'The cigarette,' he said thickly. 'Haven't ever got used to the smoke.'

Chip ground it out. 'I asked them when they knew you and Bob Lawson said I was still p.i.s.sin' my didies then. But they're seventeen, the same as me.'

'Then what?'

'Well, Garcia leans over the table and says you can't want to get him very bad if you don't even know when he leaves the f.u.c.kin' school. What was you gonna do?

So I says I was gonna matchstick your tyres and leave you with four flats.' He looked at Jim with pleading eyes. 'I wasn't even gonna do that. I said it because 'You were scared?' Jim asked quietly.

'Yeah, and I'm still scared.'

'What did they think of your idea?'

Chip shuddered. 'Bob Lawson says, is that what you was gonna do, you cheap p.r.i.c.k? And I said, tryin' to be tough, what was you gonna do, off him? And Garcia - his eyelids starts to go up and down - he takes something out of his pocket and clicked it open and it's a switchknife. That's when I took off.'

'When was this, Chip?'

'Yesterday. I'm scared to sit with those guys now, Mr Norman.'

'Okay,' Jim said. 'Okay.' He looked down at the papers he had been correcting without seeing them.

'What are you going to do?'

'I don't know,' Jim said. 'I really don't.'

On Monday morning he still didn't know. His first thought had been to tell Sally everything, starting with his brother's murder sixteen years ago. But it was impossible. She would be sympathetic but frightened and unbelieving.

Simmons? Also impossible. Simmons would think he was mad. And maybe he was. A man in a group encounter session he had attended had said having a breakdown was like breaking a vase and then gluing it back together. You could never trust yourself to handle that vase again with any surety. You couldn't put a flower in it because flowers need water and water might dissolve the glue.

Am I crazy, then?

If he was, Chip Osway was, too. That thought came to him as he was getting into his car, and a bolt of excitement went through him.

Of course! Lawson and Garcia had threatened him in Chip Osway's presence. That might not stand up in court, but it would get the two of them suspended if he could get Chip to repeat his story in Fenton's office. And he was almost sure he could get Chip to do that. Chip had his own reasons for wanting them far away.

He was driving into the parking lot when he thought about what had happened to Billy Stearns and Katy Slavin.

During his free period, he went up to the office and leaned over the registration secretary's desk. She was doing the absence list.

'Chip Osway here today?' he asked casually.

'Chip . . . ?' She looked at him doubtfully.

'Charles Osway,' Jim amended. 'Chip's a nickname.'

She leafed through a pile of slips, glanced at one, and pulled it out., 'He's absent, Mr Norman.'

'Can you get me his phone number?'

She pushed her pencil into her hair and said. 'Certainly.' She dug it out of the 0 file and handed it to him. Jim dialled the number on an office phone.

The phone rang a dozen times and he was about to' hang up when a rough, sleep-blurred voice said, 'Yeah?'

'Mr Osway?'

'Barry Osway's been dead six years. I'm Gary Denkinger.'

'Are you Chip Osway's stepfather?'

'What'd he do?' 'Pardon?'

'He's run off. I want to know what he did.'

'So far as I know, nothing. I just wanted to talk with him. Do you have any idea where he might be?'

'Naw, I work nights. I don't know none of his friends.'

'Any idea at a-'

'Nope. He took the old suitcase and fifty bucks he saved up from stealin' car parts or sellin' dope or whatever these kids do for money. Gone to San Francisco to be a hippie for all I know.'

'If you hear from him, will you call me at school? Jim Norman, English wing.'

'Sure will.'

Jim put the phone down. The registration secretary looked up and offered a quick meaningless smile. Jim didn't smile back.

Two days later, the words 'left school' appeared after Chip Osway's name on the morning attendance slip. Jim began to yvait for Simmons to show up with a new folder. A week later he did.

He looked dully down at the picture. No question about this one. The crew cut had been replaced by long hair, but it was still blond. And the face was the same, Vincent Corey. Vinnie, to his friends and intimates. He stared up at Jim from the picture, an insolent grin on his lips.

When he approached his period-seven cla.s.s, his heart was thudding gravely in his chest. Lawson and Garcia and Vinnie Corey were standing by the bulletin board outside the door - they all straightened when he came towards them.

Vinnie smiled his insolent smile, but his eyes were as cold and dead as ice floes. 'You must be Mr Norman. Hi, Norm.'

Lawson and Garcia t.i.ttered.

'I'm Mr Norman,' Jim said, ignoring the hand that Vinnie had put out. 'You'll remember that?'

'Sure, I'll remember it. How's your brother?'

