He had outwitted me, of course, and I should not have been so easily fooled. Had he not spoken of having the shopgirls and their lovers bear witness? Clearly a confession that his friends were far away, and escape close at hand, if he needed ones such as those as his witnesses.

But escape had eluded me. The clever old soul had me with my back to a wall. The doors on that street were mostly boarded up with a solidity that did honor to the carpenters who had been there, and the fences not yet so rotten with age as to offer any promise of exit. I remembered the weight of that wrinkled hand. Only in calming this beast of a man could I hope to save myself, but how could I make him understand?

The darkness had seemed to comfort him just now, as much as it had dismayed him before. How quickly his desires changed! Perhaps in this there was hope.

I took him further out of the light until, passing the veranda over a shuttered cafe, I found myself suddenly in the faint light of one of the few yellow lamps that hung on wide intervals on this street. I looked at my captor, to see if this surprise angered him, but it did not. What a confusing fellow he was, but I welcomed his good spirits, however stingily he granted them.

As the lamp grew brighter, I saw his eyes darting down a passageway between two of the homes. Taking his meaning, I turned the corner and found myself facing another dead end. Not that I was surprised. The old boy knew his business. No witnesses, no escape and no handcuffs.

Why had I not noticed that? No handcuffs. How would he take me into custody? It was then that I knew that he had no intention of doing so. No witnesses, no consequences. Just an inquiry by a coroner by a coroner with whom the old man no doubt had been drinking for years. "Terrible thing", he would say. "He came after me", he would say, pointing to the knife that he would have placed in my dying hands, wrapping my fingers around it as the life left my body.

Not at all fair, but still, I suppose that I could not complain. My death would come quickly and painlessly, one expertly delivered shot at short range, through the heart, no doubt. He did not seem the kind who liked to see a mess. My casket would be open, all who would do so, free to pay me their last respects, face to face, and if these were to be my last moments of existence, I could not have asked them to be on a warmer or more beautiful night, given the time of year. Not a bad end, at all. Others had suffered far worse, and I had not given up on suffering far better.

Slowly pointing to the hankerchief in my pocket, I arched my eyebrows slightly, as if to ask "may I?"; I did not wish to startle this man and hasten my appointed time. He shrugged. Taking it out, I spread it before him to show that it was clean and unused. As he rolled his eyes, I laid my little piece of fabric on one of the steps of the wooden staircase to one side of the passage, just below the locked gate that deprived me of even the faint hope of pounding on the door of a kind, brave soul who would give me shelter.

"Do sit down, my dear sir, and you will be better able to ask questions, while I will better be able to answer them. Only please don't torment me." "Or kill me" was the unspoken thought that I need not, dare not share. He had won. My life belonged to him. He could give it back to me as a gift, if it pleased him, or take it without protest from me. To show my submission to his judgement, I moved further into the passage, far enough that he would have no trouble rising to stop me, were I to try to escape again. He nodded and sat.

The interrogation could begin.