The Best of Gerald Kersh

Clock Without Hands

SEVERAL years ago, when newspapers had space to spare for all kinds of sensational trivialities, John Jacket of the Sunday Special went to talk with a certain Mr Wainewright about the stabbing of a man named Tooth whose wife had been arrested and charged with murder. It was a commonplace, dreary case. The only extraordinary thing about it was that Martha Tooth had not killed her husband ten years earlier. The police had no difficulty in finding her. She was sitting at home, crying and wringing her hands. It was a dull affair; she was not even young, or pretty.

But Jacket had a knack of finding strange and colourful aspects of drab, even squalid affairs. He always appproached his subjects from unconventional angles. Now he went out on the trail of Wainewright, the unassuming man who had found Tooth’s body, and who owned the house in which Tooth had lived.

Even the Scotland Yard man who took down Wainewright’s statement had not been able to describe the appearance of the little householder. He was ‘just ordinary’, the detective said, ‘sort of like a City clerk’. He was like everybody: he was a nobody. At half-past seven every evening Wainewright went out to buy a paper and drink a glass of beer in the saloon bar of the ‘Firedrake’– always the Evening Extra: never more than one glass of beer.

So one evening at half-past seven John Jacket went into the saloon bar of the ‘Firedrake’, and found Mr Wainewright sitting under an oval mirror that advertised Bach’s Light Lager. Jacket had to look twice before he saw the man.

A man has a shape; a crowd has no shape and no colour. The massed faces of a hundred thousand men make one blank pallor; their clothes add up to a shadow; they have no words. This man might have been one hundred-thousandth part of the featureless whiteness, the dull greyness, and the toneless murmuring of a docile multitude. He was something less than nondescript – he was blurred, without identity, like a smudged fingerprint. His suit was of some dim shade between brown and grey. His shirt had grey-blue stripes, his tie was patterned with dots like confetti trodden into the dust, and his oddment of limp brownish moustache resembled a cigarette-butt, disintegrating shred by shred in a tea-saucer. He was holding a brand-new Anthony Eden hat on his knees, and looking at the clock.

‘This must be the man,’ said Jacket.

He went to the table under the oval mirror, smiled politely, and said: ‘Mr Wainewright, I believe?’

The little man stood up. ‘Yes. Ah, yes. My name is Wainewright.’

‘My name is Jacket; of the Sunday Special. How do you do?’

They shook hands. Mr Wainewright said: ‘You’re the gentleman who writes every week!’

‘“Free For All”– yes, that’s my page. But what’ll you drink, Mr Wainewright?’

‘I hardly ever——’

‘Come, come,’ said Jacket. He went to the bar. Mr Wainewright blinked and said:

‘I take the Sunday Mail. With all due respect, of course. But I often read your efforts. You have a big following, I think?’

‘Enormous, Mr. Wainewright.’

‘And so this is the famous … the famous …’ He stared at Jacket with a watery mixture of wonder and trepidation in his weak eyes. ‘With all due respect, Mr Jacket, I don’t know what I can tell you that you don’t know already.’

‘Oh, to hell with the murder,’ said Jacket, easily. ‘It isn’t about that I want to talk to you, Mr Wainewright.’

‘Oh, not about the murder?’

‘A twopenny-halfpenny murder, whichever way you take it. No, I want to talk about you, Mr Wainewright.’

‘Me? But Scotland Yard——’

‘—Look. You will excuse me, won’t you? You may know the sort of things I write about, and in that case you’ll understand how this Tooth murder affair fails to interest me very much. What does it amount to, after all? A woman stabs a man.’ Jacket flapped a hand in a derogatory gesture. ‘So? So a woman stabs a man. A hackneyed business: an ill-treated wife grabs a pair of scissors and – pst! Thousands have done it before; thousands will do it again, and a good job too. If she hadn’t stabbed Tooth, somebody else would have, sooner or later. But … how shall I put it? … you, Mr Wainewright, you interest me, because you’re the …”

Jacket paused, groping for a word, and Mr Wainewright said with a little marsh-light flicker of pride: ‘The landlord of the house in which the crime was committed, sir?’

‘The bystander, the onlooker, the witness. I like to get at the, the impact of things – the way people are affected by things. So let’s talk about yourself.’

Alarmed and gratified, Mr Wainewright murmured: ‘I haven’t anything to tell about myself. There isn’t anything of interest, I mean. Tooth——’

‘Let’s forget Tooth. It’s an open-and-shut case, anyway.’

‘Er, Mr Jacket. Will they hang her, do you think?’

‘Martha Tooth? No, not in a thousand years.’

‘But surely, she’s a murderess, sir!’

‘They can’t prove premeditation.’

‘Well, Mr Jacket, I don’t know about that …’

‘Tell me, Mr Wainewright; do you think they ought to hang Martha Tooth?’

‘Well, sir, she did murder her hubby, after all …’

‘But how d’you feel about it? What would you say, if you were a juryman?’

‘The wages of sin is … ah … the penalty for murder is the, ahem, the rope, Mr Jacket!’

‘And tell me, as man to man – do you believe that this woman deserves to swing for Tooth?’

‘It’s the law, sir, isn’t it?’

‘Is it? They don’t hang people for crimes of passion these days.’

At the word ‘passion’, Mr Wainewright looked away. He drank a little whisky-and-soda, and said: ‘Perhaps not, sir. She might get away with … with penal servitude for life, Mr Jacket, do you think?’

‘Much less than that.’

‘Not really?’ Mr Wainewright’s voice was wistful.

‘She might even be acquitted.’

‘Well, sir … that’s for the judge and jury to decide. But to take human life …’

‘Do you dislike the woman, Mr Wainewright?’

Jacket blinked at the little man from under half-raised eyebrows.

‘Oh good Lord no, sir! Not at all, Mr Jacket: I don’t even know her. I only saw her for an instant.’

‘Good-looking?’

‘Good-looking, Mr Jacket? No, no she wasn’t. A … a … charwomanish type, almost. As you might say, she was bedraggled.’

‘As I might say?’

‘Well … without offence, Mr Jacket, you are a writer, aren’t you?’

‘Ah. Ah, yes. Not a handsome woman, eh?’

‘She looked – if you’ll excuse me – as if she …. as if she’d had children, sir. And then she was flurried, and crying. Handsome? No, sir, not handsome.’

‘This Tooth of yours was a bit of a son of a dog, it seems to me. A pig, according to all accounts.’

‘Not a nice man by any means, sir. I was going to give him notice. Not my kind of tenant – not the sort of tenant I like to have in my house, sir.’

‘Irregular hours, I suppose: noisy, eh?’

‘Yes, and he … he drank, too. And worse, sir.’

‘Women?’

Mr Wainewright nodded, embarrassed. ‘Yes. Women all the time.’

‘That calls for a little drink,’ said Jacket.

He brought fresh drinks. ‘Oh no!’ cried Mr Wainewright. ‘Not for me: I couldn’t, thanks all the same.’

‘Drink it up,’ said Jacket, ‘all up, like a good boy.’

The little man raised his glass.

‘Your good health, Mr Jacket. Yes, he was not a nice class of man by any means. All the girls seemed to run after him, though: I never could make out why they did. He was what you might call charming, sir – lively, always joking. But well; he was a man of about my own age – forty-six, at least – and I never could understand what they could see in Tooth.’

He swallowed his whisky like medicine, holding his breath in order not to taste it.

Jacket said: ‘Judging by his photo, I should say he was no oil-painting. A great big slob, I should have said – loud-mouthed, back-slapping, crooked.’

‘He was a big, powerful man, of course,’ said Mr Wainewright.

‘Commercial traveller, I believe?’ said Jacket.

‘Yes, he was on the road, sir.’

‘Make a lot of money?’

‘Never saved a penny, Mr Jacket,’ said Mr Wainewright, in a shocked voice. ‘But he could sell things, sir. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. Throw him out of the door, and back he comes at the window.’

‘That’s the way to please the ladies,’ said Jacket. ‘Appear ruthless; refuse to take no for an answer; make it quite clear that you know what you want and are going to get it. He did all that, eh?’

‘Yes, sir, he did …. Oh, you really shouldn’t’ve done that: I can’t——’

More drinks had been set down.

‘Cheers,’ said Jacket. Wainewright sipped another drink. ‘Are you a married man, Mr Wainewright?’

‘Married? Me? No, not me, Mr Jacket.’

‘Confirmed bachelor, hm?’

Mr Wainewright giggled; the whisky was bringing a pinkness to his cheeks. ‘That’s it, sir.’

‘Like your freedom, eh?’

‘Never given marriage a thought, sir.’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised if you were a bit of a devil on the sly, yourself, Mr Wainewright,’ said Jacket, with a knowing wink.

‘I … I don’t have time to bother with such things.’

‘Your boarding-house keeps you pretty busy.’

‘My apartment house? Yes, it does, off and on.’

‘Been in the business long?’

‘Only about eight months, sir, since my auntie died. She left me the house, you see, and I thought it was about time I had a bit of a change. So I kept it on. I was in gents’ footwear before that, sir, I was with Exton and Co., Limited, for more than twenty years.’

‘Making shoes?’

Mr Wainewright was offended. He said: ‘Pardon me, I was a salesman in one of their biggest branches, sir.’

‘So sorry,’ said Jacket. ‘Did Tooth yell out?’

‘Eh? Pardon? Yell out? N-no, no, I can’t say he did. He coughed, kind of. But he was always coughing, you see. He was a heavy smoker. A cigarette-smoker. It’s a bad habit, cigarettes: he smoked one on the end of another, day and night. Give me a pipe any day, Mr Jacket.’

‘Have a cigar?’

‘Oh … that’s very kind indeed of you I’m sure. I’ll smoke it later on if I may.’

‘By all means, do, Mr Wainewright. Tell me, how d’you find business just now? Slow, I dare say, eh?’

‘Steady, sir, steady. But I’m not altogether dependent on the house. I had some money saved of my own, and my auntie left me a nice lump sum, so …’

‘So you’re your own master. Lucky fellow!’

‘Ah,’ said Wainewright, ‘I’d like a job like yours, Mr Jacket. You must meet so many interesting people.’

‘I’ll show you round a bit, some evening,’ said Jacket.

‘No, really?’

‘Why not?’ Jacket smiled, and patted the little man’s arm. ‘What’s your address?’

‘77, Bishop’s Square, Belgravia.’

‘Pimlico … the taxi-drivers’ nightmare,’ said Jacket. writing it on the back of an old envelope. ‘Good. Well, and tell me – how does it feel to be powerful?’

‘Who, me? I’m not powerful, sir.’

‘Wainewright, you know you are.’

‘Oh, nonsense, Mr Jacket!’

‘Not nonsense. You’re the chief witness; it all depends on you. Don’t you realise that your word may send a woman to the gallows, or to jail? Just your word, your oath! Why, you’ve got the power over life and death. You’re something like a sultan, or a dictator – something like a god, as far as Martha Tooth is concerned. You have terrible power, indeed!’

Mr Wainewright blinked; and then something strange happened. His eyes became bright and he smiled. But he shook his head. ‘No, no,’ he said, with a kind of sickly vivacity. ‘No, you’re joking.’

Jacket, looking at him, said: ‘What an interesting man you are, Wainewright! What a fascinating man you really are!’

‘Ah, you only say that. You’re an author, and you can make ex-extraordinary things out of nothing.’

‘Don’t you believe it, Wainewright. You can’t make anything out of nothing. There’s more in men than meets the eye, though; and you are an extremely remarkable man. Why, I could make fifteen million people sit up and gape at you. What’s your first name?’

‘Eh? Er … George Micah.’

‘I think I’ll call you George. We ought to get together more.’

‘Well, I’m honoured, I’m sure, Mr Jacket.’

‘Call me Jack.’

‘Oh … it’s friendly of you, but I shouldn’t dare to presume. But, Mr Jacket, you must let me offer you a little something.’ Wainewright was leaning toward him, eagerly blinking. ‘I should be offended…. Whisky?’

‘Thanks,’ said Jacket.

The little man reached the bar. It was his destiny to wait unattended; to be elbowed aside by newcomers; to cough politely at counters.

At last he came back with two glasses of whisky. As soon as he was seated again he said:

‘Mr Jacket … you were joking about … You weren’t serious about making fifteen million people …’

‘Sit up and gape at you? Yes I was, George.’

‘But Mr Jacket, I … I’m nobody of interest; nobody.’

‘You are a man of destiny,’ said Jacket. ‘In the first place – not taking anything else into account – you are an Ordinary Man. What does that mean? All the genius of the world is hired to please you, and all the power of industry is harnessed in your service. Trains run to meet you; Cabinet Ministers crawl on their bellies to you; press barons woo you, George; archbishops go out of their way to make heaven and hell fit your waistcoat. Your word is Law. The King himself has got to be nice to you. Get it? You are the boss around here. All the prettiest women on earth have only one ambition, George Wainewright – to attract and amuse you, tickle you, excite you, in general take your mind off the harsh business of ruling the world. George, you don’t beg; you demand. You are the Public. Let anybody dare lift a finger without keeping an eye on your likes and dislikes: you’ll smash him, George! Rockefeller and Woolworth beg and pray you to give them your pennies. And so what do you mean by saying you’re nobody? Where do you get that kind of stuff, George? Nobody? You’re everybody!’

