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The night edition of the Daily Courier tore off the clanking presses and slammed down on every newsagent's kiosk counter across town. Rumours had coursed through Fleet Street throughout the duration of the trial--no-show witnesses--low-confidence identifications--unfavorable opinion on the conduct of the constabulary during the suspect's arrest and near-fatal plunge. Despite the Courier's unwavering support of Denis Oliver's reckoning of the events, rumour circulated faster than paper.

The cold, hard fact of the trial was now at hand. Mr. Hemingway had been acquitted of all charges!

London buzzed with news. It was a sensational trial, everyone agreed. What had begun in a swell of confidence had fizzled into a hopeless tangle of detail. The Crown's case had rested near entire on the supposedly-unique jade pins. There had been two pins. Two purchasers. Two murders. One pin for each corpse, the police had reasoned, one motive and one murderer. No outsider could have interposed himself into this scene, the Crown prosecutor had declaimed in his fiery opening remarks. The uniqueness of the pins had narrowed the world of suspects down to the men who had purchased them. The murderer had to either be poor hapless Mr. Fisher, or the dastardly calculated Mr. Hemingway.

When Mr. Araby had taken the stand, the case had begun to unravel at once. Under pressure from Mr. Hemingway's barrister, Araby recollected that he had told Mr. Oliver that the pins were rare enough in London. He had reported the same thing to the constabulary when he had been formally interviewed.

But what he hadn't known then as he knew now, the pins were quite popular in Paris; they had been arriving in Southampton by way of Le Havre via Mr. Arthur Potts' ferry. The pins had, in fact, given cover to the dope running. Hemingway's barrister begged the permission of the court to present damning visual evidence; and the judge had allowed counsel to roll a sealed wooden crate into the courtroom. The bailiff had fetched a crowbar and splintered the wood as he cracked open the shipping container. Hundreds upon hundreds of jade pins cascaded onto the floor. The courtroom galley burst into an uproar!

Hemingway's barrister plucked one from the river he had called forth and waved it at the prosecutor; in his hands, the jade pin glinted like a dagger.

"If it satisfies the court, you may examine every pin," he announced, "and discover they are all replicas of one or the other of the matched set. The Crown's case rests on a series of inferences… all of those inferences are founded on the principle of exclusion. If a weapon is unique, you must exclude all others who could not access the weapon. But every clever lad or bored housemaid in Brighton could have laid hands on a pin. There was no reason to confine the inquiry to the constabulary's list of suspects."

It was a powerful rebuttal that stirred the gallery on to tries of "miscarriage of justice!" The Crown prosecutor and Mr. Hemingway's barrister began to quarrel on a point of technical court procedure.

From the courtroom gallery, Denis Oliver's hand fell slack at his side. Hemingway turned around in the dock, and picked Oliver out of the crowd like a hawk spotting a rabbit in the underbrush. Oliver unconsciously tipped his hat even lower over his eyes, as he shrank into his default court posture (the unassuming and uninterested party who nevertheless could catch and remember every word spoken around him, to fill the court dispatches with lively human interest details).

No: it was too late; he was spotted; and Hemingway's smile transmuted into acid.

Their conversation in Editorial swam back into his mind unwillingly:

"You didn't give a damn what the evidence against a man was if you just knew he wasn't guilty."

Well. Oliver could say the same now. He didn't give a damn if there were two pins or two thousand. Hemingway had impersonated a commercial traveller, hied Geraldine Tracey off to a bungalow in the Jumbles, and he had--as surely as rain at a crucial turn in a cricket match--offed her in a jealous fit of rage.

Oliver didn't stick around to hear any of the barrister's inflammatory closing remarks. The Courier had three reporters covering the trial. Oliver wasn't on the clock. No. He was decidedly off the clock, and what he should do was allow his feet to guide him through the din of the city back to some semblance of peace and quiet. The flat would be as empty as it could be with a very nervous and attentive puppy, and Oliver would be glad of its focused attention. Beryl would be out. Understandably, she preferred to work nights, and wouldn't be back until the Morning Star had put their own evening edition to bed. Oliver could call on her; Redman wouldn't begrudge Oliver checking in...

