RAFFERTY LEFT FOR HOME that evening feeling despondent at his lack of progress. As he drove to his flat, he reflected again that he didn't seem to be getting very far in the investigation for all the interviews and reports that kept piling up on his desk. He parked in his designated parking place and went up to his flat. As he shut the front door behind him the silence seemed to echo resoundingly. That and the loneliness seemed to have physical entities. He didn't know how much longer he could stand it. It wasn't as if he could go out on the lash with Mickey every night and still do his job.
To break the oppressive sound of silence, he noisily dropped his keys in the porcelain bowl on the hall table under the mirror. But the silence, when the jangling sound of the keys had died away, seem
