said Dick Whittington, didn't you?'

'No, no, Aladdin.'

She pelted down the stairs. She didn't care a damn who saw her hurry. She said, 'Is that you, darling?' There was always something wrong with their telephone. She could hear his voice so hoarsely vibrating against her ear she could hardly realize it was his. He said, 'You've been ages. This is a public call-box. I've put in my last pennies. Listen, Anne, I can't be with you. I'm sorry. It's work. We're on to the man in that safe robbery I told you about. I shall be out all night on it. We've traced one of the notes.' His voice beat excitedly against her ear.

She said, 'Oh, that's fine, darling. I know you wanted...' but she couldn't keep it up. 'Jimmy,' she said, 'I shan't be seeing you again. For weeks.'

He said, 'It's tough, I know. I'd been thinking... Listen. You'd better not catch that early train, what's the point? There isn't a nine o'clock. I've been looking them up.'

'I know. I just said...'

'You'd better go to-night. Then you can get a rest before rehearsals. Midnight from Euston.'

'But I haven't packed...'

He took no notice. It was his favourite occupation planning things, making decisions. He said, 'If I'm near the station, I'll try...'

'Your two minutes up.'

He said, 'Oh hell, I've no coppers. Darling, I love you.'

She struggled to bring it out herself, but his name stood in the way, impeded her tongue. She could never bring it out without hesitation—'Ji—' The line went dead on her. She thought bitterly: he oughtn't to go out without coppers. She thought: it's not right, cutting off a detective like that. Then she went back up the stairs; she wasn't crying; it was just as if somebody had died and left her alone and scared, scared of the new faces and the new job, the harsh provincial jokes, the fellows who were fresh, scared of herself, scared of not being able to remember clearly how good it was to be loved.

The landlady said, 'I just thought so. Why not come down and have a cup of tea and a good chat? It does you good to talk. Really good. A doctor said to me once it clears the lungs. Stands to reason, don't it? You can't help getting dust up and a good talk blows it out. I wouldn't bother to pack yet. There's hours and hours. My old man would never of died if he'd talked more. Stands to reason. It was something poisonous in his throat cut him off in his prime. If he'd talked more he'd have blown it out. It's better than spitting.'

5

The crime reporter couldn't make himself heard. He kept on trying to say to the chief reporter, 'I've got some stuff on that safe robbery.'

The chief reporter had had too much to drink. They'd all had too much to drink. He said, 'You can go home and read The Decline and Fall...'

The crime reporter was a young earnest man who didn't drink and didn't smoke; it shocked him when someone was sick in one of the telephone-boxes. He shouted at the top of his voice: 'They've traced one of the notes.'

'Write it down, write it down, old boy,' the chief reporter said, 'and then smoke it.'

'The man escaped—held up a girl—it's a terribly good story,' the earnest young man said. He had an Oxford accent; that was why they had made him crime reporter; it was the newseditor's joke.

'Go home and read Gibbon.'

The earnest young man caught hold of someone's sleeve. 'What's the matter? Are you all crazy? Isn't there going to be any paper or what?'

'War in forty-eight hours,' somebody bellowed at him.

'But this is a wonderful story I've got. He held up a girl and an old man, climbed out of a window...'

'Go home. There won't be any room for it.'

'They've killed the annual report of the Kensington Kitten Club.'

'No Round the Shops.'

'They've made the Limehouse Fire a News in Brief.'

'Go home and read Gibbon.'

'He got clean away with a policeman watching the front door. The Flying Squad's out. He's armed. The police are taking revolvers. It's a lovely story.'

The chief reporter said, 'Armed! Go away and put your head in a glass of milk. We'll all be armed in a day or two. They've published their evidence. It's clear as daylight a Serb shot him. Italy's supporting the ultimatum. They've got forty-eight hours to climb down. If you want to buy armament shares hurry and make your fortune.'

'You'll be in the army this day week,' somebody said.

'Oh no,' the young man said, 'no, I won't be that. You see I'm a pacifist.'

The man who was sick in the telephone-box said, 'I'm going home. There wouldn't be any room in the paper if the Bank of England was blown up.'

A little thin piping voice said, 'My copy's going in.'

'I tell you there isn't any room.'

'There'll be room for mine. Gas Masks for All. Special Air Raid Practices for Civilians in every town of more than fifty thousand inhabitants.' He giggled.

'The funny thing is—it's—it's—' but nobody ever heard what it was: a boy opened the door and flung them in a pull of the middle page: damp letters on a damp grey sheet; the headlines came off on the hands: 'Yugoslavia Asks for Time. Adriatic Fleet at War Stations. Paris Rioters Break into Italian Embassy.' Everyone was suddenly quite quiet as an aeroplane went by; driving low overhead through the dark, heading south, a scarlet tail-lamp, pale transparent wings in the moonlight. They watched it through the great glass ceiling, and suddenly nobody wanted to have another drink.

The chief reporter said, 'I'm tired. I'm going to bed.'

'Shall I follow up this story?' the crime reporter asked.

'If it'll make you happy, but That's the only news from now on.'

They stared up at the glass ceiling, the moon, the empty sky.

6

The station clock marked three minutes to midnight. The ticket collector at the barrier said, 'There's room in the front.'

'A friend's seeing me off,' Anne Crowder said. 'Can't I get in at this end and go up front when we start?'

'They've locked the doors.'

She looked desperately past him. They were turning out the lights in the buffet; no more trains from that platform. 'You'll have to hurry, miss.'

The poster of an evening paper caught her eye and as she ran down the train, looking back as often as she was able, she couldn't help remembering that war might be declared before they met again. He would go to it; he always did what other people did, she told herself with irritation, although she knew it was his reliability she loved. She wouldn't have loved him if he'd been eccentric, had his own opinions about things; she lived too closely to thwarted genius, to second touring company actresses who thought they ought to be Cochran stars, to admire difference. She wanted her man to be ordinary, she wanted to be able to know what he'd say next.

A line of lamp-struck faces went by her; the train was full, so full that in the first-class carriages you saw strange shy awkward people who were not at ease in the deep seats, who feared the ticket-collector would turn them out. She gave up the search for a third-class carriage, opened a door, dropped her Woman and Beauty on the only seat and struggled back to the window over legs and protruding suitcases. The engine was getting up steam, the smoke blew back up the platform, it was difficult to see as far as the barrier.

A hand pulled at her sleeve. 'Excuse me,' a fat man said, 'if you've quite finished with that window. I want to buy some chocolate.'

She said, 'Just one moment, please. Somebody's seeing me off.'

'He's not here. It's too late. You can't monopolize the window like that. I must have some chocolate.' He swept her on one side and waved an emerald ring under the light. She tried to look over his shoulder to the barrier; he almost filled the window. He called 'Boy, Boy!' waving the emerald ring. He said, 'What chocolate have you got? No, not Motorist's, not Mexican. Something sweet.'

Suddenly through a crack she saw Mather. He was past the barrier, he was coming down the train looking for her, looking in all the third-class carriages, running past the first-class. She implored the fat man: 'Please, please do let me come. I can see my friend.'

'In a moment. In a moment. Have you Nestle? Give me a shilling packet.'

'Please let me.'

'Haven't you anything smaller,' the boy said, 'than a ten-shilling note?'

Mather went by, running past the first-class. She hammered on the window, but he didn't hear her, among the whistles and the beat of trolley wheels, the last packing cases rolling into the van. Doors slammed, a whistle blew, the train began to move.

'Please. Please.'

'I must get my change,' the fat man said, and the boy ran beside the carriage counting the shillings into his palm. When she got to the window and leant out they were past the platform, she could only see a small figure on a wedge of asphalt who couldn't see her. An elderly woman said,' You oughtn't to lean out like that. It's dangerous.'

She trod on their toes getting back to her seat, she felt unpopularity well up all around her, everyone was thinking,' She oughtn't to be in the carriage. What's the good of our paying first-class fares when...' But she wouldn't cry; she was fortified by all the conventional remarks which came automatically to her mind about spilt milk and it will be all the same in fifty years. Nevertheless she noted with deep dislike on the label dangling from the fat man's suitcase his destination, which was the same as hers, Nottwich. He sat opposite her with the Passing Show and the Evening News and the Financial Times on his lap eating sweet milk chocolate.

Chapter 2

1

RAVEN walked with his handkerchief over his lip across Soho Square, Oxford Street, up Charlotte Street. It was dangerous but not so dangerous as showing his hare-lip. He turned to the left and then to the right into a narrow street where big-breasted women in aprons called across to each other and a few solemn children scouted up the gutter. He stopped by a door with a brass plate, Dr Alfred Yogel on the second floor, on the first floor the North American Dental Company. He went upstairs and rang the bell. There was a smell of greens from below and somebody had drawn a naked torso in pencil on the wall.

A woman in nurse's uniform opened the door, a woman with a mean lined face and untidy grey hair. Her uniform needed washing; it was spotted with grease-marks and what might have been blood or iodine. She brought with her a harsh smell of chemicals and disinfectants. When she saw Raven holding his handkerchief over his mouth she said, 'The dentist's on the floor below.'

'I want to see Dr Yogel.'

She looked him over closely, suspiciously, running her eyes down his dark coat. 'He's busy.'

'I can wait.'

One naked globe swung behind her head in the dingy passage. 'He doesn't generalry see people as late as this.'

'I'll pay for the trouble,' Raven said. She judged him with just the same appraising stare as the doorkeeper at a shady nightclub. She said, 'You can come in.' He followed her into a waiting-room: the same bare globe, a chair, a round oak table splashed with dark paint. She shut him in and he heard her voice start in the next room. It went on and on. He picked up the only magazine, Good Housekeeping of eighteen months back, and began mechanically to read: 'Bare walls are very popular today, perhaps one picture to give the necessary point of colour...'

The nurse opened the door and jerked her hand. 'He'll see you.' Dr Yogel was washing his hands in a fixed basin behind his long yellow desk and swivel chair. There was no other furniture in the room except a kitchen chair, a cabinet and a long couch. His hair was jet-black; it looked, as if it had been dyed, and there was not much of it; it was plastered in thin strands across the scalp. When he turned he showed a plump hard bonhomous face, a thick sensual mouth. He said, 'And what can we do for you?' You felt he was more accustomed to deal with women than with men. The nurse stood harshly behind waiting.

Raven lowered his handkerchief. He said, 'Can you do anything about this lip quickly?'

Dr Yogel came up and prodded it with a little fat forefinger. 'I'm not a surgeon.'

Raven said, 'I can pay.'

Dr Yogel said, 'It's a job for a surgeon. It's not in my line at all.'

'I know that,' Raven said, and caught the quick flicker of glances between the nurse and Dr Yogel. Dr Yogel lifted up the lip on each side; his fingernails were not quite clean. He watched Raven carefully and said, 'If you come back tomorrow at ten...' His breath smelt faintly of brandy.

'No,' Raven said. 'I want it done now at once.'

'Ten pounds,' Dr Yogel said quickly.

'All right.'

'In cash.'

'I've got it with me.'

Dr Yogel sat down at his desk. 'And now if you'll give me your name...'

'You don't need to know my name.'

Dr Yogel said gently: 'Any name...'

'Chumley, then.'

'CHOLMO...'

'No. Spell it CHUMLEY.'

Dr Yogel filled up a slip of paper and handed it to the nurse. She went outside and closed the door behind her. Dr Yogel went to the cabinet and brought out a tray of knives. Raven said, 'The light's bad.'

'I'm used to it,' Dr Yogel said. 'I've a good eye.' But as he held up a knife to the light his hand very slightly trembled. He said softly, 'Lie down on the couch, old man.'

Raven lay down. He said, 'I knew a girl who came to you. Name of Page. She said you did her trick fine.' Dr Yogel said, 'She oughtn't to talk about it.'

'Oh,' Raven said, 'you are safe with me. I don't go back on a fellow who treats me right.' Dr Yogel took a case like a portable gramophone out of his cabinet and carried it over to the couch. He produced a long tube and a mask. He smiled gently and said, 'We don't run to anaesthetists here, old man.'

'Stop,' Raven said, 'you're not going to give me gas.'

'It would hurt without it, old man,' Dr Yogel said, approaching with the mask, 'it would hurt like hell.'

Raven sat up and pushed the mask aside. 'I won't have it,' he said, 'not gas. I've never had gas. I've never passed out yet. I like to see what's going on.'

Dr Yogel laughed gently and pulled at Raven's lip in a playful way. 'Better get used to it, old man. We'll all be gassed in a day or two.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, it looks like war, doesn't it?' Dr Yogel said, talking rapidly and unwinding more tube, turning screws in a soft, shaking, inexorable way. 'The Serbs can't shoot a Minister of War like that and get away with it. Italy's ready to come in. And the French are warming up. We'll be in it ourselves inside a week.'

Raven said, 'All that because an old man...' He explained, 'I haven't read the papers.'

'I wish I'd known beforehand,' Dr Yogel said, making conversation, fixing his cylinder. 'I'd have made a fortune in munition shares. They've gone up to the sky, old man. Now lean back. It won't take a moment.' He again approached the mask. He said, 'You've only got to breathe deep, old man.'

Raven said, 'I told you I wouldn't have gas. Get that straight. You can cut me about as much as you like, but I won't have gas.'

'It's very silly of you, old man,' Dr Yogel said. 'It's going to hurt.' He went back to the cabinet and again picked up a knife, but his hand shook more than ever. He was frightened of something. And then Raven heard from outside the tiny tinkle a telephone makes when the receiver is lifted. He jumped up from the couch; it was bitterly cold, but Dr Yogel was sweating; he stood by the cabinet holding his surgical knife, unable to say a word. Raven said, 'Keep quiet. Don't speak.' He flung the door suddenly open and there was the nurse in the little dim hall with the telephone at her ear. Raven stood sideways so that he could keep his eye on both of them. 'Put back that receiver,' he said. She put it back, watching him with her little mean conscienceless eyes. He said furiously, 'You double-crossing—' He said, 'I've got a mind to shoot you both.'

'Old man,' Dr Yogel said, 'old man. You've got it all wrong,' but the nurse said nothing. She had all the guts in their partnership, she was toughened by a long career of illegalities, by not a few deaths. Raven said, 'Get away from that 'phone.' He took the knife out of Dr Yogel's hand and hacked and sawed at the telephone wire. He was touched by something he had never felt before: a sense of injustice stammered on his tongue. These people were of his own kind; they didn't belong inside the legal borders; for the second time in one day he had been betrayed by the lawless. He had always been alone, but never so alone as this. The telephone wire gave. He wouldn't speak another word for fear his temper might master him and he might shoot. This wasn't the time for shooting. He went downstairs in a dark loneliness of spirit, his handkerchief over his face, and from the little wireless shop at the street corner heard, 'We have received the following notice...' The same voice followed him down the street from the open windows of the little impoverished homes, the suave expressionless voice from every house: 'New Scotland Yard. Wanted. James Raven. Aged about twenty-eight. Easily recognizable from his hare-lip. A little above the middle height. Last seen wearing a dark overcoat and a black felt hat. Any information leading to the arrest...' Raven walked away from the voice, out into the traffic of Oxford Street, bearing south.

There were too many things he didn't understand: this war they were talking of, why he had been double-crossed. He wanted to find Cholmondeley. Cholmondeley was of no account, he was acting under orders, but if he found Cholmondeley he could squeeze out of him... He was harassed, hunted, lonely, he bore with him a sense of great injustice and a curious pride. Going down the Charing Cross Road, past the music shops and the rubber goods shops, he swelled with it: after all it needed a man to start a war as he was doing.

He had no idea where Cholmondeley lived; the only clue he had was an accommodation address. It occurred to him there was a faint chance that if he watched the small shop to which Cholmondeley's letters were sent he might see him: a very faint chance, but it was strengthened by the fact of his escape. Already the news was on the air, it would be in the evening papers, Cholmondeley might want to clear out of the way for a while, and there was just a possibility that before he went he would call for letters. But that depended on whether he used that address for other letters besides Raven's. Raven wouldn't have believed there was one chance in a thousand if it were not that Cholmondeley was a fool. You didn't have to eat many ices with him to learn that.

The shop was in a side street opposite a theatre. It was a tiny one-roomed place in which was sold nothing above the level of Film Fun and Breezy Stories. There were postcards from Paris in sealed envelopes, American and French magazines, and books on flagellation in paper jackets for which the pimply youth or his sister, whoever was in the shop, charged twenty shillings, fifteen shillings back if you returned the book. It wasn't an easy shop to watch. A woman policeman kept an eye on the tarts at the corner and opposite there was just the long blank theatre wall, the gallery door. Against the wall you were as exposed as a fly against wall-paper, unless, he thought, waiting for the lights to flash green and let him pass, unless—the play was popular.

