On Tuesday morning he was woken by the orchestra manager, who actually shouted at him down the phone. Rehearsals on Friday, and still they had no complete score. Later the same morning Clive heard on the phone from a friend the extraordinary news. Vernon had been forced to resign! Clive hurried out to buy the papers. He had read or heard nothing since Friday’s Judge, otherwise he would have been aware of how opinion had been turning against its editor. He took a cup of coffee into the dining room and read the press there. It was grimly satisfying to have his own views of Vernon’s conduct confirmed. He had done his duty by Vernon, he had tried to warn him, but Vernon wouldn’t listen. Having read three scathing indictments, Clive went to the window and stared at the clumps of daffodils growing by the apple tree at the bottom of the garden. He had to admit it, he was feeling better. Early spring. Soon the clocks would go forward. In April, with the symphony’s premiere behind him, he’d go to New York to visit Susie Marcellan. Then to California, where he had a piece in the Palo Alto Music Festival. He was aware that his finger was tapping the radiator to the beat of some new rhythm, and he imagined a shift of mood, of key, and a note sustained over changing harmonies and a savage kettledrum pulse. He turned and hurried from the room. He had an idea, a quarter of an idea, and before it went he had to get to the piano.

In the studio he shoved books and old scores to the floor to make himself a clear surface, took up a sheet of lined paper and a sharpened pencil, and had just formed a treble clef when the doorbell downstairs rang.

His hand froze, and he waited. It rang again. He was not going down, not now, when he was about to crack the variation. It would be someone pretending to be an ex-coal miner in order to sell ironing board covers. The bell again, then silence. They’d gone. For a moment, the slender idea he had was lost. Then he had it, or part of it, and was just drawing the stem of a chord when the phone rang. He should have turned it off. In his irritation, he snatched it up.

“Mr. Linley?”

“Yes.”

“Police. C. I. D. Standing outside your front door. Appreciate a word.”

“Oh. Look, can you come back in half an hour?”

” ’Fraid not. Got a few questions for you. Might have to ask you to attend a couple of identity parades in Manchester. Help us nail a suspect. Shouldn’t take up more than a couple of days of your time. So if you wouldn’t mind opening up, Mr. Linley…”

2

In her hurry to get off to work, Mandy had left a wardrobe door open at an angle that allowed a mirror to accuse Vernon with a narrow vertical slice of himself: propped against the pillows, resting the mug of tea she had brought him against his belly, his unshaved face bluish white in the bedroom gloom, letters, junk mail, and newspapers spread beside him-truly, a tableau of unemployment. Idle. Suddenly he understood that business-page word. He had many idle hours ahead of him this Tuesday morning in which to brood on all the indignities and ironies that had accumulated about his dismissal yesterday. The curious way, for example, the letter was dropped off in his office by an innocent sub, that very same sobbing dyslexic sub he had saved from the push. Then the letter itself, politely soliciting his resignation and offering in return a year’s salary. There was a muted reference to the terms of his contract, by which, he assumed, the directors wished to remind him, without spelling it out, that if he refused and forced them to sack him, there would be no remuneration at all. The letter concluded by observing kindly that in any event, his employment would cease that day and the board wished to congratulate him on his period of brilliant editorship and to wish him well in his future plans. So there it was. He had to clear out now, and he could leave with or without a sum in the low six figures.

In his resignation letter, Vernon had noted that circulation was up by more than a hundred thousand. Just writing out the number, the zeros, pained him. When he went to the outer office and handed the envelope to Jean, she seemed to have difficulty looking him in the eye. And the building was curiously silent as he returned to collect his things from his desk. His office instincts told him that everybody knew. He left his door open in case anyone felt like coming by in the way of fellow feeling, down the beaten track of friendship. What there was to pack easily fitted into his briefcase—a framed photograph of Mandy and the kids, a couple of pornographic letters from Dana written on House of Commons paper. And it looked like no one was popping in to express their outraged sympathy. No raucous crowd of shirtsleeved colleagues to bang him out in the old style. Very well, then, he was leaving. He buzzed Jean and asked her to let the chauffeur know he was coming down. She buzzed back to tell him he no longer had a chauffeur.

He put on his coat, picked up his briefcase, and went into the outer office. Jean had found herself an urgent errand, and he met no one, not a soul, on his way to the lift. The only person to say cheerio to the editor was the porter downstairs on the desk, and he was also the one to inform Vernon of his successor. Mr. Dibben, sir. By minimally inclining his head, Vernon managed to convey the pretense that he already knew. When he stepped outside Judge House, it was raining. He raised an arm for a taxi, then remembered that he had very little cash with him. He took the tube and walked the last half-mile to his home in a downpour. He went straight for the whisky, and when Mandy came in he had a terrible row with her, when all she was trying to do was comfort him.

Vernon slumped with his tea while his mental odometer tallied the insults and humiliations. Not enough that Frank Dibben was treacherous, that all his colleagues deserted him, that every newspaper was cheering his dismissal; not enough that the whole country celebrated the crushing of the flea and that Garmony was still at large. Lying on the bed beside him was a venomous little card gloating over his downfall, written by his oldest friend, written by a man so morally eminent he would rather see a woman raped in front of him than have his work disrupted. Perfectly hateful, and mad. Vindictive. So it was war. Right, then. Here we go, don’t hesitate. He drained his cup, picked up the phone, and dialed a friend at New Scotland Yard, a contact from his old crime desk days. Fifteen minutes later all the details had been imparted, the deed was done, but Vernon was still back with.his thoughts, still not satisfied. It turned out that Clive had not broken the law. He would be inconvenienced into doing his duty, nothing more than that. But there had to be more. There had to be consequences. Vernon brooded another hour in bed on this theme, then at last got dressed, though he did not shave, and passed the morning moping about the house, refusing to answer the phone. For consolation he took out the Friday edition. The fact was, it was a brilliant frontpage. Everyone was wrong. The rest of the paper was strong too, and Lettice O’Hara had done him proud with the Dutch story. One day, especially if Garmony ever got to be prime minister and the country was lying in ruins, people would regret they had hounded Vernon Halliday from his job.

But the consolation was brief, because that was the future and this was the present, the one in which he had been sacked. He was at home when he should have been in an office. He knew only one profession, and no one would employ him in it now. He was in disgrace, and he was too old to retrain. His consolation was also brief because his thoughts kept returning to that hateful postcard, the twisting knife, the salt in his lacerations, and as the day passed it came to stand for all the major and minor insults of the past twenty-four hours. That little message to him from Clive embodied and condensed all the poison of this affair—the blindness of his accusers, their hypocrisy, their vengefulness, and above all the element that Vernon considered to be the worst of human vices-personal betrayal.