The Gigantic Shadow by Julian Symons Page A

down on her pad. When she saw me looking at it she turned the sheet.’
    Charlie bit on his toothpick and it broke. He threw it away. ‘These things aren’t what they were. They don’t make ’em tough now. This is how it could have been worked. Mekles or his agent, this Paddy of yours, puts this girl in the flat specially to give false evidence. Bond gets pushed out of the window, and she says he jumped. Simple as that. Tell you what, why don’t I tail her when she goes out, find out who her boyfriend is?’ Hunter shook his head.
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘She never believed a word you said from the start.’
    ‘You don’t think so?’ Charlie looked indignant. ‘She’s not a fool, not by any means. She was stringing us along for the fun of it, or to find out who we were. She’s smart enough to know you’re tailing her and to give you the slip. And if you did find out she was mixed up with Mekles, what are you going to do then? Don’t you suppose the police know it already?’
    Charlie looked at him, his thin head on one side. ‘Bill, if I ever used long words, I should call you a defeatist.’
    How was it possible to make Charlie understand? ‘It’s no use, Charlie, don’t you see that? It’s past history. Or at least, it is for me. It just doesn’t mean anything any more.’

Chapter Ten
    That was Thursday. On Monday of the following week he met Anthea Moorhouse for the first time.
    It was boredom that took him to the Victoria Dance Rooms. Until he received the promised cheque it was impossible for him to go abroad, and a strange inertia overcame him. He was reluctant to get in touch with his former employers. To do so, it seemed to him, would be somehow a betrayal of his plans for the future. And now he began to have doubts about that future itself and to ask whether he would really know any kind of happiness alone in a foreign country. The weather remained extremely fine. It was intolerably hot in his bedroom, yet he lacked the energy to move from the Cosmos. Ought he to get in touch with Crambo, say what he knew about Paddy Brannigan? Somehow he lacked the energy for that too.
    On Saturday he spent the day at Roehampton Swimming Pool, on Sunday he went to Brighton. The newspapers had dropped the story, and he remained unrecognised. But life after Saturday and Sunday stretched before him, an endless ribbon on which something had to be written. It was to inscribe something on the ribbon, however trivial, that he went to the Victoria Dance Rooms.
    They were down a side street, five minutes’ walk from the Cosmos. Two teddy boys lounged by the entrance. They wore long draped jackets and narrow trousers beneath which bright pink socks showed. As Hunter turned the corner of the street a long low car pulled up and two couples got out, young men and women in evening clothes. The teddy boys whistled appreciatively and said something as the couples went in. One of the young men, short, dark and sullen, turned back as if to speak to them, but the girl with him pulled him on. Hunter gave the boys a savage scowl as he passed.
    Inside the hall was hot, crowded, dingy. At one end of it Billy Bell and his Boys, six of them, were playing. There was an MC wearing a dinner jacket. Almost all of the couples on the floor were young, and danced locked together. A few unattached girls – would they be hostesses? – sat in the corner chewing gum. The lighting was dim.
    He sat out one dance, then moved towards the hostesses. He had hoped to pick up a friendly girl here, a girl with whom he could sit afterwards and talk for half an hour, but that seemed unlikely. One dance and I’ll go, he told himself. Then he noticed in the gloom a girl sitting by herself. He stopped and said, ‘Will you dance?’
    She was, he saw now, one of the girls who had got out of the car.
    ‘That would be fun.’ Her voice was light and musical. ‘Roger’s gone off and left me alone in this den of vice.’
    ‘Is it a den of vice?’
    ‘Didn’t you