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plain that you’ve spotted what he’s up to and tell him to go to the devil?’
    ‘My dear Liz! That comes of living all your life in nice clean Army circles. I’ve no doubt that Bill, rest his soul, would have upped and kicked him in the pants. But this is the age of democracy. You can’t kick grocers in the pants anymore.’
    ‘Bill was the most reasonable person who ever lived,’ said Liz.
    ‘Of course he was. That was what made him an autocrat. Real autocrats are always reasonable.’
    ‘What nonsense you do talk,’ said Liz dreamily. (It was the real test, she thought. If people who had known and liked Bill talked about him she felt warm and happy. There was no twinge of the old pain. If any other sort of people discussed him, she felt edgy straight away.)
    ‘—war’s to blame for most things,’ she heard the General saying.
    ‘Such as which things?’
    ‘Crime. Violence. Read in the papers the other day, two youths, armed with knuckledusters, attacked an old lady of seventy. Robbed her of her life’s savings. Over two hundred pounds in notes. Kept them under her mattress.’
    ‘I hold no brief for youths with knuckledusters,’ said Liz, ‘but I can’t help feeling that some of the trouble is caused by the old ladies themselves. Why must they keep their life’s savings under their mattresses? I keep mine in the bank.’
    ‘I don’t agree that there’s been such an increase in crime since the war,’ said Cleeve. ‘Immediately after, perhaps. Bit of disorganisation then. But we’ve got over that. It isn’t a case of more crime. It’s different crime.’
    ‘Advance of science.’
    ‘No. I didn’t quite mean that. Crooks get more scientific. So do the police. That cancels itself out. I meant fashions in crime. Before the war it was all gangs. Robbery and violence and intimidation. A sort of backwash from across the Atlantic.’
    ‘I’m glad gangs have gone out,’ said Liz. ‘I never really cared for gangs. What is it now?’
    Cleeve paused for a moment before answering, and looked unusually serious. ‘I should say,’ he said, ‘that it’s the age of the solitary criminal. The one-man army. I’m not talking about murder. Murder’s always a solitary job. I mean, real criminals. Blackmailers, burglars, forgers, receivers and larcenists of all sorts from men who blow safes to men who live on handfuls of coppers extracted from telephone boxes—’
    ‘And you mean,’ said Liz, ‘that all these people work on their own.’
    ‘Not all. But increasingly more.’
    ‘I shouldn’t have thought that it was easy to break open a safe single-handed,’ said Liz.
    ‘That’s because you’re not an expert,’ said Cleeve with a grin. ‘Well, no. Perhaps safe-breaking isn’t a good example. Safe breakers usually work in threes. But take your country house burglar. There’s your crown prince of criminals.’
    ‘The trouble with you, Bob,’ said the General, ‘Is that you’re really half in sympathy with all these blackguards.’
    ‘Not really,’ said Cleeve seriously. ‘Most of them are sad nuisances. But just an occasional genius. Do you remember Feder? Or Barry, as he called himself. Outwardly a respectable average adjuster in the city. And no nonsense. It was a real business. If you had an average to adjust, he’d adjust it for you. Only it didn’t quite support his flat in Albany and his house near Leatherhead and his three cars and his strings of racehorses and girlfriends. Those had to be paid for out of his homework.’
    ‘Homework?’
    ‘Not very often – so far as one can judge, not more than two or three times in a year – at about eleven o’clock at night he’d leave his country house. No guests that weekend. A conveniently deaf butler and a cook who slept in the far wing. He’d roll his car quietly out of the garage and drive off fast into the night. He’d be back before morning. Old man Reynard, lolloping home to his earth, with a big grin on his face and a tuft