And it was popular. Although the doors wouldn't open for another hour, there was quite a long queue for the gallery. Raven hired a camp stool with almost his last small change and sat down. The shop was only just across the way. The youth wasn't in charge, but his sister. She sat there just inside the door in an old green dress that might have been stripped from one of the billiard tables in the pub next door. She had a square face that could never have looked young, a squint that her heavy steel spectacles did nothing to disguise. She might have been any age from twenty to forty, a parody of a woman, dirty and depraved, crouched under the most lovely figures, the most beautiful vacant faces the smut photographers could hire.

Raven watched: with a handkerchief over his mouth, one of sixty in the gallery queue, he watched. He saw a young man stop and eye Plaisirs de Paris furtively and hurry on; he saw an old man go into the shop and come out again with a brown-paper parcel. Somebody from the queue went across and bought cigarettes.

An elderly woman in pince-nez sat beside him. She said over her shoulder, 'That's why I always liked Galsworthy. He was a gentleman. You knew where you were, if you know what I mean.'

'It always seems to be the Balkans.'

'I liked Loyalties.'

'He was such a humane man.'

A man stood between Raven and the shop holding up a little square of paper. He put it in his mouth and held up another square. A tart ambled by on the other side of the road and said something to the girl in the shop. The man put the second piece of paper in his mouth.

'They say the fleet...'

'He makes you think. That's what I like.'

Raven thought: if he doesn't come before the queue begins to move I'll have to go.

'Anything in the papers?'

'Nothing new.'

The man in the road took the papers out of his mouth and began to tear them and fold them and tear them. Then he opened them out and it was a paper St George's Cross, blowing flimsily in the cold wind.

'He used to subscribe heavily to the Anti-Vivisection Society. Mrs Milbanke told me. She showed me one of his cheques with his signature.'

'He was really humane.'

'And a really great writer.'

A girl and a boy who looked happy applauded the man with the paper flag and he took off his cap and began to come down the queue collecting coppers. A taxi drew up at the end of the street and a man got out. It was Cholmondeley. He went into the bookshop and the girl got up and followed him. Raven counted his money. He had two and sixpence and a hundred and ninety-five pounds in stolen notes he could do nothing with. He sank his face deeper in his handkerchief and got up hurriedly like a man taken ill. The paper-tearer reached him, held out his cap, and Raven saw with envy the odd dozen pennies, a sixpence, a threepenny bit. He would have given a hundred pounds for the contents of that cap. He pushed the man roughly and walked away.

At the other end of the road there was a taxi rank. He stood there bowed against the wall, a sick man, until Cholmondeley came out.

He said, 'Follow that taxi,' and sank back with a sense of relief, moving back up Charing Cross Road, Tottenham Court Road, the Euston Road where all the bicycles had been taken in for the night and the second-hand car dealers from that end of Great Portland Street were having a quick one, before they bore their old school ties and their tired tarnished bonhomie back to their lodgings. He wasn't used to being hunted; this was better: to hunt.

Nor did the meter fail him. He had a shilling to spare when Mr Cholmondeley led the way in by the Euston war memorial to the great smoky entrance and rashly he gave it to the driver: rashly because there was a long wait ahead of him with nothing but his hundred and ninety-five pounds to buy a sandwich with. For Mr Cholmondeley led the way with two porters behind him to the left-luggage counter, depositing there three suitcases, a portable typewriter, a bag of golf clubs, a small attache case and a hat-box. Raven heard him ask from which platform the midnight train went.

Raven sat down in the great hall beside a model of Stephen-son's 'Rocket'. He had to think. There was only one midnight train. If Cholmondeley was going to report, his employers were somewhere in the smoky industrial north; for there wasn't a stop before Nottwich. But again he was faced with his wealthy poverty; the numbers of the notes had been circulated everywhere; the booking clerks would almost certainly have them. The trail for a moment seemed to stop at the barrier to Number 3 platform.

But slowly a plan did form in Raven's mind as he sat under the 'Rocket' among the bundles and crumbs of sandwich-eaters. He had a chance, for it was possible that the ticket-collectors on the trains had not been given the numbers. It was the kind of loophole the authorities might forget. There remained, of course, this objection: that the note would eventually give away his presence on the north-bound tram. He would have to take a ticket to the limit of the journey and it would be easy enough to trace him to the town where he alighted. The hunt would follow him, but there might be a time lag of half a day in which his own hunt could get nearer to his prey. Raven could never realize other people; they didn't seem to him to live in the same way as he lived; and though he bore a grudge against Mr Cholmondeley, hated him enough to kill him, he couldn't imagine Mr Cholmondeley's own fears and motives. He was the greyhound and Mr Cholmondeley only the mechanical hare; but in this case the greyhound was chased in its turn by another mechanical hare.

He was hungry, but he couldn't risk changing a note; he hadn't even a copper to pass him into the lavatory. After a while he got up and walked the station to keep warm among the frozen smuts, the icy turbulence. At eleven-thirty he saw from behind a chocolate machine Mr Cholmondeley fetch his luggage, followed him at a distance until he passed through the barrier and down the length of the lit train. The Christmas crowds had begun; they were different from the ordinary crowd, you had a sense of people going home. Raven stood back in the shadow of an indicator and heard their laughter and calls, saw smiling faces raised under the great lamps; the pillars of the station had been decorated to look like enormous crackers. The suitcases were full of presents, a girl had a sprig of holly in her coat, high up under the roof dangled a bough of mistletoe lit by flood-lamps. When Raven moved he could feel the automatic rubbing beneath his arm.

At two minutes to twelve Raven ran forward, the engine smoke was blowing back along the platform, the doors were slammed. He said to the collector at the barrier: 'I haven't time to get a ticket. I'll pay on the train.'

He tried the first carriages. They were full and locked. A porter shouted to him to go up front, and he ran on. He was only just in time. He couldn't find a seat, but stood in the corridor with his face pressed against the pane to hide his hare-lip, watching London recede from him: a lit signal box and inside a saucepan of cocoa heating on the stove, a signal going green, a long line of blackened houses standing rigid against the cold-starred sky; watching because there was nothing else to do to keep his lip hidden, but like a man watching something he loves slide back from him out of his reach.

2

Mather walked back up the platform. He was sorry to have missed Anne, but it wasn't important. He would be seeing her again in a few weeks. It was not that his love was any less than hers but that his mind was more firmly anchored. He was on a job; if he pulled it off, he might be promoted; they could marry. Without any difficulty at all he wiped his mind clear of her.

Saunders was waiting on the other side of the barrier. Mather said, 'We'll be off.'

'Where next?'

'Charlie's.'

They sat in the back seat of a car and dived back into the narrow dirty streets behind the station. A prostitute put her tongue out at them. Saunders said, 'What about J-J-J-Joe's?'

'I don't think so, but we'll try it.'

The car drew up two doors away from a fried-fish shop. A man sitting beside the driver got down and waited for orders. 'Round to the back, Frost,' Mather said. He gave him two minutes and then hammered on the door of the fish shop. A light went on inside and Mather could see through the window the long counter, the stock of old newspapers, the dead grill. The door opened a crack. He put his foot in and pushed it wide. He said,'

'Evening, Charlie,' looking round.

'Mr Mather,' Charlie said. He was as fat as an eastern eunuch and swayed his great hips coyly when he walked like a street woman.

'I want to talk to you,' Mather said.

'Oh, I'm delighted,' Charlie said. 'Step this way, Mr Mather. I was just off to bed.'

'I bet you were,' Mather said. 'Got a full house down there tonight?'

'Oh, Mr Mather. What a wag you are. Just one or two Oxford boys.'

'Listen. I'm looking for a fellow with a hare-lip. About twenty-eight years old.'

'He's not here.'

'Dark coat, black hat.'

'I don't know him, Mr Mather.'

'I'd like to take a look over your basement.'

'Of course, Mr Mather. There are just one or two Oxford boys. Do you mind if I go down first? Just to introduce you, Mr Mather.' He led the way down the stone stairs. 'It's safer.'

'I can look after myself,' Mather said. 'Saunders, stay in the shop.'

Charlie opened a door. 'Now, boys, don't be scared. Mr Mather's a friend of mine.' They faced him in an ominous line at the end of the room, the Oxford boys, with their broken noses and their cauliflower ears, the dregs of pugilism.

'Evening,' Mather said. The tables had been swept clear of drink and cards. He plodded down the last steps into the stone-floored room. Charlie said, 'Now, boys, you don't need to get scared.'

'Why don't you get a few Cambridge boys into this club?' Mather said.

' Oh, what a wag you are, Mr Mather.'

They followed him with their eyes as he crossed the floor; they wouldn't speak to him; he was the Enemy. They didn't have to be diplomats like Charlie, they could show their hatred. They watched every move he made. Mather said, 'What are you keeping in that cupboard?' Their eyes followed him as he went towards the cupboard door.

Charlie said, 'Give the boys a chance, Mr Mather. They don't mean any harm. This is one of the best-run clubs—' Mather pulled open the door of the cupboard. Four women fell into the room. They were like toys turned from the same mould with their bright brittle hair. Mather laughed. He said, 'The joke's on me. That's a thing I never expected in one of your clubs, Charlie. Good night all.' The girls got up and dusted themselves. None of the men spoke.

'Really, Mr Mather,' Charlie said, blushing all the way upstairs. 'I do wish this hadn't happened in my club. I don't know what you'll think. But the boys didn't mean any harm. Only you know how it is. They don't like to leave their sisters alone.'

'What's that?' Saunders said at the top of the stairs.

'So I said they could bring their sisters and the dear girls sit around...'

'What's that?' Saunders said. 'G-g-g-girls?'

'Don't forget, Charlie,' Mather said. 'Fellow with a harelip. You'd better let me know if he turns up here. You don't want your club closed.'

'Is there a reward?'

'There'd be a reward for you all right.'

They got back into the car. 'Pick up Frost,' Mather said.

'Then Joe's.' He took his notebook out and crossed off another name. 'And after Joe's six more—'

'We shan't be f-f-finished till three,' Saunders said.

'Routine. He's out of town by now. But sooner or later he'll cash another note.'

'Finger-prints?'

'Plenty. There was enough on his soap-dish to stock an album. Must be a clean sort of fellow. Oh, he doesn't stand a chance. It's just a question of time.'

The lights of Tottenham Court Road flashed across their faces. The windows of the big shops were still lit up. 'That's a nice bedroom suite,' Mather said.

'It's a lot of f-fuss, isn't it,' Saunders said. 'About a few notes, I mean. When there may be a w-w-w-w...'

Mather said, 'If those fellows over there had our efficiency there mightn't be a war. We'd have caught the murderer by now. Then all the world could see whether the Serbs... Oh,' he said softly, as Heal's went by, a glow of soft colour, a gleam of steel, allowing himself about the furthest limits of his fancy, 'I'd like to be tackling a job like that. A murderer with all the world watching.'

'Just a few n-notes,' Saunders complained.

'No, you are wrong,' Mather said, 'it's the routine which counts. Five-pound notes today. It may be something better next time. But it's the routine which matters. That's how I see it,' he said, letting his anchored mind stretch the cable as far as it could go as they drove round St Giles's Circus and on towards Seven Dials, stopping every hole the thief might take one by one. 'It doesn't matter to me if there is a war. When it's over I'll still want to be going on with this job. It's the organization I like. I always want to be on the side that organizes. On the other you get your geniuses, of course, but you get all your shabby tricksters, you get all the cruelty and the selfishness and the pride.'

You got it all, except the pride, in Joe's where they looked up from their bare tables and let him run the place through, the extra aces back in the sleeve, the watered spirit out of sight, facing him each with his individual mark of cruelty and egotism. Even pride was perhaps there in a corner, bent over a sheet of paper, playing an endless game of double noughts and crosses against himself because there was no one else in that club he deigned to play with.

Mather again crossed off a name and drove south-west towards Kennington. All over London there were other cars doing the same: he was part of an organization. He did not want to be a leader, he did not even wish to give himself up to some God-sent fanatic of a leader, he liked to feel that he was one of thousands more or less equal working for a concrete end—not equality of opportunity, not government by the people or by the richest or by the best, but simply to do away with crime which meant uncertainty. He liked to be certain, to feel that one day quite inevitably he would marry Anne Crowder.

The loudspeaker in the car said: 'Police cars proceed back to the King's Cross area for intensified search. Raven driven to Euston Station about seven p. m. May not have left by train.' Mather leant across to the driver, 'Right about and back to Euston.' They were by Vauxhall. Another police car came past them through the Vauxhall tunnel. Mather raised his hand. They followed it back over the river. The flood-lit clock on the Shell-Mex building showed half-past one. The light was on in the clock tower at Westminster: Parliament was having an all-night sitting as the opposition fought their losing fight against mobilization.

It was six o'clock in the morning when they drove back towards the Embankment. Saunders was asleep. He said, 'That's fine.' He was dreaming that he had no impediment in his speech; he had an independent income; he was drinking champagne with a girl; everything was fine. Mather totted things up on his notebook; he said to Saunders, 'He got on a train for sure. I'd bet you—' Then he saw that Saunders was asleep and slipped a rug across his knees and began to consider again. They turned in at the gates of New Scotland Yard.

Mather saw a light in the chief inspector's room and went up.

'Anything to report?' Cusack asked.

'Nothing. He must have caught a train, sir.'

'We've got a little to go on at this end. Raven followed somebody to Euston. We are trying to find the driver of the first car. And another thing, he went to a doctor called Yogel to try and get his lip altered. Offered some more of those notes. Still handy too with that automatic. We've got him taped. As a kid he was sent to an industrial school. He's been smart enough to keep out of our way since. I can't think why he's broken out like this. A smart fellow like that. He's blazing a trail.'

'Has he much money besides the notes?'

'We don't think so. Got an idea, Mather?'

Colour was coming into the sky above the city. Cusack switched off his table-lamp and left the room grey. 'I think I'll go to bed.'

'I suppose,' Mather said, 'that all the booking offices have the numbers of those notes?'

'Every one.'

'It looks to me,' Mather said, 'that if you had nothing but phoney notes and wanted to catch an express—'

'How do we know it was an express?'

'Yes, I don't know why I said that, sir. Or perhaps—if it was a slow train with plenty of stops near London, surely someone would have reported by this time—'

'You may be right.'

'Well, if I wanted to catch an express, I'd wait till the last minute and pay on the train. I don't suppose the ticket collectors carry the numbers.'

'I think you're right. Are you tired, Mather?'

'No.'

'Well, I am. Would you stay here and ring up Euston and King's Cross and St Pancras, all of them? Make a list of all the outgoing expresses after seven. Ask them to telephone up the line to all stations to check up on any man travelling without a ticket who paid on the train. We'll soon find out where he stepped off. Good night, Mather.'

'Good morning, sir.' He liked to be accurate.

3

There was no dawn that day in Nottwich. Fog lay over the city like a night sky with no stars. The air in the streets was clear. You have only to imagine that it was night. The first tram crawled out of its shed and took the steel track down towards the market. An old piece of newspaper blew up against the door of the Royal Theatre and flattened out. In the streets on the outskirts of Nottwich nearest the pits an old man plodded by with a pole tapping at the windows. The stationer's window in the High Street was full of Prayer Books and Bibles: a printed card remained among them, a relic of Armistice Day, like the old drab wreath of Haig poppies by the War Memorial: 'Look up, and swear by the slain of the war that you'll never forget.' Along the line a signal lamp winked green in the dark day and the lit carriages drew slowly in past the cemetery, the glue factory, over the wide tidy cement-lined river. A bell began to ring from the Roman Catholic cathedral. A whistle blew.

The packed train moved slowly into another morning: smuts were thick on all the faces, everyone had slept in his clothes. Mr Cholmondeley had eaten too many sweets; his teeth needed cleaning; his breath was sweet and stuffy. He put his head into the corridor and Raven at once turned his back and stared out at the sidings, the trucks heaped with local coal; a smell of bad fish came in from the glue factory. Mr Cholmondeley dived back across the carriage to the other side trying to make out at which platform the train was drawing in. He said: 'Excuse me,' trampling on the feet; Anne smiled softly to herself and hacked his ankle. Mr Cholmondeley glared at her. She said: 'I'm sorry,' and began to mend her face with her tissues and her powder, to bring it up to standard, so that she could bear the thought of the Royal Theatre, the little dressing-rooms and the oil-heating, the rivalry and the scandals.

'If you'll let me by,' Mr Cholmondeley said fiercely, 'I'm getting down here.'

Raven saw his ghost in the window-pane getting down. But he didn't dare follow him closely. It was almost as if a voice blown over many foggy miles, over the long swelling fields of the hunting counties, the villa'd suburbs creeping up to town, had spoken to him: 'any man travelling without a ticket,' he thought, with the slip of white paper the collector had given him in his hand. He opened the door and watched the passengers flow by him to the barrier. He needed time, and the paper in his hand would so quickly identify him. He needed time, and he realized now that he wouldn't have even so much as a twelve-hour start. They would visit every boarding house, every lodging in Nottwich; there was nowhere for him to stay.