He settled for a quick ring from a telephone box just outside of the courthouse instead.

"Hullo Denis. Has the court let out early?"

"No. Hemingway's man just punched through the whole case. I think we should dine out tonight and then visit with your parents. A little early holiday."

"In Manchester!" she cried. Then she paused, into which Oliver could hear the incredulity gathering in the silence. "Denis, what's happened?"

"It's going to be an acquittal, Beryl." This next pause was even more dreadful. Oliver pressed his forehead against the glass of the telephone booth. He couldn't say how much he feared for her life, so he just came out with a: "We should quit London while the press is spirited and they'll be wanting your take on the case going sour."

"It would be monstrous to acquit him, and even more monstrous to run. Now look, Denis, I've got Redman shouting across the bullpen. The nightly edition will be running in two hours. We'll meet up afterward at the club? That should be safe, shouldn't it?"

Oliver agreed. Before he hung up, he spilled a litany of endearments that left the tips of his ears burning and that was that. He slumped against the phone box for a hard minute as he recalled how his hands hadn't shook as he'd pried Beryl's flat door open that tenmonth ago…as he'd taken Beryl's hand when she'd roused...as he'd felt the sick certainty descend that Hemingway had almost earned himself a third count on his indictment.

Best not to dwell on it.

Oliver scrubbed his face and headed out into the fog. When he emerged from the grey into the Courier's newsroom less than a quarter of an hour later, his worry had transmuted as if by magic into anger. He furiously banged out his rebuttal to Mr. Araby's damning testimony and to the penny-ante courtroom dramatics of one Mr. C. August Wilkenson.

Even if Hemingway was acquitted, he was not innocent.

Oliver was damn well going to make sure that the world remembered this point.

Hemingway's acquittal did not slip through the pages quietly, as other cases that ended disgracefully often did. Allegations of investigatorial misconduct chummed the waters, and the news frenzy spun out for days, and then weeks, and only when circulation threatened to drop did the Courier and the Morning Star slake their thirst for blood.

Hurried out of the spotlight, the Courier had relegated its speculation to a small but dedicated column on page 3. Lonely Bunglow Bungled! It featured rough courtroom sketches from artists who had been stationed in the galley, and some who had been commissioned afterward. Oliver charted the progression unfolding before his very eyes in the pages of the Courier; Hemingway became more angelic, more put-upon, more righteously angry over the calumnies impressed upon his character by Scotland Yard's investigation with each passing week. Small picture spreads of possible suspects that Scotland Yard may have overlooked were always run at the end of the short article… and while the writer had not gone so far as to name Denis Oliver outright, the hints dripped from every column that a certain reporter once in the employ of the maligned Hemingway himself had missed his mark, and ought to hang up his press credentials.

The press floor had become tense, and Oliver disliked how his editor had begun breathing down his neck to turn up a new scoop or find another pressroom that wanted him.

Beryl had taken his suggestion to holiday with her parents in Manchester. Denis Oliver had himself taken rooms at hotels on different nights. It had very much struck him that now Hemingway was at liberty, and found innocent of his crimes, Oliver might turn up dead one morning. Accidental gas leak. The thought had dogged him through several sleepless weeks.

Which is how Denis Oliver found himself, at ten o'clock on a bright July afternoon, at the Lido cafe sitting across from one Gladys Sharp, who devoured the menu with relish and ordered up another round of trifles. She looked far more put-together than she had after the Coroner's Inquest. Her hat was fixed smartly to the back of her head, and as she'd approached Oliver's table, her leather shoes shone with heels far more daring than was fashionable among the working professions. If one didn't know she called into houses to help, she could be mistaken for a lady of leisure.

Gladys Sharp dug into her Caramel Supreme and then fixed Oliver with her most confidential look.