Jim froze. He felt his bladder loosen, and as if from far away, from down a long corridor somewhere in his cranium, he heard a ghostly voice: Look, Vinnie, he wet himself'

'What do you know about my brother?' he asked thickly. 'Nothin',' Vinnie said.

'Nothin' much.' They smiled at him with their empty dangerous smiles.

The bell rang and they sauntered inside.

Drugstore phone booth, ten o'clock that night.

'Operator, I want to call the police station in Stratford, Connecticut. No I don't know the number.'

Clickings on the line. Conferences.

The policeman had been Mr Nell. In those days he had been white-haired, perhaps in his mid-fifties. Hard to tell when you were just a kid. Their father was dead, and somehow Mr Nell had known that.

Call me Mr Nell, boys.

Jim and his brother met at lunchtime every day and they went into the Stratford Diner to eat their bag lunches. Mom gave them each a nickel to buy milk - that was before school milk programmes started. And sometimes Mr Nell would come in, his leather belt creaking with the weight of his belly and his .38 revolver, and buy them each a pie ~ Ia mode.

Where were you when they stabbed my brother, Mr Nell?

A connection was made. The phone rang once.

'Stratford Police.'

'h.e.l.lo, My name is James Norman, Officer. I'm calling long-distance.' He named the city. 'I want to know if you can give me a line on a man who would have been on the force around 1957.'

'Hold the line a moment, Mr Norman.'

A pause, then a new voice.

'I'm Sergeant Morton Livingston, Mr Norman. Who are you trying to locate?'

'Well,' Jim said, 'us kids just called him Mr Nell. Does that -'

'h.e.l.l, yes! Don Nell's retired now. He's seventy-three or four.'

'Does he still live in Stratford?'

'Yes, over on Barnum Avenue. Would you like the address?'

'And the phone number, if you have it.'

'Okay. Did you know Don?'

'He used to buy my brother and me apple pie a'la mode down at the Stratford Diner.'

'Christ, that's been gone ten years. Wait a minute.' He came back on the phone and read an address and a phone number. Jim jotted them down, thanked Livingston, and hung up.

He dialled 0 again, gave the number, and waited. When the phone began to ring, a sudden hot tension filled him and he leaned forward, turning instinctively away from the drugstore soda fountain, although there was no one there but a plump teen-age girl reading a magazine.

The phone was picked up and a rich, masculine voice, sounding not at all old, said, 'h.e.l.lo?' That single word set off a dusty chain reaction of memories and emotions, as startling as the Pavlovian reaction that can be set off by hearing an old record on the radio.

'Mr Nell? Donald Nell?'

'Yes.'

'My name is James Norman, Mr Nell. Do you remember me, by any chance?'

'Yes,' the voice responded immediately. 'Pie a'la mode. Your brother was killed . . . knifed. A shame. He was a lovely boy.'

Jim collapsed against one of the booth's gla.s.s walls. The tension's sudden departure left him as weak as a stuffed toy. He found himself on the verge of spilling everything, and he bit the urge back desperately.

'Mr Nell, those boys were never caught.'

'No,' Nell said. 'We did have suspects. As I recall, we had a lineup at a Bridgeport police station.'

'Were those suspects identified to me by name?'

'No. The procedure at a police showup was to address the partic.i.p.ants by number.

What's your interest in this now, Mr Norman?'

'Let me throw some names at you,' Jim said. 'I want to know if they ring a bell in connection with the case.'

'Son, I wouldn't -'

'You might,' Jim said, beginning to feel a trifle desperate. 'Robert Lawson, David Garcia, Vincent Corey. Do any of those -'Corey,' Mr Nell said flatly. 'I remember him. Vinnie the Viper. Yes, we had him up on that. His mother alibied him. I don't get anything from Robert Lawson. That could be anyone's name. But Garcia . . . that rings a bell. I'm not sure why. h.e.l.l. I'm old.' He sounded disgusted.

'Mr Nell, is there any way you could check on those boys?'

'Well, of course, they wouldn't be boys anymore.'

Oh, yeah?

'Listen, Jimmy. Has one of those boys popped up and started hara.s.sing you?'

'I don't know. Some strange things have been happening. Things connected with the stabbing of my brother.'

'What things?'

'Mr Nell, I can't tell you. You'd think I was crazy.'

His reply, quick, firm, interested: 'Are you?'

Jim paused. 'No,' he said.

'Okay, I can check the names through Stratford R&I. Where can I get in touch?'

Jim gave his home number. 'You'd be most likely to catch me on Tuesday night.'

He was in almost every ~ight, but on Tuesday evenings Sally went to her pottery cla.s.s.

'What are you doing these days, Jimmy?'

'Teaching school.'