The Japanese Girl by Winston Graham Page A

hundred and twenty pounds in a wallet in a drawer. That was all I ever made out of my years in prison.
    I put on my coat and went and had a last look at her. It was not until I was about to close the outer door of the flat that I thought of all the fingerprints.
    So I went back in and dampened a tea-towel and spent half an hour wiping over all the surfaces I was likely to have touched.
    â€˜I caught a train back to London but missed the last train for Newbury so spent the night in a cheap hotel.
    â€¦ On the Monday morning I went back to my market gardening. And now I am waiting. There is no connection at all between me and the murdered prostitute – no one knows we ever met or knew of each other’s existence. The chances are that the police will find a fingerprint somewhere. If they do they’ll soon catch on. If not, I am free.
    If I stay free I shall stick to market gardening and the soil. Growing green things out of the good earth is one of the few worthwhile jobs left. It is real to me, one of the few things left that are real. And in doing it one does not need to meet people or have dealings with them or to travel far.
    If the police do catch up with me, it will mean, perhaps three years in close confinement, and then no doubt I shall be moved to a prison where I can till and hoe the soil again.
    I don’t want to go back, but perhaps the end in either case is not very different.
    These last few days, since that terrible visit to Brighton, some of the tension has been draining out of me. Five years in prison have quite unfitted me for the stress and strain of everyday life, the push and the pressure of people, the business of competing with other men, not merely for a living but for a foot on the pavement, a seat in a train, a place in a queue. Above all it has unfitted me for travel.
    It is a relief now to know that all those grandiose schemes we thought up need never be implemented. It’s a relief that I shall never have to travel far again.

The Medici Ear-Ring
    Bob Loveridge owned this Medici ear-ring. It had been in his family for a long time, and it was one of the things he’d always bring out to show you if you gave him any encouragement. He was proud of it, liked telling the story.
    Bob was a friend of mine, though he was 20 years older, and for a few months I’d courted his daughter. Bob was in shipping and lived in Hampstead and drove a Bentley. Lucille, his daughter, had the usual Mini. Bob’s marriage had folded up about 12 years ago, and Lucille was now the only woman in his life.
    I am an artist. That means I eke out life in patched jeans and a turtle-neck sweater and earn as much in a year, if I’m lucky, as a junior typist. This made the prospect of suggesting marriage to Lucille rather difficult. I had known the family all my life, and I got on well with Bob; and no doubt he had enough for three, but one doesn’t want to be kept – nor, if painting really means something, does one want to drift into shipping as a means of keeping a family. Because coy little water-colours of a Saturday just won’t do.
    It was hard, as I say, because she was a pretty girl and we got on well – really well; she had the colouring I like: autumn-tinted hair and short-sighted sleepy eyes with umber depths to them. So when she took up with Peter Stevenson I was half jealous, half relieved. An artist can afford girls, and there are always girls in Chelsea who will share your bed and your gas stove; but marriage … Peter’s arrival took temptation out of my way, but made what I was losing all the more delectable.
    I liked him too – perhaps all the better because he also was poor. But as a Grammar School junior teacher even his prospects, at twenty-three, were better than mine at thirty.
    This time I’m talking about, they had been engaged three months, and Bob Loveridge rang me inviting me to his house for the evening.
    Just then I’d rented a studio from