“And what happened?”
“I decided I didn’t like the sound of the saxophone.”
“So, you just stopped?”
“Well, what was the point of going on?” he told her, pausing here to allow his agitated dog to bark. “It would have been a waste of time.”
“Your hand is cold,” she told him. And for one moment, this was all she was aware of; she was not thinking of the porter, nor the laughing girls, nor her bedsitting room in the nurses’ quarters—where no other soul ever ventured—nor even of Sister Mary’s daily derisive comments and her look of disgust whenever she spotted Clemency and imagined Clemency could not see her—Yes, she also knew Clemency was worthless and unlovable; everyone knew, even the nameless people she passed in the street—no, her mind was not occupied with any of these thoughts; it was simply empty and she just listened.
“And then I spent seven years playing golf,” said Joseph. And he went on—while occasionally tending to his agitated dog—to describe how he became obsessed with improving his handicap; he practiced in every spare moment; it was his last thought at night and first on waking. Then one day he had begun his swing when he paused to let a bird glide across the path of his shot. Its flight was majestic and he was transfixed. The moment seemed to go on for an eternity. And it was while watching that bird’s progress that he started wondering what he was doing there. And by the time he heard his friend’s voice asking if he was all right, he had realized it was all a waste of time. “So,” he told Clemency, “I dropped my club, walked off the course and never played another shot.”
Clemency looked up and saw Sister Mary sweeping through the ward as if being pursued by a swarm of insects. As she passed by, she angrily instructed her to tend to Mister Brunswick then see to Mister Drake and to, “Get a move on!—what have you been doing?”
The next day, Clemency waited until she knew she would have ten minutes undisturbed, then made her way to Joseph’s bedside, smiled and asked, almost in a conspiratorial whisper: “How are you today, Joseph?”
He watched her in silence, apparently not willing to speak. She began tidying his already-tidy locker then he said, while watching no-one in particular: “Is it of value to speak, or is that also a waste of time?”
Clemency started to consider this but before she could reply, he again shackled her, as though he were hanging from a cliff’s edge and she were his last contact with life itself, and he told her, “I have nothing; I’ve done nothing. I’ve wasted my whole life.”
“But you learnt to play the saxophone. I can’t do that.”
“Well, I’m not you.”
Clemency could only agree with this. Joseph’s face seemed feeble and jaundiced but there was no disputing his logic. She asked him what had happened after he stopped playing golf.

But after carefully considering the matter, the constable decided to leak the description to the press (if only because his name was “Will Grass”—he could think of no other reason, but nonetheless, that was good enough for him), so he phoned The Perception Daily Chronicle’s star reporter, Ivor Longnose, and gave him the description, which was that of a middle‑aged, blonde woman.
This was printed in the early‑evening edition of that day’s paper. And Primrose, a few moments ago, on reading this description, found herself (as I have said) spraying her venom over the newspaper (—Incompetence, that’s what it is, twenty‑one murders and they’re looking for a woman—ha—simpletons! that’s what they are).
She sat on her sofa, clenching her fists vindictively round the petition and eyeing all those back issues of her favourite weekly magazine.
The doorbell rang and she stood—still clutching the petition—and crossed vindictively to the door. She opened it and found a frail, white‑haired old woman standing there in a white lab coat. The woman was carrying a wire basket—which was laden with test tubes—slung over her arm like a shopping basket and had an alarming look of urgency about her. She came darting in through the door, pushing passed Primrose while chanting, “Cogitation! Cogitation!—where is it?”
Her eyes darted round the flat, then she hurried—rattling all the way—over to the goldfish bowl, fiddled inside it with her implements, put a test tube back into her basket, then rattled back over to the door, when Thomas (whom Primrose noticed was limping) and Francis arrived at the door and stood there in the doorway. The white‑haired woman bustled through them all, chanting, “Cogitation! Cogitation!” and then vanished clean away, like some elusive apparition that was eternally sought after but remained ultimately ungraspable.
Thomas and Francis looked quizzically at Primrose, who shrugged back at them, then the three of them made their way down to Francis’s car (Thomas having left his car parked near to Francis’s house, it being so painful to drive with his wounded foot), and they set off for the MP’s house to deliver their attack on the constabulary.