They sat Samuel down on a chair behind the counter and he heard Mrs. Dacey, still on the stairs, calling for Polly up into the dark, dirty other floors and caves of the drunken house. But Polly did not answer.

She would be in her locked bedroom now, crying for Sam gone, at her window staring out onto the colourless, slowly disappearing street and the tall houses down at heel; or depicting, in the kitchen, the agony of a woman in childbirth, writhing and howling round the crowded sink; or being glad at a damp corner of the landing.

“Silly goose,” said George Ring, sitting long-legged on the table and smiling at Samuel with a ferocious coyness. “You might have been drownded. Drownded,” he said again, looking slyly from under the spider line of his eyebrows.

“Lucky you left the door open,” Mr. Allingham said. He lit a cigarette and looked at the match until it burned his finger. “I suppose,” he said, his finger in his mouth.

“Our maid at home always said ‘drownded,’ ” said George Ring.

“But I saw Polly lock the door. She put the key down her dress.” Samuel spoke with difficulty from behind the uncertain counter. The words came out in a rush, then reversed and were lost, tumbling among the sour bushes under his tongue. “She put it down her dress,” he said, and paused at the end of each word to untie the next. Now the shop was almost entirely dark.

“And chimbley. You know, for chimney. Well, my dear, the door was open when we went up. No key, no Polly.”

“Just a boy in the bath,” Mr. Allingham said. “Do you often get like that, Sam? The water was up to your chin.”

“And the dirt!”

“It wasn’t my dirt. Someone had been in the bath before. It was cold,” Samuel said.

“Yes, yes.” Samuel could see Mr. Allingham’s head nodding. “That alters the situation, doesn’t it? Dear God,” he said, “you should have gone in with your clothes on like everybody else.”

“Polly’s gone,” said Mrs. Dacey. She appeared out of nowhere in the wall and stood behind the counter at Samuel’s side. Her rustling dress brushed against his hands, and he drew them sharply back. I touched a funeral, he said to the dazed boy in his chair. Her corpse-cold hand fell against his cheek, chilling him out of a moment’s sleep. The coffin has walked upright into my sitting bed.

“Oooh,” he said aloud.

“Still cold, baby?” Mrs. Dacey bent down, creaking like a door, and mothered him about the hair and mouth.

There had been little light all day, even at dawn and noon, mostly the close, false light of bedroom and restaurant. All day he had sat in small, dark places, bathroom and travelling lavatory, a jungle of furniture, a stuffed shop where no one called except these voices saying:

“You looked so defenseless, Sam, lying there all cold and white.”