‘He’ll kill her,’ I sobbed. ‘He’s killing her.’

I saw her die. With his hands about her throat he laid her down on the floor and then put out the lights one by one. At the door, he looked back at her lying by the wall and then he had put up the last switch and it was dark.

‘Kiss me!’

The voice whispered at me.

‘Where’s the light? The light. We need the light.’

I tried to push her away. She pressed against me and then I felt her tongue lick my face.

‘Get away!’

I lurched from her and fell against the bed. When I found the lamp and lit it, she was gone.

In the empty corridor I stood listening. It was a very quiet house. The carpet was thick under my feet although it was dirty and unswept. On the wall between two doors there was a brass gong, figured with elephants and a procession of Indians dancing. I put out a finger and touched the tiny ecstatic figures as if to make sure that something in this world was real.

‘Birds in their little nests agree,’ Brond chanted almost in my ear, he had approached so silently.

My heart thundered in fright.

‘I saw you.’

He sketched surprise.

‘I’ve seen you kill twice now.’

‘Yes?’

‘On the bridge.’ I was full of hatred for him. What a fool he must think I was! ‘And the woman just now.’

‘Mrs Kennedy? She seemed well enough when I had a look at her.’

‘Jackie? What’s Jackie to do— Don’t despise me. I despise you. I saw you—’ it was surprisingly hard to put into words to a man like him, ‘begging and being— and being— I don’t know how you could do that.’

He made a little humming noise; incredibly he seemed pleased.

‘It really did seem extraordinary to you? Not the impression I make at all . . .’

‘I think you must be mad.’

He clicked his tongue disapprovingly.

‘Oh, come now. It’s not so bad as that. I imagine the country’s full of clergymen and retired lieutenant-colonels and bus conductors all doing or daydreaming along roughly similar lines.’

‘You killed her.’

I became conscious that he was speaking normally while I was furiously whispering as if the fear of discovery were mine alone.

‘We’ve a busy night ahead of us,’ he said, ‘but let’s spare a moment. Come along!’

He crooked his finger and I followed him like a schoolboy. The big front room had people in it now, two or three groups of them, and a piano was being played softly and some of the girls were handing out drinks. It might have been the party at the University earlier. The only differences at a first glance were that the girls were younger, the men rather older and looking conspicuously more successful.

‘Recognise anyone?’ Brond asked.

Before I could answer, we were approached by the bouncy silver-haired little man who had come with us into the house; smaller than Brond, he did not come up to my shoulder.

‘She let you stay then,’ he said jocularly.

‘Thanks to your good influence,’ Brond said.

‘Ah, influence.’ He seemed to be at the stage of drink where one mood passed easily into its opposite for now he became solemn. ‘I suppose we’re both exerting as much of that as we can – not that anything seems able to help much. Dear old William Roughhead’s world of Pritchard and Slater and Jessie McLachlan is very small beer now. Endless vandalism. Crimes against the person . . . There’s a rot in the body social. What? Oh, it’s you.’

One of the girls had brushed her fingers, decorously, along the back of his neck and he followed, head bobbing like a lecherous sparrow.

‘I doubt if a reporter,’ Brond said watching him go, ‘or a blackmailer would last long if he interfered with these nice people.’

And he smiled benevolently on the room like a widdershins archbishop.

‘Why did you say that Jackie— that Mrs Kennedy was here?’

‘Did I?’

‘Is she here?’

He turned his head from the crowd and looked at me; his lips still smiled.

‘Perhaps. That murderous animal her husband certainly is.’

‘He’s not the only murderer – and his murders were long ago.’

‘You have an odd sense of humour,’ Brond said contemptuously. ‘Who do you imagine killed Peter Kilpatrick?’

But before I could answer, the silver-haired man rejoined us. He was shadowed by a gaunt anxious man whose shoulders were spotted with scruffs of white dandruff.

‘Alex here tells me,’ the silver-haired man gestured towards his companion, ‘that E.M. Forster used to worry because his bum was full of hair.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Brond said. ‘It’s one of those evenings where everybody learns something new.’

‘It certainly gives “only connect” a new connotation,’ the silver-haired man reflected.

‘You already made that joke.’ The anxious man was not amused.

‘I know – that’s why I came over here to get a chance to repeat it.’

‘It’s a joke in bad taste,’ his friend said. ‘I believe in the virtues of liberalism. I’m even willing to believe that Forster was a thoroughly nice man.’

‘Nice people.’ The voice was high and uncontrolled. It didn’t sound like me at all. ‘Dachau must have been surrounded by nice people.’

The two men stared, lingering on the edge of being offended with me until Brond took up the idea smoothly: ‘Nice farmers, nice schoolteachers, nice lawyers too, taking the children on nice family picnics – chorusing with Brunnhilde, “O Heil der Mutter, die dich gebar!” – and never one to notice there was a stench of burning flesh on the air. But then a defective sense of smell is a medical condition not a moral one.’

‘You’re young,’ the anxious man said to me. ‘You have a lot to learn. You’ll learn.’

The silver-haired man affected a transition to the combative. ‘That’s not an argument, Alex. The matter has still to be taken to avizandum. Just you suppose some wretched dictator builds and fills a camp at Swanston – and you wake up one morning with a smell greasing the air – “Wer ist der Held, der mich erweckt?” eh, Brond? – What on earth could you do, Alex?’

The anxious man hesitated. ‘We-ell . . . I shouldn’t stay there. I should certainly move. I’d even be willing to take a loss on the house.’

And suddenly not looking at all anxious, he began to giggle and they moved off together, well pleased with one another.

‘No question of it,’ Brond went on as if there had been no interruption, ‘Kilpatrick had been sleeping with that charming married woman you call Jackie. That was something no one had foreseen. You see how I resist the temptation to impress you with my omniscience? I didn’t foresee it. I might claim to have improvised rather well once it did happen.’

‘Improvisation,’ I said, ‘– the mark of the artist.’ The words weren’t mine. It was a favourite phrase of Donald Baxter’s. Brond blinked at me. It may have been the only thing I ever said which surprised him.

‘No matter how wonderful our policemen are,’ he said, ‘a woman of that sort always offers a temptation. I shouldn’t imagine she put up much resistance, and Kilpatrick seems to have had a weakness for women. We all have our weaknesses.’

‘You want me to believe that Kennedy killed him for sleeping with his wife?’

‘He killed him twice over – and why not for that? Kennedy isn’t a citizen of the permissive society. A violent man – jealous of that neat little wife of his. That gun you delivered to me was Kennedy’s and it was Kennedy who used it.’

Not Kennedy. Not that sanctimonious keeper of a lodging house. Michael Dart had killed poor loud-mouthed Kilpatrick. And despite anything Brond said or thought about Jackie Kennedy, I didn’t believe she had ever betrayed her husband before she met Kilpatrick. Poor Jackie had forgotten to be afraid of the man she married; and he had hidden all there was of him to love.

‘Twice over,’ I said stupidly. ‘How could he kill him twice over?’

‘According to the helpful Mr Muldoon, they traced him to where the Briody girl had hidden him. It was inevitable after the stupid girl chose you as her saviour and brought the gun back to Kennedy’s own house. That was a joke, but an unfortunate one for the amorous Kilpatrick. While the girl was fetching you, he was tied up and carried outside to that dirty shed to die of exposure. Muldoon helped with that. I’m afraid Kennedy was a touch vicious there; being cuckolded does that to a man. The slowest way to die is the hardest way.’