After they returned to the front room, Terry Blewett asked, “Well, what do you think?”

Sitting before his blackwood desk Bear shrugged.   “She could be telling the truth,” he admitted, undecided.   “But I don’t have the authority to let her go.   That’s up to the magistrate.”

Over the next few hours Bear tried to settle into his work.   But he was unable to shake off the feeling of being watched.   Finally deciding that a breath of fresh air might help clear his head, he went over to the door to the street….

And saw the thickset, black-bearded figure standing near a lamppost across the road, glaring toward him.

This time instead of running away, Bear drew his revolver and ran across the road toward the lamppost.   Aiming as he ran, he began to fire the revolver, then stopped, not wanting to kill his second person in twenty-four hours.

When he got there though, there was no sign of the bearded man and nowhere that he could be hiding.   Just like at the flat! Bear thought, walking across to look behind a yellow Honda, even though he knew it was too small for the big man to be hiding behind.   ‘I must be tired, overworked, imagining things.   It can’t be Kostyn Pavolich, I killed him.’

He looked behind him to see if the man could be hiding in the front yard of one of the houses.   But the nearest house had only a low redbrick fence.  The house on either side of it no fence at all, leaving nowhere for the man to be hiding in the immaculately mown front lawns.   ‘His body is lying in a freezer drawer at the morgue!’ thought Bear, unable to get over the resemblance between the mysterious watcher and Kostyn Pavolich.   ‘It must be in the morgue!’   But although he knew it to be true, he couldn’t quite convince himself.

He returned to the police station to tell Terry Blewett, “I’m just Off to Baltimore Drive to speak to Jerry Green for a minute.”

“You can speak to him by phone, can’t you?” asked Terry, wondering why Bear would go all the way to the other end of town just to speak to Jerry for a minute.