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way you looked at it.
    During breakfast Jean and I hadn’t spoken much. The topics had been restricted to pass the toast and more coffee. But there would be time to talk after the day’s business had been attended to.
    “Well, Mickey?” I asked.
    “Clockwork,” he said, pouring coffee into the extra cup I’d made ready for him.
    He drank and sat down on the opposite side of the window.
    “Although,” he said, “it was lucky for us it all went down so quickly.”
    “That’s what Collins said,” I said.
    “They were all arse about front. The arrangements came second. Beyond me, really.”
    “Where were they?”
    “At what Carpenter used to laughingly call his pied-à-terre in Brighton. I really believe he’d convinced himself there was only him knew about it.”
    “How did it go?” I asked, out of interest.
    “I phoned him up. An anonymous well-wisher. Then I waited in Wally’s motor. They came out on rollerskates. Then I sat up and told Wally where to drive to. After that I drove back to town and put the bodies with Arthur’s. When I’d done that I drove the motor round to Cliff Wray’s.”
    That meant that the car would have been done over from plates to bodywork and by now it would be nice and shiny and on sale on the forecourt of a particular Ealing garage. I didn’t insult Mickey by asking him whether the bodies would also be recoverable.
    “Thanks, Mickey.”
    Mickey just made a vague gesture with his hand, causing his identity bracelet to jingle slightly. If you ever got close enough to read it, all that was inscribed on the metal was the single word, K ISMET . It wasn’t there just because he’d enjoyed the movie.
    He clocked the Express ’s back page and swivelled the paper round on the glass surface so he could read the result of the match.
    “Jesus!” he said.
    “Well, there you go. You could see it coming last season.”
    “They should never have elbowed Billy Nick. He was a governor.”
    “Well …”
    Mickey studied the paper a little longer, then swivelled it back so that the print was again readable from my position. Then, for a little while, the sky beyond the window behind me appeared to occupy his attention.
    “What is it?” I asked him.
    He focused his eyes on the edge of the desk, and began to run his thumbs along it.
    “I was thinking,” he said.
    I waited.
    “Last night,” he said. “You never been there before. What I mean is, not since a couple of months since I joined the firm.”
    I waited some more.
    “And Mrs. Fowler. I know how you and her, you know, sort of come to joint decisions, in many things.”
    I smiled.
    “No need to worry about that, Mickey,” I said to him. “You should know by now, anything like that, it’s just not on, is it? I mean, you’re a major shareholder. That, if nothing else, proves my confidence in you.”
    Mickey sniffed.
    “Well, I shouldn’t have mentioned it, really,” he said.
    “Well, there was no need to.”
    “No.”
    Mickey sniffed again, then stood up.
    “Anyway,” he said. “I’m on my way over to see Maurice Ford. Just a check. Anything you want me to say to him?”
    “Not that I can think of. Of course, any unforeseen eventualities, it’s up to you what you say to him.”
    “Right,” said Mickey. “I’ll be off then.”
    He tapped the edge of the table once with his knuckles, then walked around the sunken area and opened the doors and closed them behind him.
    I looked at the newspaper in front of me. The photographs showed Stan Bowles thrusting his fist up into the air as he turned away from the goal seconds after he’d scored the clincher.
    A very clever fellow, Mickey was.

THE SEA
    T HE TANK ISN ’ T GETTING any closer.
    I didn’t go to the funeral. As I said to her later, it would have seemed like an intrusion into her private grief.
    Afterwards, of course, she’d had to admit, those months between his return and his final farewell, so to speak, those months had been a strain. It hadn’t been