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and they was talking about all this police activity, and Karen said . . . would you like to talk to Karen, though? Hear it from her in her own words, like?”
    â€œI would, yes.”
    â€œAnything to oblige the law. You never know when they might come in handy. Karen, love!”
    The cry was taken up by female voices behind another door, and after a minute or two Karen appeared. She looked about as much like a Scandinavian as Ingrid Bergman looked like a Spanish peasant in For Whom the Bell Tolls. She was raven-haired, fleshy, and heavily made up. Any touch of Scandinavian there had been in her life had been from Norwegian sailors. Still, she seemed a willing enough girl, if several years older than her photograph outside the place had suggested.
    â€œYes, well, like I was just telling the girls, it was last night,” she said, clutching around her an off-white dressing-gown stained all over with stage make-up. “It was the six-fifteen performance, and I’d done my opening routine . . . You haven’t seen the show, I suppose?”
    â€œNot yet,” I said.
    â€œWell, I’d better explain,” she said, putting her hands on her ample hips and thrusting out her bosom professionally. “I start the show with a long routine on my stool—like the pic outside. Lots of shooting and whip-cracking and that, and quite artistic, though I do say it myself. Then I go off and the others come on— filling in,” she hissed, sotto voce, for the doorway through which she had come was filled with dressing-gowned drabs, who were listening to the recital with what I took to be the lethargy of their tribe. “They do various acts in ones and twos, and I don’t come on till the finarly. That gives me time for a fag, to adjust my make-up, and put on my costume, which is a fringed suede Annie Oakley sort of skirt—all fringe, actually, and nothing on underneath. Then I come on for the big number that ends the show, with all of us on stage, and me in the centre twirling the whip over everyone’s head, and them all firing shots around the room—the theatre—and all of us singing, and the pianist wishing he’d got a few extra fingers. It’s a cracking number.”
    â€œI can imagine,” I said.
    â€œAnyway, that starts about twenty to. Well, last night I’d finished my fag, and was adjusting my costume—I think it’s very important that it is well adjusted—when I heard these shots, and I thought ‘That’s funny,’ because there isn’t any shooting in the middle part of the show. It can get too much if you have it all the time, you see.”
    â€œWhat time would this be?”
    â€œWell, see, I’d normally go on for the finarly about twenty to. But last night Colin here—” Colin, by her side, smirked—“come running along to say that Bet had forgotten to put on her raw-hide bra, sillycow, and as a consequence her strip was three minutes shorter than usual, and the pianist was cursing blue murder, and I’d be on in half a minute. So I dashed off, and soon, what with all the shooting and stuff on stage, I forgot all about what I’d heard off stage.”
    â€œI suppose you would.”
    â€œI didn’t even bother to ask the girls what it’d been. But I think I half guessed it was outside. I suppose the time must have been . . . what? about twenty-five to seven, or a minute or two later.”
    â€œHow many shots was it you heard?”
    â€œOh, five or six. Was that it? Was that what’s happened next door?”
    â€œYes,” I said. “I rather think it must have been.”

Chapter 4
    â€œS TRIP CLUBS !” said my wife Jan, when I popped into the flat in Abbey Road for a cup of coffee, on my way from Scotland Yard to talk to Dale Herbert’s father. “It’s disgusting the way women are forced to degrade their bodies like that. I