Robert had decided to kill a great many birds with one stone by spending the night in London.

To begin with, he wanted to have his hand held. And in the circumstances no one would hold his hand to better purpose than his old school friend Kevin Macdermott. What Kevin did not know about crime was probably not so anyhow. And as a well-known defending counsel his knowledge of human nature was extensive, varied, and peculiar.

At the moment the betting was evens whether Macdermott would die of high blood-pressure before he was sixty, or grace the Woolsack when he was seventy. Robert hoped the latter. He was very fond of Kevin.

They had first gravitated towards each other at school because they were both “going in for Law,” but they had become and remained friends because they were complementary. To the Irishman, Robert’s equanimity was amusing, provocative, and — when he was tired — restful. To Robert, Kevin’s Celt flamboyance was exotic and fascinating. It was typical that Robert’s ambition was to go back to the little country town and continue life as it was; while Kevin’s was to alter everything that was alterable in the Law and to make as much noise as possible in the doing of it.

So far Kevin had not altered much — though he had done his best where some judges’ rulings were concerned — but he had made considerable noise in his effortless, slightly malicious, fashion. Already the presence of Kevin Macdermott in a case added fifty per cent to its newspaper value — and a good deal more than that to its cost.

He had married — advantageously but happily — had a pleasant house near Weybridge and three hardy sons, lean and dark and lively like their father. For town purposes he kept a small flat in St. Paul’s Churchyard, where, as he pointed out, he “could afford to look down on Queen Anne.” And whenever Robert was in town — which was not oftener than Robert could help — they dined together, either at the flat or at the latest place where Kevin had found good claret. Outside the Law, Kevin’s interests were show hacks, claret, and the livelier films of Warner Brothers.

Kevin was to be at some Bar dinner tonight, so his secretary had said when Robert had tried to reach him from Milford; but he would be delighted to have a legitimate excuse for dodging the speeches, so would Robert go along to St. Paul’s Churchyard after dinner, and wait for him.

That was a good thing; if Kevin came from a dinner he would be relaxed and prepared to settle down for the evening; not restless and with three-quarters of his mind still back in the court-room as he sometimes was.

Meanwhile, he would ring up Grant at Scotland Yard and see if he could spare him some minutes tomorrow morning. He must get it clear in his mind how he stood in relation with Scotland Yard: fellow sufferers, but on opposite sides of the fence.

At the Fortescue, the Edwardian old place in Jermyn Street, where he had stayed ever since he was first allowed to go to London on his own, they greeted him like a nephew and gave him “the room he had last time”; a dim comfortable box with a shoulder-high bed and a buttoned-plush settee; and brought him up a tray on which reposed an out-size brown kitchen teapot, a Georgian silver cream jug, about a pound of sugar lumps in a sixpenny glass dish, a Dresden cup with flowers and little castles, a red-and-gold Worcester plate made for “their Maj’s” William IV and his Queen, and a much buckled kitchen knife with a stained brown handle.

Both the tea and the tray refreshed Robert. He went out into the evening streets feeling vaguely hopeful.

His search for the truth about Betty Kane brought him, only half consciously, to the vacant space where that block of flats had been; the spot where both her parents had died in one shattering burst of high explosive. It was a bare neat space, waiting its appointed part in some plan. Nothing was there to show that a building had ever stood on the spot. Round about, the unharmed houses stood with blank smug faces, like mentally deficient children too idiot to have understood the meaning of a disaster. It had passed them by and that was all they knew or cared about.

On the opposite side of the wide street, a row of small shops still stood as they had obviously stood for fifty years or more. Robert crossed to them and went into the tobacconist’s to buy cigarettes; a tobacconist-and-newsagent knows everything.

“Were you here when that happened?” Robert asked, leaning his head towards the door.

“When what happened?” asked the rosy little man, so used to the blank space that he had long ago become unaware of it. “Oh, the incident? No, I was out on duty. Warden, I was.”

Robert said that he had meant was he here in business at the time.

Oh, yes; yes, certainly he had the business then, and for long before it. Brought up in the neighbourhood, he was, and succeeded his father in the business.

“You would know the local people well, then. Do you remember the couple who were caretakers of the block of flats, by any chance?”

“The Kanes? Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I remember them? They were in and out of this place all day. He for his paper in the morning, and then her for her cigarettes shortly after, and then back for his evening paper and her back for the third time probably for cigarettes again, and then he and I used to have a pint at the local when my boy had finished his lessons and would take over for me here. You knew them, sir?”

“No. But I met someone the other day who spoke of them. How was the whole place wrecked?”

The little pink man sucked his teeth with a derisive sound.

“Jerry-built. That’s what it was. Just jerry-built. The bomb fell in the area there — that’s how the Kanes were killed, they were down in their basement feeling fairly safe — and the whole thing just settled down like a house of cards. Shocking.” He straightened the edge of a pile of evening papers. “It was just her bad luck that the only evening in weeks that she was at home with her husband, a bomb had to come.” He seemed to find a sardonic pleasure in the thought.

