By God, she was lovely! Beautiful.

His thoughts slipped back to an earlier marriage; a beautiful bitch of a woman who had nearly driven him out of his mind. Chloe always, always, eased his mind. If he could talk to her at this very moment, he would feel better. But he mustn’t disturb her; it wasn’t fair.

He turned away from her again.

“Lem,” she asked, in a far from drowsy voice. “Can’t you sleep?”

His heart leapt as he turned towards her.

In the pleasant house in Wimbledon where he boarded, P.C. Bob Donaldson could not sleep either, and for some peculiar reason he kept thinking about Martha Triggett. Not deeply, not resentfully, not even suspiciously; he was simply aware of her and the month he had spent learning hair-dressing with her, and the Charm School of which he knew and yet to which he had never been admitted. Between these odd moments of thinking of her he kept tossing and turning, shifting his pillow to try to find a spot which was not damp. His hair needed cutting, and was almost soaking wet . . . that was why he kept thinking of old Aunty! Pleased with this understanding, he turned over and dropped off into a sound sleep.

Another man was sleeping very soundly, a few miles away from P.C. Donaldson; a man who was not at all troubled by the sticky heat. He was Barnaby Rudge, whose childhood — in fact, most of his twenty-three years — had been spent in summer heat and humidity much greater than this, in a small but spotlessly clean, cross-ventilated house near Montgomery in Alabama.

Rudge slept on his back. Just outside the window of this small house in Southfields, Surrey, was a street lamp which shone directly in on him. The light showed up the shiny darkness of his face and the stark whiteness of his pillow and the single sheet which covered him to his chest. One arm-his right arm, the arm with which he served -was outside the sheet, lying parallel with his body. His expression was absolutely peaceful; it would be easy to imagine that he was dreaming happily. In fact, he was not dreaming.