Leonard Hale

Leonard Hale is 52 and has guarded the door of Whitcombe Jewellers for twenty years. He was born in Walthamstow, the son of a bus driver and a hem seamstress, and before the uniform he was a soldier, a corporal and then a clerk at a haberdashery that closed. From his father he learned to greet whoever boards the bus by name and from the army to stand for hours without changing his face. He receives every customer as if he were a lord and every delivery man as if he were a customer.

He lives in a semi-detached house in Bermondsey, in south London, with a walled garden and a wall clock he sets every Sunday by the radio. He shares the house with an old cat and an armchair no one sits in anymore. His wife left six years ago, and the house kept her way of arranging the dishes. The uniform hangs pressed on the bedroom door from the night before, and his shoes have a shine he insists on showing off.

He has short gray hair combed back, a mustache trimmed with a ruler and brown eyes tired from waking at five. He wears the doorman's uniform with a dark coat with gold buttons, white shirt and a tightly knotted tie, which he redoes every time he passes a mirror. He speaks slowly, with the formal courtesy of a movie butler, and his voice rises in pitch when the subject is the conduct of the young.

About the Thursday of the robbery, his account is that of the man on guard: two doors, one at a time, and nobody enters covered, no hat, no sunglasses, no gloves. New customers by appointment only. From the door he saw the guns, the saleswoman opening the display cases and the pieces going out, and he tells it all in the voice of someone saluting. He repeats that twenty years of service cannot be bought or lost in one afternoon, and that he lives on his salary.

Leonard knows that the doorman decides who comes in, and that when the wrong person comes in the first question is for whoever was at the door. When the detective asks who paid him, he squares his shoulders, looks straight ahead and answers that no one did. It may be the honor of a man with twenty years of service. It may be someone clinging to formality because he doesn't know how to speak any other way. The detective will have to decide which.