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his address a Kingsmarkham one where he lived with his parents.
    ‘Tell me what happened.’
    ‘This girl stuck a knife in my chest.’
    ‘Now, Mr Budd, you know better than that. I want a detailed account, everything you can remember, starting with what you were doing waiting for a bus in the middle of nowhere.’
    Budd had a querulous voice that always sounded mildly indignant. He was one of those who believes the world owes him elaborate consideration as well as a living.
    ‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ he said.
    Til be the judge of that. I don’t suppose you were doing anything to be ashamed of. And if you were what you tell me will be between you and me.’
    ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at!’
    ‘Just tell me where you’d been last evening, Mr Budd.’
    ‘I was at snooker,’ Budd said sullenly.
    What a fool! He’d made it sound at least as if he was having it away with a friend’s wife in one of the isolated cottages on the hillside.
    ‘A snooker club?’
    ‘It’s on Tuesday evenings. In Pomfret, a room at the back of the White Horse. It’s over at ten and I reckoned on walking home.’ Budd shifted his body, wincing a bit, pulling himself up in the bed. ‘But the rain started coming down harder, I was getting soaked. I looked at my watch and saw the ten-forty bus’d be along in ten minutes and I was nearly at the stop by then.’
    ‘I’d have expected a motor mechanic to have his own transport.’
    ‘My car was in a crunch-up. It’s in dock having a new wing. I wasn’t doing no more than twenty-five when this woman come out of a side turning .. . ‘
    Wexford cut that one short. ‘So you reached the bus stop, the bus shelter. What happened?’
    Budd looked at him and away. ‘There was this girl already there, sitting on the seat. I sat down next to her.’
    The bus shelter was well known to Wexford. It was about ten feet long, the seat or bench inside two feet shorter.
    ‘Next to her?’ he asked. ‘Or at the other end of the seat?’
    ‘Next to her. Does it matter?’
    Wexford thought perhaps it did. In England at any rate, for good or ill, for the improving of social life or its worsening, a man of honourable intent who goes to sit on a public bench where a woman is already sitting will do so as far away from her as possible. A woman will probably do this too if a woman or man is already sitting there, and a man will do it if another man is there.
    ‘Did you know her? Had you ever seen her before?’
    Budd shook his head.
    ‘You spoke to her?’
    ‘Only to say it was raining.’
    She knew that already, Wexford thought. He looked hard at Budd. Budd said, ‘I said it was a pity we were having such a bad May, it made the winter longer, something like that. She pulled a knife out of her bag and lunged it at me.’
    ‘Just like that? You didn’t say anything else to her?’
    ‘I’ve told you what I said.’
    ‘She was mad, was she? A girl who stabs men because they tell her it’s raining?’
    ‘All I said was that normally at this time I’d have had my vehicle and I could have given her a lift.’
    ‘In other words, you were trying to pick her up?’
    ‘All right, what if I was? I didn’t touch her. I didn’t do anything to frighten her. That was all I said, that I could have given her a lift home. She pulled out this knife and stabbed at me four or five times and I cried out or screamed or something and she ran off.’
    ‘Would you know her again?’
    ‘You bet I would.’
    ‘Describe her to me.’
    Budd made the mess of that Wexford thought he would. He didn’t know whether she was tall or short, plump or thin, because he only saw her sitting down and he thought she had a raincoat on. A thin raincoat that was a sort of pale colour. Her hair was fair, he did know that, though she had a hat on or a scarf. Bits of blonde hair showed under it. Her face was just an ordinary face, not what you’d call pretty. Wexford began to wonder what had attracted Budd to