Then it was that the idea struck him, by the slot machine on No .2 arrival platform, which thrust him finally into other people's lives, broke the world in which he walked alone.

Most of the passengers had gone now, but one girl waited for a returning porter by the buffet door. He went up to her and said, 'Can I help and carry your bags?'

' Oh, if you would,' she said. He stood with his head a little bent, so that she mightn't see his lip.

'What about a sandwich?' he said. 'It's been a hard journey.'

'Is it open,' she said, 'this early?'

He tried the door. 'Yes, it's open.'

'Is it an invitation?' she said. 'You're standing treat?'

He gazed at her with faint astonishment: her smile, the small neat face with the eyes rather too wide apart; he was more used to the absent-minded routine endearments of prostitutes than to this natural friendliness, this sense of rather lost and desperate amusement. He said, 'Oh yes. It's on me.' He carried the bags inside and hammered on the counter. 'What'll you have?' he said. In the pale light of the electric globe he kept his back to her; he didn't want to scare her yet.

'There's a rich choice,' she said. 'Bath buns, penny buns, last year's biscuits, ham sandwiches. I'd like a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee. Or will that leave you broke? If so, leave out the coffee.'

He waited till the girl behind the counter had gone again, till the other's mouth was full of sandwich so that she couldn't have screamed if she'd tried. Then he turned his face on her. He was disconcerted when she showed no repulsion, but smiled as well as she could with her mouth full. He said, 'I want your ticket. The police are after me. I'll do anything to get your ticket.'

She swallowed the bread in her mouth and began to cough.—She said, 'For God's sake, hit me on the back.' He nearly obeyed her; she'd got him rattled; he wasn't used to normal life and it upset his nerve. He said, 'I've got a gun,' and added lamely, 'I'll give you this in return.' He laid the paper on the counter and she read it with interest between the coughs. 'First class. All the way to—Why, I'll be able to get a refund on this. I call that a fine exchange, but why the gun?' He said: 'The ticket.'

'Here.'

'Now,' he said, 'you are going out of the station with me. I'm not taking any chances.'

'Why not eat your ham sandwich first?'

'Be quiet,' he said. 'I haven't the time to listen to your jokes.'

She said, 'I like he-men. My name's Anne. What's yours?' The train outside whistled, the carriages began to move, a long line of light going back into the fog, the steam blew along the platform. Raven's eyes left her for a moment; she raised her cup and dashed the hot coffee at his face. The pain drove him backwards with his hands to his eyes; he moaned like an animal; this was pain. This was what the old War Minister had felt, the woman secretary, his father when the trap sprang and the neck took the weight. His right hand felt for the automatic, his back was against the door; people were driving him to do things, to lose his head. He checked himself; with an effort he conquered the agony of the burns, the agony which drove him to kill. He said, 'I've got you covered. Pick up those cases. Go out in front of me with that paper.'

She obeyed him, staggering under the weight. The ticket collector said: 'Changed your mind? This would have taken you to Edinburgh. Do you want to break the journey?'

'Yes,' she said, 'yes. That's it.' He took out a pencil and began to write on the paper. An idea came to Anne: she wanted him to remember her and the ticket. There might be inquiries. 'No,' she said, 'I'll give it up. I don't think I'll be going on. I'll stay here,' and she went out through the barrier, thinking: he won't forget that in a hurry.

The long street ran down between the small dusty houses. A milk float clattered round a corner out of sight. She said, 'Well, can I go now?'

'You think me a fool,' he said bitterly. 'Keep on walking.'

'You might take one of these bags.' She dropped one in the road and went on; he had to pick it up. It was heavy, he carried it in his left hand, he needed his right for the automatic.

She said, 'This isn't taking us into Nottwich. We ought to have turned right at the corner.'

'I know where I'm going.'

'I wish I did.'

The little houses went endlessly on under the fog. It was very early. A woman came to the door and took in the milk. Through a window Anne saw a man shaving. She wanted to scream to him, but he might have been in another world; she could imagine his stupid stare, the slow working of the brain before he realized anything was wrong. On they went, Raven a step behind. She wondered if he were bluffing her; he must be wanted for something very serious if he was really ready to shoot.

She spoke her thoughts aloud, 'Is it murder?' and the lapse of her flippancy, the whispered fear, came to Raven like something familiar, friendly: he was used to fear. It had lived inside him for twenty years. It was normality he couldn't cope with. He answered her without strain, 'No, I'm not wanted for that.'

She challenged him, 'Then you wouldn't dare to shoot,' but he had the answer pat, the answer which never failed to convince because it was the truth. 'I'm not going to prison. I'd rather hang. My father hanged.'

She asked again, 'Where are we going?' watching all the time for her chance. He didn't answer.

'Do you know this place?' but he had said his say. And suddenly the chance was there: outside a little stationer's where the morning posters leaned, looking in the window filled with cheap notepaper, pens and ink bottles—a policeman. She felt Raven come up behind her, it was all too quick, she hadn't time to make up her mind, they were past the policeman and on down the mean road. It was too late to scream now; he was twenty yards away; there'd be no rescue. She said in a low voice, 'It must be murder.'

The repetition stung him into speech.' That's justice for you. Always thinking the worst. They've pinned a robbery on to me, and I don't even know where the notes were stolen.' A man came out of a public-house and began to wipe the steps with a wet cloth; they could smell frying bacon; the suitcases weighed on their arms. Raven couldn't change his hands for fear of leaving hold of the automatic. He said, 'If a man's born ugly, he doesn't stand a chance. It begins at school. It begins before that.'

'What's wrong with your face?' she asked with bitter amusement. There seemed hope while he talked. It must be harder to murder anyone with whom you'd had any kind of relationship. 'My lip, of course.'

'What's up with your lip?'

He said with astonishment, 'Do you mean you haven't noticed—?'

'Oh,' Anne said, 'I suppose you mean your hare-lip. I've seen worse things than that.' They had left the little dirty houses behind them. She read the name of the new street: Shakespeare Avenue. Bright-red bricks and tudor gables and half timbering, doors with stained glass, names like Restholme. These houses represented something worse than the meanness of poverty, the meanness of the spirit. They were on the very edge of Nottwich now, where the speculative builders were running up their hire-purchase houses. It occurred to Anne that he had brought her here to kill her in the scarred fields behind the housing estate, where the grass had been trampled into the clay and the stumps of trees showed where an old wood had been. Plodding on they passed a house with an open door which at any hour of the day visitors could enter and inspect, from the small square parlour to the small square bedroom and the bathroom and water closet off the landing. A big placard said:' Come in and Inspect A Cozyholme. Ten Pounds Down and a House Is Yours.'

'Are you going to buy a house?' she said with desperate humour.

He said,' I've got a hundred and ninety pounds in my pocket and I couldn't buy a box of matches with them. I tell you, I was double-crossed. I never stole these notes. A bastard gave them me.'

'That was generous.'

He hesitated outside 'Sleepy Nuik'. It was so new that the builder's paint had not been removed from the panes. He said, 'It was for a piece of work I did. I did the work well. He ought to have paid me properly. I followed him here. A bastard called Chol-mon-deley.'

He pushed her through the gate of 'Sleepy Nuik', up the unmade path and round to the back door. They were at the edge of the fog here: it was as if they were at the boundary between night and day; it faded out in long streamers into the grey winter sky. He put his shoulder against the back door and the little doll's house lock snapped at once out of the cheap rotten wood. They stood in the kitchen, a place of wires waiting for bulbs, of tubes waiting for the gas cooker. 'Get over to the wall,' he said, 'where I can watch you.'

He sat down on the floor with the pistol in his hand. He said, 'I'm tired. All night standing in that train. I can't think properly. I don't know what to do with you.'

Anne said, 'I've got a job here. I haven't a penny if I lose it. I'll give you my word I'll say nothing if you'll let me go.' She added hopelessly, 'But you wouldn't believe me.'

'People don't trouble to keep their word to me,' Raven said. He brooded darkly in his dusty corner by the sink. He said, 'I'm safe here for a while as long as you are here too.' He put his hand to his face and winced at the soreness of the burns. Anne made a movement. He said, 'Don't move. I'll shoot if you move.'

'Can't I sit down?' she said. 'I'm tired too. I've got to be on my feet all the afternoon.' But while she spoke she saw herself, bundled into a cupboard with the blood still wet. She added, 'Dressed up as a Chink. Singing.' But he wasn't listening to her; he was making his own plans in his own darkness. She tried to keep her courage up with the first song that came into her head, humming it because it reminded her of Mather, the long ride home, the 'see you tomorrow'.

'It's only Kew To you, But to me It's Paradise.'

He said, 'I've heard that tune.' He couldn't remember where: he remembered a dark night and a cold wind and hunger and the scratch of a needle. It was as if something sharp and cold were breaking in his heart with great pain. He sat there under the sink with the automatic in his hand and began to cry. He made no sound, the tears seemed to run like flies of their own will from the corners of his eyes. Anne didn't notice for a while, humming the song. 'They say that's a snow-flower a man brought from Greenland.' Then she saw. She said, 'What's the matter?'

Raven said, 'Keep back against that wall or I'll shoot.'

'You're all in.'

'That doesn't matter to you.'

'Well, I suppose I'm human,' Anne said. 'You haven't done me any harm yet.'

He said, 'This doesn't mean anything. I'm just tired.' He looked along the bare dusty boards of the unfinished kitchen. He tried to swagger. 'I'm tired of living in hotels. I'd like to fix up this kitchen. I learned to be an electrician once. I'm educated.' He said: '"Sleepy Nuik". It's a good name when you are tired. But they've gone and spelt "Nook" wrong.'

'Let me go,' Anne said. 'You can trust me. I'll not say a thing. I don't even know who you are.'

He laughed miserably. 'Trust you. I'd say I can. When you get into the town you'll see my name in the papers and my description, what I'm wearing, how old I am. I never stole the notes, but I can't put a description in of the man I want: name of Chol-mon-deley, profession double-crosser, fat, wears an emerald ring...'

'Why,' she said, 'I believe I travelled down with a man like that. I wouldn't have thought he'd have the nerve...'

'Oh, he's only the agent,' Raven said, 'but if I could find him I'd squeeze the names...'

'Why don't you give yourself up? Tell the police what happened?'

'That's a great idea, that is. Tell them it was Cholmondeley's friends got the old Czech killed. You're a bright girl.'

'The old Czech?' she exclaimed. A little more light came into the kitchen as the fog lifted over the housing estate, the wounded fields. She said, 'You don't mean what the papers are so full of?'

'That's it,' he said with gloomy pride.

'You know the man who shot him?'

'As well as myself.'

'And Cholmondeley's mixed up in it... Doesn't that mean—that everyone's all wrong?'

'They don't know a thing about it, these papers. They can't give credit where credit's due.'

'And you know and Cholmondeley. Then there won't be a war at all if you find Cholmondeley.'

' I don't care a damn whether there's a war or not. I only want to know who it is who double-crossed me. I want to get even,' he explained, looking up at her across the floor, with his hand over his mouth, hiding his lip, noticing that she was young and flushed and lovely with no more personal interest than a mangy wolf will show from the cage in the groomed well-fed bitch beyond the bars. 'A war won't do people any harm,' he said. 'It'll show them what's what, it'll give them a taste of their own medicine. I know. There's always been a war for me.' He touched the automatic. 'All that worries me is what to do with you to keep you quiet for twenty-four hours.'

She said under her breath, 'You wouldn't kill me, would you?'

'If it's the only way,' he said. 'Let me think a bit.'

'But I'd be on your side,' she implored him, looking this way and that for anything to throw, for a chance of safety.

'Nobody's on my side,' Raven said. 'I've learned that. Even a crook doctor... You see—I'm ugly. I don't pretend to be one of your handsome fellows. But I'm educated. I've thought things out.' He said quickly, 'I'm wasting time. I ought to get started.'

'What are you going to do?' she asked, scrambling to her feet.

'Oh,' he said in a tone of disappointment, 'you are scared again. You were fine when you weren't scared.' He faced her across the kitchen with the automatic pointed at her breast. He pleaded with her. 'There's no need to be scared. This lip—'

'I don't mind your lip,' she said desperately. 'You aren't bad-looking. You ought to have a girl. She'd stop you worrying about that lip.'

He shook his head. 'You're talking that way because you are scared. You can't get round me that way. But it's hard luck on you, my picking on you. You shouldn't be so afraid of death. We've all got to die. If there's a war, you'll die anyway. It's sudden and quick: it doesn't hurt,' he said, remembering the smashed skull of the old man—death was like that: no more difficult than breaking an egg.

She whispered, 'Are you going to shoot me?'

'Oh no, no,' he said, trying to calm her, 'turn your back and go over to that door. We'll find a room where I can lock you up for a few hours.' He fixed his eyes on her back; he wanted to shoot her clean: he didn't want to hurt her.

She said, 'You aren't so bad. We might have been friends if we hadn't met like this. If this was the stage-door. Do you meet girls at stage-doors?'

'Me,' he said, 'no. They wouldn't look at me.'

'You aren't ugly,' she said. 'I'd rather you had that lip than a cauliflower ear like all those fellows who think they are tough. The girls go crazy on them when they are in shorts. But they look silly in a dinner jacket.' Raven thought: if I shoot her here anyone may see her through a window; I'll shoot her upstairs in the bathroom. He said, 'Go on. Walk.'

She said, 'Let me go this afternoon. Please. I'll lose my job if I'm not at the theatre.'

They came out into the little glossy hall, which smelt of paint. She said, 'I'll give you a seat for the show.'

'Go on,' he said, 'up the stairs.'

'It's worth seeing. Alfred Bleek as the Widow Twankey.' There were only three doors on the little landing: one had ground-glass panes. 'Open the door,' he said, 'and go in there.' He decided that he would shoot her in the back as soon as she was over the threshold; then he would only have to close the door and she would be out of sight. A small aged voice whispered agonizingly in his memory through a closed door. Memories had never troubled him. He didn't mind death; it was foolish to be scared of death in this bare wintry world. He said hoarsely, 'Are you happy? I mean, you like your job?'

'Oh, not the job,' she said. 'But the job won't go on for ever. Don't you think someone might marry me? I'm hoping.'

He whispered, 'Go in. Look through that window,' his finger touching the trigger. She went obediently forward; he brought the automatic up, his hand didn't tremble, he told himself that she would feel nothing. Death wasn't a thing she need be scared about. She had taken her handbag from under her arm; he noticed the odd sophisticated shape; a circle of twisted glass on the side and within it chromium initials, A. C.; she was going to make her face up.

A door closed and a voice said, 'You'll excuse me bringing you here this early, but I have to be at the office till late...'

'That's all right, that's all right, Mr Graves. Now don't you call this a snug little house?'

He lowered the pistol as Anne turned. She whispered breathlessly, 'Come in here quick.' He obeyed her, he didn't understand, he was still ready to shoot her if she screamed.

She saw the automatic and said, 'Put it away. You'll only get into trouble with that.'

Raven said, 'Your bags are in the kitchen.'

'I know. They've come in by the front door.'

'Gas and electric,' a voice said, 'laid on. Ten pounds down and you sign along the dotted line and move in the furniture.'

A precise voice which went with pince-nez and a high collar and thin flaxen hair said, 'Of course, I shall have to think it over.'

'Come and look upstairs, Mr Graves.'

They could hear them cross the hall and climb the stairs, the agent talking all the time. Raven said, 'I'll shoot if you—'

'Be quiet,' Anne said. 'Don't talk. Listen. Have you those notes? Give me two of them.' When he hesitated she whispered urgently, 'We've got to take a risk.' The agent and Mr Graves were in the best bedroom now. 'Just think of it, Mr Graves,' the agent was saying, 'with flowered chintz.'

'Are the walls sound-proof?'

'By a special process. Shut the door,' the door closed and the agent's voice went thinly, distinctly on, 'and in the passage you couldn't hear a thing. These houses were specially made for family men.'

'And now,' Mr Graves said, 'I should like to see the bathroom.'

'Don't move,' Raven threatened her.

'Oh, put it away,' Anne said, 'and be yourself.' She closed the bathroom door behind her and walked to the door of the bedroom. It opened and the agent said with the immediate gallantry of a man known in all the Nottwich bars,' Well, well, what have we here?'

'I was passing,' Anne said, 'and saw the door open. I'd been meaning to come and see you, but I didn't think you'd be up this early.'

'Always on the spot for a young lady,' the agent said.

'I want to buy this house.'

'Now look here,' Mr Graves said, a young-old man in a black suit who carried about with him in his pale face and irascible air the idea of babies in small sour rooms, of insufficient sleep. 'You can't do that. I'm looking over this house.'

'My husband sent me here to buy it.'

'I'm here first.'

'Have you bought it?'

'I've got to look it over first, haven't I?'

'Here,' Anne said, showing two five-pound notes. 'Now all I have to do...'

'Is sign along the dotted line,' the agent said.