Mr Wainewright blinked. Jacket drank his health, and said: ‘So now tell me more about yourself.’

‘Well …’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘I don’t know what to say, I’m sure. You know everything already. You want my opinion, perhaps?’ In Mr Wainewright’s eyes there appeared a queer, marsh-light flicker of self-esteem.

‘Perhaps,’ said Jacket.

‘In my humble opinion,’ Mr Wainewright said, ‘the woman deserves to die. Of course, I admit that Tooth was a bad man. He was a drunkard, and a bully, and went in for too many women. He ill-treated them, sir; and he was a married man too. I couldn’t bear him.’

‘Then why did you let him stay in your house?’ asked Jacket.

‘Well … I don’t know. I had intended to give Tooth notice to quit more than once, but whenever I began to get around to it … somehow or other he managed to put me off. He’d tell me a funny story – never a nice story, but so funny that I couldn’t help laughing. You know what I mean? He had a way with him, Mr Jacket. He must have. He sold Poise Weighing Machines. He told me, once, how he had sold a sixty-guinea weighing-machine to an old lady who had a sweet-shop in a little village – it was wicked, but I couldn’t help laughing. And then again, his success with the women…. But all the same, you didn’t ought to be allowed to get away with murder. I mean to say – he was her husband, wasn’t he? And a human being, too. And I mean to say – the fact remains, doesn’t it? She stabbed her husband to death with a pair of sharp scissors.’

‘All right,’ said Jacket. ‘But can we prove that Martha Tooth meant to do it, eh? Can we prove premeditation?’

‘I don’t know anything about all that, I’m afraid,’ said Mr Wainewright.

Jacket said: ‘They don’t hang you for murder without malice aforethought in a case of this sort. And incidentally, there isn’t any actual proof that Martha Tooth really did stab her pig of a husband, is there?’

Mr Wainewright was shocked. ‘She must have!’ he said. ‘Who else could have, if she didn’t?’

‘Anyone might have done it, my dear George. I might have done it. You might have done it. The charwoman might have done it. Did anyone see her do it?’

‘Well, no, I suppose not,’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘But the evidence! The evidence, Mr Jacket!’

‘Call me Jack, George old man.’

‘Jack,’ said Wainewright, shyly and with some reluctance.

‘But go on, George,’ said Jacket. ‘What evidence?’

‘The evidence, J-Jack. (Jack, sir, since you insist.)’

John Jacket felt a strange, perverse desire to provoke, to irritate this respectable little man. ‘Evidence,’ he said, ‘evidence! I spit on the evidence. A woman comes into a house; a woman goes out of a house. The man she visited is found, stuck like a pig – which he was – with a pair of long, sharp, paper-cutting scissors in his throat near the collar-bone. So what? So what, George? He was in the habit of smuggling women into his room. Isn’t that so?’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

‘Say, for example, this man Tooth had a woman in his room before his wife – this wretched Martha Tooth – turned up unexpectedly. Say, for example, he hides this hypothetical woman in a cupboard…. Was there a big cupboard, closet, or wardrobe in Tooth’s room?’

‘There is a big wardrobe,’ said Mr Wainewright, meditating.

‘Say, then, that Tooth, hearing his wife’s voice downstairs, hid his concubine in the wardrobe. The wife comes in. She talks to Tooth. She goes away. As the door closes, the enraged woman in the wardrobe comes out fighting, with a pair of scissors, and – jab! An overhand stroke with something like a stiletto, striking the soft part of your throat just where the big artery runs down. A child could do it. What?’

‘Possible, I dare say,’ said Mr Wainewright, tapping his foot in irritation, ‘but I don’t see the point. Mr Jacket – I’m sorry, I mean Jack. Jack, since you say I may call you Jack. If there had been any other lady in Tooth’s room I should have known it.’

‘How could you know?’ asked Jacket.

Mr Wainewright meditated, marking off points with his fingers: he was somewhat drunk. He said, laboriously: ‘In the first place, I have a respectable house. When my auntie died I converted it into little furnished flatlets. People can do as they like in my place, within reason, Mr Jacket. I mean to say Jack, Jack. By “within reason” I mean to say that people can have visitors … within reason, visitors. As the person responsible for the house, I was always on the spot – or nearly always. A person can’t be sure of anybody, and you don’t want your house to get a bad reputation. So I … to be frank, I listened to how many footsteps were going up to this floor or that floor. And as it happened my little room was next door to Tooth’s. And I can assure you that Mrs Tooth was the only visitor Tooth had that night. Mrs Madge, the lady who does the cleaning, let Mrs Tooth in. I passed her on the stairs – or rather, I stood aside to let her pass on the first-floor landing. I had seen Tooth only about two minutes before. He’d just got home from Bristol.’

‘Did he say anything?’ asked Jacket.

‘He … he was the same as usual. Full of jokes. He was telling me about some girl he met in Bristol, some girl who worked in baker’s shop. The, ah, the usual thing. Mrs Madge let Mrs Tooth in while he was talking to me. He said: “I wonder what the – the Aitch – she wants.” And he said that she had better come on up. He’d been drinking. I went down because, to be quite frank, I’d never seen Tooth’s wife, and wondered what kind of a woman she could be.’

‘And what kind of a woman was she, George?’

‘Not what I should have expected, Mr Jacket – I mean J-Jack. One of the plain, humble-looking kind. You wouldn’t have thought she’d have appealed to Tooth at all: he went in for the barmaidish type, sir.’

‘You never can tell, George, old boy. After that you went up to your room, if I remember right.’

‘That’s right. My room was next door to Tooth’s. I mean, my sitting-room: I have a little suite,’ said Mr Wainewright, with pride.

‘Have a little drink,’ said Jacket, pushing a freshly-filled glass over to him.

‘I couldn’t, really.’

‘No arguments, George. By the by, remind me to let you have some theatre tickets. You and I’ll go to the first night of Greek Scandals next week. Drink up. Well, go on, George.’

‘Where was I? Oh yes. I had some accounts to do, you see, so I went to my sitting-room. And I could hear them talking.’

‘What were they saying, George?’

‘I couldn’t quite get what they were saying, Mr Jacket.’

‘But you tried?’

Mr Wainewright fidgeted and blushed. ‘I did try,’ he admitted. ‘But I only gathered that they were having a quarrel. Once Tooth shouted. He said “Go to the devil.” She started crying and he burst out laughing.’

‘A nice man, your friend Tooth, George.’

‘Yes, sir. I mean no, Mr Jacket – not at all nice.’

‘And then?’

‘About a quarter of an hour later, I should say, they stopped talking. They’d been raising their voices quite loud. I knocked on the wall, and they stopped. Then Tooth started coughing.’

‘Was that unusual?’

‘No, not at all unusual. He was a cigarette-smoker. In the morning, and at night, it was painful to listen to him, sir. And then his door opened and closed. I opened my door and looked out, and Mrs Tooth was going downstairs crying, and there was some blood on her hand. I asked her if she had hurt herself, and if she wanted some iodine or anything, and she said “No, no,” and ran downstairs and out of the house.’

‘She’d cut herself, it appears.’

‘That’s right, ah … J-Jack.’

‘That’s it, George. Call me Jack and I’ll call you George,’ said Jacket. ‘What made you go into Tooth’s room later on?’

Mr Wainewright said: ‘He always borrowed my evening paper. I nearly always used to hand it over to him when I’d done with it.’ He held up a copy of the Evening Extra, neatly folded. ‘When I got back from here – I come here just for one quiet drink every evening, and read the paper here as a rule, you see –I went to his door and knocked.’

‘And, of course, he didn’t say “Come in,”’ said Jacket.

‘No. So I knocked again. No answer. I knocked again——’

‘– And at last you went in without knocking, eh?’

‘Exactly. And there he lay across the bed, Mr Jacket – a horrible sight to see, horrible!’

‘Bled a good deal?’

‘I never thought even Tooth could have bled so much!’

‘That shook you, eh, George?’

‘It made me feel faint, I assure you, sir. But I didn’t touch anything. I phoned the police. They were there in ten minutes.’

‘Detective Inspector Taylor, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, that’s right. A nice man.’

‘He collects stamps for a pastime. Have you any hobbies, George?’

Mr Wainewright giggled. ‘It sounds silly,’ he said. ‘When I haven’t got anything else to do I cut pictures out of magazines.’

‘And what do you do with them when you’ve cut them out, George?’

‘I stick them in a scrap-book.’

‘An innocent pastime enough.’

‘In a way, sort of like collecting stamps – in a way,’ said Mr Wainewright.

‘Yet you never can tell how that sort of thing may end,’ said Jacket. ‘Look at Tooth. He got his by means of a pair of scissors – editorial scissors, paper-cutting scissors. Lord, how often have I wanted to stab the Sub with his own scissors!’

‘That’s right,’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘Long pointy scissors. They were part of a set – scissors and paper-knife in a leather case. I’d borrowed them myself a few days before. Very sharp scissors.’

‘Little did you think,’ said Jacket, ‘that that pair of scissors would end up in your lodger’s throat!’

‘Little did I, J-Jack,’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘It makes a person think. May I ask … are you going to put something in the paper about me?’

‘I think so,’ said Jacket.

Mr Wainewright giggled. ‘You wouldn’t like a photograph of me?’

‘We’ll see about that, George. We’ll see. What are you doing on Saturday?’

‘Next Saturday morning I get my hair cut,’ said Mr Wainewright.

‘Matter of routine, eh?’

‘Yes, sir. But——’

‘No, no, never mind. You get your hair cut on Saturday, George, and I’ll give you a tinkle some time. Right. And now if I were you I’d go and get some sleep, George, old man. You don’t look quite yourself,’ said Jacket.

‘I’m not a drinking man … I oughtn’t to drink,’ muttered Mr Wainewright, putting his hat on back-to-front and rising unsteadily. ‘I don’t feel very well …’

Poor little fellow, thought Jacket, having seen Mr Wainewright safely seated in a taxi. This Tooth affair has thrown him right out of gear. Bloodshed in Wainewright’s life! A revolution! It’s almost as if he found himself wearing a bright red tie.

Jacket, who was on the edge of the haze at the rim of the steady white light of sobriety, began to work out a story about Mr Wainewright. He thought that he might call it The Red Thread of Murder. Never mind the killer, never mind the victim – all that had been dealt with a hundred times before. What about the Ordinary Man, the Man In The Street, who has never seen blood except on his chin after a bad shave with a blunt blade, who opens a door and sees somebody like Tooth lying dead in a thick red puddle? Jacket laughed. In spite of everything Mr Wainewright had to get his hair cut on Saturday. There was, he decided, something ineffably pathetic about this desperate doggedness with which people like Wainewright clung to the finical tidiness of their fussy everyday lives.

He went to sleep thinking of Mr Wainewright. Mr Wainewright lay awake thinking of John Jacket, but went to sleep thinking: To-morrow is Friday: I put a new blade in my safety-razor.

So that Saturday, Mr Wainewright went to his barber. Friday was New Blade Day; Monday was Clean Shirt Day; Sunday morning was Bath morning; and he had his hair cut every third Saturday. This was law and order; a system to be maintained. System; routine – in the life of Wainewright inevitable laws governed collar-studs, rubber heels, sheets of toilet-paper, the knotting of neckties, the lighting of pipes, the cutting of string and the sticking-on of stamps. He ate, drank, walked and combed his hair in immutable rhythm. He was established to run smoothly for ever. Every habit of Wainewright’s was a Bastille; his every timed action was housed in a little Kremlin. Therefore, to-day, he had to get his hair cut. But Jowl’s display made him stop for a few minutes.

Jowl, who owned the antique shop on the corner, had stripped some bankrupt’s walls of a great, gleaming yataganerie of edged and pointed weapons. They hung on sale: double-handed swords, moon-faced battle-axes, mailed fists, stilettos, basket-hiked Italian daggers, Toledo rapiers, needle-pointed Khyber knives, adze-shaped obsidian club-axes, three-bladed knuckle-duster daggers, arquebuses, and a heap of oddments of sixteenth-century body-armour. Wainewright stood, smoking his pipe, looking hard. He stopped and examined some assassin’s weapon of the fourteen hundreds – a knife with a spring. You stabbed your man, and – Knutch! – it flew open like a pair of scissors.

At the back of the window stood a complete suit of jousting-armour, with a massive helmet shaped like a frog’s head. Wainewright looked up and, as it happened, he saw the reflection of his face exactly where his face would have been if he had been wearing the armour.

