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you should have seen the way they nodded at the jury. It had a bearing.’ His hands began to shake again. ‘As if I really wanted to be alone for life . . .’
    Mr Rennit cleared a dry throat.
    â€˜Even the fact that my wife kept love-birds . . .’
    â€˜You are married?’
    â€˜It was my wife I murdered.’ He found it hard to put things in the right order; people oughtn’t to ask unnecessary questions: he really hadn’t meant to startle Mr Rennit again. He said, ‘You needn’t worry. The police know all about it.’
    â€˜You were acquitted?’
    â€˜I was detained during His Majesty’s pleasure. It was quite a short pleasure: I wasn’t mad, you see. They just had to find an excuse.’ He said with loathing, ‘They pitied me, so that’s why I’m alive. The papers all called it a mercy killing.’ He moved his hand in front of his face as though he were troubled by a thread of cobweb. ‘Mercy to her or mercy to me. They didn’t say. And I don’t know myself.’
    â€˜I really don’t think,’ Mr Rennit said, swallowing for breath in the middle of a sentence and keeping a chair between them, ‘I can undertake . . . It’s out of my line.’
    â€˜I’ll pay more,’ Rowe said. ‘It always comes down to that, doesn’t it?’ and as soon as he felt cupidity stirring in the little dusty room, over the half-eaten sausage-roll and the saucer and the tattered telephone-directory, he knew he had gained his point. Mr Rennit after all could not afford to be nice. Rowe said, ‘A murderer is rather like a peer: he pays more because of his tide. One tries to travel incognito, but it usually comes out . . .’

Chapter 3
    FRONTAL ASSAULT
    â€˜It were hard he should not have one faithful comrade and friend with him.’
    The Little Duke
    1
    R OWE went straight from Orthotex to the Free Mothers. He had signed a contract with Mr Rennit to pay him fifty pounds a week for a period of four weeks to carry out investigations; Mr Rennit had explained that the expenses would be heavy – Orthotex employed only the most experienced agents – and the one agent he had been permitted to see before he left the office was certainly experienced. (Mr Rennit introduced him as A.2, but before long he was absent-mindedly addressing him as Jones.) Jones was small and at first sight insignificant, with his thin pointed nose, his soft brown hat with a stained ribbon, his grey suit which might have been quite a different colour years ago, and the pencil and pen on fasteners in the breast pocket. But when you looked a second time you saw experience; you saw it in the small cunning rather frightened eyes, the weak defensive mouth, the wrinkles of anxiety on the forehead – experience of innumerable hotel corridors, of bribed chamber-maids and angry managers, experience of the insult which could not be resented, the threat which had to be ignored, the promise which was never kept. Murder had a kind of dignity compared with this muted second-hand experience of scared secretive passions.
    An argument developed almost at once in which Jones played no part, standing close to the wall holding his old brown hat, looking and listening as though he were outside a hotel door. Mr Rennit, who obviously considered the whole investigation the fantastic fad of an unbalanced man, argued that Rowe himself should not take part. ‘Just leave it to me and A.2,’ he said. ‘If it’s a confidence trick . . .’
    He would not believe that Rowe’s life had been threatened. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we’ll look into the chemists’ books – not that there’ll be anything to find.’
    â€˜It made me angry,’ Rowe repeated. ‘He said he’d checked up – and yet he had the nerve.’ An idea came to him and he went excitedly on,