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Delicately he shook the last drops from the bottle and tossed it away without a glance. “Your friend. In the back room. Behind Table Four.”
    I picked up my glass of beer and sipped. Then I turned slowly to survey the room. Big Henty’s back room had proved its worth to numerous fugitives over the years. It had always been tolerated by authority. The CID officers from Borough High Street police station found it a convenient place to meet their informants. I walked across the hall. Beyond the tasselled and fringed lights that hung over the snooker tables, the room was dark. The spectators - not many this evening - sat on wooden benches along the walls, their grey faces no more than smudges, their dark clothes invisible.
    Walking unhurriedly, and pausing to watch a tricky shot, I took my beer across to table number four. One of the players, a man in the favoured costume of dark trousers, loose-collared white shirt and unbuttoned waistcoat, moved the scoreboard pointer and watched me with expressionless eyes as I opened the door marked “Staff and went inside.
    There was a smell of soap and disinfectant. It was a small storeroom with a window through which the snooker hall could be seen if you pulled aside the dirty net curtain. On the other side of the room there was another window, a larger one that looked down upon Tower Bridge Road. From the street below there came the sound of cars slurping through the slush. “Bernard.” It was a woman’s voice. “I thought you weren’t going to come.”
    I sat down on the bench before I recognized her in the dim light. “Cindy!” I said. “Good God, Cindy!” “You’d forgotten I existed.”
    “Of course I hadn’t.” I’d only forgotten that Cindy Prettyman’s full name was Lucinda, and that she might have reverted to her maiden name. “Can I get you a drink?”
    She held up her glass. “It’s tonic water. I’m not drinking these days.”
    “I just didn’t expect you here,’ I said. I looked through the net curtain at the tables.
    “Why not?”
    “Yes, why not?’I said and laughed briefly. “When I think how many times Jim made me swear I was giving up the game for ever.” In the old days, when Jim Prettyman was working alongside me, he taught me to play snooker. He played an exhibition class game, and his wife Cindy was something of an expert too.
    Cindy was older than Jim by a year or two. Her father was a steel worker in Scunthorpe: a socialist of the old school. She’d got a scholarship to Reading University. She said she’d never had any ambition but for a career in the Civil Service since her schooldays. I don’t know if it was true but it went down well at the Selection Board. She wanted Treasury but got Foreign Office, and eventually got Jim Prettyman who went there too. Then Jim came over to work in the Department and I saw a lot of him. We used to come here, me, Fiona, Jim and Cindy, after work on Fridays. We’d play snooker to decide who would buy dinner at Enzo’s, a little Italian restaurant in Old Kent Road. Invariably it was me. It was a joke really; my way of repaying him for the lesson. And I was the eldest and making more money. Then the Prettymans moved out of town to Edgware. Jim got a rise and bought a full-size table of his own, and then we stopped coming to Big Henty’s. And Jim invited us over to his place for Sunday lunch, and a game, sometimes. But it was never the same after that.
    “Do you still play?” she asked.
    “It’s been years. And you?”
    “Not since Jim went.”
    “I’m sorry about what happened, Cindy.”
    “Jim and me. Yes, I wanted to talk to you about that.
    You saw him on Friday.”
    “Yes how do you know?”
    “Charlene. I’ve been talking to her a lot lately.”
    “Charlene?”
    “Charlene Birkett. The tall girl we used to let our upstairs flat to ... in Edgware. Now she’s Jim’s secretary.” “I saw her. I didn’t recognize her. I thought she was American.” So that’s why she’d