"It's like I was saying, it was bad luck that you couldn't fit Mr. Tracey--or Hemingway, I suppose--for irons. He was guilty, I know he was. Not, uh--begging your pardon--not suggesting you personally failed, of course. Of course, you had nothing to do with the trial. You're just a reporter, ain't ya? Sometimes you and I see better than the Law does. We know things, and we ain't afraid to say it."

Oliver mentally visualized the bailiff reading Gladys Sharp in court, only for counsel to whisper among themselves and call the next witness when she didn't appear.

"Why didn't you testify?" The question leapt out of Oliver before he could couch it more winningly. He was the bone-deep kind of tired that couldn't be banished with one night's good rest, let alone a month of them.

She sniffed. "He was going to be in court, wasn't he? Why should I let him remember my face any better than he already does? I identified him for the coppers, on that fussy inspector's say-so. Only got myself looking out for my interests."

"Yes, but we wouldn't have got into this situation if you had just taken the stand and given your identification into evidence and…"

Gladys Sharp shifted in just such a way that her face caught the light and luminesced. Oliver's thoughts spun back to the Lonely Bunglow Bungled!. Since the acquittal, pictures of every criminal known in Brighton--every notorious person who'd grabbed at least one headline from the crime desk--had been crammed into that damned column. Oliver had seen a picture of Gladys Sharp and Geraldine Tracey taken on a boardwalk, Geraldine's face turned just so--

"You identified the body, didn't you? For the Coroner."

"I don't remember testifyin' to that." It was true. Oliver had a top-notch memory. Gladys Sharp had never testified to the identification of one Geraldine Tracey, formerly of the Jumbles, formerly of London; a smartly dressed shop model who had wanted the glamor of a weekend lover, but not the reality of a bungalow wedged halfway between Newhaven and Brighton, with the nearest neighbor half an hour's walk down a lonely path and nothing to do all day to divert an active and intelligent mind.

"Not at the inquest. Before it. When they called in a relative to identify Geraldine Tracey, they didn't know about her brother. Geraldine Tracey hadn't any other living relatives that Scotland Yard could turn up. It was just her, Mr. Tracey--who we couldn't find for weeks--and … you."

Oliver pressed his hands into his temples. He had acquired the nasty habit of thinking aloud in the pressroom, where the verbatim man was hovering ready to transcribe his stream-of-consciousness directly into a column. Gladys Sharp had gone very quiet.

"Hemingway spooked badly when the inspector brought you up to his office. So badly, he chose to jump rather than be arrested. He survived the fall, but that was providence. Any one thing could have gone wrong, and that would have been it for him."

"He is a murderer, Mr. Oliver," Gladys Sharp said coolly.

Oliver sat back with it, stunned to his very core. From the outset, the shape of Geraldine Tracey had filled all corners of the case. Why did such a promising young spark leave London? Who kept her in (relative) luxury, but hadn't time enough to see her more than every other weekend? Who would put up with that kind of shoddy treatment? What, in fact, would fill her days when she had only Gladys for company; Gladys who would not stop filling up any available silence with bits about her life, Gladys who had a similar build to Geraldine Tracey and had such an ordinary face, no one in Brighton would have looked one way or another if someone else had stepped out of The Lonely Bungalow in her pinny and her worn black oxfords, and cried something fierce that her employer had been murdered, and what was she to do without some kind of reference letter for her next situation?

Oliver hadn't thought twice about it. He hadn't even confirmed Gladys Sharp's identity with her last employer. Neither had Scotland Yard, apparently.

"Geraldine Tracey, I presume?"

"I'd like to go by Gladys, if it's all the same to you."

"Your Mr. Tracey is a murderer," Oliver said slowly. "On that, I've staked my life. But he isn't just that--that was real fear that drove him over the side of the Morning Star."

Geraldine Tracey smiled, baring her teeth. "What could a cunning old newshound like Mr. Hemingway fear from someone like me?"