Then, in his breast, something uncoiled. He gazed, whistling. ‘Ye Gods!’ he said. ‘Ye Gods!’ But even as he looked he was inclined to laugh: his reflection was wearing a bowler hat.

Still, why not? thought Mr Wainewright. But then he remembered that he was an important person, that the glaring eyes of the world were focused on him. He walked across the court and pushed open the door of Flickenflocker’s Select Saloon.

Calm! thought Wainewright. Calm! Keep calm! The door of the barber’s shop was fitted with a compressed air brake: it hissed behind him and closed with a gentle tap.

As the door hissed, Wainewright stood still, tense. Then he also hissed: he had been holding his breath. When the door closed, he also made a tapping noise: he had been standing on his toes.

Flickenflocker said: ‘Harpust one! Quarder-nour late! For fifteen years so I never knew you to miss a second! Eh? Tsu, tsu, tsu!’

‘Am I late?’ asked Wainewright.

‘Fifteen minutes in fifteen years,’ said Flickenflocker. ‘One minute every year. In a hundred-twenty years, so you could save enough time to go to the pictures.’

‘The usual,’ said Wainewright, sitting in a chair.

‘Nice and clean back and sides,’ said Flickenflocker.

Wainewright nodded. But as he did so he noticed that a peculiar quietness had come over the people in the shop. They were exchanging hurried words in lowered voices, and looking at him out of the corners of their eyes. Deep in the breast of Mr Wainewright something broke into a glow which spread through him until he felt all his veins were burning brilliantly red like neon-tubes. He knew exactly what was being said: That is Wainewright, the witness for the prosecution in the Tooth murder case.

In a clear, slightly tremulous voice, he said:

‘And I’ll have a lavender shampoo.’

‘Why not?’ said Flickenflocker, as his long sharp scissors began to nibble and chatter at the fine, colourless hair of the little man in the chair. ‘Why not?’

Flickenflocker worked with the concentration and exalted patience of a biologist cutting a section, and as he worked he whistled little tunes. His whistle was a whisper: he drew in the air through his teeth, for he had been taught never to breathe on customers. At all times he seemed to be working out some problem of fabulous complexity – breathlessly following a fine thread through infinite mazes of thought. Occasionally he uttered a word or a mere noise, as if he had found something but was throwing it away … Tss! … Muhuh! … Tu-tu-tu! … Oh dear! Wainewright liked this strange, calm barber who demonstrated no urge to make conversation; whose shiny yellow hands, soft and light as a pair of blown-up rubber gloves, had touched the faces of so many men whose pictures had filled posters while their names topped bills.

For Flickenflocker’s was a theatrical establishment, or had been. A hundred photographs of forgotten and half-remembered actors hung on the walls. As small boys cut their names on desks and trees, actors and sportsmen pin their photographs to the walls of pubs and barbershops. Thus they leave a little something by means of which somebody may remember them … until the flies, in their turn, deface the likenesses which Time has almost wiped away; and the dustbins, which gape around the relics of little men like sharks in a bitter sea, close with a clang. Even in the grave nothing is completely lost as long as somebody can say: Lottie had a twenty-four-inch thigh; or Fruitcake bubble-danced; or J. J. Sullivan could have eaten Kid Fathers before breakfast. We hang about the necks of our to-morrows like hungry harlots about the necks of penniless sailors. So, for twenty-three years, singers, boxers, actors, six-day cyclists, tumblers, soubrettes, jugglers, dancers, wrestlers, clowns, ventriloquists and lion-tamers had given Flickenflocker their photographs – always with a half-shrug and a half-smile of affable indulgence. Flickenflocker hung up every one of them: he knew that the day always came when a man returned, if only to look at the wall and dig some illusion about himself out of the junk-heap of stale publicity.

They always came back to Flickenflocker, whose memory was reliable and unobtrusive as a Yale lock. One sidelong look at a profile opened a flap in his head and let out a name. After ten years he could glance at you, name you with matter-of-fact enthusiasm, and make appropriate casual chatter. As soon as the shop door closed and your heels hit the street he kicked the flap back and waited for the next customer … looked up, segregated; silent except for hisses, gulps, and monosyllables.

Yet Flickenflocker could talk. Now, while Pewter’s flat French razor chirped in the lather like a sparrow in snow and, on his left, the great hollow-ground blade of Kyropoulos sang Dzing-dzing! over the blue chin of a big man in a pearl-grey suit, Flickenflocker talked to Mr Wainewright.

The barber made conversation with the least distinguished of all his customers.

‘You’re the man of the moment, Mister Wainewright.’

‘Nonsense, Mister Flickenflocker.’

‘I can read the papers, thank God, Mister Wainewright. I’m not altogedder blind yet, God forbid. Hm!’

‘It’s all got nothing to do with me.’

‘No? Your worster enemies should be where that poor woman is now. In your hands is already a rope. A … a … a loop you can tie; you can tie a noose round her neck.’

‘It’s the Law, Mister Flickenflocker.’

‘You’re right there, Mister Wainewright. That’s what the law is for. That’s what we pay rates and taxes for. You want to kill somebody: right, go on. But afterwards don’t say: “Huxcuse me, I forgot myself.” Don’t say: “Once don’t count – give me just one more charnsh.” A huxcuse me ain’t enough – murder ain’t the hee-cups. Murderers get hung: good job too. Poor woman!’

‘But if she’s guilty?’

‘Mmmmyes, you’re right. But a woman’s got a lot to put up with. With a certain class of man a woman can put up with a lot, Mister Wainewright.’

‘But murder!’

‘Murder…. Mnyup. Still, in a temper…. I knew a baker, a gentleman. In … in … in the electric chair he’d of got up to give a lady his seat. So one day in a temper he put his friend in the oven. They found it out by trousers-buttons; by trousers-buttons they found it out. Afterwards, he was sorry. Still, I didn’t say it was right; only I don’t like hanging ladies. N-hah, mmmmyah! Well, you got nerve!’

‘Why? Why have I got nerve?’

‘Judge, juries: I’d be frightened out of my life.’

‘But why?’

‘They can make black white. White black they can make.’

‘I’ve nothing to fear: I can only tell the plain truth.’

‘And good luck to you! What class of people is a murderer? No class. A man in the prime of life, so she goes and kills. With scissors, eh? She kills her husband with scissors! It shows you. Scissors, pokers – if somebody wants to murder a person, hm! Daggers they can find in … in … in chocolate cakes, if they put their minds to it. Even a razor they can kill somebody with. Present company excepted. With a murderer, everything is a revolver. But what for? Why should she do it to her own husband?’

‘For love, I think, Mister Flickenflocker.’

‘Eeeeh! Love. People should settle down, with a home, and plenty children, with plenty work; happy they ought to be, people. If there’s an argument, so sometimes one gives way, sometimes another gives way. For peace in the house, you got to give way. It looks bad to fight in front of the kids. So in the end you have grandchildren. What do they mean, love? To kill a person for love? In a book they read such rubbish, Mister Wainewright. For hate, for money, for hunger kill a person. For your wife and children kill a person. But love? Never heard of such a thing.’

‘We’d better leave that to the judge and jury,’ said Wainewright, coldly.

‘We got no option,’ said Flickenflocker. ‘We got to leave it to the judgen-jury. Anyway, it didn’t have nothing to do with you, thank goodness.’

‘No?’ said Wainewright.

‘No,’ said Flickenflocker, easily.

‘It happened in my own house. I was in the next room. It does affect me a little bit,’ said Wainewright, frowning.

‘It’s all for the best I dessay,’ Flickenflocker picked up a pair of fine clippers. ‘Lots o’ people’ll want to live there now.’

‘More likely they’ll want to stay away from my house, Mister Flickenflocker.’

‘Don’t you believe it! If there was a body (God forbid) in every cupboard, people’d pay double to stay there. For every one that don’t like a murder, there’s ten that’d rather have a murder than a … a … a hot-water-bottle. Don’t you worry. I know people, so they’d give fifty pounds to have a murder in their place.’

‘Dry shampoo, please,’ said Wainewright.

Flickenflocker unscrewed the top of a bottle. ‘Curiosity,’ he said.

‘Hm?’

‘Curiosity. Were they open or shut?’

‘Were what?’

‘The scissors. The scissors the lady killed the gent with.’

‘Shut.’

‘It only shows you, eh? What can cut, can cut out lives from people. Psss! … Hwheee! Even a road – fall on it from a high roof, and where are you? … Scissors, eh? Temper, that’s what it is: temper. A stab and a cut, and there you are: you’ve hanged yourself.’

Wainewright did not want to talk any more. He was looking into the mirror. Two men, awaiting their turn, were exchanging whispers and looking in his direction. He knew what they were saying. That’s Wainewright, they were saying; that quite ordinary-looking man having the lavender shampoo is Wainewright, the Wainewright who has the house where Tooth was murdered by his wife.

He smiled. But then old Pewter flipped the linen cover from the man in the chair on Wainewright’s right – a big, swaggering man with a humorous, rosy face. One of the whispering men got up and said, in a voice that shook with awe: ‘Excuse me, but aren’t you Al Allum?’

The big man nodded gravely. ‘That is my name,’ he said.

‘May I shake hands with you? Would you mind?’

‘Not at all.’ The big man held out a heavy, manicured fist, caught the stranger’s hand in a grip that made him jump, gave Pewter a shilling, and went out with a cordial and resonant ‘Good-bye’.

The man who had shaken hands with him said to Pewter: ‘I’ll give you two shillings for that shilling Al Allum gave you just now.’

The old man handed him a shilling with a faint smile. The other man, putting it in his breast-pocket, explained: ‘It’s for my boy. He’s crazy about Al Allum: you know what kids are.’

Somebody else said: ‘The greatest comedian alive today, Al Allum. Ever see his fake conjuring sketch? Brilliant!’

‘Brilliantine?’ asked Flickenflocker.

‘Cream,’ said Wainewright.

‘Mmmmmyah! … There.’

As Wainewright was paying his bill he said to the cashier: ‘Is your clock right?’

The girl replied: ‘It wouldn’t be working in a barbershop if it was.’ Everybody laughed. A man said: ‘Dead clever, that!’

Mr Wainewright went out.

The city muttered under dry dust and blue smoke; the day was warm. Girls passed looking like bursting flowers in their new summer dresses. Wainewright looked at them. Here – passing him, jostling him and touching him with swinging hands in the crowded street – here walked thousands of desirable young women with nothing more than one-sixtieth of an inch of rayon, linen, or crêpe de Chine between their bare flesh and his eyesight. Why – ah, why – did his destiny send him out to walk alone? What’s wrong with me? Wainewright asked himself. Tramps, cripples, hunchbacks, criminals, horrible men deformed and discoloured and old – they all know the love of women. What’s wrong with me? What have they got that I haven’t got? I am a man of property … still a young man. He stared piercingly at a pretty girl who was slowly walking towards him. Wainewright felt that his eyes were blazing like floodlights. But the girl, looking at him incuriously, saw only a small ordinary man with mild, expressionless eyes; if she thought of him at all, drawing conclusions from what she saw, she thought of him as a dim and boring little family man – a nobody – the same as everybody.

Mentally addressing the passing girl, That’s what you think, said Wainewright. If I told you who and what I am you’d change your ideas quickly enough, Blondie! He stopped to look at hats in a shop window. A furry green velour caught his eye, and he decided to buy a hat like that – a two-guinea hat, a real Austrian hat and not a ten-shilling imitation such as Tooth used to wear. That, and a younger-looking suit, a tweed suit; a coloured shirt, even…. Why have I waited so long?

Wainewright was not a drinking man. Alcohol gave him a headache. But now he felt that everything was changing inside him: he was getting into step with life. Now he wanted a drink. He walked jauntily to the ‘Duchess of Douro’. Tooth had taken him there once before, one Saturday afternoon several months ago. Wainewright remembered the occasion vividly: he had not yet come into his inheritance; he worked for his living then. His aunt was still alive. He was waiting: she could not live for ever. His little Personal Expenses Cash Book said that Wainewright had had seven hair-cuts since then. This made five months since his last drink of beer with Tooth.

Tooth was a tall dark man, strongly built, bright with the sickly radiance and the good-fellowship of the travelling salesman. He resembled one of those wax models that make cheap clothes attractive in the windows of mass-production tailors: he had the same unnatural freshness of complexion, the same blueness of chin, agelessness of expression, and shoddy precision of dress. Tooth wore Tyrolean hats and conspicuous tweeds. He liked to be seen smoking cigars. Yes, with his fivepenny cigars he was a man of personality with a manner at once detestable and irresistible – a way of seeming to give himself body and soul to the achievement of the most trivial objects. He could not accept the finality of anybody’s ‘No’. Argument, with Tooth soon became acrimonious, full of recrimination. Women described him as ‘masterful’; Tooth would shout for twenty minutes over a bad penny, a bus ticket, or an accidental nudge of the elbow.