'Give me time,' Mr Graves said. 'I like this house.' He went to the window. 'I like the view.' His pale face stared out at the damaged fields stretching under the fading fog to where the slag-heaps rose along the horizon. 'It's quiet country,' Mr Graves said. 'It'll be good for the children and the wife.'

'I'm sorry,' Anne said, 'but you see I'm ready to pay and sign.'

'References?' the agent said.

'I'll bring them this afternoon.'

'Let me show you another house, Mr Graves.' The agent belched slightly and apologized. 'I'm not used to business before breakfast.'

'No,' Mr Graves said, 'if I can't have this I won't have any.' Pallid and aggrieved he planted himself in the best bedroom of 'Sleepy Nuik' and presented his challenge to fate, a challenge which he knew from long and bitter experience was always accepted.

'Well,' the agent said, 'you can't have this. First come, first served.'

Mr Graves said, 'Good morning,' carried his pitiful, narrow-chested pride downstairs; at least he could claim that, if he had been always too late for what he really wanted, he had never accepted substitutes.

'I'll come with you to the office,' Anne said, 'straight away,' taking the agent's arm, turning her back on the bathroom where the dark pinched man stood waiting with his pistol, going downstairs into the cold overcast day which smelt to her as sweet as summer because she was safe again.

4

'What did Aladdin say When he came to Pekin?'

Obediently the long shuffling row of them repeated with tired vivacity, bending forward, clapping their knees, 'Chin Chin.' They had been rehearsing for five hours. 'It won't do. It hasn't got any sparkle. Start again, please.'

'What did Aladdin say...'

'How many of you have they killed so far?' Anne said under her breath. 'Chin Chin.'

'Oh, half a dozen.'

'I'm glad I got in at the last minute. A fortnight of this! No thank you.'

'Can't you put some Art into it?' the producer implored them. 'Have some pride. This isn't just any panto.'

'What did Aladdin say...'

'You look washed out,' Anne said.

'You don't look too good yourself.'

'Things happen quick in this place.'

'Once more, girls, and then we'll go on to Miss Maydew's scene.'

'What did Aladdin say When he came to Pekin?'

'You won't think that when you've been here a week.' Miss Maydew sat sideways in the front row with her feet up on the next stall. She was in tweeds and had a golf-and-grouse-moor air. Her real name was Binns, and her father was Lord Fordhaven. She said in a voice of penetrating gentility to Alfred Bleek, 'I said I won't be presented.'

'Who's the fellow at the back of the stalls?' Anne whispered. He was only a shadow to her.

'I don't know. Hasn't been here before. One of the men who put up the money, I expect, waiting to get an eyeful.' She began to mimic an imaginary man. 'Won't you introduce me to the girls, Mr Collier? I want to thank them for working so hard to make this panto a success. What about a little dinner, missy?'

'Stop talking, Ruby, and make it snappy,' said Mr Collier.

'What did Aladdin say When he came to Pekin?'

'All right. That'll do.'

'Please, Mr Collier,' Ruby said, 'may I ask you a question?'

'Now, Miss Maydew, your scene with Mr Bleek. Well, what is it you want to know?'

' What did Aladdin say?'

'I want discipline,' Mr Collier said, 'and I'm going to have discipline.' He was rather under-sized with a fierce eye and straw-coloured hair and a receding chin. He was continually glancing over his shoulder in fear that somebody was getting at him from behind. He wasn't a good director; his appointment was due to more 'wheels within wheels' than you could count. Somebody owed money to somebody else who had a nephew... but Mr Collier was not the nephew: the chain of causes went much further before you reached Mr Collier. Somewhere it included Miss Maydew, but the chain was so long you couldn't follow it. You got a confused idea that Mr Collier must owe his position to merit. Miss Maydew didn't claim that for herself. She was always writing little articles in the cheap women's papers on: 'Hard Work the only Key to Success on the Stage.' She lit a new cigarette and said, 'Are you talking to me?' She said to Alfred Bleek, who was in a dinner-jacket with a red knitted shawl round his shoulders, 'It was to get away from all that... royal garden parties.'

Mr Collier said, 'Nobody's going to leave this theatre.' He looked nervously over his shoulder at the stout gentleman emerging into the light from the back of the stalls, one of the innumerable 'wheels within wheels' that had spun Mr Collier into Nottwich, into this exposed position at the front of the stage, into this fear that nobody would obey him.

'Won't you introduce me to the girls, Mr Collier?' the stout gentleman said. 'If you are finishing. I don't want to interrupt.'

'Of course,' Mr Collier said. He said, 'Girls, this is Mr Davenant, one of our chief backers.'

'Davis, not Davenant,' the fat man said. 'I bought out Davenant.' He waved his hand; the emerald ring on his little finger flashed and caught Anne's eye. He said, 'I want to have the pleasure of taking every one of you girls out to dinner while this show lasts. Just to tell you how I appreciate the way you are working to make the panto a success. Whom shall I begin with?' He had an air of desperate jollity. He was like a man who suddenly finds he has nothing to think about and somehow must fill the vacuum.

'Miss Maydew,' he said half-heartedly, as if to show to the chorus the honesty of his intentions by inviting the principal boy.

'Sorry,' Miss Maydew said, 'I'm dining with Bleek.'

Anne walked out on them; she didn't want to high-hat Davis, but his presence there shocked her. She believed in Fate and God and Vice and Virtue, Christ in the stable, all the Christmas stuff; she believed in unseen powers that arranged meetings, drove people along ways they didn't mean to go; but she was quite determined she wouldn't help. She wouldn't play God or the Devil's game; she had evaded Raven, leaving him there in the bathroom of the little empty house, and Raven's affairs no longer concerned her. She wouldn't give him away; she was not yet on the side of the big organized battalions; but she wouldn't help him either. It was a strictly neutral course she steered out of the changing-room, out of the theatre door, into Nottwich High Street.

But what she saw there made her pause. The street was full of people; they stretched along the southern pavement, past the theatre entrance, as far as the market. They were watching the electric bulbs above Wallace's, the big drapers, spelling out the night's news. She had seen nothing like it since the last election, but this was different, because there were no cheers. They were reading of the troop movements over Europe, of the precautions against gas raids. Anne was not old enough to remember how the last war began, but she had read of the crowds outside the Palace, the enthusiasm, the queues at the recruiting offices, and that was how she had pictured every war beginning. She had feared it only for herself and Mather. She had thought of it as a personal tragedy played out against a background of cheers and flags. But this was different; this silent crowd wasn't jubilant, it was afraid. The white faces were turned towards the sky with a kind of secular entreaty; they weren't praying to any God; they were just willing that the electric bulbs would tell a different story. They were caught there, on the way back from work, with tools and attaché cases, by the rows of bulbs, spelling out complications they simply didn't understand.

Anne thought: can it be true that that fat fool... that the boy with the hare-lip knows... Well, she told herself, I believe in Fate, I suppose I can't just walk out and leave them. I'm in it up to the neck. If only Jimmy were here. But Jimmy, she remembered with pain, was on the other side; he was among those hunting Raven down. And Raven must be given the chance to finish his hunt first. She went back into the theatre.

Mr Davenant—Davis—Cholmondeley, whatever his name was, was telling a story. Miss Maydew and Alfred Bleek had gone. Most of the girls had gone too to change. Mr Collier watched and listened nervously; he was trying to remember who Mr Davis was; Mr Davenant had been silk stockings and had known Callitrope, who was the nephew of the man Dreid owed money to. Mr Collier had been quite safe with Mr Davenant, but he wasn't certain about Davis... This panto wouldn't last for ever and it was as fatal to get in with the wrong people as to get out with the right. It was possible that Davis was the man Cohen had quarrelled with, or he might be the uncle of the man Cohen had quarrelled with. The echoes of that quarrel were still faintly reverberating through the narrow back-stage passages of provincial theatres in the second-class touring towns. Soon they would reach the third companies and everyone would either move up one or move down one, except those who couldn't move down any lower.

Mr Collier laughed nervously and glared in a miserable attempt to be in and out simultaneously.

'I thought somebody breathed the word dinner,' Anne said. 'I'm hungry.'

'First come, first served,' Mr Davis-Cholmondeley said cheerily. 'Tell the girls I'll be seeing them. Where shall it be, Miss?'

'Anne.'

'That's fine,' Mr Davis-Cholmondeley said. 'I'm Willie.'

'I bet you know this town well,' Anne said. 'I'm new.' She came close to the floodlights and deliberately showed herself to him; she wanted to see whether he recognized her; but Mr Davis never looked at a face. He looked past you. His large square face didn't need to show its force by any eye-to-eye business. Its power lay in its existence at all; you couldn't help wondering, as you wondered with an outsize mastiff, how much sheer weight of food had daily to be consumed to keep him fit.

Mr Davis winked at Mr Collier, and said, 'Oh yes, I know this town. In a manner of speaking I made this town.' He said, 'There isn't much choice. There's the Grand or the Metropole. The Metropole's more intimate.'

'Let's go to the Metropole.'

'They have the best sundaes too in Nottwich.'

The street was no longer crowded, just the usual number of people looking in the windows, strolling home, going into the Imperial Cinema. Anne thought, where is Raven now? How can I find Raven?

'It's not worth taking a taxi,' Mr Davis said, 'the Metropole's only just round the corner. You'll like the Metropole,' he repeated. 'It's more intimate than the Grand,' but it wasn't the kind of hotel you associated with intimacy. It came in sight at once all along one side of the market place, as big as a railway station, of red and yellow stone with a clock-face in a pointed tower.

'Kind of Hotel de Ville, eh?' Mr Davis said. You could tell how proud he was of Nottwich.

There were sculptured figures in between every pair of windows; all the historic worthies of Nottwich stood in stiff neo-Gothic attitudes, from Robin Hood up to the Mayor of Nottwich in 1864. 'People come a long way to see this,' Mr Davis said.

'And the Grand? What's the Grand like?'

'Oh, the Grand,' Mr Davis said, 'the Grand's gaudy.'

He pushed her in ahead of him through the swing doors, and Anne saw how the porter recognized him. It wasn't going to be hard, she thought, to trace Mr Davis in Nottwich; but how to find Raven?

The restaurant had enough room for the passengers of a liner; the roof was supported on pillars painted in stripes of sage-green and gold. The curved ceiling was blue scattered with gold stars arranged in their proper constellations. 'It's one of the sights of Nottwich,' Mr Davis said. 'I always keep a table under Venus.' He laughed nervously, settling in his seat, and Anne noticed that they weren't under Venus at all but under Jupiter.

'You ought to be under the Great Bear,' she said.

'Ha, ha, that's good,' Mr Davis said. 'I must remember that.' He bent over the wine-list. 'I know you ladies always like a sweet wine.' He confessed, 'I've a sweet tooth myself.' He sat there studying the card, lost to everything; he wasn't interested in her; he seemed interested at that moment in nothing but a series of tastes, beginning with the lobster he had ordered. This was his chosen home: the huge stuffy palace of food; this was his idea of intimacy, one table set among two hundred tables.

Anne thought he had brought her there for a flirtation. She had imagined that it would be easy to get on terms with Mr Davis, even though the ritual a little scared her. Five years of provincial theatres had not made her adept at knowing how far she could go without arousing in the other more excitement than she could easily cope with. Her retreats were always sudden and dangerous. Over the lobster she thought of Mather, of security, of loving one man. Then she put out her knee and touched Mr Davis's. Mr Davis took no notice, cracking his way through a claw. He might just as well have been alone. It made her uneasy, to be so neglected. It didn't seem natural. She touched his knee again and said, 'Anything on your mind, Willie?'

The eyes he raised were like the lenses of a powerful microscope focused on an unmounted slide. He said, 'What's that? This lobster all right, eh?' He stared past her over the wide rather empty restaurant, all the tables decorated with holly and mistletoe. He called, 'Waiter, I want an evening paper,' and set to again at his claw. When the paper was brought he turned first of all to the financial page. He seemed satisfied; what he read there was as good as a lollipop.

Anne said, 'Would you excuse me a moment, Willie?' She took three coppers out of her bag and went to the ladies' lavatory. She stared at herself in the glass over the wash basin; there didn't seem to be anything wrong. She said to the old woman there, 'Do I look all right to you?'

The woman grinned. 'Perhaps he doesn't like so much lipstick.'

'Oh no,' Anne said, 'he's the lipstick type. A change from home. Hubbie on the razzle.' She said, 'Who is he? He calls himself Davis. He says he made this town.'

'Excuse me, dear, but your stocking's laddered.'

'It's not his doing, anyway. Who is he?'

'I've never heard of him, dear. Ask the porter.'

'I think I will.'

She went to the front door. 'That restaurant's so hot,' she said. 'I had to get a bit of air.' It was a peaceful moment for the porter of the Metropole. Nobody came in; nobody went out. He said, 'It's cold enough outside.' A man with one leg stood on the kerb and sold matches; the trams went by; little lighted homes full of smoke and talk and friendliness. A clock struck half-past eight and you could hear from one of the streets outside the square the shrill voices of children singing a tuneless carol. Anne said, 'Well, I must be getting back to Mr Davis.' She said, 'Who is Mr Davis?'

'He's got plenty,' the porter said.

'He says he made this town.'

'That's boasting,' the porter said. 'It's Midland Steel made this town. You'll see their offices in the Tanneries. But they're ruining the town now. They did employ fifty thousand. Now they don't have ten thousand. I was a doorkeeper there once myself. But they even cut down the doorkeepers.'

'It must have been cruel,' Anne said.

'It was worse for him,' the porter said, nodding through the door at the one-legged man. 'He had twenty years with them. Then he lost his leg and the court brought it in wilful negligence, so they didn't give him a tanner. They economized there too, you see. It was negligence, all right; he fell asleep. If you tried watching a machine do the same thing once every second for eight hours, you'd feel sleepy yourself.'

'But Mr Davis?'

'Oh, I don't know anything about Mr Davis. He may have something to do with the boot factory. Or he may be one of the directors of Wallace's. They've got money to burn.' A woman came through the door carrying a Pekinese; she wore a heavy fur coat. She asked: 'Has Mr Alfred Piker been in here?'

'No, ma'am.'

'There. It's just what his uncle was always doing. Disappearing.' She said, 'Keep hold of the dog,' and rolled away across the square.

'That's the Mayoress,' the porter said.

Anne went back. But something had happened. The bottle of wine was almost empty and the paper lay on the floor at Mr Davis's feet. Two sundaes had been laid in place, but Mr Davis hadn't touched his. It wasn't politeness; something had put him out. He growled at her, 'Where have you been?' She tried to see what he had been reading; it wasn't the financial page any more, but she could make out only the main headlines: 'Decree Nisi for Lady—' the name was too complicated to read upside down; 'Manslaughter Verdict on Motorist'. Mr Davis said, 'I don't know what's wrong with the place. They've put salt or something in the sundaes.' He turned his furious dewlapped face at the passing waiter. 'Call this a Knickerbocker Glory?'

'I'll bring you another, sir.'

'You won't. My bill.'

'So we call it a day,' Anne said.

Mr Davis looked up from the bill with something very like fear. 'No, no,' he said, 'I didn't mean that. You won't go and leave me flat now?'

'Well, what do you want to do, the flickers?'

'I thought,' Mr Davis said, 'you might come back with me to my place and have a tune on the radio and a glass of something good. We might foot it together a bit, eh?' He wasn't looking at her; he was hardly thinking of what he was saying. He didn't look dangerous. Anne thought she knew his type, you could pass them off with a kiss or two, and when they were drunk tell them a sentimental story until they began to think you were their sister. This would be the last: soon she would be Mather's; she would be safe. But first she was going to learn where Mr Davis lived.

As they came out into the square the carol singers broke on them, six small boys without an idea of a tune between them. They wore wool gloves and mufflers and they stood across Mr Davis's path chanting: 'Mark my footsteps well, my page.'

'Taxi, sir?' the porter asked.

'No.' Mr Davis explained to Anne, 'It saves threepence to take one from the rank in the Tanneries.' But the boys got in his way, holding out their caps for money.' Get out of the way,' Mr Davis said. With the intuition of children they recognized his uneasiness and baited him, pursuing him along the kerb, singing: 'Follow in them boldly.' The loungers outside the Crown turned to look. Somebody clapped. Mr Davis suddenly rounded and seized the hair of the boy nearest him; he pulled it till the boy screamed; pulled it till a tuft came out between his fingers. He said, 'That will teach you,' and sinking back a moment later in the taxi from the rank in the Tanneries, he said with pleasure, 'They can't play with me.' His mouth was open and his lip was wet with saliva; he brooded over his victory in the same way as he had brooded over the lobster; he didn't look to Anne as safe as she had thought. She reminded herself that he was only an agent. He knew the murderer, Raven said; he hadn't committed it himself.

'What's that building?' she asked, seeing a great black glass-front stand out from the Victorian street of sober offices where once the leather-workers had tanned their skins.

'Midland Steel,' Mr Davis said.

'Do you work there?'

