Of course Esther Costello could see, hear, and speak. That was what people who collected vast sums of money on the plea of being blind, deaf, and dumb, could inevitably do. It was the natural second paragraph to any twentieth-century charitable handout.

Only very simple people – that was, newspaper readers – would ever be surprised by it. Ryan himself knew well that there was no limit to the corruptibility and baseness even of normal human beings: there was nothing, thinkable or unthinkable, that one man would not do to another. They seduced each other, raped each other, cheated each other, sold each other. They killed, mutilated, drugged, and maimed; they slandered, swindled, and traduced. They could smile engagingly, even as they betrayed, even as they dropped the poison into the cup.

In America, a negro accused (wrongly, as it turned out) of rape, had been castrated and burned alive. In England, an idiot male child had been kept chained in an attic, sleeping on newspapers, fed on bones, for eleven years before a complaint was made – to the health authorities. In France, a woman took a lover on the kitchen table while her children looked on, and told her twelve-year-old daughter: “You can watch, but you oughtn’t to start till next year.” In Germany a doctor had been ready to gas his fellow men in batches of a hundred at a time, with a squad standing by to salvage their clothes, their shoes, their hair, and the gold in their teeth, before their corpses were rendered down for soap and glue. In South Africa, a white farmer killed the negro girl he had got with child, cut off her head, and disembowelled her of the telltale foetus, while his wife held a torch for him to see by.

Such things were part of the human pattern: they were the things that people did to each other, the things that made up a front page. Harry Grant’s news, though promising, was nothing out of the way. Except, of course, as a story: in that category, it was a good one, though it still needed readying.

He said: “We’ll have to have a lot more facts, before we can print.”

Grant nodded. Obscurely, it was the answer he had been hoping to hear: it relieved him of responsibility for not filing the story straightaway, it made sense of his hesitation. Of course, the story needed more facts to support it … But for honour’s sake he had to argue the point.

“Surely we’ve got enough to go on. The spectacles, the mirror, Jack Lett’s confession–”

“Lett won’t testify,” Ryan interrupted. “I know these smart operators – and so do you. They’re like bookies. Try to put them on the witness stand, and they’re three states away, under a different name and a false beard, before the case comes up.”

“But I can testify to what he said.”

Ryan smiled. “You’re a reporter,” he said. “A man with a story to sell to the public. You’re the biggest suspect of all.”