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only with spinsters and divorcees but with widows too. I suppose I was getting desperate.”
    “So you decided to try a more direct approach?”
    She nodded. “One of my regular customers had been to the agency. She didn’t hide it. She even turned it into a joke. And suddenly she seemed so well and alive. She’d met such a nice man, older than her, a retired bank clerk, a widower.”
    She stopped short. “I’m losing track,” she said. “You don’t want to hear all this. I don’t very often have the opportunity to talk about myself.”
    “Go on,” Ramsay said. “We’re in no hurry.”
    Speak for yourself, Hunter thought. He wanted his tea and a few pints before closing time.
    “So I plucked up courage and thought: why not? Why not give it a go at least? To see if I could find someone nice like my customer. Perhaps it sounds ridiculous at my age but I wanted that excitement, you know, of falling in love. Just once more.”
    “You went to the agency in person?”
    “Yes,” she said. “I made a telephone appointment first and then I went. I’d been expecting an office, something official, but it was run by a young woman, a young mother actually who couldn’t get out to work, from her own home.”
    “And she introduced you to Mr. Bowles?”
    “Not directly. She showed me a file of application forms. I read through them and chose three, put them in order of preference. Mr. Bowles was my first choice.” Her voice was flat.
    “Had the manager of the agency met him?”
    “I’m not sure,” she said. “I don’t think she can have done.” She shivered slightly. “She seemed a very honest woman. I don’t think she would have recommended him if she’d met him.”
    Ramsay let that go. They would come to Mrs. Symons’s meeting with Ernie Bowles in time.
    “Were you the first woman to be introduced to Mr. Bowles?” he asked.
    “Yes,” she said. “I rather think I was.”
    “What was it about Mr. Bowles’s application form which led you to choose him?”
    She paused, considered. “To be honest I expect it was wishful thinking,” she said. “The form wasn’t very well written, you know, and at the time I even saw that in a positive light. Russell, my husband, had always been very superior about his education. It was the farming, I suppose, which attracted me, and the fact that he’d never been married. I’ve always been a fan of Thomas Hardy and I imagined Mr. Bowles as one of his heroes: uneducated perhaps and shy, but close to nature, gentle.”
    “And Mr. Bowles didn’t live up to those expectations?”
    “No,” she said. “But to be honest no one would. I see that now.”
    “How did you arrange to meet?”
    “The agency gave him my telephone number. He phoned me up.”
    “When was that?”
    “At the beginning of the week. Monday morning.”
    “You weren’t put off by his phone call?”
    “No,” she said. “He sounded a little … rough, but I’d expected that. I’ve never been a snob, Inspector.”
    Hardy again, Ramsay thought. Hunter, who’d never heard of Thomas Hardy, thought she’d been turned on by the idea of doing it with one of the working class.
    “Tell me about Saturday night,” Ramsay said. “What happened?”
    “We arranged to meet in the lounge of the Ship. He said he would buy me dinner.”
    “He was there when you got there?”
    “Yes,” she said. “He may have been there for some time. He’d certainly had a couple of drinks.”
    “He was drunk?”
    “No. Not really drunk.”
    “Could you give me your first impressions of him?”
    She hesitated, surprised by the question.
    “He was short, thick-set. He’d obviously made some effort to get ready to meet me but it hadn’t quite come off. I suppose I should have found that touching.”
    “But you didn’t?”
    “No,” she said. “I’m finding this hard to explain, Inspector, but there was something about him which disturbed me. Nothing concrete. A way of looking at me. Perhaps that’s