Fifty thousand people besides himself were down for the day, and for quite a while he gave himself up to the good day, drinking gins and tonics wherever his programme allowed. It had seemed quite easy to Hale to be lost in Brighton. They came in by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down Queen’s Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale Victorian water-colour a race in miniature motors, a band playing, flower gardens in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising some- thing for the health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.
With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn’t belong - belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.
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