Cecil Pellow

Cecil Pellow is 54 and has sold medicine on Tidewater Road for twenty-two years. Born in the countryside, the son of a watchmaker, he studied pharmacy on a Methodist church scholarship and inherited from his father a taste for everything that works in miniature. He married young and was widowed in 1944. Since then he speaks of his wife in the present tense when he forgets himself, and corrects himself at once, apologizing.

He lives in a room above the pharmacy and comes down at seven to turn on the window lights. He prepares prescriptions with a precision scale and a patience that irritates hurried customers. He likes to say the names of substances in Latin, in a low voice, just to hear how they sound. At night he walks around the neighborhood, alone, like someone not yet used to the silent house.

He is tall and thin, a little stooped, with a long, wrinkled face, a thin gray mustache and metal-rimmed glasses. He wears a white coat over a gray waistcoat, a dark bow tie and a black mourning band on his sleeve that he never took off. He speaks slowly, shy, asking leave even to answer, and looks at the counter while talking.

His pharmacy knows the heart of half the city through prescriptions, and he says the other half hasn't grown old yet. He admits he sells digitalis, always with a prescription and a signature in the poison book, as the law requires. He also says the front door stays unlocked at night, as in the whole neighborhood. He was the one who handed the police a book of verses belonging to the dead man, missing its last page, which turned up inside the dead man's own car.

Cecil knows a pharmacist who hands a book to the police and keeps the key to the poisons draws attention. It could be the honesty of a man who prefers to be inconvenient than to omit. It could be someone hiding behind good manners. The detective will have to decide which.