'The money,' Raven said.
'Here in this case.'
'They are all fivers.'
'You can't expect to be paid two hundred in small change. And it's nothing to do with me,' Mr Cholmondeley said, 'I'm merely the agent.' His eyes softened as they rested on a Raspberry Split at the next table. He confessed wistfully to Raven, 'I've got a sweet tooth.'
'Don't you want to hear about it?' Raven said. 'The old woman...'
'Please, please,' Mr Cholmondeley said, 'I want to hear nothing. I'm just an agent. I take no responsibility. My clients...'
Raven twisted his hare-lip at him with sour contempt. 'That's a fine name for them.'
'How long the waitress is with my parfait,' Mr Cholmondeley complained. 'My clients are really quite the best people. The acts of violence—they regard them as war.'
'And I and the old man...' Raven said.
'Are in the front trench.' He began to laugh softly at his own humour; his great white open face was like a curtain on which you can throw grotesque images: a rabbit, a man with horns. His small eyes twinkled with pleasure at the mass of iced cream which was borne towards him in a tall glass. He said, 'You did your work very well, very neatly. They are quite satisfied with you. You'll be able to take a long holiday now.' He was fat, he was vulgar, he was false, but he gave an impression of great power as he sat there with the cream dripping from his mouth. He was prosperity, he was one of those who possessed things, but Raven possessed nothing but the contents of the wallet, the clothes he stood up in, the hare-lip, the automatic he should have left behind. He said, 'I'll be moving.'
'Good-bye, my man, good-bye,' Mr Cholmondeley said, sucking through a straw.
Raven rose and went. Dark and thin and made for destruction, he wasn't at ease among the little tables, among the bright fruit drinks. He went out into the Circus and up Shaftesbury Avenue. The shop windows were full of tinsel and hard red Christmas berries. It maddened him, the sentiment of it. His hands clenched in his pockets. He leant his face against a modiste's window and jeered silently through the glass. A girl with a neat curved figure bent over a dummy. He fed his eyes contemptuously on her legs and hips; so much flesh, he thought, on sale in the Christmas window.
A kind of subdued cruelty drove him into the shop. He let his hare-lip loose on the girl when she came towards him with the same pleasure that he might have felt in turning a machine-gun on a picture gallery. He said, 'That dress in the window. How much?'
She said, 'Five guineas.' She wouldn't 'sir' him. His lip was like a badge of class. It revealed the poverty of parents who couldn't afford a clever surgeon. He said, 'It's pretty, isn't it?'
She lisped at him genteelly, 'It's been vewwy much admired.'
'Soft. Thin. You'd have to take care of a dress like that, eh? Do for someone pretty and well off?'
She lied without interest, 'It's a model.' She was a woman, she knew all about it, she knew how cheap and vulgar the little shop really was. 'It's got class, eh?'
'Oh yes,' she said, catching the eye of a dago in a purple suit through the pane, 'it's got class.'
'All right,' he said. 'I'll give you five pounds for it.' He took a note from Mr Cholmondeley's wallet. 'Shall I pack it up?'
'No,' he said. 'The girl'll fetch it.' He grinned at her with his raw lip.' You see, she's class. This the best dress you have?' and when she nodded and took the note away he said, 'It'll just suit Alice then.'
And so out into the Avenue with a little of his scorn expressed, out into Frith Street and round the corner into the German café where he kept a room. A shock awaited him there, a little fir tree in a tub hung with coloured glass, a crib. He said to the old man who owned the café, 'You believe in this? This junk?'
'Is there going to be war again?' the old man said. 'It's terrible what you read.'
'All this business of no room in the inn. They used to give us plum pudding. A decree from Caesar Augustus. You see I know the stuff, I'm educated. They used to read it us once a year.'
'I have seen one war.'
'I hate the sentiment.'
'Well,' the old man said, 'it's good for business.'
Raven picked up the bambino. The cradle came with it all of a piece: cheap painted plaster. 'They put him on the spot, eh? You see I know the whole story. I'm educated.'
He went upstairs to his room. It hadn't been seen to: there was still dirty water in the basin and the ewer was empty. He remembered the fat man saying, 'Chumley, my man, Chum-ley. It's pronounced Chumley,' flashing his emerald ring. He called furiously, 'Alice,' over the banisters.
She came out of the next room, a slattern, one shoulder too high, with wisps of fair bleached hair over her face. She said, 'You needn't shout.'
He said, 'It's a pigsty in there. You can't treat me like that. Go in and clean it.' He hit her on the side of the head and she cringed away from him, not daring to say anything but, 'Who do you think you are?'
'Get on,' he said, 'you humpbacked bitch.' He began to laugh at her when she crouched over the bed. 'I've bought you a Christmas dress, Alice. Here's the receipt. Go and fetch it. It's a lovely dress. It'll suit you.'
'You think you're funny,' she said.
'I've paid a fiver for this joke. Hurry, Alice, or the shop'll be shut.' But she got her own back calling up the stairs, 'I won't look worse than what you do with that split lip.' Everyone in the house could hear her, the old man in the café, his wife in the parlour, the customers at the counter. He imagined their smiles. 'Go it, Alice, what an ugly pair you are.' He didn't really suffer; he had been fed the poison from boyhood drop by drop: he hardly noticed its bitterness now.
He went to the window and opened it and scratched on the sill. The kitten came to him, making little rushes along the drain pipe, feinting at his hand. 'You little bitch,' he said, 'you little bitch.' He took a small twopenny carton of cream out of his overcoat pocket and spilt it in his soap-dish. She stopped playing and rushed at him with a tiny cry. He picked her up by the scruff and put her on top of his chest of drawers with the cream. She wriggled from his hand, she was no larger than the rat he'd trained in the home, but softer. He scratched her behind the ear and she struck back at him in a preoccupied way. Her tongue quivered on the surface of the milk.
Dinner-time, he told himself. With all that money he could go anywhere. He could have a slap-up meal at Simpson's with the business men; cut off the joint and any number of veg.
When he got by the public call-box in the dark corner below the stairs he caught his name 'Raven'. The old man said, 'He always has a room here. He's been away.'
'You,' a strange voice said, 'what's your name—Alice—show me his room. Keep an eye on the door, Saunders.'
Raven went on his knees inside the telephone-box. He left the door ajar because he never liked to be shut in. He couldn't see out, but he had no need to see the owner of the voice to recognize: police, plain clothes, the Yard accent. The man was so near that the floor of the box vibrated to his tread. Then he came down again. 'There's no one there. He's taken his hat and coat. He must have gone out.'
'He might have,' the old man said. 'He's a soft-walking sort of fellow.'
The stranger began to question them. 'What's he like?'
The old man and the girl both said in a breath, 'A hare-lip.'
'That's useful,' the detective said. 'Don't touch his room. I'll be sending a man round to take his fingerprints. What sort of a fellow is he?'