It was then mid-afternoon and the town was sweltering in the sun; white walls reflecting the glare, tarmac softening in the heat, an odour of petrol exhaust and ripe fruit hanging in the air. It was a ten-minute walk from the waterfront to police headquarters, a plain, architecturally undistinguished, four-storey building with a large car-park in front and a few palm-trees giving a bit of shade here and there, Fletcher walked across the car-park and up the steps to the main entrance. He had never previously been inside the place and he was not at all sure he ever wanted to be inside it again; it made him nervous. Perfectly innocent though he knew himself to be, in these surroundings he could not avoid a sense of guilt; it was almost as though he had come to confess to a crime rather than to report one committed by someone else, some person or persons unknown. There was a counter on the right of the entrance hall, with a couple of policemen behind it hammering laboriously away at typewriters and another one, with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves, using a telephone.
