On the opposite side of the wide street, a row of small shops still stood as they had obviously stood for fifty years or more. Robert crossed to them and went into the tobacconist's to buy cigarettes; a tobacconist-and-newsagent knows everything.
"Were you here when that happened?" Robert asked, leaning his head towards the door.
"When what happened?" asked the rosy little man, so used to the blank space that he had long ago become unaware of it. "Oh, the incident? No, I was out on duty. Warden, I was."
Robert said that he had meant was he here in business at the time.
Oh, yes; yes, certainly he had the business then, and for long before it. Brought up in the neighbourhood, he was, and succeeded his father in the business.
"You would know the local people well, then. Do you remember the couple who were caretakers of the block of flats, by any chance?"
"The Kanes? Of course I do. Why wouldn't I remember them? They were in and out of this place all day. He for his paper in the morning, and then her for her cigarettes shortly after, and then back for his evening paper and her back for the third time probably for cigarettes again, and then he and I used to have a pint at the local when my boy had finished his lessons and would take over for me here. You knew them, sir?"
"No. But I met someone the other day who spoke of them. How was the whole place wrecked?"
The little pink man sucked his teeth with a derisive sound.
"Jerry-built. That's what it was. Just jerry-built. The bomb fell in the area there-that's how the Kanes were killed, they were down in their basement feeling fairly safe-and the whole thing just settled down like a house of cards. Shocking." He straightened the edge of a pile of evening papers. "It was just her bad luck that the only evening in weeks that she was at home with her husband, a bomb had to come." He seemed to find a sardonic pleasure in the thought.