‘Have a drink,’ Tooth had said.

‘I couldn’t really, Tooth.’

‘You can and will, cocko. There’s a girl in the ‘Douro’ I want to introduce you to. A blonde. Genuine blonde: I found out. Eh? Ha-ha! Eh? Come on.’

On the way to the public-house Tooth talked:

‘Having the car painted. Just as well: I always seem to get myself into bother when I’m out in the car. Be lost without it, though. Tell you about the other night? Listen: I’m on my way to Derby. Listen. Listening? Well … listen:

‘On the way I meet two girls, sisters. Both ginger; one slim and the other plumpish. So I say: “Want a ride?” And so they say: “Yes”. And well … after a few miles we pull up …’ Tooth became briefly but luridly obscene. ‘But listen: the joke of it was this; I ran ’em about fifteen miles farther on and we pulled up at a sort of tea-shop place and went in for a cup of tea. Listening? Well, I order tea and cakes and things, and I say: “Excuse me, my dears, I’ve got to see a man from the Balkans about a boarhound,” I say. “Pour my tea out and I’ll be right back,” I tell ’em. So I nip out, start up the old jam-jar, and scram before you can say knife. Eh? Ha-ha! Eh? Eh?’

‘But what happened to the girls, all that way from home?’

‘That’s their look-out. I told you I had to get to Derby, didn’t I? What was I going to do with ’em in Derby? Have a heart! Ah-ah, now you’re coming in here to meet the nicest barmaid in London. No nonsense. Shut up. Come on in now.’

He crashed through the grouped drinkers, pulling Wainewright after him. A tall young woman with honey-coloured hair, whose face was strangely expressive of lust and boredom, dragged languidly at the handle of a beer-engine. But when she saw Tooth she smiled with unmistakable sudden joy. Only a woman in love smiles like that.

‘Baby,’ said Tooth, ‘meet Mr Wainewright, one of the best.’

‘Why, Sid! Why haven’t you been to see me for such a long time?’

‘Been busy. But I’ve been thinking of you. Ask George Wainewright. We met in the City. He wanted me to go with him to a posh week-end party in Kingston. (He’s a very well-to-do man.) But I insisted on coming here. Did I or did I not, Wally?’ said this pathological liar.

The compulsion of Tooth’s glance was too strong. Wainewright nodded.

‘See, Baby? Now, what’ll we have?’

‘I, ah, a small shandy.’

‘Oh, no, George. Not if you drink with me, you don’t. None of your shandies. Drink that stuff and you don’t drink with me. You’re going to have a Bass, a Draught Bass. That’s a man’s drink. Baby, two Draught Bass.’

‘He always has his own way,’ said the girl called Baby.

‘Skin like cream,’ whispered Tooth, with a snigger. When the girl returned with the beer he leaned across the bar and stroked her arm. ‘This evening?’

‘No, I can’t.’

Tooth grasped her wrist. ‘Yes.’

‘Leave go. People are looking.’

‘I don’t care. I’ll wait for you after eleven.’

‘I shan’t be there. Let go my arm, I tell you. The manager’s coming over.’

‘This evening?’

‘Stop it, you’ll get me the sack.’

‘I don’t care. This evening?’

‘All right, but let go.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

Wainewright saw four red marks on the white skin of her arm as Tooth released her. She rubbed her wrist, and said in a voice which quivered with admiration: ‘You’re too strong.’

‘Eh, George?’ said Tooth, nudging Wainewright and grinning.

‘You must have one more drink with me,’ said Wainewright, emptying his glass with a wry face, ‘and then I must be off…. Excuse me, miss. One more of these, please.’

‘Eh? Eh? What’s that? Oh no, damn it, no, I don’t stand that. You make it two more, Baby. Do you hear what I say?’ Fixing Wainewright with an injured stare, Tooth added: ‘On principle, I don’t stand for that kind of thing.’

‘Very well.’

‘So I should think! No! Fair’s fair! Well, and where are you staying now?’

‘In my aunt’s place still.’

“Hear that, Baby? Looking after his old auntie, eh? His nice rich old auntie. Ha-ha! He knows which side his bread’s buttered, George here. No offence, George. I’m going to look you up in a week or two. I want a nice room, reasonable.’

‘We’re full right up just now, Tooth.’

‘Ah, you old kidder! Isn’t he a kidder, Baby? You’ll find me a room all right. I know.’

And surely enough, a fortnight later Tooth came, and by then Wainewright’s aunt was dead, and there was a room vacant in the solid and respectable old house in Bishop’s Square. So Tooth had come to live with Wainewright. Yes, indeed, he had blustered and browbeaten his way into the grave, as luck ordered the matter; for there Mrs Tooth had found him.

And therefore all Britain was waiting for a Notable Trial and, under rich black headlines, the name of George Wainewright was printed in all the papers, called by the prosecution as witness in the Victoria Scissors Murder.

Mr Wainewright smiled as he entered the ‘Duchess of Douro’: this pub had brought him luck. In this saloon bar he had found power.

The barmaid called Baby was still there. Wainewright stood at the bar and waited. ‘What can I get you?’ she asked.

With a gulp of trepidation Wainewright said. ‘Whisky.’

‘Small or large?’

‘Ah … large, please.’

‘Soda?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Ice?’

‘Please.’

He looked at her. She did not recognise him. He said: ‘You don’t remember me.’

‘I’ve seen you somewhere,’ she said.

‘I was in here some time ago with a friend of yours.’

‘Friend of mine?’

‘Tooth.’

‘Who?’

‘Tooth. Sid Tooth.’

‘Sid! I didn’t know he was called Tooth. I thought his name was Edwards. He told me his—— Well, anyway …’

‘If you didn’t know his name was Tooth, you don’t know about him, then,’ said Wainewright, gulping his drink in his excitement.

‘Know what?’

‘Victoria Scissors Murder,’ said Wainewright.

‘What’s that? Oh-oh! Tooth! Was that Sid? Really?’

‘Yes, that was Sid. It happened in my house. I’m Mr Wainewright. I’m witness for the prosecution.’

She served another customer: Wainewright admired the play of supple muscles in her arm as she worked the beer engine.

‘Want another one?’ she asked, and Wainewright nodded.

‘Will you have one?’

‘Mustn’t drink on duty,’ she said. ‘So that was Sid! Well.’

‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of sad tidings,’ said Wainewright.

‘Sad tidings? Oh. I didn’t know him very well. We were just sort of acquaintances. Scissors, wasn’t it? Well, I dare say he deserved it.’

Wainewright stared at her. ‘I was in the next room at the time,’ he said.

‘Did you see it?’

‘Not exactly: I heard it.’

‘Oh,’ said the barmaid. ‘Well …’

She seemed to bite off and swallow bitter words. ‘WELL what?’ said Wainewright, with a little giggle.

She looked at him, pausing with a glass in one hand and a duster in the other, and said:

‘That makes one swine less in the world.’

‘I thought you liked him,’ Wainewright said.

‘I don’t like many men.’

‘Oh,’ said Wainewright. ‘Um … ah … oh, Miss,’

‘Yes?’

‘Tooth. Did he … ah …’

‘Did he what?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

‘Yes, he did,’ said the barmaid.

‘Did what?’

‘Nothing,’ She turned away. ‘Excuse me.’

Wainewright wanted to talk to her. ‘May I have another?’ he asked. ‘Do you mind?’

He emptied his third glass. ‘You don’t like me,’ he said.

‘I don’t know you.’

‘Do you want to know me?’

The barmaid called Baby said: ‘Not particularly.’

‘Don’t go,’ said Wainewright.

She sighed. There was something about Wainewright that made her uneasy: she did not like this strange, dead-looking empty-eyed man. ‘Do you want something?’

He nodded.

‘Another double Scotch?’

Wainewright nodded absently. Baby replenished his glass: he looked at it in astonishment, and put down a ten-shilling note.

‘You’ve got some silver,’ she said.

‘I haven’t got anything at all,’ said Wainewright, ‘I’m lonely.’

The barmaid said, in a tone of hostility mixed with pity: ‘Find yourself somebody.’

‘Nobody wants me. I’m lonely.’

‘Well?’

‘I’ve got eight thousand pounds and a house. A big house. Big, big …’ He spread his arms in a large gesture. ‘Twenty years I waited. God, I waited and waited!’

‘What for?’

A buzzer sounded. A voice cried: ‘Order your last drinks please, gentlemen! Order your last drinks!’

‘She was eighty-seven when she died. She was an old woman when I was a boy.’

‘Who was?’

‘Auntie. I waited twenty years.’

‘What for?’

‘Eight thousand pounds. She left it to me. I’ve got eight thousand pounds and a house. Furnished from top to bottom. Old lease. It brings in seven pounds a week clear.’

He groped in a fog, found himself, and dragged himself up.

‘Pardon me, Miss,’ he said. ‘I ought not to drink.’ He felt ill.

‘That’s all right,’ said the barmaid.

‘Will you excuse me, Miss?’ asked Wainewright.

The girl called Baby was turning away. Something like rage got into his throat and made him shout: ‘You think I’m nobody! You wait!’

A doorman in a grey uniform, a colossus with a persuasive voice, picked him up as a whirlwind picks up a scrap of paper, and led him to the door, murmuring: ‘Now come on, sir, come on. You’ve had it, sir, you’ve had enough sir. Let’s all be friendly. Come on, now.’

‘You think I’m nobody,’ said Mr Wainewright, half crying.

‘I wish there was a million more like you,’ said the doorman, ‘because you’re sensible, that’s what you are. You know when you’ve had enough. If there was more like you, why …’

The swing-door went whup, and Mr Wainewright was in the street.

He thought he heard people laughing behind him in the bar.

‘You’ll see, tomorrow!’ he cried.

The doorman’s voice said: ‘That’s right. Spoken like a man. Here you are, then, sir. Where to?’

A taxi was standing, wide-open and quivering.

‘77, Bishop’s Square, Belgravia,’ said Mr Wainewright.

‘Bishop’s Square, Victoria,’ said the taxi-driver.

‘Belgravia,’ said Mr Wainewright.

The doorman was waiting. He fumbled and found coins. ‘Here,’ he said. The doorman saluted and the taxi-door slammed. Everything jolted away. At Whitehall, Mr Wainewright realised that he had given the doorman four half-crowns instead of four pennies. He rapped at the window.

‘Well?’ said the driver.

‘Oh, never mind,’ said Mr Wainewright.

Let them all wait until tomorrow. They would know then to whom they had been talking.

But on that Sunday, for the first time in ten years, the editor of the Sunday Special cut out John Jacket’s article. Twenty minutes before midnight, formidable news came through from Middle Europe. Jacket’s page was needed for a statistical feature and a special map.

Mr Wainewright went over the columns, inch by inch, and found nothing. He telephoned the Sunday Special. A sad voice said: ‘Mr Jacket won’t be in until Tuesday – about eleven o’clock. Tell him what name, did you say? Daylight? Maybright? Wainewright. With an E, did you say, did you say? E. Wainewright? Oh, George. George E. Wainewright? Just George? George. Make your mind up. George Wainewright, I’ll give Mr Jacket the message. ’Bye.’

On Tuesday, Mr Wainewright arrived at the offices of the Sunday Special before half-past ten in the morning. Jacket arrived at a quarter to twelve. He saw that the little man looked ill.

‘How are you, George?’ he asked.

‘Mr Jacket,’ said Mr. Wainewright, ‘what’s happened?’

‘Happened? About what?’

‘I hate to disturb you——’

‘Not at all, George.’

‘We met, you remember?’

‘Certainly I remember. Hm?’

‘The piece you were going to put in the paper about … about … my views on the Tooth case. Did you …?’

‘I wrote it, George. But my page was cut last Sunday. On account of Germany. Sorry, but there it is. Feel like a drink?’

‘No, nothing to drink, thank you.’

‘Coffee?’

‘Perhaps a cup of coffee,’ said Mr Wainewright.

They went to a café not far away. Jacket was aware of Mr Wainewright’s wretchedness: it was twitching at the corners of the nondescript mouth and dragging down the lids of the colourless eyes. ‘What’s up?’ he asked, as if he did not know.

‘Nothing. I simply wondered … I wondered …’

‘About that story? Take it easy, George. What is there that I can do? Bigger things have happened. As for this Tooth murder case – if you can call it a case. Martha Tooth is certain to get off lightly. Especially with Concord defending. I must get back to the office.’

In Fleet Street Mr Wainewright asked him: ‘Is the trial likely to be reported?’

‘Sure,’ said Jacket.

‘I suppose I’ll be called, as witness?’

‘Of course.’

‘But I’m detaining you, J-Jack.’

‘Not at all, George. Good-bye.’

‘Good-bye, sir.’

Jacket hurried eastwards. Mr Wainewright walked deliberately in the direction of the Strand.

