"A live one," the policeman who led Teddy called out, jocosely, as they approached the desk.
"Looks like a dead one," the man behind the desk replied, with the same sense of humor. "Looks like he'd been dead and buried and dug up again."
The allusion to Teddy's hatless, mud-caked appearance raised a laugh.
The man behind the desk dipped his pen in the ink bottle and drew up a big ledger.
"Name?"
Teddy could just articulate. "Edward Scarborough Follett."
"Gee, whiz! Guess you'll have to spell it out."
Teddy spelled slowly, as if the letters were new to him. Having done this, he was asked no more questions. Explanations came from the officer who had "run him in" and who produced the automatic pistol picked up on the floor of the shack. When it was stated in addition that Teddy was charged with shooting and killing Peter Flynn, whom all of them knew and to whom they were bound by ties of professional solidarity, the boy felt the half-friendly indifference with which the spectators had seen him come in change to sullen hostility.
The formulas fulfilled, he was seized more roughly than before, to be half led, half pushed, along a dim hall and down a dimmer flight of steps to a worn, stone-flagged basement pervaded by dankness and a smell of disinfectants. The corridor into which they turned was long and straight and narrow like a knife-cut through a cheese. On the left a blank stone wall was the blanker for its whitewash; on the right, a row of little doors diminished down the vista to the size of pigeonholes. Pressed close to the square foot of grating inset in each door was a human face eager to see who was coming next, while the officer was greeted with howls of rage or whining petitions or strings of ugly words.
They stopped at the first open door, and after one glance within Teddy started back.