Sparrow nodded, unconcerned. “Sure, Harry,” he said. “I know what you did for her … It just came through.” Harry turned back to Ryan. Already he knew that he must cope with this, and that it was about to crash down upon his head with fearful weight. He could only remain foolish, and simple, and hidden, for a very little while longer … By way of prolonging it, he pointed to the typewritten sheets on the edge of the desk, and said: “I finished the story.”

Ryan looked at him with compassion. “Hold it, Harry,” he repeated. “This is something else again …We just got word–” He jerked his head at Sparrow. “Esther was found dead this morning. About an hour back.”

The time to cope was nearly at hand. “You’re crazy!” Harry burst out. “I was with her myself, a couple of hours ago.”

Ryan’s eyes sharpened. “How long ago?”

Christ, thought Harry: that’s another angle to it … He swallowed, and said: “Longer than that … I was driving around all night … I left about one o’clock.”

“Was she all right then?”

“Of course she was all right …” He groped for a firmer hold on what was going on. “What’s the story? What happened?”

“Police report.” That was Sparrow, telling about his friends and their routine discoveries. “She was found dead in bed this morning. Overdose of sleeping tablets.”

Harry swallowed again. “How?”

“Accident, maybe.” There was an infinitely long line of accidents in Sparrow’s voice. “Or suicide.” There was another long line of suicides, mostly with guns or disinfectant. “What else could it be?” Sparrow was talking tiredly, unmoved by spectral deaths that boiled down to simple police reports. But he had one more thing to add. “She died some time between one and four.”

Harry Grant stood up. There was a wild moment when he wished with all his might that he could confess to it, and so end his life with hers. But he said: “She was OK when I left.”

Sparrow nodded.

To him, this was straight witness stuff, either suspect or not suspect: the police would give the verdict on that. Dead girls always had fellows who’d left them a few hours before. Occasionally they died of that too – but very rarely, very rarely. In that respect, they were mighty tough and recuperative. He said: “She was blind. She must have reached for a bottle of something, and taken the wrong sort of pill.”

“Is that the police angle?” asked Ryan.

“Yes.”

“Jesus,” said Harry. “I don’t believe it!”

“You know something?” asked Sparrow immediately.

Harry shook his head. “No. But she wouldn’t do that. She was too – too clever.”

“You mean it was suicide?” There was another train of thought in Sparrow’s voice, a minor variation: the girl who killed herself after the man left. “We had a quarrel,” the man always admitted, loosening his collar. “Nothing serious, just a lover’s quarrel.” But it was invariably enough to tip the girl over the edge. Either that, or she was going to have a baby almost immediately, on Tuesday next, and the man wouldn’t come across with that old gold ring, “Was she having a baby?” he asked straightaway.