Sumner Concord was perhaps the greatest defender of criminals the world had ever known. He could combine the crafty ratiocination of a Birkett with the dialectical oratory of a Marshall Hall, and act like John Barrymore – whom he closely resembled. The louder he sobbed the closer he observed you. In cross-examination he was suave and murderous. Birkenhead himself was afraid of Sumner Concord. Yet Concord was an honest man. He would defend no one whom he believed to be guilty.

‘Tell me about it,’ he said, to Martha Tooth.

‘What do you want me to tell you?’ she asked.

‘You must tell me exactly what happened that evening at Number 77, Bishop’s Square. The truth, Mrs Tooth. I want to help you. How can I help you if you do not tell me the truth?’

She said: ‘There isn’t anything to tell.’

‘Now you are charged——’ began Sumner Concord.

‘Oh, what do I care? What do I care?’ cried Martha Tooth. ‘Charge me, hang me – leave me alone!’

Sumner Concord had strong tea brought in before he continued. ‘Tell me, Mrs Tooth. Why did you visit your husband that night?’

Martha Tooth said: ‘I wasn’t well. I couldn’t work. There were the children. I wanted Sid to do something about the children. I was his wife. He was my husband, after all…. I only wanted him to give me some money, just a little, till I could work again.’

‘Work again at what, Mrs Tooth?’

‘I’d been doing housework.’

‘And it had been some time since your husband had given you any money?’

‘Three years.’

‘You had been supporting yourself and your two children all that time?’

‘Yes.’

‘He had sent you nothing?’

‘Not a penny. I left Sid over three years ago.’

‘Why did you leave him, Mrs Tooth?’

‘He used to beat me. I couldn’t stand him beating me in front of the children. Then – it was when we had two rooms in Abelard Street near the British Museum – he brought a woman in.’

‘Are there, Mrs Tooth, by any chance, any witnesses who could testify to that?’

‘Mrs Ligo had the house. Then there was Miss Brundidge; she lived downstairs. I ran away with the children and went to my aunt’s place. She still lives there: Mrs Lupton, 143, Novello Road, Turners Green. Her friend, Mrs Yule, she lives there too. They both know. We stayed with them once. Sid used to knock me about. The police had to be called in twice. He wanted to kill me when he’d been drinking.’

‘… In twice,’ wrote Sumner Concord. ‘Novello Road. Novello Street Police Station, um? Take your time. Have some more tea. A cigarette. You don’t smoke? Wise of you, wise. He was a violent and dangerous man, this husband of yours, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘He threatened, for instance, to kill you, no doubt?’

‘No,’ said Martha Tooth, ‘he never threatened. He just hit.’

‘And on this last occasion. You called to see him. Hm?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘You hadn’t seen him for some time?’

‘About three years.’

‘How did you find out his address?’

‘From his firm, Poise Weighing Machines.’

‘You hadn’t tried to find out his address before, eh?’

‘All I cared about was that Sid shouldn’t find out my address.’

‘But you were at the end of your tether, hm?’

‘I was supposed to be having an operation. I’ve still got to have an operation. And I thought Sid might let me have something …’

‘There-there, now-now! Calm. Tears won’t help, Mrs Tooth. We must be calm. You saw Sid. Yes?’

‘Yes, sir. But … he’d been drinking, I think.’

‘Tell me again exactly what happened.’

‘I called. A lady let me in. I went up, and Sid was there. He said: “What, you?” I said: “Yes, me.” Then he said – he said——’

‘Take your time, Mrs Tooth.’

‘He said: “What a sight you look.”’

‘And then?’

‘I suppose I started crying.’

‘And he?’

‘He told me to shut up. And so I did. I think I did, sir. I tried to. I asked him to let me have some money. He said that I’d had as much money as I was ever going to get out of him – as if I’d ever had anything out of him!’ cried Mrs Tooth, between deep, shuddering sobs.

‘There, there, my dear Mrs Tooth. You must drink your tea and be calm. Everything depends on your being calm. Now.’

‘I said I’d go to his firm. I told him I was ill. I told him I’d go to his firm in the City. Then he hit me, sir.’

‘Where?’

‘In the face – a slap. I started to cry again. He hit me again, and he laughed at me.’

‘He hit you in the face again?’

‘Yes, with his hand.’

‘This is very painful to you, Mrs Tooth, but we must have everything clear. Your hand was wounded. How did you hurt your hand?’

‘All of a sudden … I didn’t want to keep on living. I was so miserable –I was so miserable – I was——’

Sumner Concord waited. In a little while Martha Tooth could speak again.

‘You hurt your hand.’

‘I wanted to kill myself. There was a knife, or something. I picked it up. I meant to stick it in myself. But Sid was quick as lightning.’

There was a ring of pride in her voice, at which Sumner Concord shuddered, although he had heard it before.

‘What happened then?’ he asked.

‘He hit me again and knocked me over.’

‘You fell?’

‘Against the bed, sir. Then Sid hit me some more and told me to get out. He said: “I hate the sight of you, get out of my sight,” he said.’

‘Above all, be calm, Mrs Tooth. What happened after that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘After he hit you the last time – think.’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘You got up?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘You can’t remember. Do you remember going out of the room?’

‘I sort of remember going out of the room.’

‘You got back to your home?’

‘Yes.’

‘You remember that?’

‘Yes, sir. I know, because I washed my face in cold water, and moved quietly so as not to wake the children up.’

‘That, of course, was quite reasonable. That would account for the blood in the water in the wash-bowl.’

‘I dare say.’

‘Your throat was bruised, Mrs. Tooth. Did your husband try to strangle you?’

‘He got hold of me to keep me quiet, I should think, sir.’

‘Before you picked up this knife, or whatever it was? Or after?’

‘I couldn’t say. I don’t know. I don’t care.’

‘I suggest that you picked up this sharp instrument, knife, scissors, or whatever it may have been, after your husband took you by the throat.’

‘Very likely,’ said Martha Tooth, drearily, ‘I don’t know. I don’t care.’

‘You must pull yourself together, Mrs Tooth. How can I help you if you will not help yourself? You picked up this knife, or pair of scissors, after your husband began to strangle you with his hands. Is that so?’

‘I should think so.’

‘He was an extremely powerful man, I think?’

‘My Sid? Sid was as strong as a bull, sir.’

‘Yes. Now can you give me a list of the places – rooms, flats, houses, hotels, any places – in which you and your husband lived together from the date of your marriage until the date of your separation?’

‘Yes, I think I could, sir.’

‘You lived together for several years, didn’t you?’

‘Nearly seven years, off and on.’

‘He ill-treated you from the start?’

Martha Tooth laughed. ‘He beat me the first time two days after we were married,’ she said.

‘However, you managed to keep this matter secret?’

‘Oh, everybody knew.’

‘Hush, hush, Mrs Tooth. Everything depends upon your self-control! He can’t hurt you now.’

‘I’m not crying because of that …’ Martha Tooth bit her sleeve and pressed the fingers of her free hand into her eyes. Still, tears came out between her fingers.

‘Why are you crying, then?’

‘You’re so good to me!’

‘You must be calm,’ said Sumner Concord, in a cold, hard voice.

She stopped crying. ‘Everybody knew how he treated me,’ she said.

‘You must try and remember everyone who might make a statement concerning the manner in which your husband treated you, Mrs Tooth. You must try and remember. Is that quite clear?’

‘Yes, sir, but I’m afraid. I’m afraid of being in the court. They’ll make me swear black is white. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say. I don’t——’

Sumner Concord stopped her with a gentle, but imperious gesture, and said: ‘Mrs Tooth, you mustn’t persuade yourself that there is anything to be afraid of. You will be given a perfectly fair trial. The clerk of the court will say to you: “Martha Tooth, you are charged with the murder of Sidney Tooth on the 7th May of this year. Are you guilty or not guilty?” And you will say: “Not guilty.” This I believe to be the truth. I believe that you are not guilty of the murder of your husband. I believe that, desperate with grief and pain and terror, you picked up the scissors intending to kill yourself, and not to kill your husband.’

Martha Tooth stared at him in blank astonishment and said: ‘Me, pick up a pair of scissors to kill Sid? I shouldn’t have dared to raise a hand to Sid.’

‘Just so. He had you by the throat, Mrs Tooth. He was shaking you. Your head was spinning. You struck out wildly, blindly, Mrs Tooth, and it happened that the point of that sharp pair of scissors struck him in the soft part of his neck and penetrated the subclavian artery. You had not the slightest intention of hurting him in any way,’ said Sumner Concord, holding her with his keen, calm, hypnotic eyes. ‘What happened after that, Mrs Tooth?’

‘I don’t know what happened,’ she cried. ‘As he let go of my neck, I ran away from him, that’s all I know.’

‘Exactly. You ran away blindly, neither knowing or caring where you were going. Is that not so? And later they found you wringing your ice-cold hands and crying, while the children lay asleep in your poor furnished room. Is that not so?’

‘My hands were ice-cold,’ said Martha Tooth in a wondering undertone. ‘How did you know my hands were ice-cold?’

Sumner Concord smiled sadly and with pity. ‘Be calm, my dear lady, be calm.’

‘But how did you know my hands were ice-cold?’

‘They frequently are in such cases,’ said Sumner Concord. ‘And now you must eat your meals and rest and get your poor nerves in order again, Mrs Tooth. You are to banish this matter from your mind until it is necessary for us to talk about it again. You are to leave everything in my hands. I believe that you have been telling me the truth, and in that case I give you my word of honour that I believe that no great harm can come to you. Now you must rest.’

‘I don’t care what happens to me, sir, but the children – what about the children?’ asked Martha Tooth, twisting her wet handkerchief in her skinny, little chapped hands.

‘Put your mind at rest, they are being well looked after, I promise you.’

A shocking thought seemed suddenly to strike her and she gasped: ‘They can send me to prison for years. And then what would happen to them?’

Rising, and laying large, gentle hands on her shoulders, Sumner Concord replied: ‘Even if you had known that you were striking your husband, you would have been striking him without premeditation, and in self-defence, because in the hands of this crazy drunken brute you were in peril of your life, and if there is any justice in the world, you need not necessarily go to prison at all.’

Then he went away and obtained the statements of Mrs Ligo, Miss Brundidge, Mrs Lupton, Mrs Yule, and half a dozen others. He obtained certain evidence from the police at the Novello Street Police Station. A few days later, everybody began to take it for granted that Martha Tooth would get away scot-free.

Because it was Sumner Concord who was defending Martha Tooth, the Central Criminal Court was crowded. Mr Wainewright, glancing timidly from wig to horsehair wig, felt his heart contract and his stomach shrink, and when his fascinated gaze fell upon the hard, white, turtle-face of Mr Justice Claverhouse, who sat in his great robes under the sword, he was seized by an insane impulse to run away and hide. Yet, at the same time, he was aware of a certain spiritual exaltation as witness for the prosecution in Rex v. Tooth.

Mr Sherwood’s speech for the prosecution was longer than one might have expected. He had put a lot of work into it. If he could hang Martha Tooth, snatching her from the protective arms of Sumner Concord, he was a made man. His manner was cold and precise. His voice was – as one journalist described it – winter sunlight made articulate. As he spoke, members of the public who had hitherto believed that Martha Tooth could not possibly be convicted changed their minds. One or two sportsmen who had laid five to four on her acquittal began furtively to try to hedge their bets. Mr Sherwood’s sentences struck home like so many jabs of an ice-pick. Here was an angry woman, may it please His Lordship and the members of the jury. Here was an embittered woman, a jealous woman. Here was a woman scorned. She had brooded over her real or imaginary wrongs until at last she had decided on a bloody revenge. Under the cover of the gathering darkness, she had gone stealthily out of her house, to the house of her husband. And there she had stabbed him to death with this pair of scissors, paper-cutting scissors with a shagreen handle. (The pair of scissors was unwrapped from some tissue paper in a little cardboard box, into which they had been packed with loving care.) She left the scissors in the wound, knowing that no fingerprints would be visible on the rough shagreen handle. Then she slunk out of the house. But her cunning had not been quite deep enough. She had forgotten to wipe her fingerprints from the door-knob on the inside of Mr Tooth’s bed-sitting-room door. There were witnesses who could swear to having seen her come and seen her go. Medical evidence would prove that this murderous stab in the throat, which had gone down through the subclavian artery, had been inflicted at such-and-such a time. She was arrested almost literally red-handed, for she had not yet had time to empty certain blood-stained water from a basin in her room. While her husband’s innocent children lay asleep in her bed, the murderess had crept back to wash away the evidence of her guilt, and so on and so forth. And now with the assistance of his learned friend, Mr Bottle, he would call the evidence before the court.

