He must have seen Arthur Simpkins on the phone through the window and, not realizing the instrument was useless, got scared.

Yellow, a coward. No backbone. That was how they were.

Arthur Simpkins slung the receiver back on the hook. The thing would probably have righted itself in the morning.

Whistling, he went out to the kitchen to boil up the kettle again.

Then he carried it into the dining room and added the hot water to the cold. He left the kettle on the carpet and slipped off his socks. Aside from a bath, which he took regularly once a week, the foot soaking was his little luxury.

He rolled another cigarette. He might watch a bit of TV in the front, after. (Though there would doubtless be nothing but rubbish, blacks and nancy boys.) It was too late to start on the cuttings now. He would do them tomorrow.

Malach penetrated the gardens, agile, like a cat. The fences were low, the ground strewn only with flowerpots and gnomes.

Even from the back, the house of Malach's quarry was at once identifiable. Its barren yard, and general appearance. Years of neglect had stamped themselves upon it. There were no plants, no garden toys, no dog food set out for hedgehogs. The man with short hair was sufficient unto himself.

The kitchen, like an outhouse, stretched from the back wall. The door was bolted and locked. Above, two unlit windows with undrawn curtains.

Malach set one foot against the brickwork. He put his hands there. He began to climb, up the wall. There were the thousand crevices of desuetude, the pointing was no more, his long fingers tucked into the gaps and the long feet followed. His spine was straight, he moved like water flowing, upward. In the lamp dark, almost invisible, but for the beacon of hair.

When he had reached the sloping kitchen roof he stepped delicately across the tiles and onto its brickwork ridge. He walked along it to the bathroom window.

Like knives, his ringers drove into the rotted frame, the crumbled, sixty-year-old putty. Dust, rot, and ancient flakes of paint fell away. Then the frame came up and out, and the window with it.

There had been scarcely a sound. A noise maybe like a cat scratching.

He lowered the window in, onto the bathroom lino.

The smells of the house pushed out of their long imprisonment. Tobacco smoke and nicotine, old midday dinners of mince, kippers, tinned peas, cabbage and spuds, the stench of the never-cleansed lavatory.

In the dark the bath glowed pale, with cracks of verdigris where the taps for ever dripped. Above the washbasin was a tiny shaving mirror, and below, on a shelf, razor and brush, the Steradent, the greasy comb, soap, and slimy flannel.

Outside, across the landing, the bedroom, the box room.

Malach did not bother with them.

He passed like a shadow down the worn carpet of the stairs.