'As a matter of fact,' he told her with a lopsided grin, 'I got it in a free-for-all. Last night some pals of mine suggested that we should try our luck at a gambling joint that one of them knew of up in St. John's Wood. After a bit of a binge we went along there and played chemi for a while. Of course the game was rigged, as it always is in those sort of places; but the bloke who runs it made it a bit too obvious that he took us all for suckers. When we caught him out red-handed, we decided to break the place up. By ill luck I found myself up against the chucker-out. He was only a little runt of a man, but I suppose he had served in the Commandoes or something. Anyhow, before I knew what was huppening, he had given me this whopper, and a couple of minutes later he bundled me out into the street.'

The truth was very different. The previous night he had attended a Union meeting down in Shoreditch and come up against one of the casual risks inseparable from his investigation.

His work entailed his covering the activities of several Branches, each of a different Union, for all of which his office had provided him with forged membership cards, and he could, at most, have taken a regular job in the area of only one of them. Since it would have been pointless to devote eight hours a day to working as a docker, busman or some other category of labourer, having told the Secretary at each branch that he had recently come to London from Ireland for family reasons, he had registered himself at them all as unemployed and since skilfully evaded, on one excuse or another, taking such jobs as had been offered him.

The Party ticket he carried was evidence enough for the Communist members on the committees of the Branches to which he belonged that he was to be trusted, but to induce them actually to confide in and make use of him, he had lost no opportunity of putting himself forward at every meeting he attended as an active trouble-maker. It followed that the more conservative members of the branches had come to regard him as the type of hot-head who is a menace to regular employment and good relations with the bosses. The night before, on his leaving the meeting, three such anti-Communists had followed and later tackled him in an ill-lit street. They had charged him with being a 'professional out-of-work' and a 'bloody agitator' who wanted to see everyone else out of work in support of his Communist opinions. Then, while two of them had stood by, the third stalwart, a man with the build of a blacksmith, whom they referred to as 'good old Ed', had made him put his fists up and sailed into him.