Arthur Penrose

Arthur Penrose is 52 and has sold insurance since he was 19, in Liverpool, where he was born and from which he has never been away for more than a week. The son of a mathematics teacher, he learned early that numbers are more reliable than people. He married Edith at 30, and the two lived twenty-two years of a routine so predictable that the neighbors set their clocks by it.

He spends the day at the firm's office, in a high-ceilinged room on the third floor of a red brick building, with an iron filing cabinet, an oak desk, a map of the city on the wall with the collection routes marked in pins and a hat stand he has used for twenty years. At the end of the day he walks back along the same street, on the same sidewalk, and enters his house at a quarter past six.

He is tall and thin, with pale skin, a long, sunken face, thin gray hair and a short gray mustache. He wears round wire-rimmed glasses, a worn black overcoat, a stiff white collar and a black mourning tie that he has not taken off since his father's death. Cold and methodical, he speaks like a chess player, weighing every word, and the coldness makes everyone distrust him.

About the night of the message, his account is that of a man who did his duty: at the address given, he found nothing, because the street has a North, a South and a West, but no East. He asked a policeman, a postman and a newsstand, and nobody knew the gentleman in question. When he got back, the front door would not open and he went in through the back. Edith was giving piano lessons to the children on the street, and nothing irritated her more than a wrong sum.

Arthur answers questions as if transcribing them, and shows no emotion at what the detective describes. It may be the natural restraint of a man raised not to cry in front of strangers. It may be the mask of someone who measures a confession the way he measures everything else. The detective will have to decide which.