He heard her say, ‘Well, thank you, but I didn’t mean to . . .’ and her voice trailed away, drowned by the other’s brashness.

‘Catch my eye? Think nothing of it, love. My pleasure. Your fella one of the unpunctual sort, is he?’

She made no reply. Barry was fascinated, compelled to stare, by the resemblance to Pat Leston, by more than that, by seeing in this face what seemed a quintessence, a gathering together and a concentrating here of every quality variously apparent in each of the six. And what gave it a particular piquancy was to see it side by side with such brutal ugliness. He wondered at the girl’s nerve, her daring to make overtures. And now she was making them afresh, actually laying a hand on his sleeve.

‘I suppose you’ve got a date yourself?’ she said.

The man laughed. ‘Afraid I have, love. I was just whiling away ten minutes.’ He started to get up.

‘Let me buy you a drink.’

His answer was only another harsh laugh. Without looking at the girl again, he walked away and through the swing doors out into the street. That people could expose themselves to such danger in the present climate of feeling intrigued Barry, his eyes now on the girl who was also leaving the pub. In a few seconds it was deserted, the only clients likely to visit it during that evening all gone.

A strange idea, with all its amazing possibilities, crossed his mind and he stood on the pavement, gazing the length of the High Street. But the girl had crossed the road and was waiting at the bus stop, while the man was only just visible in the distance, turning into the entrance of the underground car park.

Barry banished his idea, ridiculous perhaps and, to him, rather upsetting, and he crossed the road behind the oncoming bus, wondering how to pass the rest of the evening. Review once more those murder scenes, was all that suggested itself to him and then go home.

It must have been the wrong bus for her. She was still waiting. And as Barry approached, she spoke to him, ‘I saw you in the pub.’

‘Yes,’ he said. He never knew how to talk to girls. They intimidated and irritated him, especially when they were taller than he, and most of them were. The little thin ones he despised.

‘I thought,’ she said hesitantly, ‘I thought I was going to have someone to see me home.’

Barry made no reply. She came out of the bus shelter, quite close to him, and he saw that she was much bigger and taller than he had thought at first.

‘I must have just missed my bus. There won’t be another for ten minutes.’ She looked, and then he looked, at the shiny desert of this shopping centre, lighted and glittering and empty, pitted with the dark holes of doorways and passages. ‘If you’re going my way,’ she said, ‘I thought maybe . . .’