The line-up room was an old, abandoned theatre.   Three quarters of the room was taken up by hundreds of collapsible metal chairs.   A passageway three or four paces wide, separated the front row of seats from the stage.   It had a varnished wooden floor and dirty chocolate brown walls which had rarely been washed in the twelve years since it had last been used as a theatre.   Originally there had been a dozen fluorescent tubes to light up the room, but now it was lit solely by a powerful arc floodlight, at the back of the room.

Eight men were led into the room by an unsmiling, prematurely grey-haired police sergeant and were lined up with their backs to the stage.   The men were all tall, thin, dark-haired and dark-eyed and dressed in black or dark brown.

Constable Judith Brown helped the woman to walk slowly down the line, closely followed by Lieutenant Arafura.

The room was in darkness, except for the glare from the spotlight.   As it moved along the line it returned one man to the shadows and gave him back his sight, and highlighted the next man, temporarily blinding him.

Watching the distraught woman being helped by the constable, Lieutenant Arafura knew that it could take a long time if ever for her to recognise the man.   Sometimes even when they had the culprit in the line-up as many as half-a-dozen victims would all fail to recognise him.   But not this time, however, as the woman had only passed the first three suspects when she shrieked and pointed at a man.

“That’s him!” insisted Elizabeth Batlow.   “That’s the animal!”

Fighting against the grip of Constable Brown, the woman tried to leap at the man, aiming for his eyes with her fingernails.

“I want to kill him!   I want to kill him!” shrieked the woman as she was half dragged, half carried away by the policewoman and two other officers who ran across at the sound of her screams.

After the woman had been taken away to be sedated, Lieutenant Anson Arafura talked up to the man she had identified and asked, “Where were you on the night of March the fifth this year?”