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voice which came only when he felt deeply about something, and now I didn’t know what to say. I was glad to see the photograph under the bed.
    ‘What’s that?’ I said.
    Gladstone knelt by the bed and picked up the photo. I looked over his shoulder. It was a picture of a boy, taken in a studio, a shadowy castle behind him. He had dark hair brushed across his forehead, and his eyes were fixed steadily on the camera. He looked special, somehow. One hand was raised so that his finger touched the top of his chin. It was an old face, and he must have made a witty remark to someone who was watching. Yet he was only a little boy in a sailor suit.
    ‘Look at the writing,’ Gladstone whispered. ‘Jupiter Vaughan,’ he read in an unsteady voice. ‘Jupiter Vaughan, 1904–1920.’
    He held the photo up for a second or two longer, then hurriedly pushed it back on top of the suitcase. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we shouldn’t have looked.’
    He let me go out first, then closed the door verygently, as you do when you are leaving a sickroom, as I imagined you did when leaving a room where someone lay dead.

VII
    Saturday evening, Porthmawr crouching under open skies, and only the visitors out. They had spilled out of the trains all afternoon, and since they had come so far they had to see something, rain or no rain. So they padded the brimming streets in dripping macs and squelching pumps, and looked into windows of closed shops, and stomped into the pubs and the fish and chips and the pictures. Porthmawr in the wet on a Saturday night waved no welcome sign. It seemed to be hanging on, waiting, like the chapels, for Sunday.
    I was at home, the house to myself with Meira and Owen at the pictures, passing time on with another Zane Grey but thinking of Ashton Vaughan. I had been warned not to have the wireless on because the wet battery was down and Meira would want the service in the morning. Meira always had the service on while the Sunday dinnerwas cooking – better than chapel itself, she said. So there was only the hiss of the fire, and the rain against the window, and the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece: quiet sounds that send the mind spinning.
    How was the party going? The biggest yet. It had started at opening time that morning and had been raging ever since. By mid-afternoon Ashton and his crowd had been thrown out of the Bells. There had been a fight, Gladstone said, in the yard behind the pub, but the police hadn’t been called or anything like that. Just an honest fight, then back to Ashton’s room the whole lot went with a couple of crates. Gladstone had taken some laundry over at teatime and reported that it was wetter in that room than outside. ‘All the town spongers, Lew,’ he said. ‘All singing hymns and swearing.’
    At opening time in the evening they had all gone off to the Fishers, which was rough and the only pub that would have them. We had watched them go, the four of us. I think we all wanted to pull Ashton away from them and get him back to his room. He’d seen us too, standing there in the shop doorway, but he’d turned away and lurched past. I looked at the clock. Half past nine: they’d be out on the streets now, and so would the police. Zane Grey had all the pull of the Three Bears that night.
    I was at the door almost before the sound of the knocker had stopped echoing in the empty house. It was Gladstone and the other two, huddled under an old umbrella with a hole in it.
    ‘Get your coat,’ Gladstone ordered. ‘Ashton’s down by the harbour somewhere. It’s a matter of life and death.’
    I had my coat on in no time, and was running afterthem along the shining streets. I caught them up by Harbour View. They were looking up at Ashton’s room.
    ‘Sure he isn’t up there?’ I said.
    ‘No light,’ Gladstone replied. ‘Dewi saw him leave the Fishers, then Maxie lost him because he stopped to see this fight.’
    ‘Two men from the country,’ Maxie said. ‘Great fight. Teeth