Mr Davis for the first time returned look for look. 'What made you think that?'

'I don't know,' Anne said and recognized with uneasiness that Mr Davis was only simple when the wind stood one way.

'Do you think you could like me?' Mr Davis said, fingering her knee.

'I dare say I might.'

The taxi had left the Tanneries. It heaved over a net of tramlines and came out into the Station Approach. 'Do you live out of town?'

'Just at the edge,' Mr Davis said.

'They ought to spend more on lighting in this place.'

'You're a cute little girl,' Mr Davis said. 'I bet you know what's what.'

'It's no good looking for eggshell if that's what you mean,' Anne said, as they drove under the great steel bridge that carried the line on to York. There were only two lamps on the whole of the long steep gradient to the station. Over a wooden fence you could see the shunted trucks on the side line, the stacked coal ready for entrainment. An old taxi and a bus waited for passengers outside the small dingy station entrance. Built in 1860 it hadn't kept pace with Nottwich.

'You've got a long way to go to work,' Anne said.

'We are nearly there.'

The taxi turned to the left. Anne read the name of the road: Khyber Avenue, a long row of mean villas showing apartment cards. The taxi stopped at the end of the road. Anne said, 'You don't mean you live here?' Mr Davis was paying off the driver. 'Number sixty-one,' he said (Anne noticed there was no card in this window between the pane and the thick lace curtains). He smiled in a soft ingratiating way and said, 'It's really nice inside, dear.' He put a key in the lock and thrust her firmly forward into a little dimly lit hall with a hatstand. He hung up his hat and walked softly towards the stairs on his toes. There was a smell of gas and greens. A blue fan of flame lit up a dusty plant.

'We'll turn on the wireless,' Mr Davis said, 'and have a tune.'

A door opened in the passage and a woman's voice said, 'Who's that?'

'Just Mr Cholmondeley.'

'Don't forget to pay before you go up.'

'The first floor,' Mr Davis said. 'The room straight ahead of you. I won't be a moment,' and he waited on the stairs till she passed him. The coins clinked in his pocket as his hand groped for them.

There was a wireless in the room, standing on a marble washstand, but there was certainly no space to dance in, for the big double bed filled the room. There was nothing to show the place was ever lived in: there was dust on the wardrobe mirror and the ewer beside the loud speaker was dry. Anne looked out of the window behind the bedposts on a little dark yard. Her hand trembled against the sash: this was more than she had bargained for. Mr Davis opened the door.

She was badly frightened. It made her take the offensive. She said at once, 'So you call yourself Mr Cholmondeley?'

He blinked at her, closing the door softly behind him: 'What if I do?'

'And you said you were taking me home. This isn't your home.'

Mr Davis sat down on the bed and took off his shoes. He said, 'We mustn't make a noise, dear. The old woman doesn't like it.' He opened the door of the washstand and took out a cardboard box; it spilt soft icing sugar out of its cracks all over the bed and the floor as he came towards her. 'Have a piece of Turkish Delight.'

'This isn't your home,' she persisted.

Mr Davis, with his fingers half-way to his mouth, said, 'Of course it isn't. You don't think I'd take you to my home, do you? You aren't as green as that. I'm not going to lose my reputation.' He said, 'We'll have a tune, shall we, first?' And turning the dials he set the instrument squealing and moaning. 'Lot of atmospherics about,' Mr Davis said, twisting and turning the dials until very far away you could hear a dance band playing, a dreamy rhythm underneath the shrieking in the air; you could just discern the tune: 'Night light, Love light.'

'It's our own Nottwich programme,' Mr Davis said. 'There isn't a better band on the Midland Regional. From the Grand. Let's do a step or two,' and grasping her round the waist he began to shake up and down between the bed and the wall.

'I've known better floors,' Anne said, trying to keep up her spirits with her own hopeless form of humour,' but I've never known a worse crush,' and Mr Davis said, 'That's good. I'll remember that.' Quite suddenly, blowing off relics of icing sugar which clung round his mouth, he grew passionate. He fastened his lips on her neck. She pushed him away and laughed at him at the same time. She had to keep her head. 'Now I know what a rock feels like,' she said, 'when the sea amen—anem—damn, I can never say that word.'

' That's good,' Mr Davis said mechanically, driving her back.

She began to talk rapidly about anything which came into her head. She said, 'I wonder what this gas practice will be like. Wasn't it terrible the way they shot the old woman through her eyes?'

He loosed her at that, though she hadn't really meant anything by it. He said, 'Why do you bring that up?'

'I was just reading about it,' Anne said. 'The man must have made a proper mess in that flat.'

Mr Davis implored her, 'Stop. Please stop.' He explained weakly, leaning back for support against the bedpost, 'I've got a weak stomach. I don't like horrors.'

'I like thrillers,' Anne said. 'There was one I read the other day...'

'I've got a very vivid imagination,' Mr Davis said.

'I remember once when I cut my finger...'

'Don't. Please don't.'

Success made her reckless. She said, 'I've got a vivid imagination too. I thought someone was watching this house.'

'What do you mean?' He was scared all right. But she went too far. She said, 'There was a dark fellow watching the door. He had a hare-lip.'

Mr Davis went to the door and locked it. He turned the wireless low. He said, 'There's no lamp within twenty yards. You couldn't have seen his lip.'

'I just thought...'

'I wonder how much he told you,' Mr Davis said. He sat down on the bed and looked at his hands. 'You wanted to know where I lived, whether I worked—' He cut his sentence short and looked up at her with horror. But she could tell from his manner that he was no longer afraid of her; it was something else that scared him. He said, 'They'd never believe you.'

'Who wouldn't?'

'The police. It's a wild story.' To her amazement he began to sniffle, sitting on the bed nursing his great hairy hands. 'There must be some way out. I don't want to hurt you. I don't want to hurt anyone. I've got a weak stomach.'

Anne said, 'I don't know a thing. Please open the door.'

Mr Davis said in a low furious voice, 'Be quiet. You've brought it on yourself.'

She said again, 'I don't know anything.'

'I'm only an agent,' Mr Davis said. 'I'm not responsible.' He explained gently, sitting there in his stockinged feet with tears in his deep selfish eyes, 'It's always been our policy to take no risks. It's not my fault that fellow got away. I did my best. I've always done my best. But he won't forgive me again.'

'I'll scream if you don't open that door.'

'Scream away. You'll only make the old woman cross.'

'What are you going to do?'

'There's more than half a million at stake,' Mr Davis said. 'I've got to make sure this time.' He got up and came towards her with his hands out; she screamed and shook the door, then fled from it because there was no reply and ran round the bed. He just let her run; there was no escape in the tiny cramped room. He stood there muttering to himself, 'Horrible. Horrible.' You could tell he was on the verge of sickness, but the fear of somebody else drove him on. Anne implored him, 'I'll promise anything.' He shook his head, 'He'd never forgive me,' and sprawled across the bed and caught her wrist. He said thickly, 'Don't struggle. I won't hurt you if you don't struggle,' pulling her to him across the bed, feeling with his other hand for the pillow. She told herself even then: it isn't me. It's other people who are murdered. Not me. The urge to life which made her disbelieve that this could possibly be the end of everything for her, for the loving enjoying I, comforted her even when the pillow was across her mouth; never allowed her to realize the full horror, as she fought against his hands, strong and soft and sticky with icing sugar.

5

The rain blew up along the River Weevil from the east; it turned to ice in the bitter night and stung the asphalt walks, pitted the paint on the wooden seats. A constable came quietly by in his heavy raincoat gleaming like wet macadam, moving his lantern here and there in the dark spaces between the lamps. He said, 'Good night' to Raven without another glance. It was couples he expected to find, even in December under the hail, the signs of poor cooped provincial passion.

Raven buttoned to the neck went on, looking for any shelter. He wanted to keep his mind on Cholmondeley, on how to find the man in Nottwich. But continually he found himself thinking instead of the girl he had threatened that morning. He remembered the kitten he had left behind in the Soho café. He had loved that kitten.

It had been sublimely unconscious of his ugliness. 'My name's Anne.'

'You aren't ugly.' She never knew, he thought, that he had meant to kill her; she had been as innocent of his intention as a cat he had once been forced to drown; and he remembered with astonishment that she had not betrayed him, although he had told her that the police were after him. It was even possible that she had believed him.

These thoughts were colder and more uncomfortable than the hail. He wasn't used to any taste that wasn't bitter on the tongue. He had been made by hatred; it had constructed him into this thin smoky murderous figure in the rain, hunted and ugly. His mother had borne him when his father was in gaol, and six years later when his father was hanged for another crime, she had cut her own throat with a kitchen knife; afterwards there had been the home. He had never felt the least tenderness for anyone; he was made in this image and he had his own odd pride in the result; he didn't want to be unmade. He had a sudden terrified conviction that he must be himself now as never before if he was to escape. It was not tenderness that made you quick on the draw.

Somebody in one of the larger houses on the river-front had left his garage gate ajar; it was obviously not used for a car, but only to house a pram, a child's playground and a few dusty dolls and bricks. Raven took shelter there; he was cold through and through except in the one spot that had lain frozen all his life. That dagger of ice was melting with great pain. He pushed the garage gate a little further open; he had no wish to appear furtively hiding if anyone passed along the river beat; anyone might be excused for sheltering in a stranger's garage from this storm, except, of course, a man wanted by the police with a hare-lip.

These houses were only semi-detached. They were joined by their garages. Raven was closely hemmed in by the redbrick walls. He could hear the wireless playing in both houses. In the one house it switched and changed as a restless finger turned the screw and beat up the wavelengths, bringing a snatch of rhetoric from Berlin, of opera from Stockholm. On the National Programme from the other house an elderly critic was reading verse. Raven couldn't help but hear, standing in the cold garage by the baby's pram, staring out at the black hail: 'A shadow flits before me, Not thou, but like to thee; Ah Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be.'

He dug his nails into his hands, remembering his father who had been hanged and his mother who had killed herself in the basement kitchen, all the long parade of those who had done him down. The elderly cultured Civil Service voice read on: 'And I loathe the squares and streets, and the faces that one meets, Hearts with no love for me...'

He thought: give her time and she too will go to the police. That's what always happens in the end with a skirt, —'My whole soul out to thee'— trying to freeze again, as hard and safe as ever, the icy fragment.

'That was Mr Druce Winton, reading a selection from Maud by Lord Tennyson. This ends the National Programme. Good night, everybody.'

Chapter 3

1

MATHER'S train got in at eleven that night and with Saunders he drove straight through the almost empty streets to the police station. Nottwich went to bed early; the cinemas closed at ten-thirty and a quarter of an hour later everyone had left the middle of Nottwich by tram or bus. Nottwich's only tart hung round the market place, cold and blue under her umbrella, and one or two business men were having a last cigar in the hall of the Metropole. The car slid on the icy road. Just before the police station Mather noticed the posters of Aladdin outside the Royal Theatre. He said to Saunders, 'My girl's in that show.' He felt proud and happy.

The Chief Constable had come down to the police station to meet Mather. The fact that Raven was known to be armed and desperate gave the chase a more serious air than it would otherwise have had. The Chief Constable was fat and excited. He had made a lot of money as a tradesman and during the war had been given a commission and the job of presiding over the local military tribunal. He prided himself on having been a terror to pacifists. It atoned a little for his own home life and a wife who despised him. That was why he had come down to the station to meet Mather: it would be something to boast about at home.

Mather said, 'Of course, sir, we don't know he's here. But he was on the train all right, and his ticket was given up. By a woman.'

'Got an accomplice, eh?' the Chief Constable asked.

'Perhaps. Find the woman and we may have Raven.'

The Chief Constable belched behind his hand. He had been drinking bottled beer before he came out and it always repeated itself. The superintendent said, 'Directly we heard from the Yard we circulated the number of the notes to all shops, hotels and boarding houses.'

'That a map, sir,' Mather asked, 'with your beats marked?

They walked over to the wall and the superintendent pointed out the main points in Nottwich with a pencil: the railway station, the river, the police station.

'And the Royal Theatre,' Mather said, 'will be about there?'

'That's right.'

'What's brought 'im to Nottwich?' the Chief Constable asked.

'I wish we knew, sir. Now these streets round the station, are they hotels?'

'A few boarding houses. But the worst of it is,' the superintendent said, absent-mindedly turning his back on the Chief Constable, 'a lot of these houses take occasional boarders.'

'Better circulate them all.'

'Some of them wouldn't take much notice of a police request. Houses of call, you know. Quick ten minutes and the door always open.'

'Nonsense,' the Chief Constable said, 'we don't have that kind of place in Nottwich.'

'If you wouldn't mind my suggesting it, sir, it wouldn't be a bad thing to double the constables on any beats of that kind. Send the sharpest men you've got. I suppose you've had his description in the evening papers? He seems to be a pretty smart safebreaker.'

'There doesn't seem to be much more we can do tonight,' the superintendent said. 'I'm sorry for the poor devil if he's found nowhere to sleep.'

'Keep a bottle of whisky here, super?' the Chief Constable asked. 'Do us all good to 'ave a drink. Had too much beer. It returns. Whisky's better, but the wife doesn't like the smell.' He leant back in his chair with his fat thighs crossed and watched the inspector with a kind of child-like happiness; he seemed to be saying, what a spree this is, drinking again with the boys. Only the superintendent knew what an old devil he was with anyone weaker than himself. 'Just a splash, super.' He said over his glass, 'You caught that old bastard Baines out nicely,' and explained to Mather. 'Street betting. He's been a worry for months.'

'He was straight enough. I don't believe in harrying people. Just because he was taking money out of Macpherson's pocket.'

'Ah,' the Chief Constable said, 'but that's legal. Macpherson's got an office and a telephone. He's got expenses to carry. Cheerio, boys. To the ladies.' He drained his glass. 'Just another two fingers, super.' He blew out his chest. 'What about some more coal on the fire? Let's be snug. There's no work we can do tonight.'

Mather was uneasy. It was quite true there wasn't much one could do, but he hated inaction. He stayed by the map. It wasn't such a large place, Nottwich. They ought not to take long to find Raven, but here he was a stranger. He didn't know what dives to raid, what clubs and dance halls. He said, 'We think he's followed someone here. I'd suggest, sir, that first thing in the morning we interview the ticket collector again. See how many local people he can remember leaving the train. We might be lucky.'

'Do you know that story about the Archbishop of York?' the Chief Constable asked. 'Yes, yes. We'll do that. But there's no hurry. Make yourself at 'ome, man, and take some Scotch. You're in the Midlands now. The slow Midlands (eh, super?). We don't 'ustle, but we get there just the same.'

Of course, he was right. There was no hurry, and there wasn't anything anyone could do at this hour, but as Mather stood beside the map, it was just as if someone were calling him, 'Hurry. Hurry. Hurry. Or you may be too late. ' He traced the main streets with his finger; he wanted to be as familiar with them as he was with central London. Here was the G. P. O., the market, the Metropole, the High Street; what was this? the Tanneries. 'What's this big block in the Tanneries, sir?' he asked.

'That'll be Midland Steel,' the superintendent said and turning to the Chief Constable he went on patiently, 'No, sir. I hadn't heard that one. That's a good one, sir.'

'The mayor told me that,' the Chief Constable said. 'He's a sport, old Piker. Do you know what he said when we had that committee on the gas practice? He said, 'This'll give us a chance to get into a strange bed.' He meant the women couldn't tell who was who in a gas mask. You see?'

'Very witty man, Mr Piker, sir.'

'Yes, super, but I was too smart for him there. I was on the spot that day. Do you know what I said?'

'No, sir.'

'I said, "You won't be able to find a strange bed, Piker." Catch me meaning? He's a dog, old Piker.'

'What are your arrangements for the gas practice, sir?' Mather asked with his finger jabbed on the Town Hall.

'You can't expect people to buy gas masks at twenty-five bob a time, but we're having a raid the day after tomorrow with smoke bombs from Hanlow aerodrome, and anyone found in the street without a mask will be carted off by ambulance to the General Hospital. So anyone who's too busy to stop indoors will have to buy a mask. Midland Steel are supplying all their people with masks, so it'll be business as usual there.'

'Kind of blackmail,' the superintendent said.' Stay in or buy a mask. The transport companies have spent a pretty penny on masks.'

'What hours, sir?'

'We don't tell them that. Sirens hoot. You know the idea. Boy Scouts on bicycles. They've been lent masks. But of course we know it'll be all over before noon.'

Mather looked back at the map. 'These coal yards,' he said, 'round the station. You've got them well covered?'

'We are keeping an eye on those,' the superintendent said. 'I saw to that as soon as the Yard rang through.'

'Smart work, boys, smart work,' the Chief Constable said, swallowing the last of his whisky. 'I'll be off home. Busy day before us all tomorrow. You'd like a conference with me in the morning, I dare say, super?'

'Oh, I don't think we'll trouble you that early, sir.'

'Well, if you do need any advice, I'm always at the end of the 'phone. Good night, boys.'