At this point, Mrs Madge was called. She remembered everything. She had let Mrs Tooth in on the evening of the murder. She knew at exactly what time she had let that party in. How did she know the time? She had every reason to know the time because it was time for Mrs Madge to go home and she had paid a certain amount of attention to the clock. She was not a clock-watcher but she did her duty, and was not paid to stay more than a certain number of hours. On this particular evening she had an appointment with a friend, Mrs Glass, with whom she had arranged to go to the pictures in time for a certain performance. Therefore she had particularly desired to get away in time to change her clothes and make herself decent. Therefore – give or take half a minute – she could fairly exactly say at what time the lady came to the door and asked for Mr Sidney Tooth and she could swear to the lady: she was in the habit of keeping her eyes open; it was her hobby, sizing people up. Mrs Tooth was wearing a very old loose black coat, the sort that the Jewish shops sell for a guinea, and one of those black hats you could get for three-and-six-pence at Marks and Spencer’s. She was carrying an old black handbag, and her shoes must have been given to her by a lady, a bigger lady than Mrs Tooth who had worn them out and was about to throw them away. She could take her oath on it that Mrs Tooth was the person she had let in on that fatal evening.

Then came Mr Wainewright. He had bought a new suit for the occasion – a smart, well-cut suit, with the first double-breasted coat he had ever worn. He had gone to the West End for a shirt that cost eighteen shillings. His tie must have cost as much again, and there was a pearl pin stuck into the middle of it. An equilateral triangle of white handkerchief protruded from his breast pocket. He looked respectable and intensely uncomfortable as he gave his evidence, which was as he had outlined it to John Jacket that evening in the ‘Fire-drake’.

Cross-examined, he gave the defence nothing to work on. It was apparent that Wainewright was telling the truth. Then came the turn of the defence.

To the astonishment of the public, Mr Sumner Concord did not attempt to break down the evidence for the prosecution. There was no doubt at all, he said, that the unfortunate Mrs Tooth had called on her husband at that time. But he happened to know that she had called in order to plead with him. Tooth had callously deserted her and his two children. He was earning a good salary and substantial sums in commission, which he devoted entirely to dissipation. Mrs Tooth, the deserted woman, had been compelled to support the children and herself by menial labour. Medical evidence would indicate that it was necessary for this lady to undergo a serious internal operation in the near future. She had visited her husband merely in order to beg – to beg on her bended knees if necessary – for the wherewithal to feed their children, his children and hers, until such time as she could find strength to go out again and scrub other women’s floors to earn the few shillings that she needed to maintain them.

Sumner Concord drew the attention of His Lordship and the jury to the fact that Mrs Tooth had a separation order but had never received a penny: her forbearance was inspired by mercy and also by fear, because Sidney Tooth, as he was about to prove, had been one of the most murderous bullies and unmitigated scoundrels that ever polluted God’s earth. This poor woman, Mrs Tooth, did not care whether she lived or died – her husband by his persistent brutality and ill-treatment had beaten the normal fear of death out of her. Evidence was forthcoming which would prove that this wretched, persecuted woman had for many years gone in terror of her life and had frequently interposed her broken and bruised body between the drunkenly raging Sidney Tooth and the undernourished, trembling bodies of his children. Mother-love was stronger than the terror of bodily harm. Knowing that in a little while her exhausted frame could no longer support the strain imposed upon it – knowing that the time was fast approaching when she must go into hospital – Martha Tooth went to plead with her husband, and he mocked her. He laughed in her face. He struck her. She, driven to desperation, God forgive her, driven to self-destruction, picked up that pair of scissors to stab herself. In doing so she wounded her hand. Then Tooth, who was drunk and who – a brute at the best of times – was murderous when drunk, as evidence would prove, took her by the throat and began to strangle her. She struck out blindly and he let her go. She went weeping, she ran out blindly into the night. Mr Sumner Concord did not deny the validity of the evidence of Mr Wainewright and Mrs Madge. Mrs Tooth believed that she must have killed her husband, and she was horrified at the very thought of it. As for killing him by intention – she could never have thought of that, she loved him too much and she feared him too much. She wanted to kill herself. There was medical evidence to prove that the blood in the hand-basin was her own blood from her own hand which she cut in so blindly snatching the scissors with which Tooth had been killed. That her life was in danger might be indicated by the evidence of eleven witnesses, three of them doctors….

Mr Wainewright, wondering at the complexity of it all, looked away. He looked away from the face of Sumner Concord, scanned the faces of the jurymen (one of them was surreptitiously slipping a white tablet into his mouth) and blinked up at the ceiling. A piece of fluffy stuff, such as comes away from a dandelion that has run to seed, was floating, conspicuous against the panelling. It began to descend. Mr Wainewright’s eyes followed it. It came to rest on the judge’s wig, where it disappeared. Mr Wainewright was conscious of a certain discontent.

After that nothing of the trial stuck in his mind except Sumner Concord’s peroration, and Mr Justice Claverhouse’s verdict.

The peroration was something like:

‘Here was a beast. He tortured this woman. She trusted him and gave him her life. He accepted it brutally and threw it away. She had been beautiful. He had battered her with his great bony fists into the woman you see before you. That face was offered to Tooth in the first flush of its beauty. He beat it into the wreck and ruin of a woman’s face – the wreck, the ruin that you see before you now. She did not complain. He mocked and humiliated her. She was silent. She wept alone. He made her an object of pity, this mad and murderous bully, and she said nothing. He deserted her, leaving her with two young sons whom she loved very dearly: she was sick and weak, and still she never spoke! The prosecution has raised its voice: Martha Tooth suffered in silence. She worked for her children, happy to bring home a little bread in her poor cracked hands.

‘You have heard the evidence of those who have known her. She was a woman without stain, a woman undefiled. But when, at last, she went ill – dear God, what was she to do? She wanted nothing for herself. But there were her children. Her husband was prosperous. She asked him only for bread for his children – he laughed in her face. He struck her and ordered her to go. She pleaded – and he beat her. She cried for mercy and he abused her, reproaching her for the loss of her beauty, the beauty he himself had savagely beaten away.

‘At last, driven mad by despair, she picks up the first thing that comes to hand, a pair of scissors, and tries – poor desperate woman – to kill herself. Laughing, he takes her by the throat. These hands, strong enough to break a horseshoe, are locked about her frail throat. Imagine them upon your own, and think!

‘She struggles, she cannot speak, she can only struggle while he laughs in her face, because these murderous thumbs are buried in her windpipe. She strikes out blindly, and this great furious hulk of bestial manhood collapses before her. Sixteen stone of bone and muscle falls down, while seven stone of wretchedness and sickness stands aghast.

‘And looking down she sees the scissors embedded in that bull neck. By some freak of chance – by some act of God – she has struck the subclavian artery and the great beast has fallen. She runs blindly away, weeping bitterly, half demented with anguish, and when the police find her (which was easy, since she had not attempted to conceal herself) she is crying, and the blood in the basin is her own blood. The children lie asleep and she begs the police to take her away, to take her away anywhere out of this world. She asks for nothing but death, and there, there is the pity of it! …’

After an absence of twenty-five minutes the jury returned a verdict of Not Guilty.

Then, although everyone said he had known from the beginning that Martha Tooth would be acquitted, London went wild with delight. The Sunday Extra sent Munday Marsh to offer the bewildered woman five hundred pounds for her life-story. Pain of the Sunday Briton offered a thousand. She shook her head wearily and dispiritedly. ‘Twelve hundred and fifty,’ said the Sunday Briton. The Extra said: ‘Fifteen hundred.’

‘I can’t write stories,’ said Martha Tooth. ‘Anyway——’

‘I can,’ said Pain.

‘Calm, gentlemen, calm,’ said the sardonic voice of John Jacket. They turned, and saw him dangling an oblong of scribbled paper between a thumb and a forefinger. ‘I’ve got it.’

The Sunday Special had given Jacket authority to pay as much as two thousand pounds for Martha Tooth’s story. Ten minutes before Munday Marsh arrived, Jacket had bought the story for six hundred pounds.

‘Oh well,’ they said, without malice, and went away. Pain said: ‘To-day to thee, to-morrow to me, Jack,’ and they shook hands. Ainsworth of The People said nothing: he knew that in a year’s time the whole business would be forgotten, and then, if he happened to need a human-interest murder-feature, he could re-tell the story from the recorded facts.

So John Jacket wrote fifteen thousand words – four instalments, illustrated with photographs and snapshots – under the title of DIARY OF AN ILL-USED WOMAN. What Jacket did not know he invented: Martha Tooth signed every thing – she still could not understand what it was all about. Soon after the first instalment was published she began to receive fan-mail: half a dozen religious leaflets, letters urging her to repent, prophecies concerning the Second Coming, and proposals of marriage, together with frantically abusive notes signed Ill-used Man. She also received parcels of food and clothes, and anonymous letters enclosing postal orders. An old lady in the West Country, saying that she had wanted to kill her husband every day for forty years, enclosed sixty twopenny stamps.

Martha Tooth was taken in hand by a lady reporter, who carried her off to a beauty parlour, compelled her to have her hair waved, and showed her how to choose a hat. In three weeks she changed; paid attention to her finger-nails and expressed discontent with the Press. The press, she complained, wouldn’t leave her alone, and everyone wanted to marry her. Before the fourth instalment appeared she had received eleven offers of marriage. Martha Tooth had become whimsical, smiled one-sidedly, and took to lifting her shoulders in a sort of shrug. ‘Men,’ she said, ‘men! These men!’

After the fourth week, however, she got no more letters. She was out of sight and out of mind.

She went to the offices of the Sunday Special to see Jacket. Someone had told her that she ought to have got thousands of pounds for her story, and that there was a film in it. When she told Jacket this, he drew a deep breath and said:

‘Mrs Tooth. Your story is written, read, and wrapped around fried fish, and forgotten. You forget it too. Be sensible and forget it. You’ve lived your story and told your story. Go away and live another story.’ He added: ‘With a happy ending, eh?’

She went away. Soon, a paragraph on the gossip page of an evening newspaper announced that she had married a man called Booth. Her name had been Tooth – there was the story. Mrs Tooth married Mr Booth. He was a market-gardener, and, strangely enough, a widower. Mr Booth had proposed to her by letter.

John Jacket had forgotten the Tooth case when Mr Wainewright came to see him for the second time, twelve weeks later.

It struck Jacket as odd that Mr Wainewright was wearing a jaunty little green Tyrolean hat and a noticeable tweed suit.

‘Is it fair?’ asked Wainewright. ‘Where do I come in?’

‘Come in? How? How d’you mean, where do you come in?’

‘Well,’ said Mr Wainewright, shuffling his feet, ‘I mean to say … I hear that Tooth’s good lady got thousands and thousands of pounds.’

‘A few hundreds, George,’ said Jacket.

‘It isn’t that, Mr Jacket. It’s——’

‘The credit?’ asked Jacket, twitching an ironic lip.

‘Who is she to be made a heroine out of?’ asked Wainewright, looking at his finger-tips.

‘What exactly are you trying to get at, George?’ asked Jacket.

‘Get at? Who, me? Nothing, Mr Jacket.’

‘Then what do you want? What do you want me to do?’

Mr Wainewright looked at the ball of his right thumb and shook his head. ‘There was nothing about me at all in the papers,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a story, too.’

‘Be a pal,’ said Jacket, ‘and go away. I’ve got work to do, George, old man, work. So be a pal.’

‘Right.’ Mr Wainewright got up.

‘Don’t be angry with me. Things come and things go,’ said Jacket, ‘and a story is a nine-days’ wonder. Wash this murder out of your head.’

Mr Wainewright said: ‘Well, you know best. But I’ve also got a story——’

A telephone bell rang. ‘See you some other time,’ said John Jacket, lifting the receiver. ‘So long for now, George.’

Wainewright went out without saying good day. Shortly after he had gone, John Jacket, hanging up the telephone, found himself wondering about something. There had been something wrong with Wainewright. What?

Jacket gnawed a fat black pencil.

He had eaten his way to the last letter of the pencil-maker’s name before he knew what he was trying to remember. He laughed, and said to himself: That silly little man has gone and got himself up in a furry green hat and a tweed suit. What on earth for?

Jacket felt that he was on the verge of a discovery – not a Sunday Special story, but something interesting all the same.

Then his telephone rang. By the time he had stopped listening new things were in his head, and Mr Wainewright, being gone, was forgotten.

Three weeks later, as Jacket was leaving the office at lunch-time, he heard Mr Wainewright’s voice again. The little man came breathlessly out of the cover of a doorway and said: ‘Mr Jacket, sir. Please. One moment. Just one moment.’

‘Well, what is it?’ said Jacket, looking down at him with an expression of something like loathing. ‘What is it now, Wainewright?’

‘It’s something important, sir. Something very important. I give you my word, my word of honour, you’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t listen to me.’

‘I’m in a hurry.’

‘I’ve been waiting for you here in the street for an hour and a half,’ said Mr Wainewright.

‘You should have telephoned.’

‘If I had, you wouldn’t have spoken to me.’

‘True,’ said Jacket. Then he blinked, and said: ‘What the devil have you been doing to yourself?’

