He was reading the Daily Mirror. Rowe could see the print over his shoulder with Zee's cartoon filling most of the page. Once, elusively, from an upper window Mr Rennit peered anxiously out and withdrew. The clock in the auction-room said five minutes to ten. The grey day full of last night's debris and the smell of damp plaster crept on. Even Mr Rennit's desertion made Rowe feel a degree more abandoned.
There had been a time when he had friends, not many because he was not gregarious -- but for that very reason in his few friendships he had plunged deeply. At school there had been three: they had shared hopes, biscuits, measureless ambitions, but now he couldn't remember their names or their faces. Once he had been addressed suddenly in Piccadilly Circus by an extraordinary grey-haired man with a flower in his button-hole and a double-breasted waistcoat and an odd finicky manner, an air of uncertain and rather seedy prosperity. "Why, if it isn't Boojie," the stranger said, and led the way to the bar of the Piccadilly Hotel, while Rowe sought in vain for some figure in the lower fourth -- in black Sunday trousers or football shorts, inky or mud-stained -- who might be connected with this over-plausible man who now tried unsuccessfully to borrow a fiver, then slid away to the gents and was no more seen, leaving the bill for Boojie to pay.
More recent friends he had had, of course: perhaps half a dozen. Then he married and his friends became his wife's friends even more than his own. Tom Curtis, Crooks, Perry and Vane. . . Naturally they had faded away after his arrest. Only poor silly Henry Wilcox continued to stand by, because, he said, "I know you are innocent. You wouldn't hurt a fly" -- that ominous phrase which had been said about him too often. He remembered how Wilcox had looked when he said, "But I'm not innocent. I did kill her." After that there wasn't even Wilcox or his small domineering wife who played hockey. (Their mantelpiece was crowded with the silver trophies of her prowess.)
The plain-clothes man looked impatient. He had obviously read every word of his paper because it was still open at the same place. The clock said five past ten. Rowe closed his catalogue, after marking a few lots at random, and walked out into the street. The plain-clothes man said, "Excuse me," and Rowe's heart missed a beat.
"Yes?"
"I've come out without a match."
"You can keep the box," Rowe said.
"I couldn't do that, not in these days." He looked over Rowe's shoulder, up the street to the ruins of the Safe Deposit, where safes stood about like the above-ground tombs in Latin cemeteries, then followed with his eye a middle-aged clerk trailing his umbrella past Rennit's door.
"Waiting for someone?" Rowe asked.
"Oh, just a friend," the detective said clumsily. "He's late."
"Good morning."
"Good morning, sir." The "sir" was an error in tactics, like the soft hat at too official an angle and the unchanging page of the Daily Mirror. They don't trouble to send their best men for mere murder, Rowe thought, touching the little sore again with his tongue.
What next? He found himself, not for the first time, regretting Henry Wilcox. There were men who lived voluntarily in deserts, but they had their God to commune with. For nearly ten years he had felt no need of friends - one woman could include any number of friends. He wondered where Henry was in wartime. Perry would have joined up and so would Curtis. He imagined Henry as an air-raid warden, fussy and laughed at when all was quiet, a bit scared now during the long exposed vigils on the deserted pavements, but carrying on in dungarees that didn't suit him and a helmet a size too large. God damn it, he thought, coming out on the ruined corner of High Holborn, I've done my best to take part too. It's not my fault I'm not fit enough for the army, and as for the damned heroes of civil defence -- the little clerks and prudes and what-have-yous -- they didn't want me: not when they found I had done time -- even time in an asylum wasn't respectable enough for Post Four or Post Two or Post any number. And now they've thrown me out of their war altogether; they want me for a murder I didn't do. What chance would they give me with my record?
He thought: Why should I bother about that cake any more? It's nothing to do with me: it's their war, not mine. Why shouldn't I just go into hiding until everything's blown over (surely in wartime a murder does blow over). It's not my war; I seem to have stumbled into the firing-line, that's all. I'll get out of London and let the fools scrap it out, and the fools die. . . There may have been nothing important in the cake; it may have contained only a paper cap, a motto, a lucky sixpence. Perhaps that hunchback hadn't meant a thing: perhaps the taste was imagination: perhaps the whole scene never happened at all as I remember it. Blast often did odd things, and it certainly wasn't beyond its power to shake a brain that had too much to brood about already. . .
As if he were escaping from some bore who walked beside him explaining things he had no interest in, he dived suddenly into a telephone-box and rang a number. A stern dowager voice admonished him down the phone as though he had no right on the line at all, "This is the Free Mothers. Who is that, please?"
"I want to speak to Miss Hilfe."
"Who is that?"
"A friend of hers." A disapproving grunt twanged the wires. He said sharply, "Put me through, please," and almost at once he heard the voice which if he had shut his eyes and eliminated the telephone-box and ruined Holborn he could have believed was his wife's. There was really no resemblance, but it was so long since he had spoken to a woman, except his landlady or a girl behind a counter, that any feminine voice took him back. . . "Please. Who is that?"
"Is that Miss Hilfe?"
"Yes. Who are you?"
He said as if his name were a household word, "I'm Rowe."
There was such a long pause that he thought she had put the receiver back. He said, "Hullo. Are you there?"
"Yes."
"I wanted to talk to you."
"You shouldn't ring me."
"I've nobody else to ring -- except your brother. Is he there?"
"No."