'Good night, sir. Good night.'

'The old boy's right about one thing.' The superintendent put the whisky away in his cupboard. 'We can't do anything more tonight.'

'I won't keep you up, sir,' Mather said. 'You mustn't think I'm fussy. Saunders will tell you I'm as ready to knock off as any man, but there's something about this case... I can't leave it alone. It's a queer case. I was looking at this map, sir, and trying to think where I'd hide. What about these dotted lines out here on the east?'

'It's a new housing estate.'

'Half-built houses?'

'I've put two men on special beat out there.'

'You've got everything taped pretty well, sir. You don't really need us.'

'You mustn't judge us by him.'

'I'm not quite easy in my mind. He's followed someone here. He's a smart lad. We've never had anything on him before, and yet for the last twenty-four hours he's done nothing but make mistakes. The chief said he's blazing a trail, and it's true. It strikes me that he's desperate to get someone.'

The superintendent glanced at the clock.

'I'm off, sir,' Mather said. 'See you in the morning. Good night, Saunders. I'm just going to take a stroll around a bit before I come to the hotel. I want to get this place clear.'

He walked out into the High Street. The rain had stopped and was freezing in the gutters. He slipped on the pavement and had to push his hand on the lamp standard. They turned the lights very low in Nottwich after eleven. Over the way, fifty yards down towards the market, he could see the portico of the Royal Theatre. No lights at all to be seen there. He found himself humming, 'But to me it's Paradise,' and thought: it's good to love, to have a centre, a certainty, not just to be in love floating around. He wanted that too to be organized as soon as possible: he wanted love stamped and sealed and signed and the licence paid for. He was filled with a dumb tenderness he would never be able to express outside marriage. He wasn't a lover; he was already like a married man, but a married man with years of happiness and confidence to be grateful for.

He did the maddest thing he'd done since he had known her: he went and took a look at her lodgings. He had the address. She'd given it him over the 'phone, and it fitted in with his work to find his way to All Saints Road. He learnt quite a lot of things on the way, keeping his eyes open: it wasn't really a waste of time. He learnt, for instance, the name and address of the local papers: the Nottwich Journal and the Nottwich Guardian, two rival papers facing each other across Chatton Street, one of them next a great gaudy cinema. From their posters he could even judge their publics: the Journal was popular, the Guardian was 'class'. He learnt too where the best fish-and-chip shops were and the public-houses where the pitmen went; he discovered the park, a place of dull wilted trees and palings and gravel paths for perambulators. Any of these facts might be of use and they humanized the map of Nottwich so that he could think of it in terms of people, just as he thought of London, when he was on a job, in terms of Charlies and Joes. All Saints Road was two rows of small neo-Gothic houses lined up as carefully as a company on parade. He stopped outside No .14 and wondered if she were awake. She'd get a surprise in the morning; he had posted a card at Euston telling her he was putting up at the Crown, the commercial 'house'. There was a light on in the basement: the landlady was still awake. He wished he could have sent a quicker message than that card; he knew the dreariness of new lodgings, of waking to the black tea and the unfriendly face. It seemed to him that life couldn't treat her well enough.

The wind froze him, but he lingered there on the opposite pavement, wondering whether she had enough blankets on her bed, whether she had any shillings for the gas meter. Encouraged by the light in the basement he nearly rang the bell to ask the landlady whether Anne had all she needed. But he made his way instead towards the Crown. He wasn't going to look silly; he wasn't even going to tell her that he'd been and had a look at where she slept.

2

A knock on the door woke him. It was barely seven. A woman's voice said, 'You're wanted on the 'phone,' and he could hear her trailing away downstairs, knocking a broom handle against the banisters. It was going to be a fine day.

Mather went downstairs to the telephone, which was behind the bar in the empty saloon. He said, 'Mather. Who's that?' and heard the station sergeant's voice, 'We've got some news for you. He slept last night in St Mark's, the Roman Catholic Cathedral. And someone reports he was down by the river earlier.'

But by the time he was dressed and at the station more evidence had come in. The agent of a housing estate had read in the local paper about the stolen notes and brought to the station two notes he had received from a girl who said she wanted to buy a house. He'd thought it odd because she had never turned up to sign the papers.

'That'll be the girl who gave up his ticket,' the superintendent said. 'They are working together on this.'

'And the cathedral?' Mather asked.

'A woman saw him come out early this morning. Then when she got home (she was on the way to chapel) and read the paper, she told a constable on point duty. We'll have to have the churches locked.'

'No, watched,' Mather said. He warmed his hand over the iron stove. 'Let me talk to this house agent.'

The man came breezily in in plus fours from the outer room. 'Name of Green,' he said.

'Could you tell me, Mr Green, what this girl looked like?'

'A nice little thing,' Mr Green said.

'Short? Below five-feet four?'

'No, I wouldn't say that.'

'You said little?'

'Oh,' Mr Green said, 'term of affection, you know. Easy to get on with.'

'Fair? Dark?'

'Oh, I couldn't say that. Don't look at their hair. Good legs.'

'Anything strange in her manner?'

'No, I wouldn't say that. Nicely spoken. She could take a joke.'

'Then you wouldn't have noticed the colour of her eyes?'

'Well, as a matter of fact, I did. I always look at a girl's eyes. They like it. "Drink to me only", you know. A bit of poetry. That's my gambit. Kind of spiritual, you know.'

'And what colour were they?'

'Green with a spot of gold.'

'What was she wearing? Did you notice that?'

'Of course I did,' Mr Green said. He moved his hands in the air. 'It was something dark and soft. You know what I mean.'

'And the hat? Straw?'

'No. It wasn't straw.'

'Felt?'

'It might have been a kind of felt. That was dark too. I noticed that.'

'Would you know her again if you saw her?'

'Of course I would,' Mr Green said. 'Never forget a face.'

'Right,' Mather said, 'you can go. We may want you later to identify the girl. We'll keep these notes.'

'But I say,' Mr Green said, 'those are good notes. They belong to the company.'

'You can consider the house is still for sale.'

'I've had the ticket collector here,' the superintendent said. 'Of course he doesn't remember a thing that helps. In these stories you read people always remember something, but in real life they just say she was wearing something dark or something light.'

'You've sent someone up to look at the house? Is this the man's story? It's odd. She must have gone there straight from the station. Why? And why pretend to buy the house and pay him with stolen notes?'

'It looks as if she was desperate to keep the other man from buying. As if she'd got something hidden there.'

'Your man had better go through the house with a comb, sir. But of course they won't find much. If there was still anything to find she'd have turned up to sign the papers.'

'No, she'd have been afraid,' the superintendent said, 'in case he'd found out they were stolen notes.'

'You know,' Mather said, 'I wasn't much interested in this case. It seemed sort of petty. Chasing down a small thief when the whole world will soon be fighting because of a murderer those fools in Europe couldn't catch. But now it's getting me. There's something odd about it. I told you what my chief said about Raven? He said he was blazing a trail. But he's managed so far to keep just ahead of us. Could I see the ticket collector's statement?'

'There's nothing in it.'

'I don't agree with you, sir,' Mather said, while the superintendent turned it up from the file of papers on his desk, 'the books are right. People generally do remember something. If they remembered nothing at all, it would look very queer. It's only spooks that don't leave any impression. Even that agent remembered the colour of her eyes.'

'Probably wrong,' the superintendent said. 'Here you are.

All he remembers is that she carried two suitcases. It's something, of course, but it's not worth much.'

'Oh, one could make guesses from that,' Mather said. 'Don't you think so?' He didn't believe in making himself too clever in front of the provincial police; he needed their cooperation. 'She was coming for a long stay (a woman can get a lot in one suitcase) or else, if she was carrying his case too, he was the dominant one. Believes in treating her rough and making her do all the physical labour. That fits in with Raven's character. As for the girl—'

'In these gangster stories,' the superintendent said, 'they call her a moll.'

'Well, this moll,' Mather said, 'is one of those girls who like being treated rough. Sort of clinging and avaricious, I picture her. If she had more spirit he'd carry one of the suitcases or else she'd split on him.'

'I thought this Raven was about as ugly as they are made.'

'That fits too,' Mather said. 'Perhaps she likes 'em ugly. Perhaps it gives her a thrill.'

The superintendent laughed. 'You've got a lot out of those suitcases. Read the report and you'll be giving me her photograph. Here you are. But he doesn't remember a thing about her, not even what she was wearing.'

Mather read it. He read it slowly. He said nothing, but something in his manner of shock and incredulity was conveyed to the superintendent. He said, 'Is anything wrong? There's nothing there, surely?'

'You said I'd be giving you her photograph,' Mather said. He took a slip of newspaper from the back of his watch. 'There it is, sir. You'd better circulate that to all stations in the city and to the Press.'

'But there's nothing in the report,' the superintendent said.

'Everybody remembers something. It wasn't anything you could have spotted. I seem to have private information about this crime, but I didn't know it till now.'

The superintendent said, 'He doesn't remember a thing. Except the suitcases.'

'Thank God for those,' Mather said. 'It may mean... You see he says here that one of the reasons he remembers her—he calls it remembering her—is that she was the only woman who got out of the train at Nottwich. And this girl I happen to know was travelling by it. She'd got an engagement at the theatre here.'

The superintendent said bluntly—he didn't realize the full extent of the shock, 'And is she of the type you said? Likes 'em ugly?'

'I thought she liked them plain,' Mather said, staring out through the window at a world going to work through the cold early day.

'Sort of clinging and avaricious?'

'No, damn it.'

'But if she'd had more spirit—' the superintendent mocked; he thought Mather was disturbed because his guesses were wrong.

'She had all the spirit there was,' Mather said. He turned back from the window. He forgot the superintendent was his superior officer; he forgot you had to be tactful to these provincial police officers; he said, 'God damn it, don't you see? He didn't carry his suitcase because he had to keep her covered. He made her walk out to the housing estate.' He said, 'I've got to go out there. He meant to murder her.'

'No, no,' the superintendent said. 'You are forgetting: she paid the money to Green and walked out of the house with him alone. He saw her off the estate.'

'But I'd swear,' Mather said, 'she isn't in this. It's absurd. It doesn't make sense.' He said, 'We're engaged to be married.'

'That's tough,' the superintendent said. He hesitated, picked up a dead match and cleaned a nail, then he pushed the photograph back. 'Put it away,' he said. 'We'll go about this differently.'

'No,' Mather said. 'I'm on this case. Have it printed. It's a bad smudged photo.' He wouldn't look at it. 'It doesn't do her justice. But I'll wire home for a better likeness. I've got a whole strip of Photomatons at home. Her face from every angle. You couldn't have a better lot of photos for newspaper purposes.'

'I'm sorry, Mather,' the superintendent said. 'Hadn't I better speak to the Yard? Get another man sent?'

'You couldn't have a better on the case,' Mather said. 'I know her. If she's to be found, I'll find her. I'm going out to the house now. You see, your man may miss something. I know her.'

'There may be an explanation,' the superintendent said.

'Don't you see,' Mather said, 'that if there's an explanation it means—why, that she's in danger, she may even be—'

'We'd have found her body.'

'We haven't even found a living man,' Mather said. 'Would you ask Saunders to follow me out? What's the address?' He wrote it carefully down; he always noted facts; he didn't trust his brain for more than theories, guesses.

It was a long drive out to the housing estate. He had time to think of many possibilities. She might have fallen asleep and been carried on to York. She might not have taken the train... and there was nothing in the little hideous house to contradict him. He found a plainclothes man in what would one day be the best front room; in its flashy fireplace, its dark brown picture rail and the cheap oak of its wainscoting, it bore already the suggestion of heavy unused furniture, dark curtains and Gosse china. 'There's nothing,' the detective said, 'nothing at all. You can see, of course, that someone's been here. The dust has been disturbed. But there wasn't enough dust to make a footprint. There's nothing to be got here.'

'There's always something,' Mather said. 'Where did you find traces? All the rooms?'

'No, not all of them. But that's not evidence. There was no sign in this room, but the dust isn't as thick here. Maybe the builders swept up better. You can't say no one was in here.'

'How did she get in?'

'The lock of the back door's busted.'

'Could a girl do that?'

'A cat could do it. A determined cat.'

'Green says he came in at the front. Just opened the door of this room and then took the other fellow straight upstairs, into the best bedroom. The girl joined them there just as he was going to show the rest of the house. Then they all went straight down and out of the house except the girl went into the kitchen and picked up her suitcases. He'd left the front door open and thought she'd followed them in.'

'She was in the kitchen all right. And in the bathroom.'

'Where's that?'

'Up the stairs and round to the left.' The two men, they were both large, nearly filled the cramped bathroom. 'Looks as if she heard them coming,' the detective said, 'and hid in here.'

'What brought her up? If she was in the kitchen she had only to slip out at the back.' Mather stood in the tiny room between the bath and the lavatory seat and thought: she was here yesterday. It was incredible. It didn't fit in at any point with what he knew of her. They had been engaged for six months; she couldn't have disguised herself so completely: on the bus ride from Kew that evening, humming the song—what was it?—something about a snowflower; the night they sat two programmes round at the cinema because he'd spent his week's pay and hadn't been able to give her dinner. She never complained as the hard mechanized voices began all over again, 'A wise guy, huh?'

'Baby, you're swell.'

'Siddown, won't you?'

'Thenks', at the edge of their consciousness. She was straight, she was loyal, he could swear that; but the alternative was a danger he hardly dared contemplate. Raven was desperate. He heard himself saying with harsh conviction, 'Raven was here. He drove her up at the point of his pistol. He was going to shut her in here—or maybe shoot her. Then he heard voices. He gave her the notes and told her to get rid of the other fellows. If she tried anything on, he'd have shot her. Damn it, isn't it plain?' but the detective only repeated the substance of the superintendent's criticism, 'She walked right out of the place alone with Green. There was nothing to prevent her going to the police station.'

'He may have followed at a distance.'

'It looks to me,' the detective said, 'as if you are taking the most unlikely theory,' and Mather could tell from his manner how puzzled he was at the Yard man's attitude: these Londoners were a little too ingenious: he believed in good sound Midland common sense. It angered Mather in his professional pride; he even felt a small chill of hatred against Anne for putting him in a position where his affection warped his judgement. He said, 'We've no proof that she didn't try to tell the police,' and he wondered: do I want her dead and innocent or alive and guilty? He began to examine the bathroom with meticulous care. He even pushed his finger up the taps in case... He had a wild idea that if it were really Anne who had stood here, she would have wanted to leave a message. He straightened himself impatiently. 'There's nothing here.' He remembered there was a test: she might have missed her train. 'I want a telephone,' he said.

'There'll be one down the road at the agent's.'

Mather rang up the theatre. There was no one there except a caretaker, but as it happened she could tell him that no one had been absent from rehearsal. The producer, Mr Collier, always posted absentees on the board inside the stage door. He was great on discipline, Mr Collier. Yes, and she remembered that there was a new girl. She happened to see her going out with a man at dinner-time after the rehearsal just as she came back to the theatre to tidy up a bit and thought: 'that's a new face'. She didn't know who the man was. He might be one of the backers. 'Wait a moment, wait a moment,' Mather said; he had to think what to do next; she was the girl who gave the agent the stolen notes; he had to forget that she was Anne who had so wildly wished that they could marry before Christmas, who had hated the promiscuity of her job, who had promised him that night on the bus from Kew that she would keep out of the way of all rich business backers and stage-door loungers. He said: 'Mr Collier? Where can I find him?'

'He'll be at the theatre tonight. There's a rehearsal at eight.'

'I want to see him at once.'

'You can't. He's gone up to York with Mr Bleek.'

'Where can I find any of the girls who were at the rehearsal?'

'I dunno. I don't have the address book. They'll be all over town.'

'There must be someone who was there last night—'

'You could find Miss Maydew, of course.'

'Where?'

'I don't know where she's staying. But you've only got to look at the posters of the jumble.'

'The jumble? What do you mean?'

'She's opening the jumble up at St Luke's at two.'

Through the window of the agent's office Mather saw Saunders coming up the frozen mud of the track between the Cozyholmes: He rang off and intercepted him. 'Any news come in?'

'Yes,' Saunders said. The superintendent had told him everything, and he was deeply distressed. He liked Mather. He owed everything to Mather; it was Mather who had brought him up every stage of promotion in the police force, who had persuaded the authorities that a man who stammered could be as good a policeman as the champion reciter at police concerts. But he would have loved him anyway for a quality of idealism, for believing so implicitly in what he did. 'Well? Let's have it.'

'It's about your g-girl. She's disappeared.' He took the news at a run, getting it out in one breath. 'Her landlady rang up the station, said she was out all night and never came back.'

'Run away,' Mather said.

Saunders said, 'D-don't you believe it. You t-t-t-told her to take that train. She wasn't going till the m-m-m-m-morning.'

'You're right,' Mather said. 'I'd forgotten that. Meeting him must have been an accident. But it's a miserable choice, Saunders. She may be dead now.'

