‘Private detective? Jehovah’s Witnesses? Just whatever do you mean? And you’d better tell me, young man, you’d better tell me. I’ve never had any lodger here but what I’ve known he was respectable, yes, and in a steady job too, and here you come and won’t tell me what it is you do and now you come out with all this, a detective, a man that has to mix with criminals, and bringing them to my house before long I shouldn’t wonder, that is IF it’s true what you’re saying.’

Charles dragged out a packet of cheap cigarettes. ‘Just a minute,’ he mumbled. ‘Left matches in bedroom.’ ‘Never mind matches now,’ she shrilled, but he dashed out, slamming the door behind him, and pounded up the stairs to his bedroom. On reaching it his first impulse was to hide under the bed, but he knew it was useless. He must steel himself. Lighting his cigarette, he took a gulp of the acrid smoke and turned to face the landlady as she ran into the room. Then, suddenly, his mind cleared. She had asked for an explanation, and he would give her one. Before she could speak he had launched into a long and circumstantial narrative: how he was employed by the Central Office of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to keep his eye on one of the four regional treasurers, a Blackwall man, who was accused of bringing dis­credit on the movement in various ways which—his voice dropped to a confidential undertone—she would forgive him if he did not specify. He invented a name for the agency in which he was a junior partner. Did she remember the Evans case, the one that got so much space in the News of the World? But then, she did not read the News of the World, of course, she would not have seen it: anyway, he, Charles, had been responsible for bringing that man to justice. He talked on and on, thoroughly bored but surprisingly calm. And now, to come back to his original point, the suspected man had moved into a small hotel in the town (as she opened her mouth to ask ‘What hotel?’ he forestalled her by asking, gently, if she would mind not forcing him to reveal its name) and he felt it to be his duty to move into the same hotel.

‘And so, you see, Mrs. Smythe, when I said that I needed to move so as to be nearer my work, it was,’ he smiled gravely, ‘very literally true.’ And for the first time in fifty-six years Mrs. Smythe was speechless. She had taken in perhaps a third of his involved narrative, and her mind was a swirling chaos. If she had one desire in the world, it was to see the last of Charles Lumley. His point was gained.