“And you didn’t tell anybody what had happened?”

“Well, they didn’t tell me anything, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“They never told me anything was wrong. It was weeks afterwards they said my parents had both gone away and I couldn’t see them. Years later I found out what had really happened. It came —” he hesitated for the understatement — “as a considerable shock to me.”

There was another long pause, during which I recollected as much as I could of Gerald’s reputation as a child. In the little town there had gathered quite a sizable legend of his precocious unreliability. He “romanced,” or, if you cared to use the less flattering word, he told the most astounding lies. He would (in the days when I had met him once or twice at children’s parties) assure people that he had seen an elephant in Shawgate, or a collision between two steam rollers going at full speed, or a man with three noses. And once, I remember, he told a few of us very solemnly that his father had bought a deathbed. How he had picked up the word we could only guess, but it was clear that in his mind a deathbed was a particular kind of bed that one went to a furniture shop to buy; so that was what he told us, as calmly as you please. We thought it amusing that his own childish ignorance should so completely prove him a liar.

Thinking of all this, I said: “Well, it’s a pity you didn’t tell the story when it might have done some good.”

“Yes, but I shouldn’t have been believed. At least, I very much doubt it. Nobody ever believed me. Why, you don’t even believe me now. Do you? Honestly?”

“May I say — for the third time — I simply don’t know what to believe.”

“I don’t blame you. We none of us know much about what really happens. Or has happened. The real truth is often hidden — perhaps because it’s a dark truth … It seems to me that we’re all children of the dead — the dead who shouldn’t have died — the dead who were put to death. … And they wait with us all the time, hoping we’ll understand and learn something, but we don’t, and we can’t do anything about it … Is all that too mystical for you?”

“I don’t quite know what you mean.”

He laughed as he answered: “Why should you? To hell with you, anyway. That’s how you make me feel.”

I smiled, liking him a little. After a short silence I said: “I’m interested in the girl — the German girl.”

“Why?”

“I liked the look of her, I think I saw her once — before I saw her in the court. There used to be a motor bus that made journeys between the foot of Shawgate and Lissington Hill — the seats faced each other and one day I sat opposite someone I couldn’t help staring at. Afterwards, when I described her to others, they said she must have been ‘the foreign girl who works at the little doctor’s.’ So maybe she was. She wore a brown coat and a black fur hat like a fez … But you knew her well, of course. Tell me. what she was like.”