Except outside Ern’s house. There was quite a lot of activity going on there. A highly-polished black car was drawn up outside the door, with a man in a dark uniform waiting beside it on the pavement. The light was on in the front room on to which the front door opened. Charles stopped his bicycle in time to see, framed in the lighted doorway, three figures. Two of them were dressed in the same dark uniform as the man on the pavement, so that Ern, who was in his ordinary working clothes, seemed quite conspicuous.

He would have been conspicuous in any case, for he walked with the clumsy, rather swaying gait of a man whose wrists are handcuffed together.

The bicycle clattered to the ground as Charles went forward. Idiotically, his voice uttered three syllables.

‘What’s up, Ern?’

The toothless face turned in his direction. The policemen halted for a minute while one of them opened the car door.

‘Go into the ’ouse, Charley,’ said Ern. ‘The landlord’s got summat for you.’

‘But can’t I—I mean surely there must be—’

One of the policemen turned to him with a kind of sad menace.

‘Come on, out of it,’ he said in a voice which conveyed the same blend of threat and melancholy. ‘Else I shall have to teach you better than to try to hold a conversation with a man under arrest.’

‘This is a free—’ Charles began weakly.

‘I’d pull you in under suspicion,’ groaned the policeman gently, as he followed Ern into the car, ‘only we know all about you already and we’ve checked that you’re not in this.’

‘Not in WHAT?’ Charles shouted in exasperation, but the polished car droned away smoothly, with Ern’s cloth-capped head just visible through the back window.

He stood, utterly paralysed, in front of the still open door. His bicycle lay on its side a few yards away. Froulish and Betty gone. Ern gone. Policemen in cars. Where was his life? How could he even begin to piece together its fragments, when he was not even certain that he could remember what shape it used to be?

Then he remembered that at least Ern had left him with one concrete instruction. Go into the house, the landlord’s got some­thing for you. He turned to go in at the door at the precise instant that an enormously fat man in his shirt-sleeves began to close it.

‘You’d be the partner?’ said the fat man.

Charles nodded, and entered without speaking. The fat man led the way down the greasy passage to what had been Ern’s room. Inside, he waited for Charles to get well into the room, then closed the door with heavy deliberation.