Mr Wainewright was dressed in a tight-fitting, half-belted jacket of white stuff like tweed, an orange-coloured shirt and a black satin tie with a diamond horseshoe pin, blue flannel trousers, a panama hat, and brown-and-white buckskin shoes. He had trimmed his moustache to a fine straight line, above and below which Jacket could see a considerable area of tremulous white lip, beaded with perspiration. And he could smell lavender-water and whisky.

‘Doing to myself? Nothing, sir,’ said Mr Wainewright.

‘I like your hat.’

‘It’s real panama.’

‘Um-um!’ Jacket considered him for a second or two, and then said: ‘Come on, then. Tell me all about it. Come and have a drink.’

‘It’s very private,’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘It’s not something I could talk about if there was anybody around. Look, Mr Jacket, it’ll be worth your while. Come home with me, just for a few minutes.’

‘Home with you?’

‘To Bishop’s Square – ten minutes in a taxi, no more. I’ve got plenty of drinks at home. Have a drink there. Ten minutes. I’ll show you something…. I’ll tell you something. Please do! Please do, Mr Jacket.’

‘All right, then. But I haven’t long,’ said Jacket.

They got into a taxi. Neither of them spoke until Mr Wainewright said: ‘After you,’ as he unlocked the street door of Number 77, Bishop’s Square. ‘Lead the way,’ said Jacket. The little man bobbed in a shopwalker’s obeisance. They passed through a clean, dim passage hung with framed caricatures out of Vanity Fair, and climbed sixteen darkly-carpeted stairs to the first floor. Mr Wainewright opened another door. ‘This used to be my auntie’s room,’ he said, rather breathlessly.

‘Charming,’ said Jacket, without enthusiasm.

‘It was Tooth’s room, too.’

‘Oh I see. The room in which Tooth was murdered, eh?’

‘Yes, sir. It’s my bedroom now.’

‘And is this what you brought me here to see?’ asked Jacket.

‘No, no,’ cried Mr Wainewright, splashing a quarter of a pint of whisky into a large tumbler, and pressing the nozzle instead of the lever of a soda-water syphon. ‘Please sit down.’

‘That’s a massive drink you’ve given me,’ said Jacket. He observed that his host’s drink was not much smaller.

‘No, not at all.’

‘Cheers.’ Jacket emptied his glass in two gulps. Mr Wainewright tried to do the same, but choked; recovered with a brave effort, and forced the rest of his drink into his mouth and down his throat. Jacket could hear his heavy breathing. ‘Now, tell us all about it,’ he said.

‘There was,’ said Mr Wainewright, swaying a little in his chair, ‘there was a … an astounding miscarriage of justice.’

‘In what way, Wainewright?’

‘In every way, Mr Jacket, sir. In every way. What I have to say will shock you.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Sid Tooth died just about on the spot where you are sitting, sir.’

‘Well?’

‘The rug, of course, is a new one. They couldn’t clean the old one…. But your glass is empty.’

‘I’ll pour drinks. You go on,’ said Jacket, rising.

‘Listen,’ said Mr Wainewright….

Mr Wainewright said, dreamily:

‘What I want to know is this: where’s your justice? Where’s your law? If justice is made a mockery of, and law is tricked – what do I pay rates and taxes for? The world’s going mad, sir. A woman is accused, sir, of killing her hubby with a pair of scissors. It’s proved that she did it, proved beyond doubt, Mr Jacket! And what happens? This woman, a nobody, mind you; this woman does not pay the penalty of her crime, sir. No. She is made a heroine of. She is cheered to the echo. She has her picture in all the papers. She has her life-story published. She marries again, lives happy ever after. Is that fair? Is that right?’

‘What’s on your mind, Wainewright? It was pretty well established as a clean-cut case of self-defence.’

Mr Wainewright, with extraordinary passion, said: ‘She was lying! Tooth was still alive when she left this house! He was hale and hearty as you or me, after the street door closed behind Martha Tooth. Alive and laughing, I tell you. She’s a perjurer … a perjuress. She’s a liar. She got what she got under false pretences: all that money, all that sympathy. “Ill-Used Woman”, as you called her! She never killed Tooth. The world must be going mad.’

‘What about your evidence?’ asked Jacket, skilfully pouring half his drink into his host’s glass.

Mr Wainewright snapped: ‘Evidence! Don’t talk to me about evidence!’

‘You drink up your nice drink,’ said Jacket, ‘and go over it all again.’

‘I hated that man,’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘Who did he think he was, that Sid Tooth? He was no good. And all the women were in love with him. He was a bully, a dirty bully. A drunkard, a bad ’un – bad to the backbone. He practically forced his way into this house. A laugh, a joke, a drink, a bang on the back – and before I knew where I was, there was Tooth, in auntie’s old room. I’m not used to that sort of thing, Mr Jacket, sir. I’m not used to it. He borrowed money in cash, and ran up bills. He told me he’d done a deal with a new department store, for weighing machines – over a thousand pounds in commission he had to collect. So he said. All lies, sir, all lies, but I swallowed ’em. I swallowed everything Tooth said. Bad, sir, bad! He was bad to the backbone.’

Jacket asked: ‘Why didn’t you tell him to get out?’

‘I meant to,’ said Mr Wainewright, ‘but he always saw it coming. Then it was a laugh, and a joke, and a drink, and a bang on the back…. To-morrow: he’d pay me to-morrow. And to-morrow, he said, to-morrow. And then he had to go to Leeds, or Bristol. It was drinks and women with him, sir, all the time. He used to bring women into this very room, Mr Jacket, sir, into this very room. And I was next door. No woman ever looked twice at me, sir. What’s the matter with me? Have I got a hump on my back, or something? Eh? Have I?’

Jacket said: ‘Far from it, old friend.’

‘And I sat in my room, next door, with nothing to do but get my scrap-book up to date.’

‘What scrap-book?’ asked Jacket, refilling the little man’s glass.

Mr Wainewright giggled, pointing to a neatly-arranged pile of red-backed volumes on a shelf by the bed. Jacket opened one, and riffled the pages. Mr Wainewright had meticulously cut out of cinematic and physical-culture magazines the likenesses of young women in swimming suits. He had gummed them in and smoothed them down. Here, between the eight covers of four scrap-books, lay his seraglio. His favourite wife, it appeared, was Ann Sheridan.

‘You think I’m pretty terrible,’ he said, rising uncertainly and taking the book out of Jacket’s hands.

‘Go on,’ said Jacket.

‘No, but I don’t want you to think …’

‘I’m not thinking anything. Go on, pal, go on.’

‘I think there’s something artistic in the human form, sir. So for a hobby, you see, I collect it in my scrap-books.’

‘I understand, I understand,’ said Jacket. ‘You were sitting in your room next door to this, with nothing to do but get your scrap-books up to date, when – go on, go on, George.’

‘I asked you here to tell you this,’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘You don’t need to … to draw me out. I’m telling you something. A story – worth a fortune. No need to screw your face up. No need to pretend to treat me with respect. I know what you think. You think I’m nothing. You think I’m nobody. Let me tell you.’

‘You were sitting in your room——’

‘I was cutting out the picture of the young lady called Pumpkins Whitaker, sir – an artistic figure – when Mrs Tooth came to visit him.’

He pointed to the floor under Jacket’s chair.

‘Go on.’

‘Yes, Mr Jacket. I listened. What happened was as I said in court. They quarrelled. She cried. He laughed. There was a scuffle. In the end Mrs Tooth ran out. Just like I said, sir.’

‘Well?’

Mr Wainewright leaned forward, and Jacket had to support him with an unobtrusive hand.

‘Then, sir, I went into Tooth’s room, this very room, sir. I knocked first, of course.’

‘And there was no answer?’

‘There was an answer. Tooth said “Come in.” And I came in, Mr Jacket.’

‘You mean to say Tooth was alive when you came in here, after his wife had left?’

‘Exactly, sir. I was curious to know what had been going on. I made up an excuse for coming to see him just then. I’d borrowed his scissors, you see, the ones she is supposed to have killed him with. I’d been using them – they were very sharp – for cutting things out. They were part of a set – scissors and paper-knife in a shagreen case. I came to give them back – it was an excuse. Actually, I wanted to know what had been going on.’

‘Go on, George,’ said Jacket, quietly.

Mr Wainewright said: ‘He was sitting on the bed, just about where you are now, in his shirt-sleeves, laughing and playing with the paper-knife. He started telling me all about his wife, Mr Jacket, sir – how much she loved him, how much the barmaid at the “Duchess of Douro” loved him, how much every woman he met loved him. His collar was undone.’ Mr Wainewright paused and moistened his lips. ‘His collar was undone. He had one of those great big thick white necks. I had that pair of scissors in my hand. He threw his head back while he was laughing. I said: “Here’s your scissors.” He went on laughing, and coughing – he was a cigarette-smoker – at the same time. “Here’s your scissors,” I said. I think he’d been drinking. He roared with laughter. And then, all of a sudden, something got hold of me. I hit him with my right hand. I couldn’t pull my hand away. It was holding on to the scissors, and they were stuck in his neck, where his collar was open. He made a sort of noise like Gug – as if you’d pushed an empty glass into a basin. of water, sir, and simply went down. I hadn’t intended to do it. I hadn’t even shut the door of this room when I came in. But as soon as I saw what I’d done I wiped the scissors with my handkerchief, in case of fingerprints, and I slipped out, shutting the door from the outside, and went back to my room. Do you see?

‘Martha Tooth never killed anybody. It was me. I killed Sid Tooth, Mr Jacket, in this very room.

‘And so you see, sir. There was a miscarriage of justice. Martha Tooth hasn’t got any right to be made a heroine out of. She never killed that beast, sir. I killed Tooth. But she,’ said Mr Wainewright, with bitterness, ‘she gets acquitted. She is made a fuss of. Her life-story is all over your paper. Her picture and her name is all over the place. And the honest truth of it is, that I did it!’

John Jacket said: ‘Prove it.’

Mr Wainewright drew a deep breath and said: ‘I beg pardon, sir?’

‘Prove it,’ said Jacket. ‘Prove you did it.’

‘Do you think I’m crazy?’ asked Mr Wainewright.

‘Of course you’re crazy,’ said Jacket.

‘I swear before the Almighty,’ said Mr Wainewright, with passionate sincerity, ‘I swear, so help me God, that I killed Tooth!’

Jacket, who had been watching his face, said: ‘I believe you, Wainewright. I believe you did kill Tooth.’

‘Then there’s your story,’ Mr Wainewright said. ‘Eh?’

‘No,’ said Jacket. ‘No story. It’s proved that Martha Tooth killed her husband and was justified in killing him. It’s all weighed and paid. It’s all over. You can’t prove a thing. I believe you when you say you killed Tooth. But if you weren’t a lunatic, why should you go out of your way to tell me so after everything has been resolved and poor Martha Tooth has been comfortably provided for?’

Mr Wainewright sat still and white. He was silent.

Jacket rose, stretched himself, and said: ‘You see, George old man, nobody in the world is ever going to believe you now.’ He reached for his hat.

‘Still, I did it,’ said Mr Wainewright.

‘I begin,’ said Jacket, ‘to understand the way you work. Tooth was a swine, a strong and active swine. I see how you envied Tooth’s beastly strength, and shamelessness. I think I get it. You wanted to ill-treat Tooth’s wife and betray his girl friends. You were jealous of his power to be wicked. You wanted what he had. You wanted to be Tooth. No? So you killed Tooth. But all the while, George, in your soul, you were Tooth! And so you’ve gone and killed yourself, you poor little man. You tick unheard, George; you move unseen – you are a clock without hands. You are in hell, George!’

John Jacket put on his hat and left the house.

He did no work that afternoon. At five o’clock he telephoned Chief Inspector Dark, at Scotland Yard, and said: ‘… Just in case. That little man Wainewright has just been telling me that he killed Tooth in Bishop’s Square.’

Chief Inspector Dark replied: ‘I know. He’s been telling the same story around here. He was in yesterday. The man’s mad. Damned nuisances. Happens every time. Dozens of ’em always confess to what they haven’t done every time somebody kills somebody. Have to make a routine investigation, as you know. But this Tooth business is nothing but a lot of Sweet Fanny Adams. Pay no attention to it. Wainewright’s stone crackers, plain crazy. Forget it.’

‘Just thought I’d tell you,’ said Jacket.

‘Right you are,’ said the chief inspector, and rang off.

So Jacket forgot it. Great things were happening. Everyone knew that England was about to go to war against Germany. The nights were full of menace, for the lights were out in the cities. London after dark was like something tied up in a damp flannel bag. Jacket, who preferred to work a little ahead of time, was preparing certain articles which, he was certain, were going to be topical. He wrote a thousand words about a gas attack, under the title They Thought This Was Funny, and had it set up, illustrated with a cartoon from a 1915 issue of Simplicissimus. He wrote an impassioned obituary on the first baby that was to be killed in London, for immediate use if and when the war broke out. He compiled and elaborated monstrously scurrilous biographical articles about Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, etcetera.