“Where was she usually, then?” Robert asked. “Did she work somewhere in the evenings?”

“Work!” said the little man, with vast scorn. “Her!” And then, recollecting: “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sure. I forgot for the minute that they might be friends of ——”

Robert hastened to assure him that his interest in the Kanes was purely academic. Someone had remembered them as caretakers of the block of flats, that was all. If Mrs. Kane was not out working in the evenings what was she out doing?

“Having a good time, of course. Oh, yes, people managed to have a good time even then — if they wanted it enough and looked hard enough for it. Kane, he wanted her to go away to the country with that little girl of theirs, but would she? Not her! Three days of the country would kill her she said. She didn’t even go to see the little thing when they evacuated her. The authorities, that is. With the rest of the children. It’s my opinion she was tickled to death to have the child off her hands so that she could go dancing at nights.”

“Whom did she go dancing with?”

“Officers,” the little man said succinctly. “A lot more exciting than watching the grass grow. I don’t say there was any actual harm in it, mind you,” he said hastily. “She’s dead, and I wouldn’t like to pin anything on her that she isn’t here to unpin, if you take my meaning. But she was a bad mother and a bad wife, that’s flat and no one ever said anything to the contrary.”

“Was she pretty?” Robert asked, thinking of the good emotion he had wasted on Betty’s mother.

“In a sulky sort of way, yes. She sort of smouldered. You wondered what she would be like when she was lit up. Excited, I mean; not tight. I never saw her tight. She didn’t get her excitement that way.”

“And her husband?”

“Ah, he was all right, Bert Kane was. Deserved better luck than that woman. One of the best, Bert was. Terribly fond of the little girl. Spoiled her, of course. She had only to want something and he got it for her; but she was a nice kid, for all that. Demure. Butter wouldn’t melt in her little mouth. Yes, Bert deserved better out of life than a good-time wife and a cupboard-love kid. One of the best, Bert was. . . . ” He looked over the roadway at the empty space, reflectively. “It took them the best part of a week to find him,” he said.

Robert paid for his cigarettes and went out into the street both saddened and relieved. Sad for Bert Kane, who had deserved better; but glad that Betty Kane’s mother was not the woman he had pictured. All the way to London his mind had grieved for that dead woman; the woman who had broken her heart for her child’s good. It had seemed to him unbearable that the child she had so greatly loved should be Betty Kane. But now he was free of that grief. Betty Kane’s mother was exactly the mother he would have chosen for her if he were God. And she on her part looked very like being her mother’s daughter.

“A cupboard-love kid.” Well, well. And what was it Mrs. Wynn had said? “She cried because she didn’t like the food, but I don’t remember her crying for her mother.”

Nor for that father who so devotedly spoiled her, apparently.

When he got back to the hotel he took his copy of the Ack–Emma from his despatch case, and over his solitary dinner at the Fortescue considered at his leisure the story on Page Two. From its poster-simplicity opening —

“On a night in April a girl came back to her home clad in nothing but a frock and shoes. She had left home, a bright happy schoolgirl with not a . . . ”

to its final fanfare of sobs, it was of its kind a small masterpiece. It did perfectly what it set out to do. And that was to appeal to the greatest number of readers with one and the same story. To those who wanted sex-interest it offered the girl’s lack of clothes, to the sentimentalist her youth and charm, to the partisan her helpless condition, to the sadist the details of her beatings, to the sufferer from class-hatred a description of the big white house behind its high walls, and to the warm-hearted British public in general the impression that the police had been, if not “nobbled,” then at least lax, and that Right had not been Done.

Yes. It was clever.

Of course the story was a gift for them — which is why they had sent a man back immediately with young Leslie Wynn. But Robert felt that, when really on their mettle, the Ack–Emma could probably make a good story of a broken connecting-rod.

It must be a dreary business catering exclusively for the human failings. He turned the pages over, observing how consistently each story was used to appeal to the regrettable in the reader. Even GAVE AWAY A MILLION, he noticed, was the story of a disgraceful old man unloading on his income-tax and not of a boy who had climbed out of a slum by his own courage and enterprise.

With a slight nausea he put the thing back in his case, and took the case with him to St. Paul’s Churchyard. There he found the “daily” woman waiting for him with her hat on. Mr. Macdermott’s secretary had telephoned to say that a friend of his was coming and that he was to be given the run of the house and left alone in it without scruple; she had stayed merely to let him in; she would now leave him to it; there was whisky on the little table by the fire, and there was another bottle in the cupboard, but it might, if you asked her, be wise not to remind Mr. Macdermott about it or he would stay up too late and she had great trouble getting him up in the morning.

“It’s not the whisky,” Blair said, smili............