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facts, but she raised her hand in a careless goodbye, and was out of the door and down the stairs before he could marshal the words of explanation. He went to the window and watched her walk in her slovenly heel-scuffing way along the street outside, and then turn in the direction of Baker Street.
    He stayed in the room with that disturbing consciousness of something left unsaid. It was Anna’s room, not his, with her bad paintings on the walls, her French clock, her collection of foreign dolls staring, dusty and frozen-eyed, from a shelf in one corner, her books, D H Lawrence and Rupert Brooke and Gone With the Wind untidily piled on another shelf, her box of darning wools left open with two or three needles from it gleaming on the floor. There was no personal sign of his own occupancy, more than his shaving things and toothbrush in the bathroom, and his clothes in the bedroom wardrobe. She took me into her warm, comfortable life, he thought, and let me become part of it, but now that I am separating myself from her, it will be for her as though I had never been.
    He went into the bedroom and began to pack his clothes, taking only as much as would go in the old blue suitcase. One day he would come back for the rest.

Chapter Seven
    He went underground by taking a room in the Cosmos, a dubious hotel in Pimlico, just off Wilton Road. Here he registered under the name of William Smith, ate the dreary food, roast beef, mashed and cabbage for lunch, roast lamb, baked and carrots for dinner, sat in the lounge downstairs and watched the tarts come in with their men, or lay on the bed in his mauve-papered room upstairs that looked out over Pimlico chimney pots, and read the papers.
    He had been quite right about the newspaper boys quickly making the link between Hartley and O’Brien. Indeed, he had got out only just in time. The evening papers on the day he left the flat were full of it, and the morning papers on the following day elaborated the theme, telling the full story of his original IRA exploit and of night watchman Tibbitt’s murder – he had forgotten the name, and now its slight absurdity brought the whole thing back to him, but how extraordinary it was to kill a man and then forget his name. Very naturally, the papers were chiefly concerned with his progress from convicted murderer to television reporter. The evening newspaper for which he had worked ran a special feature of notes by people who had been with him on the news desk, and had apparently made all kinds of interpretations of his character that had not been evident at the time.
    He had been engaged after the submission of a series of spoof articles supposed to have been written by a traveller in the Soviet Union. The paper had bought, but never printed, these articles. Somebody had now disinterred one of these from the files, and it was printed, presumably to show the extreme disingenuousness of his character. There was an interview with Jerry Wilton in which he stuck rather bravely to some sort of guns, saying that Bill Hunter had been a very good television interviewer, with fresh ideas and a good technique, and that he had been personally extremely sorry when Bill resigned. In answer to the question, ‘Would it have made any difference to you, had you known you were working with a convicted murderer?’ Jerry had gallantly replied, ‘Not the slightest. I judge people by their behaviour, and Bill was always a good trooper.’ Anna was mentioned in a couple of the stories, as his friend. She replied to all questions about where he was, ‘He told me he was going away to the country for a complete rest.’
    All this was what he had expected, and he was glad to be away from it. There was one other item of interest, a telephone call made by the Banner to Mr Nicholas Mekles, at his villa on the Riviera. Mekles, according to the paper, had said:
    ‘I was given the information about Hunter shortly before the interview began. I confess that I was surprised that