But one evening, as he sat refreshing himself with a glass of beer and a sandwich in the ‘Duchess of Douro’, he saw Mr Wainewright again. Mr Wainewright could not see him: a twelve-inch-square artificial mahogany pillar stood between them, and the hot, smoky bar was crowded. Mr Wainewright, dressed in a tight-fitting black suit with red chalk-stripes, was conversing with a thick-set sweaty man in a light tweed sports coat.

The conversation had touched the perils and the dangers of the coming night. The thick-set man was saying:

‘Buy torches! Buy bulbs, buy bulbs and batteries! At any price – any price at all, wherever you can lay your hands on them. Buy torches, bulbs, and batteries. Prices are going up by leaps and bounds. A good torch is going to be worth its weight in gold. Everybody is stumbling about in the dark. There’s going to be accidents in the black-out. Mark my words. Accidents. And crime. Look out for crime.’

‘Crime?’ said Mr Wainewright.

‘Crime. Forgive me if I can’t offer you a drink,’ said the thick-set man.

‘Oh please, have one with me.’

‘No, no! Well, a small one. You’re very kind…. Yes, crime. Robberies, murders – the black-out sets the stage for robberies and murders.’

The barmaid whom Tooth had called Baby said, as she put down two drinks: ‘Are you still on about murders?’

Mr Wainewright, paying her, said: ‘You look out. This gentleman is right. You can’t be too careful. What’s to stop anybody following you home in the dark and sticking a knife in you?’

The thick-set man said: ‘Exactly, sir. Exactly.’

‘I don’t go home. I’ve got no home,’ said the barmaid. ‘I live here. You and your murders!’

‘Yes, but you go out sometimes,’ said the thick-set man.

‘Only on Tuesday,’ said the barmaid, with a tired laugh. ‘If you want to stick a knife in me, you’d better wait till Tuesday.’ She pushed Mr Wainewright’s change across the bar and served another customer.

‘Tuesday,’ said Mr Wainewright.

The thick-set man was pleased with his idea. He said: ‘I’m a man who is as it were professionally interested in crime.’ He looked sideways and laughed.

‘Oh, indeed?’ said Mr Wainewright.

‘As a writer,’ said the thick-set man, suddenly grave. ‘My name is Munday Marsh. You may have come across one or two of my little efforts in the Roger Bradshaw Detective Library.’ He cleared his throat and waited. Mr Wainewright said:

‘Oh yes, yes I have indeed!’

‘I hate to have this drink with you because I can’t return it…. No, no – not again! You’re very good! As I was saying. Assume there is a sort of Jack the Ripper; a murderer without motive – the most difficult sort of killer to catch. The lights are out in this great city. The streets are dark. Dark, and swarming with all kinds of men from everywhere. Now, say a woman – Blondie there, for instance——’

‘She is called Baby,’ said Mr Wainewright.

‘Baby. Baby is found dead, killed with a common kitchen knife. There are thousands of kitchen knives. I’ve got half a dozen at home myself. Say I kill Baby with such a knife. All I need is nerve. I walk past her, stab suddenly, and walk on, leaving the knife in the wound. If necessary I turn back as the lady falls and ask “What’s the trouble?” Do you get the idea? I simply kill, and walk coolly on. Who could swear to me in this blackout, even if anyone saw me? Eh?’

‘What a clever man you must be!’ exclaimed Mr Wainewright.

Jacket, who could see his face, saw that the scanty eyebrows arched upwards, and observed a strange light in the colourless eyes.

‘Of course,’ Mr Wainewright continued, thoughtfully, ‘you’d use – in your story, I mean – any sort of knife. Something anyone could get anywhere. A common French cook’s knife, say: a strong knife with a point. Um?’

‘Any knife,’ said the writer who called himself Munday Marsh. ‘Anything. You don’t wait to get your victim alone. No. All you need is nerve, sir, nerve! A quick, accurate stab, and walk calmly on your way. I’d write that story, only I can see no means of catching my murderer.’

The barmaid heard the last word and said: ‘My God, why is everybody so morbid? Murder, murder, murder – war, war, war. What’s the matter with you? You got a kink or something?’

‘Wait and see,’ said Mr Wainewright. ‘I’m not so kinky as you think.’

Jacket, still watching, saw Mr Wainewright’s pale and amorphous mouth bend and stretch until it made a dry smile. For the first time he saw Mr Wainewright’s teeth. He did not like that smile.

The barmaid raised her eyes to the painted ceiling with languid scorn. Jacket observed that she looked downward quickly. Then he heard the whup-whup-whup of the swinging door, and noticed that Mr Wainewright was gone.

A week passed. John Jacket was eating and drinking at the bar of the ‘Duchess of Douro’ before one o’clock in the afternoon, the day being Wednesday.

‘How’s life?’ he asked the barmaid.

‘So-so,’ she said.

‘Doing anything exciting?’

She hesitated, and said: ‘I ran into a friend of yours last night.’

‘A friend? Of mine?’

‘That little man. What’s his name? A little man. You remember! That funny little man. Old Murders – I for get what he calls himself. The one that gets himself up like a gangster. Used to go about in a bowler hat. Talks about murders. What is his name?’

‘You mean Wainewright?’

‘That’s it, Wainewright.’

‘How did you manage to run into him, Baby?’

‘It was a funny thing. You know Tuesday’s my day off. I generally go to see my sister. She lives near High Road, Tottenham. I left here about eleven in the morning and there was little what’s-his-name. Wainewright. I walked along Charing Cross Road to get the tram at the end of Tottenham Court Road – you like to stretch your legs on a nice morning like yesterday, don’t you?’

‘Well?’

‘I walk to Hampstead Road, and there he is again.’

‘Wainewright?’

‘Yes. Well, I pay no attention, I catch my tram, I go to my sister’s and spend the afternoon, and we go to the pictures. We get the tram back and go to the Dominion. And when we get out, there he is again!’

‘Wainewright?’

‘That’s right. There he is. So my sister says: “A nice night like this – let’s walk a bit. I’ll walk back with you.” So we walk back here. Well, when we get to the National Gallery, we wait for the lights to change before we cross the road – there he is again.’

‘There Wainewright is again?’

‘Uh-huh. So I say to him: “Hallo.” And he says “Hallo,” and walks off again along Charing Cross Road. It was almost as if he was following us.’

‘That’s funny,’ said John Jacket.

‘Coincidence, I dare say. But he’s a funny little man. Do you like him, Mr Jacket?’

‘No, Baby, I can’t say I do.’

‘Well,’ said the barmaid, reluctantly, ‘he seems to be all right. But somehow or other I don’t seem to like him very much myself. What’s the matter? What’re you thinking about, all of a sudden?’

‘Nothing, Baby, just nothing.’ Jacket finished his drink, and said: ‘He was outside here. He was at the tram-stop in Hampstead Road. He was at the Dominion. And then he was here again. Is that right?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Nothing. When’s your next day off?’

‘Tuesday.’

‘Are you going to your sister’s again?’

‘I generally do,’ said Baby, turning away to serve a soldier.

‘What time d’you get out?’ asked Jacket, when she returned.

‘About eleven or so. Why?’

‘I just wondered. And you get back before the pub closes, I suppose? Before half-past eleven, I mean. Eh?’

‘We’ve got to be in before twelve o’clock, you know,’ said Baby. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Curiosity. Your movements fascinate me,’ said Jacket.

Then the lunch-hour rush began to come into the ‘Duchess of Douro’, and Jacket went out.

He went to see Chief Inspector Dark. ‘Listen, Dark,’ he said, ‘you know me.’

‘Well?’ said the chief inspector.

‘You know I’m not crazy.’

Chief Inspector Dark pursed his lips and said: ‘Well?’

‘You remember that crazy little man Wainewright, the witness in the Tooth case?’

‘Well?’

‘I think he’s getting to be dangerous.’

‘How?’

‘You remember how he kept confessing to the killing of Tooth?’

‘Well?’

‘Well, Dark, I believe he really did do it.’

‘Well?’ said Chief Inspector Dark.

‘If I were you I’d keep an eye on Wainewright.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I believe that Wainewright’s gone really mad, dangerously mad at last, Dark.’

‘What makes you think so?’

Having explained why he thought so, Jacket concluded: ‘Wainewright’s feelings are hurt. He is determined to make you believe, at any cost.’

‘Look,’ said Chief Inspector Dark. ‘With one thing and another I’m rushed off my feet. I’m short-handed, and I’m busy. Is this all you’ve got to say?’

‘Keep an eye on Wainewright,’ said Jacket. ‘He’s after the barmaid, Baby, at the “Duchess of Douro”.’

‘Following her about? So would I, if I wasn’t a married man, and had time to spare,’ said Dark. ‘Keep an eye on Wainewright yourself. I don’t think there’s anything to it. I’m short-handed, and I’m busy, Jacket. Will you take a hint?’

Jacket said: ‘Oh well, I can’t blame you for not seeing my point.’

‘Much obliged,’ said Dark. ‘See you some other time.’

Jacket left, grinding his teeth. I’ll keep close to Baby myself, he said to himself, as he waited for a taxi in Whitehall. I’ll show them. I’ll make Dark feel small!

But on the following Sunday, Mr Chamberlain announced that England was at war with Germany, and ten days passed before John Jacket had time to think of Baby and of Mr Wainewright.

By then, something had happened.

It happened on the night of 5 September 1939. The Germans had destroyed the 7th Polish Division, and the French Army had engaged the Germans between the Rhine and the Moselle. U-boats had sunk British merchant ships. The blonde called Baby had her day off, and Mr Wainewright followed her. She did not leave until half-past five that day.

He had learned something of the technique of pursuit. Instinct had warned him to put on again his dark suit and his bowler hat. He wore, also, a grey overcoat. The blonde called Baby could be kept in sight without his being seen. Mr Wainewright knew how to play his cards. He saw her coming out of the side entrance of the ‘Duchess of Douro’, and kept her in sight: she wore a fur that resembled a silver fox, and a diminutive yellow hat. It was not difficult to keep her within your range of vision.

Mr Wainewright followed her to St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, and right, into Charing Cross Road. Something had happened to the current of life in the town. There was a new, uneasy swirl of dark-clothed civilians, like tea-leaves in a pot, together with a rush of men in khaki uniforms.

Baby walked on: she had to walk. Once she tried to stop a taxi, but the driver waved a vague hand and drove towards Whitehall. So she walked, until she caught her tram. Baby climbed to the upper deck to smoke a cigarette. Mr Wainewright sat below. When she got out, he got out. She disappeared into a little house beyond Seven Sisters corner. He waited.

As he waited he thought:

‘Nobody believes me. I’ve confessed to a murder. They throw me out. They laugh at me. They take me for a lunatic. To the police, I’m one of those madmen who go about confessing – saying they’ve committed crimes they haven’t committed. I killed Tooth, and I tell them so. But no! I’m crazy, they say. Good. I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her with a common knife. When the papers report it, I’ll mark it with a pencil and go along and confess again. Nobody will believe.’

The light was fading. Keeping his right eye on the ground-floor window of the house into which Baby had disappeared, Mr Wainewright stepped sideways into the road. He put his right hand under his coat and chuckled. Then he heard something coming. He hesitated, leapt backwards – saw that the truck had swerved into the middle of the street to miss him, and tried to jump back to the pavement.

But the driver, having seen his first leap in that treacherous autumnal light, spun back to the left-hand side of the road, and knocked Mr Wainewright down.

The light truck squealed to a standstill as its rear wheels came back to the surface of the road with a soft, sickening jolt. Somewhere a woman screamed, and a man shouted. A policeman came running, and as he ran he switched on the beam of an electric torch which waggled in front of him.

A few minutes later an ambulance came, with a high, flat clangor of bells. Mr Wainewright was carried away.

He was horribly crushed. But he also had a knife-wound. A long, wide, triangular cook’s knife – what they call a French knife – was embedded in his stomach.

The surgeon came to the conclusion that Mr Wainewright must have been carrying the knife in his inside breast pocket.

When, at last, Mr Wainewright opened his eyes he knew that he was dying. He did not know how he knew, but he knew. A cool hand was upon his left arm, and he could discern – in a big, shadowy place – a white coat and a white face.

‘I killed Sid Tooth,’ he said.

‘There, there,’ said a voice.

‘I tell you I killed Sid Tooth!’

‘That’s all right, there, there …’

Something pricked his left arm, hesitated, went in deep, and threw out a sort of cold dullness.

Pain receded, tingled, and went away.

Mr Wainewright said: ‘I swear I did it. Believe me, do please believe me – I did it!’

‘There, there, there,’ said a whisper.

Looking down at his blank, white, featureless face, the surgeon was reminded of the dial of a ruined clock, a mass-produced clock picked to bits by a spoiled child, and not worth repairing.