They took a long time to fall. They took long enough for him to notice, and to stare at them. They seemed to be sinking through the air as slowly as dust, turning enormously like worlds, filling the whole of his attention. In each of them a faint image was appearing: in one a landscape, in another a calm and luminous face.
It must be the angle at which you held them to the light. They were falling so slowly he could catch them yet, could catch the face and the landscape which he could almost see, the other images which trembled at the very edge of recognition, images like a sweet and piercing song, approaching from inaudibility. They were falling slowly—yet he was only making to move towards them when the globes smashed on the floor, their fragments parting like petals. He heard no sound at all.
He stood shaking in the dimness. He had had enough. He felt his trembling hands wrap the stained bar in his handkerchief. The rag was large enough; it had always made a companionable bulge in his pocket. He sniffed, and wondered if the old woman's pockets were empty. It was only when he stooped to search that he saw the enormous bulge in her coat, over her belly.
Part of his mind was warning him, but his fingers wrenched eagerly at her buttons. He threw her coat open, in the dust. Then he recoiled, gasping. Beneath the faded flowers of her dress she was heavily pregnant.
She couldn't be. Who would have touched her? Her coat hadn't bulged like that in the street, he was sure. But there was no mistaking the swelling of her belly. He pushed himself away from her, his hands against the damp wall. The light was so dim and thick he felt he was struggling in mud. He gazed at the swollen lifeless body, then he turned and ran.
Still there was nobody in the street. He stumbled to the waste ground and thrust the wrapped bar deep in the bonfire. Tomorrow night the blood would be burned away. As he limped through the broken streets, the old woman's room hung about him. At last, in a doorway two streets distant, he found Tommy.
He collapsed on the doorstep and seized the bottle Tommy offered him. The cloying wine poured down his throat; bile rose to meet it, but he choked them down. As the wind blustered at his chest it seemed to kindle the wine in him. There was no pregnant corpse in the settling dust, no room thick with dim light, no crackling head. He tilted his head back, gulping.
Tommy was trying to wrest the bottle from him. The neck tapped viciously against Dutton's teeth, but he held it between his lips and thrust his tongue up to hurry the last drops; then he hurled the bottle into the gutter, where it smashed, echoing between the blank houses. As he threw it, a police car entered the road.
Dutton sat inert while the policemen strolled towards him. Tommy was levering himself away rapidly, crutch thumping. Dutton knew one of the policemen: Constable Wayne. "We can't pretend we didn't see that, Billy," Wayne told him. "Be a good boy and you'll be out in the morning."
The wine smudged the world around Dutton for a while. The cell wall was a screen on which he could put pictures to the sounds of the police station: footsteps, shouts, telephones, spoons rattling in mugs. His eyes were coaxing the graffiti from beneath the new paint when, distant but clear, he heard a voice say "What about Billy Dutton?"
"Him knock an old woman's head in?" Wayne's voice said. "I don't reckon he could do that, even sober. Besides, I brought him in around the time of death. He wasn't capable of handling a bottle, let alone a murder."
Later a young policeman brought Dutton a mug of tea and some ageing cheese sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, then stood frowning with mingled disapproval and embarrassment while Dutton was sick. Yet though Dutton lay rocking with nausea for most of the night, though frequently he stood up and roamed unsteadily about the cell and felt as if his nausea was sinking deep within him like dregs, always he could hear Wayne's words. The words freed him of guilt. He had risked, and lost, and that was all. When he left the cell he could return to his old life. He would buy a bottle and celebrate with Tommy, Maud, even old Frank.
He could hear an odd sound far out in the night, separate from the musings of the city, the barking dogs, the foghorns on the Mersey. He propped himself on one elbow to listen. Now that it was coming closer he could make it out: a sound like an interrupted metal yawn. It was groaning towards him; it was beside him. He awoke shouting and saw Wayne opening his cell. It must have been the hinges of the door.
"It's about time you saw someone who can help you," Wayne said.
Perhaps he was threatening to give Dutton's address to a social worker or someone like that. Let him, Dutton thought. They couldn't force their way into his room so long as he didn't do wrong. He was sure that was true, it must be.
Three doors away from the police station was a pub, a Wine Lodge. They must have let him sleep while he could; the Wine Lodge was already open. Dutton bought a bottle and crossed to the opposite pavement, which was the edge of the derelict area towards which he'd pursued the old woman. The dull sunlight seemed to seep out of the ruined walls. Dutton trudged over the orange mud, past stagnant puddles in the shape of footprints; water welled up around his shoes, the mud sucked them loudly. As soon as there were walls between him and the police station he unstoppered the bottle and drank. He felt like a flower opening to the sun. Still walking, he hadn't lowered the bottle when he caught sight of old Frank sitting on the step of a derelict house.
"Here's Billy," Frank shouted, and the others appeared in the empty window. At the edge of the waste land a police car was roving; that must be why they had taken refuge.
They came forward as best they could to welcome him. "You won't be wanting to go home tonight," Maud said.
"Why not?" In fact there was no reason why he shouldn't know—he could have told them what he'd overheard Wayne discussing—but he wouldn't take the risk. They were ready to suspect anyone, these people; you couldn't trust them.
"Someone did for that old woman," Frank said. "The one in the room below you. Bashed her head in and took her pram."
Dutton's throat closed involuntarily; wine welled up from his lips, around the neck of the bottle. "Took her pram?" he coughed, weeping. "Are you sure?"
"Sure as I was standing outside when they carried her out. The police knew her, you know, her and her pram. They used to look in to make sure she was all right. She wouldn't have left her pram anywhere, they said. Someone took it."
"So you won't be wanting to go home tonight. You can warm my bed if you like," Maud said toothlessly, lips wrinkling.
"What would anyone want to kill her for?" Betty said, dragging her grey hair over the scarred side of her face. "She hadn't got anything."
"She had once. She was rich. She bought something with all that," Maud said.
"Don't care. She didn't have anything worth killing her for. Did she, Billy?"
"No," Dutton said, and stumbled hurriedly on: "There wasn't anything in that pram. I know. I looked in it once when she was going in her room. She was poorer than us."
"Unless she was a witch," Maud said.
Dutton shook the bottle to quicken the liquor. In a moment it would take hold of him completely, he'd be floating on it, Maud's words would drift by like flotsam on a warm sea. "What?" he said. "Unless she was a witch. Then she could have given everything she owned, and her soul as well, to that man they never found, and still have had something for it that nobody could see, or wouldn't understand if they did see." She panted, having managed her speech, and drank.