"You framed him somehow," Oliver tried; but the theory sank into the pit of his stomach. Hemingway had killed Johnson. He was the only one who knew where Johnson would be, and whom Johnson would have turned his back to, in complete trust. And if he hadn't killed Geraldine--er--presumedly Gladys Sharp, who had been identified as Geraldine Tracey before the courts, with the medical and dental records to pass it up--Oliver's eyes squinched shut against his will. "You set this up, somehow. The crime that your Mr. Hemingway committed was a crime of intense, violent passion. But you had already made the dental record switch. You'd already tried on Gladys Sharp's clothes, hadn't you, and gone around town at least once to see if anyone would notice anything amiss? Because you wouldn't have risked this deception if you weren't absolutely sure you could pull it off. This plan is dastardly, Ms. Tracey. Completely without conscience."

Geraldine Tracey prodded her Caramel Supreme diffidently. "I suppose we'll never know, will we? You'd need to have the story from Mr. Hemingway himself, and I don't think he's too keen to talk to the press. I'm not particularly eager either, but I know that this conversation is worth the risk."

"What makes you think I'll turn down the scoop of the year?" Oliver said almost by rote. He wasn't as keen for it as he imagined. Unraveling one murder plot had almost brought personal tragedy upon him. If he'd been a minute later to Beryl's door, or a minute slower to the constable's shanty--she would have been dead. Hemingway would have successfully covered yet another crime. Oliver didn't know if he'd survive another brush with that madman.

"Why, my dear, it's because I can see it on your face. You want Mr. Hemingway in irons as much as I do. Which is why we're going to be such good friends."

Oliver nearly choked. "Why would I ever be friends with the likes of you?"

"We're going to need to be friends. We're going to need to be sure of each other. We're going to need to know that we can rely on each other absolutely, Mr. Oliver, because we are going to frame him for another murder."

Oliver took to his feet. He'd never waffled over a single decision in his life. Yet he found himself standing over the table, caught between the worn-in impulse to immediately phone in to the daytime editor at the Courier and the darker impulse that was urging him to resume his seat and hear Geraldine Tracey out in full.

"You don't have to decide right this moment, Mr. Oliver. Why don't you take a seat, and I give you to the end of this caramel monstrosity to ask any questions that you want, and then we see if we can't be friends?"

Oliver sat. Goddamn him, but he sat.

"Explain to me one thing. How did you set up poor Mr. Fisher and Mr. Hemingway with the jade pins."

Geraldine Tracey's face glowed. Oliver could imagine that this was the first time since she may have fled The Lonely Bungalow that she actually felt herself again.

"That one was really quite simple. There weren't just two pins. My brother had been bringing them over on the ferry, you see, and I'd had at least a dozen laid away in my dresser--they're rather cheap, and I had a tendency to snap them. When Mr. Hemingway had seen one in a Broad St. shop, he purchased it for me, thinking himself to have found such a clever bargain for a valuable antique. You can imagine my reaction when I saw one of my brother's tchotchkes in my lover's hands, telling me what a rare and beautiful find he'd made..."

Oliver committed the whole story, backward to forward, to memory as Geraldine Tracey laid out the whole sordid affair. Throughout the tale, Oliver couldn't help but imagine Beryl in Geraldine's shoes; how she might have reacted, being cut off from friends and social relations, only to be threatened in the vague and knowing way that men who are familiar with power and sordid affairs often are. He grew more and more convinced that Geraldine's pre-emptive measures had been justified after all. For she didn't bait him into a violent rage; Hemingway wound himself up on his own. Surely, Oliver could see that. And when he did, poor Gladys in Geraldine's borrowed pin and robe had received the fatal blow… parts of the story were too fanciful to be the truth, but Oliver nodded along with those likely falsehoods despite himself. And by the end of the story, when the Caramel Supreme's picked over dish had been spirited away by the waitress, Oliver found himself in a strange lull.

Geraldine looked at him hopefully. Oliver roused. Finally, he said: "Yes, I think we will be friends."