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‘It was the same drug. People would have said it was suicide, that I’d managed to keep some of it hidden . . .’
    â€˜If there’s anything in your idea,’ Mr Rennit said, ‘the cake was given to the wrong man. We’ve only got to find the right one. It’s a simple matter of tracing. Jones and I know all about tracing. We start from Mrs Bellairs. She told you the weight, but why did she tell you the weight? Because she mistook you in the dark for the other man. There must be some resemblance . . .’ Mr Rennit exchanged a look with Jones. ‘It all boils down to finding Mrs Bellairs. That’s not very difficult. Jones will do that.’
    â€˜It would be easiest of all for me to ask for her – at the Free Mothers.’
    â€˜I’d advise you to let Jones see to it.’
    â€˜They’d think he was a tout.’
    â€˜It wouldn’t do at all for a client to make his own investigations, not at all.’
    â€˜If there’s nothing in my story,’ Rowe said, ‘they’ll give me Mrs Bellairs’ address. If I’m right they’ll try to kill me, because, though the cake’s gone, I know there was a cake, and that there are people who want the cake. There’s the work for Jones, to keep his eye on me.’
    Jones shifted his hat uneasily and tried to catch his employer’s eye. He cleared his throat and Mr Rennit asked, ‘What is it, A.2?’
    â€˜Won’t do, sir,’ Jones said.
    â€˜No?’
    â€˜Unprofessional, sir.’
    â€˜I agree with Jones,’ Mr Rennit said.
    All the same, in spite of Jones, Rowe had his way. He came out into the shattered street and made his sombre way between the ruins of Holborn. In his lonely state to have confessed his identity to someone was almost like making a friend. Always before it had been discovered, even at the warden’s post; it came out sooner or later, like cowardice. They were extraordinary the tricks and turns of fate, the way conversations came round, the long memories some people had for names. Now in the strange torn landscape where London shops were reduced to a stone ground-plan like those of Pompeii he moved with familiarity; he was part of this destruction as he was no longer part of the past – the long weekends in the country, the laughter up lanes in the evening, the swallows gathering on telegraph wires, peace.
    Peace had come to an end quite suddenly on an August the thirty-first – the world waited another year. He moved like a bit of stone among the other stones – he was protectively coloured, and he felt at times, breaking the surface of his remorse, a kind of evil pride like that a leopard might feel moving in harmony with all the other spots on the world’s surface, only with greater power. He had not been a criminal when he murdered; it was afterwards that he began to grow into criminality like a habit of thought. That these men should have tried to kill him who had succeeded at one blow in destroying beauty, goodness, peace – it was a form of impertinence. There were times when he felt the whole world’s criminality was his; and then suddenly at some trivial sight – a woman’s bag, a face on an elevator going up as he went down, a picture in a paper – all the pride seeped out of him. He was aware only of the stupidity of his act; he wanted to creep out of sight and weep; he wanted to forget that he had ever been happy. A voice would whisper, ‘You say you killed for pity; why don’t you have pity on yourself?’ Why not indeed? except that it is easier to kill someone you love than to kill yourself.
    2
    The Free Mothers had taken over an empty office in a huge white modern block off the Strand. It was like going into a mechanised mortuary with a separate lift for every slab. Rowe moved steadily upwards in silence for five floors: a long passage, frosted glass, somebody in pince-nez