‘Here,’ she said. ‘This way.’

There was a door ahead, a metal fire door at the end of the alley. It was wedged open with a wooden block, and the woman pulled at it, opening it further. She was about to step inside, when he stopped her and asked, ‘What’s your name?’

Her face hovered in the dark of the doorway.

‘Glenda,’ she answered. ‘Glenda Jones.’

‘I’m Detective Constable Hobbes. Has somebody hurt you?’

She didn’t reply.

‘Glenda, you have blood on your hands. Is somebody injured? I need to know.’

In answer she moved into the gloom of the building. Even there he could see traces of the smog. It got everywhere, into the lungs, the hair, the eyes, the rooms where people were living and working. At first Hobbes felt that he’d been abandoned. A sudden thought came to him: was this a trap? Oh, Jesus, would he ever get better at this?

He called, ‘Glenda!’

Her voice answered: ‘This way. Quickly! Down here.’

A set of stairs took him down into the basement of the building. He stepped forward, feeling his way with his hands on the walls, and walked through an open door into another room. There was a flickering light, images dancing. A bank of seats. It was a small cinema of some kind. The seats were almost all empty, but the film continued on the screen: a masked woman, a whip, and was that a saddle? Christ. And then he looked down and saw a figure lying on the floor, a little way down the central aisle. It was a woman. Hobbes stared ahead, unable to move. The blood, the wounds to her stomach, the torn clothing.

Glenda was kneeling close by. She said, ‘Marge, I’ve brought someone, a policeman. Listen, darling, stay awake, will yer? Please, Margery. We’re here to help you.’

At last, Hobbes snapped out of his trance. He bent down, and examined the wounds. A lot of blood had been shed. It had splashed on to Glenda’s dress.

‘What happened? Glenda! I need to know.’

‘It was a punter. He went crazy. We get that sometimes, but never like this.’

‘And Margery, she works here?’

‘Oh, yeah. She’s an usher, like me.’

‘What about the weapon?’

Glenda had a drained expression. She was staring at her friend, unseeing.

‘What did they use? A knife?’

‘Yes, yes. I think so. A flick knife. He was a Teddy boy.’

Hobbes didn’t have a wireless on him. He attended to Margery as best he could, and told Glenda what to do, to keep pressure on her wound.

‘Don’t worry, she’ll be all right. We’ll look after her.’

He walked to the back of the cinema and found a telephone in an empty office. The projector was still whirring around. As he waited to be connected, he looked through a small window into the auditorium. Maybe fifty seats in all. A tiny place. And despite everything, there were still one or two customers gazing at the screen. And now he knew why. Almost for the first time, or for the first conscious time, he took in the nature of the film being shown – the bare flesh, the groans of the soundtrack, the sleazy music, the grimaces on the faces of the performers.