"You needn't bother. I want to discuss. . ."
"There's hardly anything left to discuss, and it isn't any bother."
The stranger picked at the scurf which had lodged below his finger-nail. He said, "There's no more to say then?"
"Nothing at all."
"In that case. . ." the stranger said: he began to listen as the next plane beat towards them. He shifted uneasily as the first guns fired, far away in East London. "Perhaps I will have another cup."
When Rowe returned the stranger was pouring out the milk -- and he had cut himself another piece of cake. He was conspicuously at home with his chair drawn nearer to the gas fire. He waved his hand towards Rowe's chair as if he were the host, and he seemed quite to have forgotten the squabble of a moment ago. "I was thinking," he said, "while you were out of the room that it's intellectuals like ourselves who are the only free men. Not bound by conventions, patriotic emotions, sentimentality. . . we haven't what they call a stake in the country. We aren't shareholders and it doesn't matter to us if the company goes on the rocks. That's quite a good image, don't you think?"
"Why do you say 'we'?"
"Well," the cripple said, "I see no sign that you are taking any active part. And of course we know why, don't we? " and suddenly, grossly, he winked.
Rowe took a sip of tea: it was too hot to swallow. . . an odd flavour haunted him like something remembered, something unhappy. He took a piece of cake to drown the taste, and looking up caught the anxious speculative eyes of the cripple, fixed on him, waiting. He took another slow sip and then he remembered. Life struck back at him like a scorpion, over the shoulder. His chief feeling was astonishment and anger, that anybody should do this to him. He dropped the cup on the floor and stood up. The cripple trundled away from him like something on wheels: the huge back and the long strong arms prepared themselves. . . and then the bomb went off.
They hadn't heard the plane this time; destruction had come drifting quietly down on green silk cords: the walls suddenly caved in. They were not even aware of noise.
Blast is an odd thing; it is just as likely to have the effect of an embarrassing dream as of man's serious vengeance on man, landing you naked in the street or exposing you in your bed or on your lavatory seat to the neighbours' gaze. Rowe's head was singing; he felt as though he had been walking in his sleep; he was lying in a strange position, in a strange place. He got up and saw an enormous quantity of saucepans all over the floor: something like the twisted engine of an old car turned out to be a refrigerator. He looked up and saw Charles's Wain heeling over an arm-chair which was poised thirty feet above his head: he looked down and saw the Bay of Naples intact at his feet. He felt as though he were in a strange country without any maps to help him, trying to get his position by the stars.
Three flares came sailing slowly, beautifully, down, clusters of spangles off a Christmas tree: his shadow shot out in front of him and he felt exposed, like a gaolbreaker caught in a searchlight beam. The awful thing about a raid is that it goes on: your own private disaster may happen early, but the raid doesn't stop. They were machine-gunning the flares: two broke with a sound like cracking plates and the third came to earth in Russell Square; the darkness returned coldly and comfortingly.
But in the light of the flares Rowe had seen several things; he had discovered where he was -- in the basement kitchen: the chair above his head was in his own room on the first floor, the front wall had gone and all the roof, and the cripple lay beside the chair, one arm swinging loosely down at him. He had dropped neatly and precisely at Rowe's feet a piece of uncrumbled cake. A warden called from the street, "Is anyone hurt in there?" and Rowe said aloud in a sudden return of his rage, "It's beyond a joke: it's beyond a joke."
"You're telling me," the warden called down to him from the shattered street as yet another raider came up from the south-east muttering to them both like a witch in a child's dream, "Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?"
Chapter 2
PRIVATE INQUIRIES
"There was a deep scar long after the pain had ceased."
The Little Duke
1
ORTHOTEX -- the Longest Established Private Inquiry Bureau in the Metropolis -- still managed to survive at the unravaged end of Chancery Lane, close to a book auctioneer's, between a public house which in peace-time had been famous for its buffet and a legal bookshop. It was on the fourth floor, but there was no lift. On the first floor was a notary public, on the second floor the office of a monthly called Fitness and Freedom, and the third was a flat which nobody occupied now.
Arthur Rowe pushed open a door marked Inquiries, but there was no one there. A half-eaten sausage-roll lay in a saucer beside an open telephone directory: it might, for all one knew, have lain there for weeks. It gave the office an air of sudden abandonment, like the palaces of kings in exile where the tourist is shown the magazines yet open at the page which royalty turned before fleeing years ago. Arthur Rowe waited a minute and then explored further, trying another door.
A bald-headed man hurriedly began to put a bottle away in a filing cabinet.
Rowe said, "Excuse me. There seemed to be nobody about. I was looking for Mr Rennit."
"I'm Mr Rennit."
"Somebody recommended me to come here."
The bald-headed man watched Rowe suspiciously with one hand on the filing cabinet. "Who, if I may ask?"
"It was years ago. A man called Keyser."
"I don't remember him."
"I hardly do myself. He wasn't a friend of mine. I met him in a train. He told me he had been in trouble about some letters. . ."
"You should have made an appointment."
"I'm sorry," Rowe said. "Apparently you don't want clients. I'll say good morning."
"Now, now," Mr Rennit said. "You don't want to lose your temper. I'm a busy man, and there's ways of doing things. If you'll be brief. . ." Like a man who deals in something disreputable -- pornographic books or illegal operations - he treated his customer with a kind of superior contempt, as if it was not he who wanted to sell his goods, but the other who was over-anxious to buy. He sat down at his desk and said as an afterthought, "Take a chair." He fumbled in a drawer and hastily tucked back again what he found there; at last he discovered a pad and pencil. "Now," he said, "when did you first notice anything wrong?" He leant back and picked at a tooth with his pencil point, his breath whistling slightly between the uneven dentures. He looked abandoned like the other room: his collar was a little frayed and his shirt was not quite clean. But beggars, Rowe told himself, could not be choosers.
"Name?" Mr Rennit went on. "Present address?" He stubbed the paper fiercely, writing down the answers. At the name of a hotel he raised his head and said sombrely, "In your position you can't be too careful."
"I think perhaps," Rowe said, "I'd better begin at the beginning."