The policeman got off his motor-bike. His eyes followed this crazy Engleza’s finger, pointed back, into the exhausted evening, at a peaceful emptiness of dusk.

Mrs Mortlock herself was rather surprised at its emptiness, and as there was nothing further which she could do personally, she allowed the policeman to help her aboard the rackety bus.

Considering the ghastly nature of her experience, she was fairly composed by the time she entered her well-starred hotel. In the foyer, in the press of strangers, she passed for normal. Nobody examined her split seam, everybody took it that her tousled hair was fashionably dressed.

On reaching her room she took off her clothes, dropping into the basket a wilted rose she had accepted from those people against the warning of her better judgment. She bathed. She ordered a cup of iced consommé. Her ritual made her almost scornful, and after she had hidden the air ticket and her traveller’s cheques, under the pillow for safety, she lay down with the Mrs Parkinson Keyes she had been lucky enough to find in an otherwise ghastly shop. Almost immediately she fell asleep.

How long Mrs Mortlock remained dead to the world would have been difficult to estimate. The clocks of Athens were standing still. But at some point in that incalculable night, she awoke to her own face. The glass was overflowing with it. The grey face, emerging from the wastes of sleep, had been mutilated unmercifully. Extinct terrors caked her lips, choked her long, dusty throat. But it was not the isolation of her own reflected and reflective face of which Mrs Mortlock was chiefly conscious. She began, with a slow distaste, to accept that she had been dreaming of Cherie Flegg, of her stained leopard-skin matador pants.

It was only then that Mrs Mortlock’s face forced itself on her, out of the glass, and the breath went Crrkk in her throat, and she fell back, and switched the light off.

Willy-Wagtails by Moonlight

The Wheelers drove up to the Mackenzies’ punctually at six-thirty. It was the hour for which they had been asked. My God, thought Jum Wheeler. It had been raining a little, and the tyres sounded blander on the wet gravel.

In front of the Mackenzies’, which was what is known as a Lovely Old Home – colonial style – amongst some carefully natural-looking gums, there stood a taxi.

‘Never knew Arch and Nora ask us with anyone else,’ Eileen Wheeler said.

‘Maybe they didn’t. Even now. Maybe it’s someone they couldn’t get rid of.’

‘Or an urgent prescription from the chemist’s.’

Eileen Wheeler yawned. She must remember to show sympathy, because Nora Mackenzie was going through a particularly difficult one.

Anyway, they were there, and the door stood open on the lights inside. Even the lives of the people you know, even the lives of Nora and Arch look interesting for a split second, when you drive up and glimpse them through a lit doorway.

‘It’s that Miss Cullen,’ Eileen said.