“I’m wearing my watch and ring, I don’t drink, and I sure don’t own a gun.” She went into the kitchen, and George watched through the open door. She opened a coffee tin. “I had eighty dollars in here,” she told the cop. “It’s gone.”

He wrote in his notebook. “Exactly eighty?”

“Three twenties and two tens.”

There was one more room. George crossed the living room and opened the door to the bedroom.

Maria cried: “George! Don’t go in there!”

She was too late.

George stood in the doorway, looking around the bedroom in amazement. “Oh, my God,” he said. Now he saw why she was not dating.

Maria turned away, mortified with embarrassment.

The cop went past George into the bedroom. “Wow,” he said. “You must have a hundred pictures of President Kennedy in here! I guess you were a fan of his, right?”

Maria struggled to speak. “Yes,” she said, sounding choked up. “A fan.”

“I mean, with the candles, and flowers, and like that, it’s amazing.”

George turned away from the sight. “Maria, I’m sorry I looked,” he said quietly.

She shook her head, meaning he had no need to apologize: it had been an accident. But George knew he had violated a secret, sacred place. He wanted to kick himself.

The cop was still talking. “It’s almost like a, what do you call it, in a Catholic church? A shrine, is the word.”

“That’s right,” said Maria. “It’s a shrine.”

• • •

The program This Day was part of a network of television and radio stations and studios, some of which were housed in a downtown skyscraper. In the personnel department was an attractive middle-aged woman called Mrs. Salzman who fell victim to Jasper Murray’s charm. She crossed her shapely legs and looked at him archly over the top of her blue-framed spectacles and called him Mr. Murray. He lit her cigarettes and called her Blue Eyes.

She felt sorry for him. He had come all the way from Britain in the hope of being interviewed for a job that did not exist. This Day never hired beginners: all its staff were experienced television reporters, producers, cameramen, and researchers. Several of them were distinguished in their profession. Even the secretaries were news veterans. In vain Jasper protested that he was not a beginner: he had been editor of his own paper. The student press did not count, Mrs. Salzman told him, oozing compassion.

He could not go back to London: it would be too humiliating. He would do anything to stay in the USA. His job on the Western Mail would have been filled by someone else by now.

He begged Mrs. Salzman to find him a job, any job, no matter how menial, somewhere in the network of which This Day was a part. He showed her his green card, obtained from the American embassy in London, which meant he had permission to seek employment in the States. She told him to come back in a week.