He stared round the walls of the public bar as if searching for inspiration. Those walls were composed, to waist level, of reddish wood. The upper part was adorned on one side by glazed tiles which formed pictures of pseudo-classical half-draped women, and on the other two, including the bar, by plate glass with an engraved border. The fourth side consisted of the frosted windows. The ceiling was almost completely hidden by an oppressive mesh of paper chains and bells which hung in a pall of smoke unruffled by the draught that seemed to Beddoes to be cutting through his ankles.

Nightingale, he thought, was probably swigging surreptitious sherries by a roaring fire in the plutocratic jeweller’s house. In thirteen years, he calculated, he would be as old as Nightingale was now, and would have risen as high; in the meantime, he was a silly sergeant, who had only himself to blame for his present discomfort. As soon as Ivan was reported to be in the Derby Arms he had rushed down there himself; which would have been all right if it had stopped at his taking a look, to make himself familiar with the fellow. But the detective who had discovered Ivan and who had watched him thereafter, had mistaken Beddoes’ single glance of recognition for a dismissal. He had, of course, his own lines to watch. Quite a separate matter, in fact, had taken him into the Derby. That he had spotted Ivan was incidental and a stroke of luck, especially as he must have heard the message by the narrowest margin, just as he was leaving the station to come on duty. For him, Ivan’s description had been superfluous; he knew him, as did certain other local detectives, from having to spend almost as much time on duty in pubs as Ivan spent voluntarily. And the division, which had its Christmas rush together with and as a result of the one in the outside world, could not have been expected to transfer someone solely to the Derby for the sake of saving Sergeant Beddoes a walk in the cold. Thus Beddoes repeatedly tried to indoctrinate himself.

He let his eyes come to rest on Ivan, who was sitting against the plate glass wall, a little apart from the groups of talkative drinkers. He was obviously very drunk. Beddoes thought he must have been swilling steadily almost since he had run out of the house in Bright’s Row. He was surprised that Ivan had found energy to come so far from home, some ten minutes’ walk; for even considered as a product of his environment Ivan was a poor specimen. Although the cut of his cheap suit was skimped to a degree, it lay loose and awkward on his puny frame. The skin of his face glistened, stretched over inflamed, almost ulcerous flesh. His straw-coloured hair looked wet, though when from time to time he left his seat for the bar a greasy patch was visible on the plate glass where his head had rested. Beneath a straggling moustache his mouth permanently drooped, thereby increasing the slackness of his chin. He had a nasty spattering cough, which appeared not to trouble him. But nothing appeared to trouble him. He stared blankly at the ground, raising his glass and swallowing the beer in it with dull regularity.