'Your mother-in-law. '
'Her... how did you know?'
'She asked for Rose.'
The Boy put down the News of the World upon the counter; a headline stood up 'Assault on Schoolgirl in Epping Forest.' He walked across to Billy's, thinking hard, and up the stairs. Half-way he stopped; she'd dropped an artificial violet from a spray; he picked it off the stair: it smelt of Calif ornian Poppy. Then he went in, holding the flower concealed in his palm, and Rose came across to him, welcoming. He avoided her mouth. 'Well,' he said and tried to express in his face a kind of rough and friendly jocularity, 'I hear your Mum's been visiting you,' and waited anxiously and avidly for her reply.
'Oh, yes,' Rose said doubtfully, 'she did look in.'
'Not one of her moody days?'
'No.'
He kneaded the violet furiously in his palm, 'Well, did she think it suited you being married?'
'Oh, yes, I think she did.... She didn't say much.'
The Boy went across to the bed and slipped on his coat. He said: 'You been out too, I hear.'
'I thought I'd go and see friends.'
'What friends?'
'Oh at Snow's.'
'You call them friends?' he asked with contempt.
'Well, did you see them?'
'Not really. Only one Maisie. For a minute.'
'And then you got back here in time to catch your Mum. Don't you want to know what I've been up to?'
She stared stupidly at him; his manner scared her.
'If you like.'
'What do ypu mean, if I like? You aren't as dumb as that.' The wire anatomy of the flower pricked his palm. He said: 'I got to have a word with Dallow.
Wait here,' and left her.
He called to Dallow across the street, and when Dallow joined him, he said: 'Where's Judy?'
'Upstairs.'
'Billy working?'
'Yes.'
'Come down to the kitchen then.' He led the way down the stairs; in the basement dusk his feet crunched on dead coke. He sat down on the edge of the kitchen table and said: 'Have a drink.'
'Too early,' Dallow said.
'Listen,' the Boy said. An expression of pain crossed his face as if he was about to wring out an appalling confession. 'I trust you,' he said.
'Well,' Dallow said, 'what's getting you?'
'Things aren't too good,' the Boy said. 'People are getting wise to a lot of things. Christ,' he said, 'I killed Spicer and I married the girl. Have I got to have a massacre?'
'Was Cubitt here last night?'
'He was and I sent him away. He begged he wanted a fiver.'
'Did you give it him?'
'Of course I didn't. D'you think I'd let myself be blackmailed by a thing like him?'
'You oughta have given him something.'
'It's not him I'm worried about.*'
'You ought to be.'
'Be quiet, can't you?' the Boy suddenly and shrilly squealed at him. He jerked his thumb towards the ceiling. 'It's her I'm worried about.' He opened his hand and said: 'God damn it, I dropped that flower.'
'Flower...?'
'Be quiet, can't you, and listen,' he said low and furiously. 'That wasn't her Mum.'
'Who was it?' Dallow said.
'The buer who's been asking questions... the one who was with Fred in the taxi the day...' He put his head for a moment between his hands in an attitude of grief or desperation but it wasn't either. He said: 'I got a headache. I got to think clear. Rose told me it was her Mum. What's she after?'
'You don't think,' Dallow said, 'she's talked?'
'I got to find out,' the Boy said.
'I'd have trusted her,' Dallow said, 'all the way.'
'I wouldn't trust anyone that far. Not you, Dallow.'
'But if she's talking, why does she talk to her why not to the police?'
'Why don't any of them talk to the police?' He stared with troubled eyes at the cold stove. He was haunted by his ignorance. 'I don't know what they're getting at.' Other people's feelings bored at his brain; he had never before felt this desire to understand. He said passionately: 'I'd like to carve the whole bloody boiling.'
'After all,' Dallow said, 'she don't know much.
She only knows it wasn't Fred left the card. If you ask me she's a dumb little piece. Affectionate, I dare say, but dumb.'
'You're the dumb one, Dallow. She knows a lot.
She knows I killed Fred.'
'You sure?'
'She told me so.'
'An' she married you?' Dallow said. 'I'm damned if I understand what they want .99 'If we don't do something quick it looks to me as if all Brighton'll know we killed Fred. All England. The whole God-damned world.'
'What can M;* do?'
The Boy went over to the basement window crunching on the coke: a tiny asphalt yard with an old dustbin which hadn't been used for weeks, a blocked grating, and a sour smell. He said: 'It's no good stopping now. We got to go on.' People passed overhead, invisible from the waist upwards; a shabby shoe scuffled the pavement wearing out the toecap; a bearded face stooped suddenly into sight looking for a cigarette end.
He said slowly: 'It ought to be easy to quiet her. We quieted Fred an' Spicer, an' she's only a kid...'
'Don't be crazy,' Dallow said. 'You can't go on like that.'
'Maybe I got to. No choice. Maybe it's always that way you start and then you go on going on.'
'We're making a mistake,' Dallow said. 'I'd stake you a fiver she's straight. Why you told me yourself she's stuck on you.'
'Why did she say it was her Mum then?' He watched a woman go by: young as far as the thighs; you couldn't see further up than that. A spasm of disgust shook him--he'd given way; he had even been proud of that what Spicer did with Sylvie in a Lancia. Oh, it was all right, he supposed, to take every drink once if you could stop at that, say 'never again,' not go on going on.
'I can tell it myself,' Dallow said. 'Clear as clear.
She's stuck on you all right.'
Stuck j high heels trodden over, bare legs moving out of sight. 'If she's stuck,' he said, 'it makes it easier she'll do what I say.' A piece of newspaper blew along the street: the wind was from the sea.
Dallow said: 'Pinkie, I won't stand for any more killing.'
The Boy turned his back to the window and his mouth made a bad replica of mirth. He said: 'But suppose she killed, herself?' An insane pride bobbed in his breast; he felt inspired j it was like a love of life returning to the blank heart: the empty tenement and then the seven devils worse than the first....
Dallow said: 'For Christ's sake, Pinkie. You're imagining things.'
'We'll soon see,' the Boy said.
He came up the stairs from the basement, looking this way and that for the scented flower of cloth and wire. He could see it nowhere. Rose's voice said: 'Pinkie' over the new bannister; she was waiting there for him anxiously on the landing. She said: 'Pinkie, I got to tell you. I wanted to keep you from worrying but there's got to be someone I don't have to lie to.
