She seemed reluctant to face him. Eventually he heard her shooing the poodles into her kitchen before she came to peer out at him. “Been having a good time, have we?” she demanded.
“It’s the season,” he said without an inkling of why he should need to justify himself. “Am I bothering your pets somehow?”
“Maybe they don’t recognize your walk since you did whatever you did to yourself.”
“It happened while I was asleep.” He’d meant to engage her in conversation so that she would feel bound to invite him in—he was hoping that would give the dogs a chance to grow used to him again—but he couldn’t pursue his intentions when she was so openly hostile, apparently because she felt entitled to the only limp in the building. “Happy Christmas to you and yours,” he flung at her, and hobbled back to his floor.
He wrote out his Christmas card list in case he had overlooked anyone, only to discover that he couldn’t recall some of the names to which he had already addressed cards. When he began doodling, slashing at the page so as to sketch stick figures whose agonized contortions felt like a revenge he was taking, he turned the sheet over and tried to read a book. The yapping distracted him, as did the sound of Mrs. Hutton’s limp; he was sure she was exaggerating it to lay claim to the gait or to mock him. He switched on the radio and searched the wavebands, coming to rest at a choir which was wishing the listener a merry Christmas. He turned up the volume to blot out the noise from below, until Mrs. Hutton thumped on her ceiling and the yapping of the poodles began to lurch repetitively at him as they leaped, trying to reach the enemy she was identifying with her stick.
Even his bed was no refuge. He felt as though the window on the far side of the city were an eye spying on him out of the dark, reminding him of all that he was trying not to think of before he risked sleep. During the night he found himself surrounded by capering figures which seemed determined to show him how much life was left in them—how vigorously, if unconventionally, they could dance. He managed to struggle awake at last, and lay afraid to move until the rusty taste like a memory of blood had faded from his mouth.
He couldn’t go on like this. In the morning he was so tired that he felt as if he were washing someone else’s face and hands. He thought he could feel his nerves swarming. He bared his teeth at the yapping of the dogs and tried to recapture a thought he’d glimpsed while lying absolutely still, afraid to move, in the hours before dawn. What had almost occurred to him about Fishwick’s death?
The yapping receded as he limped downhill. On the bus a woman eyed him as if she suspected him of feigning the limp in a vain attempt to persuade her to give up her seat. The city streets seemed full of people who were staring at him, though he failed to catch them in the act. When Jackie and Annette converged on the shop as he arrived, he prayed they wouldn’t mention his limp. They gazed at his face instead, making him feel they were trying to ignore his leg. “We can cope, Mr. Foulsham,” Annette said, “if you want to start your Christmas early.”
“You deserve it,” Jackie added.
What were they trying to do to him? They’d reminded him how often he might be on his own during the next few days, a prospect which filled him with dread. How could he ease his mind in the time left to him? “You’ll have to put up with another day of me,” he told them as he unlocked the door.
Their concern for him made him feel as if his every move were being observed. Even the Christmas Eve crowds failed to occupy his mind, especially once Annette took advantage of a lull in the day’s business to approach him. “We thought we’d give you your present now in case you want to change your mind about going home.”
“That’s thoughtful of you. Thank you both,” he said and retreated into the office, wondering if they were doing their best to get rid of him because something about him was playing on their nerves. He used the phone to order them a bouquet each, a present which he gave them every Christmas but which this year he’d almost forgotten, and then he picked at the parcel until he was able to see what it was.
It was a book of detective stories. He couldn’t imagine what had led them to conclude that it was an appropriate present, but it did seem to have a message for him. He gazed at the exposed spine and realized what any detective would have established days ago. Hearing Fishwick’s name in the night had been the start of his troubles, yet he hadn’t ascertained the time of Fishwick’s death.
He phoned the radio station and was put through to the newsroom. A reporter gave him all the information which the police had released. Foulsham thanked her dully and called the local newspaper, hoping they might contradict her somehow, but of course they confirmed what she’d told him. Fishwick had died just before nine-thirty on the night when his name had wakened Foulsham, and the media hadn’t been informed until almost an hour later.
He sat at his bare desk, his cindery eyes glaring at nothing, then he stumbled out of the cell of an office. The sounds and the heat of the shop seemed to rush at him and recede in waves on which the faces of Annette and Jackie and the customers were floating. He felt isolated, singled out—felt as he had throughout the trial.
Yet if he couldn’t be certain that he had been singled out then, why should he let himself feel that way now without trying to prove himself wrong? “I think I will go early after all,” he told Jackie and Annette.
Some of the shops were already closing. The streets were almost blocked with people who seemed simultaneously distant from him and too close, their insect eyes and neon faces shining. When at last he reached the alley between two office buildings near the courts, he thought he was too late. But though the shop was locked, he was just in time to catch the hairdresser. As she emerged from a back room, adjusting the strap of a shoulder-bag stuffed with presents, he tapped on the glass of the door.
She shook her head and pointed to the sign which hung against the glass. Didn’t she recognize him? His reflection seemed clear enough to him, like a photograph of himself holding the sign at his chest, even if the placard looked more real than he did. “Foulsham,” he shouted, his voice echoing from the close walls. “I was behind you on the jury. Can I have a word?”
“What about?”
He grimaced and mimed glancing both ways along the alley, and she stepped forward, halting as far from the door as the door was tall. “Well?”
“I don’t want to shout.”
She hesitated and then came to the door. He felt unexpectedly powerful, the winner of a game they had been playing. “I remember you now,” she said as she unbolted the door. “You’re the one who claimed to be sharing the thoughts of that monster.”
She stepped back as an icy wind cut through the alley, and he felt as though the weather was on his side, almost an extension of himself. “Well, spit it out,” she said as he closed the door behind him.
She was ranging about the shop, checking that the electric helmets which made him think of some outdated mental treatment were switched off, opening and closing cabinets in which blades glinted, peering beneath the chairs which put him in mind of a death cell. “Can you remember exactly when you heard what happened?” he said.
She picked up a tuft of bluish hair and dropped it in a pedal bin. “What did?”
“He killed himself.”
“Oh, that? I thought you meant something important.” The bin snapped shut like a trap. “I heard about it on the news. I really can’t say when.”