'Why should he do that? We've only got a theft on him. What are you going to do next?'

'Back to the station. And then at two,' he smiled miserably, 'a jumble sale.'

3

The vicar was worried. He wouldn't listen to what Mather had to say; he had too much to think about himself. It was the curate, the new bright broad-minded curate from a London east-end parish, who had suggested inviting Miss Maydew to open the jumble sale. He thought it would be a draw, but as the vicar explained to Mather, holding him pinned there in the pitch-pine ante-room of St Luke's Hall, a jumble was always a draw. There was a queue fifty yards long of women with baskets waiting for the door to open; they hadn't come to see Miss Maydew; they had come for bargains. St Luke's jumble sales were famous all over Nottwich.

A dry perky woman with a cameo brooch put her head in at the door. 'Henry,' she said, 'the committee are rifling the stalls again. Can't you do something about it? There'll be nothing left when the sale starts.'

'Where's Mander? It's his business,' the vicar said.

'Mr Mander, of course, is off fetching Miss Maydew.' The perky woman blew her nose and crying 'Constance, Constance!' disappeared into the hall.

'You can't really do anything about it,' the vicar said. 'It happens every year. These good women give their time voluntarily. The Altar Society would be in a very bad way without them. They expect to have first choice of everything that's sent in. Of course the trouble is: they fix the prices.'

'Henry,' the perky woman said, appearing again in the doorway, 'you must interfere. Mrs Penny has priced that very good hat Lady Cundifer sent at eighteen pence and bought it herself.'

'My dear, how can I say anything? They'd never volunteer again. You must remember they've given time and trouble...' but he was addressing a closed door. 'What worries me,' he said to Mather,' is that this young lady will expect an ovation. She won't understand that nobody's interested in who opens a jumble sale. Things are so different in London.'

'She's late,' Mather said.

'They are quite capable of storming the doors,' the vicar said with a nervous glance through the window at the lengthening queue. 'I must confess to a little stratagem. After all she is our guest. She is giving time and trouble.' Time and trouble were the gifts of which the vicar was always most conscious. They were given more readily than coppers in the collection. He went on, 'Did you see any young boys outside?'

'Only women,' Mather said.

'Oh dear, oh dear. I told Troop Leader Lance. You see, I thought if one or two Scouts, in plain clothes, of course, brought up autograph books, it would please Miss Maydew, seem to show we appreciated... the time and trouble.' He said miserably, 'The St Luke's troop is always the least trustworthy...'

A grey-haired man with a carpet bag put his head in at the door. He said,' Mrs 'Arris said as there was something wrong with the toilet.'

'Ah, Mr Bacon,' the vicar said, 'so kind of you. Step into the hall. You'll find Mrs Harris there. A little stoppage, so I understand.'

Mather looked at his watch. He said, 'I must speak to Miss Maydew directly—' A young man entered at a rush; he said to the vicar, 'Excuse me, Mr Harris, but will Miss Maydew be speaking?'

'I hope not. I profoundly hope not,' the vicar said. 'It's hard enough as it is to keep the women from the stalls till after I've said a prayer. Where's my prayer book? Who's seen my prayer book?'

'Because I'm covering it for the Journal, and if she's not, you see, I can get away—'

Mather wanted to say: Listen to me. Your damned jumble is of no importance. My girl's in danger. She may be dead. He wanted to do things to people, but he stood there heavy, immobile, patient, even his private passion and fear subdued by his training. One didn't give way to anger, one plodded on calmly, adding fact to fact; if one's girl was killed, one had the satisfaction of knowing one had done one's best according to the standards of the best police force in the world. He wondered bitterly, as he watched the vicar search for his prayer book, whether that would be any comfort.

Mr Bacon came back and said, 'She'll pull now,' and disappeared with a clank of metal. A boisterous voice said, 'Upstage a little, upstage, Miss Maydew,' and the curate entered. He wore suede shoes, he had a shiny face and plastered hair and he carried an umbrella under his arm like a cricket bat; he might have been returning to the pavilion after scoring a duck in a friendly, taking his failure noisily as a good sportsman should. 'Here is my C. O., Miss Maydew, on the O. P. side.' He said to the vicar, 'I've been telling Miss Maydew about our dramatics.'

Mather said,' May I speak to you a moment privately, Miss Maydew?'

But the vicar swept her away. 'A moment, a moment, first our little ceremony. Constance! Constance!' and almost immediately the ante-room was empty except for Mather and the journalist, who sat on the table swinging his legs, biting his nails. An extraordinary noise came from the next room: it was like the trampling of a herd of animals, a trampling suddenly brought to a standstill at a fence; in the sudden silence one could hear the vicar hastily finishing off the Lord's Prayer, and then Miss Maydew's clear immature principal boy's voice saying, 'I declare this jumble well and truly—' and then the trampling again. She had got her words wrong—it had always been foundation stones her mother laid; but no one noticed. Everyone was relieved because she hadn't made a speech. Mather went to the door; half a dozen boys were queued up in front of Miss Maydew with autograph albums; the St Luke's troop hadn't failed after all. A hard astute woman in a toque said to Mather, 'This stall will interest you. It's a Man's Stall,' and Mather looked down at a dingy array of pen-wipers and pipe-cleaners and hand-embroidered tobacco pouches. Somebody had even presented a lot of old pipes. He lied quickly, 'I don't smoke.'

The astute woman said, 'You've come here to spend money, haven't you, as a duty? You may as well take something that will be of use. You won't find anything on any of the other stalls,' and between the women's shoulders, as he craned to follow the movements of Miss Maydew and the St Luke's troop, he caught a few grim glimpses of discarded vases, chipped fruit stands, yellowing piles of babies' napkins. 'I've got several pairs of braces. You may just as well take a pair of braces.'

Mather, to his own astonishment and distress, said, 'She may be dead.'

The woman said, 'Who dead?' and bristled over a pair of mauve suspenders.

'I'm sorry,' Mather said. 'I wasn't thinking.' He was horrified with himself for losing grip. He thought: I ought to have let them exchange me. It's going to be too much. He said, 'Excuse me,' seeing the last Scout shut his album.

He led Miss Maydew into the ante-room. The journalist had gone. He said, 'I'm trying to trace a girl in your company called Anne Crowder.'

'Don't know her,' Miss Maydew said.

'She only joined the cast yesterday.'

'They all look alike,' Miss Maydew said, 'like Chinamen. I never can learn their names.'

'This one's fair. Green eyes. She has a good voice.'

'Not in this company,' Miss Maydew said, 'not in this company. I can't listen to them. It sets my teeth on edge.'

'You don't remember her going out last night with a man, at the end of rehearsal?'

'Why should I? Don't be so sordid.'

'He invited you out too.'

'The fat fool,' Miss Maydew said.

'Who was he?'

'I don't know. Davenant, I think Collier said, or did he say Davis? Never saw him before. I suppose he's the man Cohen quarrelled with. Though somebody said something about Callitrope.'

'This is important, Miss Maydew. The girl's disappeared.'

'It's always happening on these tours. If you go into their dressing-rooms it's always Men they are talking about. How can they ever hope to act? So sordid.'

'You can't help me at all? You've no idea where I can find this man Davenant?'

'Collier will know. He'll be back tonight. Or perhaps he won't. I don't think he knew him from Adam. It's coming back to me now. Collier called him Davis and he said, No, he was Davenant. He'd bought out Davis.'

Mather went sadly away. Some instinct that always made him go where people were, because clues were more likely to be found among a crowd of strangers than in empty rooms or deserted streets, drove him through the hall. You wouldn't have known among these avid women that England was on the edge of war. 'I said to Mrs 'Opkinson, if you are addressing me, I said.'

'That'll look tasty on Dora.' A very old woman said across a pile of artificial silk knickers, "E lay for five hours with 'is knees drawn up.' A girl giggled and said in a hoarse whisper, 'Awful. I'd say so. 'E put 'is fingers right down.' Why should these people worry about war? They moved from stall to stall in an air thick with their own deaths and sicknesses and loves. A woman with a hard driven face touched Mather's arm; she must have been about sixty years old; she had a way of ducking her head when she spoke as if she expected a blow, but up her head would come again with a sour unconquerable malice. He had watched her, without really knowing it, as he walked down the stalls. Now she plucked at him; he could smell fish on her fingers. 'Reach me that bit of stuff, dear,' she said. 'You've got long arms. No, not that. The pink,' and began to fumble for money—in Anne's bag.

4

Mather's brother had committed suicide. More than Mather he had needed to be part of an organization, to be trained and disciplined and given orders, but unlike Mather he hadn't found his organization. When things went wrong he killed himself, and Mather was called to the mortuary to identify the body. He had hoped it was a stranger until they had exposed the pale drowned lost face. All day he had been trying to find his brother, hurrying from address to address, and the first feeling he had when he saw him there was not grief. He thought: I needn't hurry, I can sit down. He went out to an A. B. C. and ordered a pot of tea. He only began to feel his grief after the second cup.

It was the same now. He thought: I needn't have hurried, I needn't have made a fool of myself before that woman with the braces. She must be dead. I needn't have felt so rushed.

The old woman said, 'Thank you, dear,' and thrust the little piece of pink material away. He couldn't feel any doubt whatever about the bag. He had given it her himself; it was an expensive bag, not a kind you would expect to find in Nottwich, and to make it quite conclusive, you could still see, within a little circle of twisted glass, the place where two initials had been removed. It was all over for ever; he hadn't got to hurry any more; a pain was on its way worse than he had felt in the A. B. C. (a man at the next table had been eating fried plaice and now, he didn't know why, he associated a certain kind of pain with the smell of fish). But first it was a perfectly cold calculating satisfaction he felt, that he had the devils in his hands already. Someone was going to die for this. The old woman had picked up a small bra and was testing the elastic with a malicious grin because it was meant for someone young and pretty with breasts worth preserving. 'The silly things they wear,' she said.

He could have arrested her at once, but already he had decided that wouldn't do; there were more in it than the old woman; he'd get them all, and the longer the chase lasted the better; he wouldn't have to begin thinking of the future till it was over. He was thankful now that Raven was armed because he himself was forced to carry a gun, and who could say whether chance might not allow him to use it?

He looked up and there on the other side of the stall, with his eyes fixed on Anne's bag, was the dark bitter figure he had been seeking, the hare-lip imperfectly hidden by a few days' growth of moustache.

Chapter 4

1

RAVEN had been on his feet all the morning. He had to keep moving; he couldn't use the little change he had on food, because he did not dare to stay still, to give anyone the chance to study his face. He bought a paper outside the post office and saw his own description there, printed in black type inside a frame. He was angry because it was on a back page: the situation in Europe filled the front page. By midday, moving here and moving there with his eyes always open for Cholmondeley, he was dog-tired. He stood for a moment and stared at his own face in a barber's window; ever since his flight from the café he had remained unshaven; a moustache would hide his scar, but he knew from experience how his hair grew in patches, strong on the chin, weak on the lip, and not at all on either side of the red deformity. Now the scrubby growth on his chin was making him conspicuous and he didn't dare go into the barber's for a shave. He passed a chocolate machine, but it would take only sixpenny or shilling pieces, and his pocket held nothing but half-crowns, florins, halfpennies. If it had not been for his bitter hatred he would have given himself up; they couldn't give him more than five years, but the death of the old minister lay, now that he was so tired and harried, like an albatross round his neck. It was hard to realize that he was wanted only for theft.

He was afraid to haunt alleys, to linger in culs-de-sac because if a policeman passed and he was the only man in sight he felt conspicuous; the man might give him a second glance, and so he walked all the time in the most crowded streets and took the risk of innumerable recognitions. It was a dull cold day, but at least it wasn't raining. The shops were full of Christmas gifts, all the absurd useless junk which had lain on back shelves all the year was brought out to fill the windows; foxhead brooches, book-rests in the shape of the Cenotaph, woollen cosies for boiled eggs, innumerable games with counters and dice and absurd patent variations on darts or bagatelle,' Cats on a Wall', the old shooting game, and' Fishing for Gold Fish'. In a religious shop by the Catholic Cathedral he found himself facing again the images that angered him in the Soho café; the plaster mother and child, the wise men and the shepherds. They were arranged in a cavern of brown paper among the books of devotion, the little pious scraps of St Theresa. 'The Holy Family': he pressed his face against the glass with a kind of horrified anger that that tale still went on. 'Because there was no room for them in the inn'; he remembered how they had sat in rows on the benches waiting for Christmas dinner, while the thin precise voice read on about Caesar Augustus and how everyone went up to his own city to be taxed. Nobody was beaten on Christmas Day: all punishments were saved for Boxing Day. Love, Charity, Patience, Humility—he was educated; he knew all about those virtues; he'd seen what they were worth. They twisted everything; even that story in there, it was historical, it had happened, but they twisted it to their own purposes. They made him a God because they could feel fine about it all, they didn't have to consider themselves responsible for the raw deal they'd given him. He'd consented, hadn't he? That was the argument, because he could have called down 'a legion of angels' if he'd wanted to escape hanging there. On your life he could, he thought with bitter lack of faith, just as easily as his own father taking the drop at Wandsworth could have saved himself when the trap opened. He stood there with his face against the glass waiting for somebody to deny that reasoning, staring at the swaddled child with a horrified tenderness, 'the little bastard', because he was educated and knew what the child was in for, the double-crossing Judas and only one man to draw a knife on his side when the Roman soldiers came for him in the garden.

A policeman came up the street, as Raven stared into the window, and passed without a glance. It occurred to him to wonder how much they knew. Had the girl told them her story? He supposed she had by this time. It would be in the paper, and he looked. There was not a word about her there.

It shook him. He'd nearly killed her and she hadn't gone to them: that meant she had believed what he'd told her. He was momentarily back in the garage again beside the Weevil in the rain and dark with the dreadful sense of desolation, of having missed something valuable, of having made an irretrievable mistake, but he could no longer comfort himself with any conviction with his old phrase: 'give her time... it always happens with a skirt'. He wanted to find her, but he thought: what a chance, I can't even find Cholmondeley. He said bitterly to the tiny scrap of plaster in the plaster cradle: 'If you were a God, you'd know I wouldn't harm her: you'd give me a break, you'd let me turn and see her on the pavement,' and he turned with half a hope, but of course there was nothing there.

As he moved away he saw a sixpence in the gutter. He picked it up and went back the way he had come to the last chocolate slot machine he had passed. It was outside a sweet shop and next a church hall, where a queue of women waited along the pavement for some kind of sale to open. They were getting noisy and impatient; it was after the hour when the doors should have opened, and he thought what fine game they would be for a really expert bag-picker. They were pressed against each other and would never notice a little pressure on the clasp. There was nothing personal in the thought; he had never fallen quite so low, he believed, as picking women's bags. But it made him idly pay attention to them, as he walked along the line. One stood out from the others, carried by an old rather dirty woman, new, expensive, sophisticated, of a kind he had seen before; he remembered at once the occasion, the little bathroom, the raised pistol, the compact she had taken from the bag.

The door was opened and the women pushed in; almost at once he was alone on the pavement beside the slot machine and the jumble-sale poster: 'Entrance 6d.' It couldn't be her bag, he told himself, there must be hundreds like it, but nevertheless he pursued it through the pitch-pine door. 'And lead us not into temptation,' the vicar was saying from a dais at one end of the hall above the old hats and the chipped vases and the stacks of women's underwear. When the prayer was finished he was flung by the pressure of the crowd against a stall of fancy goods: little framed amateur water-colours of lakeland scenery, gaudy cigarette boxes from Italian holidays, brass ashtrays and a row of discarded novels. Then the crowd lifted him and pushed on towards the favourite stall. There was nothing he could do about it. He couldn't seek for any individual in the crowd, but that didn't matter, for he found himself pressed against a stall, on the other side of which the old woman stood. He leant across and stared at the bag; he remembered how the girl had said, 'My name's Anne,' and there, impressed on the leather, was a faint initial A, where a chromium letter had been removed. He looked up, he didn't notice that there was another man beside the stall, his eyes were rilled with the image of a dusty wicked face.

He was shocked by it just as he had been shocked by Mr Cholmondeley's duplicity. He felt no guilt about the old War Minister, he was one of the great ones of the world, one of those who 'sat', he knew all the right words, he was educated, 'in the chief seats at the synagogues', and if he was sometimes a little worried by the memory of the secretary's whisper through the imperfectly shut door, he could always tell himself that he had shot her in self-defence. But this was evil: that people of the same class should prey on each other. He thrust himself along the edge of the stall until he was by her side. He bent down. He whispered, 'How did you get that bag?' but an arrowhead of predatory women forced themselves between; she couldn't even have seen who had whispered to her. As far as she knew it might have been a woman mistaking it for a bargain on one of the stalls, but nevertheless the question had scared her. He saw her elbowing her way to the door and he fought to follow her.

