Summary
In the first chapter, Ida is at Snow's with Phil Corkery, a "friend" of hers. They talk about the news report of Hale's death, and Ida, finding out that Rose was the waitress who had served the man who was supposed to be Hale, tries to question the girl, but to no avail. Knowing that something is fishy, she goes to the police to ask them to question Rose, but they refuse.
In the second chapter, Spicer feels a great deal of fear and anxiety over the gang's murder of Hale. He runs into Crab, a former associate who is now working for Colleoni. Back at Frank's house, he picks up the phone and hears from Rose, which makes him suspect that she knows something. He tries to prepare telling Pinkie and the others that he is tired of the mob life and wants out.
In the third chapter, Pinkie is feeling humiliated by how Colleoni condescended to him. He goes to Snow's and runs into Rose, who tells him she has been trying to call him. He takes her brusquely on a bus trip out of the city to Peacehaven, where she explains that Ida has been asking her questions. When they return to town, Rose identifies Spicer in a photo taken of him incognito hanging up.
Analysis
With the police having such a low presence in the story, it is through a very clever development of a character that Greene gives us the detective character for the thriller story, to make it into a chase between criminal and investigator. Although Ida would seem a highly unlikely candidate for someone to look into an almost, though unintentionally perfect murder, Greene shows how her simplistic notion of justice, her easy affection for Hale, and her forthright presumptuousness come together to make her a formidable force. For example, when she is asking a man about Hale, we hear about how her capacious sense of having some interest in everyone's life draws her to pick at the lives of those who are in fact like her opposites, solitary and strange:
"None I heard of," the barman said. "He wasn't a Brighton man. No one knew him round these parts. He was a stranger."
A stranger: the word meant nothing to her: there was no place in the world where she felt a stranger. She circulated the dregs of the cheap port in her glass and remarked to no one in particular, "It's a good life." There was nothing with which she didn't claim kinship (76).
If Hale is a stranger, this is actually to draw a connection between him and Pinkie and Rose, who are strangers in society because of their lower class and minority Catholic faith. Ida, then, represents the good-willed but indiscriminate and somewhat boorish power of society that tries to understand and integrate them.
