“Expecting a letter from Jim?”

She flared: “What are you getting at? Who are you? I’ve every right—”

But her voice trailed off because he was smiling at her, not mockingly or to make her feel foolish but as if he were amused and asking her to share the joke.

“I’m Richard Rollison, and I’ve heard a lot about you. I wanted to find out what you really looked like, what way you did your hair, whether you cared a hoot about Jim or whether he had almost faded out of your mind—all that kind of thing. You see, I’m interested in Jim Mellor’s disappearance. Not in Jim himself—we weren’t even acquaintances, I’m not a long-lost friend. It still gets you badly, doesn’t it? You can’t believe he ever killed a man, yet the evidence has piled up against him. To make it worse, he hasn’t written and hasn’t telephoned you. That’s almost as bad as a confession.”

She said: “He didn’t kill that man!”

“Do you know for sure or is that just wishful thinking?”

“He couldn’t have done. Not Jim.”

“Why did you look up and down the street?” asked Rollison.

“That’s nothing to do with it!”

Rollison went to the desk and picked up the photograph. She saw him glance at the sketches which were so stiff and wooden but his gaze didn’t linger for long on them. He studied the photograph and spoke while he was doing so.

“You know, I’ve a feeling that your jaunt has something to do with Jim. If you ask me why, I couldn’t tell you. But Jim’s very much on top of your mind just now—more even than usually. He’s always there, ready to pop out at a moment’s notice, but this afternoon he’s in complete possession. Why?”

He put the photograph down and looked at the letter which lay in her lap.

“Is that from him?” he asked gently.

Then suddenly, for no reason at all, hot tears stung her eyes and she turned her face away hastily. She hadn’t talked freely about Jim to anyone for twenty-nine days. She hadn’t met a soul who really understood what was in her mind, how Jim was with her so often, ready to smile at her or sing “Charles, Peter and Anne.” Or, if there were a gloomy headline in a newspaper, how he was likely to frown and become earnest and say that, hell, he didn’t know what the world was coming to.