‘It’s ludicrous,’ said Burden when he had gone. ‘All that carry-on when it’s a dead cert his insurance company’ll fork out. He might as well go straight back to Scotland. We’re the people who’ve got the slog and we’ll get stick if those villains aren’t caught, while it won’t make a scrap of difference to him one way or the other. And I’ll tell you another thing that’s ludicrous,’ he said, warming to a resentful theme. ‘The ratepayers of Sussex could have the expense of young Ginger’s upbringing for eighteen years because his mother’s too scared to come and claim him.’

‘What shall I do about it? Hold a young wives’ meeting and draw them a chalk circle?’

Burden looked bewildered.

‘Haven’t you ever heard of the Chinese chalk circle and Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle? You have to draw a circle in chalk on the ground and put the child in it, and of the mothers who claim him the one who can pull him out of the circle is his true mother and may have him.’

‘That’s all very well,’ said Burden after a pause, ‘but in this case, it’s not mothers who want him, it’s he who wants a mother. No one seems to want him.’

‘Poor Ginger,’ said Wexford, and then the phone rang. It was Loring on his radio to say Paddy Jasper had come into Roland Road and gone up the stairs to Leilie Somers’s flat.

By the time Wexford and Burden got there Tony Jasper had arrived as well. The brothers were both tall, heavily built men but Tony’s figure still had a youthfully athletic look about it while Paddy had the beginnings of a paunch. Tony’s otherwise handsome appearance was ruined by a broken nose which had never been put right and through which he had difficulty in breathing. The repulsive and even sinister air he had was partly due to his always breathing through his mouth. Paddy and he were sitting facing each other at Leilie’s living-room table. They were both smoking, the air in the room was thick with smoke, and Tony was dealing a pack of cards. Wexford thought the cards were the inspiration of the moment, hastily fetched out when they heard the knock at the downstairs door.

‘Put the cards away, Tone,’ said Paddy. ‘It’s rude to play when we’ve got company.’ He was always polite in a thoroughly offensive way. ‘Leilie here,’ he said, ‘has got something in her head about you wanting to know where I was last evening. Like what sort of time did you have in mind?’

Wexford told him. Paddy smiled. Somehow he managed to make it a paternal smile. He was stopping a few days with Leilie, he said, and his son. He hadn’t seen much of his son since the child was born on account of having this good job up north but not a chance of accommodation for a woman and a kid, no way. So he’d come down for his holidays the previous Saturday and what does he hear but that Leilie’s got this evening job up the Andromeda. Well, she’d taken Monday night off to be with him and done an exchange with another girl for Tuesday, but when it got to last night she couldn’t very well skive off again so he said not to worry, he’d babysit, him and Tony here, and they’d have some of their old mates round. Johnny Farrow and Pip Monkton, for a beer and a hand of solo.