‘What the hell has it got to do with you where I work?’ he would have liked to say. But after all he supposed it was, to some extent, a question she had the right to ask. He had puzzled her from the beginning, he knew that; neither in speech nor dress resembling the dapper young clerks and elementary-school teachers to whom she was accustomed to let rooms. And yet it had been out of the question to say, bluntly: ‘I have just come down from the University with a mediocre degree in History, I have no job and no prospects, and I am living on fifty pounds I happen to have left in the bank, while I consider my next move.’ No! he shuddered, as he had often shuddered, at the thought of the demoniac eagerness with which she would have seized on him and his problems; the advertisements of ‘Situations Vacant’ she would have found for him in the paper, the enquiries she would have ‘felt obliged’ to make into the state of his finances. ‘I shall have to ask you to pay in advance, Mr. Lumley. Your money won’t last for ever, you know.’ He could hear her saying it, her reedy voice full of suspicion.

‘I don’t understand it. You seem to have some objection to telling me what you do for a living. It’s not as if I was an inquisi­tive person, not at all.’

He had been a damned fool not to think up something in readiness for this situation. What could he be? A teacher? But what blasted schools were there in Stotwell? He ought to have made a note of one, somewhere about five miles away so as to support his original untruth. Well, what did he know about Stotwell? There was a greyhound racing track. Could he be employed there? Working the totalisator perhaps. He realized with a start that he had never even seen a totalisator. Besides, he had been at home in the evenings too often. Articled to a solicitor? But she would ask him what solicitor, and where his office was; and it would be useless to invent one, for her suspicions were violently aroused and she would check his story with passionate thoroughness. He must speak. He forced his tongue into action, trusting that it would say something of its own accord, without any help from him.

‘Well, it’s like this, Mrs. Smythe. You’ve heard of—of Jehovah’s Witnesses?’

Her head swivelled round. She was trying to keep her startled eyes on his.

‘You don’t mean to say you’re one of them?’

‘Well, not exactly one of them. I mean, not one of them.’

‘Mr. Lumley. What do you do?’

‘I’m a private detective.’

The words jumped out of their own accord. This was it.