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the same, whatever she’d told herself. Oddly, she said, a lot of the strain came from him, trying to show her how sincere he was in his declarations. She should have realised, of course, why he’d tried to impress her. Ironic, she said. She wouldn’t have found out if it hadn’t been for the crash. Who the girl was, the police had never been able to discover. Both bodies had been burnt beyond recognition, but you would have thought someone would have come forward, somewhere, to report a girl of her age gone missing. She hadn’t been from his head office, or from any of the branches. She could have been from one of the firms he called at, but, as Jean said, if she had been, someone would have connected the two of them some time. The only evidence of her existence, apart from her remains, came from the publican who ran the pub near his head office, where he often used to drop in for a drink. All the publican could say was that on that particular night, the night of the crash, Jean’s husband had been having a quiet drink at the bar when this girl had come in, on her own … nothing unusual in that these days. The two of them had gottalking. Nothing unusual in that, either. The publican did hear something, when they left, about could he drop her anywhere? Jean had been particularly cynical about that bit: he’d been so careful, even in a place they never went together.
    Nobody could really explain the accident. Well, a dozen witnesses, they see a dozen different things; some of them said the car behaved as though a tire had blown, which was impossible to check, the state the motor was in; but they all agreed he must have been doing seventy-plus when he crossed the central reservation. Amazing how, in the resulting pile-up, he’d only taken another two with him, along with the girl.
    Regarding that, Jean had been particularly bitter; the other innocent deaths, as much as anything, contributed to his memory becoming more to her than just the literal ashes he had become already.
    I’d told her, look, you mustn’t dwell on things like that. An accident’s an accident. They happen every day.

THE SMOKE
    A FTER M ICKEY ’ D GONE , I went through into the office.
    Jean was leaning back in the chair behind her desk. Some of the books lay open in front of her. The grey Soho daylight diffused her thoughtfulness. My entrance did nothing to break her present preoccupation.
    I sat down by the window.
    “You haven’t had your coffee yet,” I said.
    She shook her head.
    “You want me to give Gerry a buzz?”
    She shook her head again.
    “The mail order,” she said.
    “What about it?”
    “Well, at present, there are eighty-four agents.”
    Which was right: throughout the country, there were these offices, at present numbering eighty-four, run by an agent each with a phone and a typewriter and an addressing machine and nothing else but wall-to-wall brown envelopes. And of course, the merchandise, that being the Blues. This side of the business, being of its particular nature, meant a lot of changing of offices, even with what we paid the law, but apart from that, the overheads were very low. You won’t believe how much that side of the business takes. It takes over £1,200,000 a year. I told you you wouldn’t believe me. Nobody does, not even the agents, who have no idea how many other agents there are. Except forthe law, of course, who in a way are like an extra agent with their ten percent. They know. That’s why they ask for so much. If you still don’t believe it, look at it this way: each agent has a list of around one thousand clients. They renew a movie once a month, sometimes more than one movie, at our competitive part-exchange rates of £10 a go. The agents do this renewal for them automatically. You can work out your own arithmetic.
    This was just one of our businesses.
    What Jean did was to check the books. There were other employees who did them, but Jean checked them. She was good at it. The only other