When he got out of the hall she was just in sight, trailing her long old-fashioned skirt round a corner. He walked fast. He didn't notice in his hurry that he in his turn was followed by a man whose clothes he would immediately have recognized, the soft hat and overcoat worn like a uniform. Very soon he began to remember the road they took; he had been this way with the girl. It was like retracing in mind an old experience. A newspaper shop would come in sight next moment, a policeman had stood just there, he had intended to kill her, to take her out somewhere beyond the houses and shoot her quite painlessly in the back. The wrinkled deep malice in the face he had seen across the stall seemed to nod at him: 'You needn't worry, we have seen to all that for you.'

It was incredible how quickly the old woman scuttled. She held the bag in one hand, lifted the absurd long skirt with the other; she was like a female Rip Van Winkle who had emerged from her sleep in the clothes of fifty years ago. He thought: they've done something to her, but who are 'they'? She hadn't been to the police; she'd believed his story; it was only to Cholmondeley's advantage that she should disappear. For the first time since his mother died he was afraid for someone else, because he knew too well that Cholmondeley had no scruples.

Past the station she turned to the left up Khyber Avenue, a line of dingy apartment houses. Coarse grey lace quite hid the interior of little rooms save when a plant in a jardiniere pressed glossy green palms against the glass between the lace. There were no bright geraniums lapping up the air behind closed panes: those scarlet flowers belong to a poorer class than the occupants of Khyber Avenue, to the exploited. In Khyber Avenue they had progressed to the aspidistra of the small exploiters. They were all Cholmondeleys on a tiny scale. Outside No .61 the old woman had to wait and fumble for her key; it gave Raven time to catch her up. He put his foot against the closing door and said, 'I want to ask you some questions.'

'Get out,' the old woman said. 'We don't 'ave anything to do with your sort.'

He pressed the door steadily open. 'You'd better listen,' he said. 'It'd be good for you.' She stumbled backwards amongst the crowded litter of the little dark hall: he noted it all with hatred: the glass case with a stuffed pheasant, the moth-eaten head of a stag picked up at a country auction to act as a hat-stand, the black metal umbrella-holder painted with gold stars, the little pink glass shade over the gas-jet. He said, 'Where did you get that bag? Oh,' he said, 'it wouldn't take much to make me squeeze your old neck.'

'Acky!' the old woman screamed. 'Acky!'

'What do you do here, eh?' He opened one of the two doors at random off the hall and saw a long cheap couch with the ticking coming through the cover, a large gilt mirror, a picture of a naked girl knee-deep in the sea; the place reeked of scent and stale gas.

'Acky!' the old woman screamed again. 'Acky!'

He said, 'So that's it, eh? You old bawd,' and turned back into the hall. But she was supported now. She had Acky with her; he had come through to her side from the back of the house on rubber-soled shoes, making no sound. Tall and bald, with a shifty pious look, he faced Raven. 'What d'you want, my man?' He belonged to a different class altogether: a good school and a theological college had formed his accent; something else had broken his nose.

'What names!' the old woman said, turning on Raven from under Acky's protecting arm.

Raven said, 'I'm in a hurry. I don't want to break up this place. Tell me where you got that bag.'

'If you refer to my wife's reticule,' the bald man said, 'it was given her—was it not, Tiny?—by a lodger.'

'When?'

'A few nights ago.'

'Where is she now?'

'She only stayed one night.'

'Why did she give her bag to you?'

'We only pass this way once,' Acky said, 'and therefore—you know the quotation?'

'Was she alone?'

'Of course she wasn't alone,' the old woman said. Acky coughed, put his hand over her face and pushed her gently behind him. 'Her betrothed,' he said, 'was with her.' He advanced towards Raven. 'That face,' he said, 'is somehow familiar. Tiny, my dear, fetch me a copy of the Journal.'

'No need,' Raven said. 'It's me all right.' He said, 'You've lied about that bag. If the girl was here, it was last night. I'm going to search this bawdy house of yours.'

'Tiny,' her husband said, 'go out at the back and call the police.' Raven's hand was on his gun, but he didn't move, he didn't draw it, his eyes were on the old woman as she trailed indeterminately through the kitchen door. 'Hurry, Tiny, my dear.'

Raven said, 'If I thought she was going, I'd shoot you straight, but she's not going to any police. You're more afraid of them than I am. She's in the kitchen now hiding in a corner.' Acky said, 'Oh no, I assure you she's gone; I heard the door; you can see for yourself,' and as Raven passed him he raised his hand and struck with a knuckle-duster at a spot behind Raven's ear.

But Raven had expected that. He ducked his head and was safely through in the kitchen doorway with his gun out.' Stay put,' he said. 'This gun doesn't make any noise. I'll plug you where you'll feel it if you move.' The old woman was where he had expected her to be, between the dresser and the door squeezed in a corner. She moaned, 'Oh, Acky, you ought to 'ave 'it 'im.'

Acky began to swear. The obscenity trickled out of his mouth effortlessly like dribble, but the tone, the accent never changed; it was still the good school, the theological college. There were a lot of Latin words Raven didn't understand. He said impatiently, 'Now where's the girl?' But Acky simply didn't hear; he stood there in a kind of nervous seizure with his pupils rolled up almost under the lids; he might have been praying; for all Raven knew some of the Latin words might be prayers: 'Saccus stercoris', 'fauces'. He said again: 'Where's the girl?'

'Leave 'im alone,' the old woman said. "E can't 'ear you. Acky,' she moaned from her corner by the dresser, 'it's all right, love, you're at 'ome.' She said fiercely to Raven, 'The things they did to 'im.'

Suddenly the obscenity stopped. He moved and blocked the kitchen door. The hand with the knuckle-duster grasped the lapel of his coat. Acky said softly, 'After all, my Lord Bishop, you too, I am sure—in your day—among the haycocks,' and tittered.

Raven said, 'Tell him to move. I'm going to search this house.' He kept his eye on both of them. The little stuffy house wore on his nerves, madness and wickedness moved in the kitchen. The old woman watched him with hatred from her corner. Raven said, 'My God, if you've killed her...' He said, 'Do you know what it feels like to have a bullet in your belly? You'll just lie there and bleed...' It seemed to him that it would be like shooting a spider. He suddenly shouted to her husband, 'Get out of my way.'

Acky said, 'Even St Augustine...' watching him with glazed eyes, barring the door. Raven struck him in the face, then backed out of reach of the nailing arm. He raised his pistol and the woman screamed at him, 'Stop! I'll get 'im out.' She said, 'Don't you dare to touch Acky. They've treated 'im bad enough in 'is day.' She took her husband's arm; she only came half-way to his shoulder, grey and soiled and miserably tender. 'Acky, dear,' she said, 'come into the parlour.' She rubbed her old wicked wrinkled face against his sleeve. 'Acky, there's a letter from the bishop.'

His pupils moved down again like those of a doll. He was almost himself again. He said, 'Tut-tut! I gave way, I think, to a little temper.' He looked at Raven with half-recognition. 'That fellow's still here, Tiny.'

'Come into the parlour, Acky dear. I've got to talk to you.' He let her pull him away into the hall and Raven followed them and mounted the stairs. All the way up he heard them talking. They were planning something between them; as like as not when he was out of sight and round the corner they'd slip out and call the police. If the girl was really not here or if they had disposed of her, they had little to fear from the police. On the first-floor landing there was a tall cracked mirror; he came up the stairs into its reflection, unshaven chin, hare-lip and ugliness. His heart beat against his ribs; if he had been called on to fire now, quickly, in self-defence, his hand and eye would have failed him. He thought hopelessly: this is ruin. I'm losing grip, a skirt's got me down. He opened the first door to hand and came into what was obviously the best bedroom, a wide double-bed with a flowery eiderdown, veneered walnut furniture, a little embroidered bag for hair combings, a tumbler of Lysol on the washstand for someone's false teeth. He opened the big wardrobe door and a musty smell of old clothes and camphor balls came out at him. He went to the closed window and looked out at Khyber Avenue, and all the while he looked he could hear the whispers from the parlour: Acky and Tiny plotting together. His eye for a moment noted a large rather clumsy-looking man in a soft hat chatting to a woman at the house opposite; another man came up the road and they strolled together out of sight. He recognized the police at once. They mightn't, of course, have seen him there, they might be engaged on a purely routine inquiry. He went quickly out on to the landing and listened: Acky and Tiny were quite silent now. He thought at first they might have left the house, but when he listened carefully he could hear the faint whistling of the old woman's breath somewhere near the foot of the stairs.

There was another door on the landing. He tried the handle. It was locked. He wasn't going to waste any more time with the old people downstairs. He shot through the lock and crashed the door open. But there was no one there. The room was empty. It was a tiny room almost filled by its double-bed, its dead fireplace hidden by a smoked brass trap. He looked out of the window and saw nothing but a small stone yard, a dustbin, a high sooty wall keeping out neighbours, the grey waning afternoon light. On the washstand was a wireless set, and the wardrobe was empty. He had no doubt what this room was used for.

But something made him stay: some sense uneasily remaining in the room of someone's terror. He couldn't leave it, and there was the locked door to be accounted for. Why should they have locked up an empty room unless it held some clue, some danger to themselves? He turned over the pillows of the bed and wondered, his hand loose on the pistol, his brain stirring with another's agony. Oh, to know, to know. He felt the painful weakness of a man who had depended always on his gun. I'm educated, aren't I, the phrase came mockingly into his mind, but he knew that one of the police out there could discover in this room more than he. He knelt down and looked under the bed. Nothing there. The very tidiness of the room seemed unnatural, as if it had been tidied after a crime. Even the mats looked as if they had been shaken.

He asked himself whether he had been imagining things. Perhaps the girl had really given the old woman her bag? But he couldn't forget that they had lied about the night she'd stayed with them, had picked the initial off the bag. And they had locked this door. But people did lock doors—against burglars, but in that case surely they left the key on the outside. Oh, there was an explanation, he was only too aware of that, for everything; why should you leave another person's initials on a bag? When you had many lodgers, naturally you forgot which night … There were explanations, but he couldn't get over the impression that something had happened here, that something had been tidied away, and it came over him with a sense of great desolation that only he could not call in the police to find this girl. Because he was an outlaw she had to be an outlaw too. Ah, Christ! that it were possible. The rain beating on the Weevil, the plaster child, the afternoon light draining from the little stone yard, the image of his own ugliness fading in the mirror, and from below stairs Tiny's whistling breath. For one short hour to see … He went back on to the landing, but something all the time pulled him back as if he were leaving a place which had been dear to him. It dragged on him as he went upstairs to the second floor and into every room in turn. There was nothing in any of them but beds and wardrobes and the stale smell of scent and toilet things and in one cupboard a broken cane. They were all of them more dusty, less tidy, more used than the room he'd left. He stood up there among the empty rooms listening; there wasn't a sound to be heard now; Tiny and her Acky were quite silent below him waiting for him to come down. He wondered again if he had made a fool of himself and risked everything. But if they had nothing to hide, why hadn't they tried to call the police? He had left them alone, they had nothing to fear while he was upstairs, but something kept them to the house just as something kept him tied to the room on the first floor.

It took him back to it. He was happier when he had closed the door behind him and stood again in the small cramped space between the big bed and the wall. The drag at his heart ceased. He was able to think again. He began to examine the room thoroughly inch by inch. He even moved the radio on the washstand. Then he heard the stairs creak and leaning his head against the door he listened to someone he supposed was Acky mounting the stairs step by step with clumsy caution; then he was crossing the landing and there he must be, just outside the door waiting and listening. It was impossible to believe that those old people had nothing to fear. Raven went along the walls, squeezing by the bed, touching the glossy flowery paper with his fingers; he had heard of people before now papering over a cavity. He reached the fireplace and unhooked the brass trap.

Propped up inside the fireplace was a woman's body, the feet in the grate, the head out of sight in the chimney. The first thought he had was of revenge; if it's the girl, if she's dead, I'll shoot them both, I'll shoot them where it hurts most so that they die slow. Then he went down on his knees to ease the body out.

The hands and feet were roped, an old cotton vest had been tied between her teeth as a gag, the eyes were closed. He cut the gag away first; he couldn't tell whether she was alive or dead; he cursed her, 'Wake up, you bitch, wake up.' He leant over her, imploring her, 'Wake up.' He was afraid to leave her, there was no water in the ewer, he couldn't do a thing; when he had cut away the ropes he just sat on the floor beside her with his eyes on the door and one hand on his pistol and the other on her breast. When he could feel her breathing under his hand it was like beginning life over again.

She didn't know where she was. She said, 'Please. The sun. It's too strong.' There was no sun in the room; it would soon be too dark to read. He thought: what ages have they had her buried there, and held his hand over her eyes to shield them from the dim winter light of early evening. She said in a tired voice, 'I could go to sleep now. There's air.'

'No, no,' Raven said, 'we've got to get out of here,' but he wasn't prepared for her simple acquiescence. 'Yes, where to?'

He said, 'You don't remember who I am. I haven't anywhere. But I'll leave you some place where it's safe.'

She said, 'I've been finding out things.' He thought she meant things like fear and death, but as her voice strengthened she explained quite clearly, 'It was the man you said. Cholmondeley.'

'So you know me,' Raven said. But she took no notice. It was as if all the time in the dark she had been rehearsing what she had to say when she was discovered, at once, because there was no time to waste.

'I made a guess at somewhere where he worked. Some company. It scared him. He must work there. I don't remember the name. I've got to remember.'

'Don't worry,' Raven said. 'It'll come back. But how is it you aren't crazy … Christ! you've got nerve.'

She said, 'I remembered till just now. I heard you looking for me in the room, and then you went away and I forgot everything.'

'Do you think you could walk now?'

'Of course I could walk. We've got to hurry.'

'Where to?'

'I had it all planned. It'll come back. I had plenty of time to think things out.'

'You sound as if you weren't scared at all.'

'I knew I'd be found all right. I was in a hurry. We haven't got much time. I thought about the war all the time.'

He said again admiringly, 'You've got nerve.'

She began to move her hands and feet up and down quite methodically as if she were following a programme she had drawn up for herself. 'I thought a lot about that war. I read somewhere, but I'd forgotten, about how babies can't wear gas masks because there's not enough air for them.' She knelt up with her hand on his shoulder. 'There wasn't much air there. It made things sort of vivid. I thought, we've got to stop it. It seems silly, doesn't it, us two, but there's nobody else.' She said, 'My feet have got pins and needles bad. That means they are coming alive again.' She tried to stand up, but it wasn't any good.

Raven watched her. He said, 'What else did you think?'

She said, 'I thought about you. I wished I hadn't had to go away like that and leave you.'

'I thought you'd gone to the police.'

'I wouldn't do that.' She managed to stand up this time with her hand on his shoulder. 'I'm on your side.'

Raven said, 'We've got to get out of here. Can you walk?'

'Yes.'

'Then leave go of me. There's someone outside.' He stood by the door with his gun in his hand listening. They'd had plenty of time, those two, to think up a plan, longer than he. He pulled the door open. It was very nearly dark. He could see no one on the landing. He thought: the old devil's at the side waiting to get a hit at me with the poker. I'll take a run for it, and immediately tripped across the string they had tied across the doorway. He was on his knees with the gun on the floor; he couldn't get up in time and Acky's blow got him on the left shoulder. It staggered him, he couldn't move, he had just time to think: it'll be the head next time, I've gone soft, I ought to have thought of a string, when he heard Anne speak: 'Drop the poker.' He got painfully to his feet; the girl had snatched the gun as it fell and had Acky covered. He said with astonishment, 'You're fine.' At the bottom of the stairs the old woman cried out, 'Acky, where are you?'

'Give me the gun,' Raven said. 'Get down the stairs, you needn't be afraid of the old bitch.' He backed after her, keeping Acky covered, but the old couple had shot their bolt. He said regretfully, 'If he'd only rush I'd put a bullet in him.'

'It wouldn't upset me,' Anne said. 'I'd have done it myself.'

He said again, 'You're fine.' He nearly forgot the detectives he had seen in the street, but with his hand on the door he remembered. He said, 'I may have to make a bolt for it if the police are outside.' He hardly hesitated before he trusted her. 'I've found a hide-out for the night. In the goods yard. A shed they don't use any longer. I'll be waiting by the wall tonight fifty yards down from the station.' He opened the door. Nobody moved in the street; they walked out together and down the middle of the road into a vacant dusk. Anne said, 'Did you see a man in the doorway opposite?'

'Yes,' Raven said. 'I saw him.'

'I thought it was like—but how could it—?'

'There was another at the end of the street. They were police all right, but they didn't know who I was. They'd have tried to get me if they'd known.'

'And you'd have shot?'

'I'd have shot all right. But they didn't know it was me.' He laughed with the night damp in his throat. 'I've fooled them properly.' The lights went on in the city beyond the railway bridge, but where they were it was just a grey dusk and the sound of an engine shunting in the yard.

'I can't walk far,' Anne said. 'I'm sorry. I suppose I'm a bit sick after all.'