Rose said, gazing over the waste of green-painted tables, the daffodils, the paper napkins, the sauce bottles.
'Are you a local?'
'I've always lived here all my life,' Rose said, 'in Nelson Place. This is a fine situation for me because they have us sleep in. There's only three of us in my room, and we have two looking glasses.'
'How old are you?'
Rose leant gratefully across the table. 'Sixteen,' she said. 'I don't tell them that. I say seventeen.
They'd say I wasn't old enough if they knew. They'd send me' she hesitated a long while at the grim word 'home.'
'You must have been glad,' Ida said, 'when you found that card.'
'Oh, I was.'
'Do you think I could have a glass of stout, dear?'
'We have to send out,' Rose said. 'If you give me the money '
Ida opened her purse. 'I don't suppose you'll ever forget the little fellow.'
'Oh, he wasn't so...' Rose began and suddenly stopped, staring out through Snow's window across the parade to the pier.
'He wasn't what?' Ida said. 'What was it you were going to say?'
'I don't remember,' Rose said.
'I just asked if you'd ever forget the little fellow.'
'It's gone out of my head,' Rose said. 'I'll get your drink. Does it cost all that a glass of stout?' she asked, picking up the two shilling pieces.
'One of them's for you, dear,' Ida said. 'I'm inquisitive. I can't help it. I'm made that way. Tell me how he looked?'
'I don't know. I can't remember. I haven't got any memory for faces.'
'You can't have, can you, dear, or you'd have challenged him. You must have seen his picture in the papers.'
'I know. I'm silly that way.' She stood there, pale and determined and out of breath and guilty.
'And then it would have been ten pounds not ten shillings.'
'I'll get your drink.'
'Perhaps 111 wait after all. The gentleman who's giving me lunch, he can pay.' Ida picked up the shillings again, and Rose's eyes followed her hand back to her bag. 'Waste not, want not,' Ida said gently, taking in the details of the bony face, the large mouth, the eyes too far apart, the pallor, the immature body, and then suddenly she was loud and cheerful again, calling out: 'Phil Corkery, Phil Corkery,' waving her hand.
Mr. Corkery wore a blazer with a badge and a stiff collar underneath. He looked as if he needed feeding up, as if he was wasted with passions he had never had the courage to pursue far enough.
'Cheer up, Phil. What are you having?'
'Steak and kidney,' Mr. Corkery said gloomily.
'Waitress, we want a drink.'
'We have to send out,'
'Well, in that case make it two large bottles of Guinness,' Mr. Corkery said.
When Rose came back Ida introduced her to Mr.
Corkery: 'This is the lucky girl who found a card.'
Rose backed away, but Ida detained her, grasping firmly her black cotton sleeve. 'Did he eat much?' she said.
'I don't remember a thing,' Rose said, 'really I don't.' Their faces, flushed a little with the warm summer sun, were like posters announcing danger.
'Did he look,' Ida said, 'as if he was going to die?'
'How can I tell?' Rose said.
'I suppose you talked to him?'
'I didn't talk to him. I was rushed. I just fetched him a Bass and a sausage roll, and I never saw him again.' She snatched her sleeve from Ida's hand and was gone.
'You can't get much from her,' Mr. Corkery said.
'Oh, yes, I can,' Ida Said, 'more than I bargained for.'
'Why, whatever's wrong?'
'It's what that girl said.'
'She didn't say much.'
'She said enough. I always had a feeling it was fishy. You see, he told me in the taxi he was dying and I believed him for a moment: it gave me quite a turn till he told me he was just spinning a tale.'
'Well, he was dying.'
'He didn't mean it that way. I have my instincts.'
'Anyway,' Mr. Corkery said, 'there's the evidence, he died natural. I don't see as there's anything to worry about. It's a fine day, Ida. Let's go on the Brighton Belle and talk it over there. No closing hours at sea. After all if he did kill himself, it's his business.'
'If he killed himself,' Ida said, 'he was driven to it. I heard what the girl said, and I know this it wasn't him that left the ticket here.'
'Good God!' Mr. Corkery said. 'What do you mean? You oughtn't to talk like that. It's dangerous.'
He swallowed nervously and the Adam's apple bobbed up and down under the skin of his scrawny neck.
'It's dangerous all right,' Ida said, watching the thin sixteen-year-old body shrink by in its black cotton dress, hearing the clink, clink, clink of a glass on a tray carried by an unsteady hand, 'but who to's another matter.'
'Let's go out in the sun,' Mr. Corkery said. 'It's not so warm here.' He hadn't got an undershirt on, or a tie; he shivered a little in his cricket shirt and blazer.
'I've got to think,' Ida repeated.
'I shouldn't get mixed up in anything, Ida. He wasn't anything to you.'
'He wasn't anything to anyone, that's the trouble,'
Ida said. She dug down into her deepest mind, the plane of memories, instincts, hopes, and brought up from them the only philosophy she lived by. 'I like fair play,' she said. She felt better when she'd said that and added with terrible lightheartedness: 'An eye for an eye, Phil. Will you stick by me?'
The Adam's apple bobbed. A draught from which all the sun had been sifted swung through the revolving door and Mr. Corkery felt it on his bony breast.
He said: 'I don't know what's given you the idea, Ida, but I'm for law and order. I'll stick by you.' His daring went to his head. He put a hand on her knee.
'I'd do anything for you, Ida.'
'There's only one thing to do after what she told me,' Ida said.
'What's that?'
'The police.'
Ida blew in to the police station with a laugh to this man and a wave of the hand to that. She didn't know them from Adam. She was cheerful and determined, and she carried Phil along in her wake.
'I want to see the inspector,' she told the sergeant at the desk.
'He's busy, ma'am, what was it you wanted to see him about?'
'I can wait,' Ida said, sitting down between the police capes. 'Sit down, Phil.' She grinned at them all with brassy assurance. 'Pubs don't open till six,' she said. 'Phil and I haven't anything to do till then.'
'What was it you wanted to see him about, ma'am?'
'Suicide,' Ida said, 'right under your noses and you call it natural death.'
The sergeant stared at her, and Ida stared back.
Her large clear eyes (a spot of drink now and then didn't affect them) told nothing, gave away no secrets.
Camaraderie, good nature, cheeriness, fell like shutters before a plate-glass window. You could only guess at the goods behind: sound old-fashioned hall-marked goods, justice, an eye for an eye, law and order, capital punishment, a bit of fun now and then, nothing nasty, nothing shady, nothing you'd be ashamed to own, nothing
