Her reply came guilelessly up to them as they mounted the steep stairs: ‘Not unless he’s come back. I heard him go out at just after eight this morning.’

At the top there was a door to the left and a door to the right. Burden knocked on the right one, and it was so rapidly opened that it was apparent Leilie Somers had been listening behind it. And she wanted them inside the flat just as fast. Her neighbour was steadily coming up the stairs and Leilie knew better than to let her hear the law introducing itself or see warrant cards flashed. She was a thin little person of twenty-eight or nine with a pinched face and hennaed hair. Throughout her whole youth she had been the mistress of a man who lived by robbery and occasionally by violent crime, and she had herself been in the dock. But she had never come to adopt, as other such women adopt, an attitude of insolence or truculence towards the police. She was always polite, she was always timid, and now as Wexford said, ‘So you’ve moved back to your old stamping ground, Leilie,’ she only nodded and smiled nervously and said yes, that was right, she’d moved back, managed to get this flat which was a piece of luck.

‘And Paddy with you, I gather.’

‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘On and off. He’s not what you’d call living here.’

‘What would I call it then? Staying here for his holidays?’ Leilie made no answer. The flat seemed to consist of a living room, a bedroom, a lavatory and a kitchen with covered bath in it. They went through to the living room. The furniture in it was ugly and cheap and old but it was very clean and the woodwork and walls were fresh white. The room had been re-decorated perhaps only the week before. There was still a lingering smell of paint. ‘He was here last night,’ said Wexford. ‘He went out around eight this morning. When’s he coming back?’

She would be rid of the man if she could be. Wexford had that impression now as he had received it from her once before, years before. Some bond she couldn’t break bound her to Paddy Jasper, love or merely habit, but she would be relieved if external circumstances could sever it. Meanwhile, she would be unremittingly loyal.

‘What did you want to see him for?’

Two can play at that game, thought Wexford, answering questions with another question. ‘Where was he last evening?’

‘He was here. He had a couple of pals in playing cards and for a beer.’

‘I don’t suppose,’ said Burden, ‘that one of these pals was by any chance his little brother Tony?’

Leilie looked at the rug on the floor, up at the ceiling, then out of the window so intently that it seemed there must be at least Concorde manifesting itself up in the sky if not a flying saucer.

‘Come on, Leilie, you know Tony. That nice clean-living young Englishman who did two years for mugging an old lady up in the Smoke.’