First there was the long strip of snapshots of his mother propped against the cut-glass of the windowsill. A professional under a dickybird hood had snapped her as she walked down Chapel Street in December, and developed the photographs while she waited looking at the thermos flasks and the smoking sets in the nearest shopwindow, calling “Good morning” across the street to the shopping bags she knew, and the matrons’ outside costumes, and the hats like flowerpots and chambers on the crisp, permed heads. There she was, walking down the street along the windowsill, step by step, stout, safe, confident, buried in her errands, clutching her handbag, stepping aside from the common women blind and heavy under a week’s provisions, prying into the looking-glasses at the doors of furniture shops.

“Your photograph has been taken.” Immortalized in a moment, she shopped along forever between the cut-glass vase with the permanent flowers and the box of hairpins, buttons, screws, empty shampoo packets, cotton-reels, flypaper, cigarette cards. At nearly two in the morning she hurried down Chapel Street against a backcloth of trilbies and burberries going the other way, umbrellas rising to the first drops of the rain a month ago, the sightless faces of people who would always be strangers hanging half-developed behind her, and the shadows of the shopping center of the sprawling, submerged town. He could hear her shoes click on the tramrails. He could see, beneath the pastelled silk scarf, the round metal badge of Mrs. Rosser’s Society, and the grandmother’s cameo brooch on the vee of the knitted clover jumper.

The clock chimed and struck two. Samuel put out his hand and took up the strip of snaps, Then he tore it into pieces. The whole of her dead, comfortable face remained on one piece, and he tore it across the cheeks, up through the chins, and into the eyes.

The pom growled in a nightmare, and showed his little teeth. “Lie down, Tinker. Go to sleep, boy.” He put the pieces in his pyjama pocket.