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moment. “I suppose I might have gone into town for a spot of lunch.” This was partly true, in so far as he had to eat and there was nothing in the flat, not now he had flagrantly wasted his last slice of bread and an entire ration of powdered cheese. He hadn’t even had a cup of tea since some time the previous evening: he had run out of milk and he couldn’t abide tea without milk; not that this mattered very much as he had run out of tea as well. “I’m absolutely famished; can’t stop thinking about hot buttered toast.”
    “Oh dear!” she said, with what sounded like genuine dismay.
    “It’s entirely my own fault; I’m as useless as a sign in an Aberdeen shop that asks customers to count their change before leaving.”
    It was a feeble joke, hardly Max Miller, but he laughed in spite of himself for the first, and last, time that day. Her legs were only a few inches from his and pretty enticing, even in the thick black stockings and the flat black shoes of the A4 Branch. He angled himself away from temptation.
    “I don’t suppose you’re useless at all, sir,” she was saying, sounding rather like a nanny giving encouragement to a backward child. He drummed his fingers on the dashboard and looked out of the window. “I might go to the flicks if we finish in time,” she said.
    “Unlikely,” he said. He scarcely went to the cinema these days, only to see the news if he had time; pictures were awful rubbish for the most part, and it was depressing walking home alone afterwards. “Too warm for the pictures today, anyway,” he said.
    “Yes. I suppose it is.” They fell silent for a few moments; she turned up the Blackstock Road. “All this frightful crime,” she said. “It seems hardly a day goes past without some awful murder or other.” He sighed. “Look at that awful man they caught in Eastbourne the other day.”
    “Bournemouth,” he corrected.
    “The one who murdered those poor girls in the boarding house.”
    “Neville Heath.”
    “He was an officer!”
    She shuddered.
    “Actually, I think he just posed as one.”
    “And then there was that poor little Welsh girl who was shot dead. And a week later another poor little mite – strangled – in Kent of all places! Ten years old! And that woman strangled in Piccadilly. I heard they’d questioned three Yanks about that!”
    He did not want to discuss sex murders with her.
    “Maniacs have been with us since the days of Jack the Ripper,” he said. She paid him no heed.
    “It’s something to do with the post-war psychology,” she averred. “Thousands of men – trained killers – let loose on the world. They’ve seen terrible things; they’ve suffered and they’re scarred. And of course a good many of them are deserters.”
    He loathed the pseudo-psychiatric drivel that had become part of common parlance since the war. Thanks to
John Bull
magazine and the Home Service, everyone was now a blasted Freudian; just the other day he’d heard some fellow on a bus talking about how the Germans had a “persecution complex”, whatever the dickens that was. Not uncommonly for a detective , he had no interest whatsoever in why men do bad things.
    “All crooks have their reasons,” he said, “which they will give if asked and sometimes even if not asked: poverty; drink; absent fathers; absent mothers; a bump on the head… It’s all absolute tosh to my mind.” He had heard it all at one time or another and the self-pity of a certain type of criminal nauseated him. As far as he was concerned using war as some sort of justification for misbehaviour was simply more of the same. He’d been through another war before the last one, and he had suffered and seen terrible things – along with millions of other men, most of them, like him, schoolboys. Were they all irrevocably scarred, too? He pondered for a moment before deciding, with no particular ill-feeling, that he probably was.
    “But aren’t you curious, sir? Don’t you want to