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the flares Rowe had seen several things; he had discovered where he was – in the basement kitchen: the chair above his head was in his own room on the first floor, the front wall had gone and all the roof, and the cripple lay beside the chair, one arm swinging loosely down at him. He had dropped neatly and precisely at Rowe’s feet a piece of uncrumbled cake. A warden called from the street, ‘Is anyone hurt in there?’ and Rowe said aloud in a sudden return of his rage, ‘It’s beyond a joke: it’s beyond a joke.’
    â€˜You’re telling me,’ the warden called down to him from the shattered street as yet another raider came up from the south-east muttering to them both like a witch in a child’s dream, ‘Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?’

Chapter 2
    PRIVATE INQUIRIES
    â€˜There was a deep scar long after the pain had ceased.’
    The Little Duke
    1
    O RTHOTEX – the Longest Established Private Inquiry Bureau in the Metropolis – still managed to survive at the unravaged end of Chancery Lane, close to a book auctioneer’s, between a public house which in peace-time had been famous for its buffet and a legal bookshop. It was on the fourth floor, but there was no lift. On the first floor was a notary public, on the second floor the office of a monthly called Fitness and Freedom , and the third was a flat which nobody occupied now.
    Arthur Rowe pushed open a door marked Inquiries, but there was no one there. A half-eaten sausage-roll lay in a saucer beside an open telephone directory: it might, for all one knew, have lain there for weeks. It gave the office an air of sudden abandonment, like the palaces of kings in exile where the tourist is shown the magazines yet open at the page which royalty turned before fleeing years ago. Arthur Rowe waited a minute and then explored further, trying another door.
    A bald-headed man hurriedly began to put a bottle away in a filing cabinet.
    Rowe said, ‘Excuse me. There seemed to be nobody about. I was looking for Mr Rennit.’
    â€˜I’m Mr Rennit.’
    â€˜Somebody recommended me to come here.’
    The bald-headed man watched Rowe suspiciously with one hand on the filing cabinet. ‘Who, if I may ask?’
    â€˜It was years ago. A man called Keyser.’
    â€˜I don’t remember him.’
    â€˜I hardly do myself. He wasn’t a friend of mine. I met him in a train. He told me he had been in trouble about some letters . . .’
    â€˜You should have made an appointment.’
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ Rowe said. ‘Apparently you don’t want clients. I’ll say good morning.’
    â€˜Now, now,’ Mr Rennit said. ‘You don’t want to lose your temper. I’m a busy man, and there’s ways of doing things. If you’ll be brief . . .’ Like a man who deals in something disreputable – pornographic books or illegal operations – he treated his customer with a kind of superior contempt, as if it was not he who wanted to sell his goods, but the other who was over-anxious to buy. He sat down at his desk and said as an afterthought, ‘Take a chair.’ He fumbled in a drawer and hastily tucked back again what he found there; at last he discovered a pad and pencil. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘when did you first notice anything wrong?’ He leant back and picked at a tooth with his pencil point, his breath whistling slightly between the uneven dentures. He looked abandoned like the other room: his collar was a little frayed and his shirt was not quite clean. But beggars, Rowe told himself, could not be choosers.
    â€˜Name?’ Mr Rennit went on. ‘Present address?’ He stubbed the paper fiercely, writing down the answers. At the name of a hotel he raised his head and said sombrely, ‘In your position you can’t be too careful.’
    â€˜I think perhaps,’ Rowe said,