Jason Dunn and Dolores’s sexual relationship

Jason Dunn and Dolores’s sexual relationship is presented not as a romance but as a clandestine, recurring arrangement initiated by Palinurus Maciver Junior. Its Wednesday routine offers Jason an outlet while Helen Dunn is pregnant, and its secrecy becomes newly consequential when Palinurus disappears and the police reach Moscow House. Jason’s later account to Andrew Dalziel makes the relationship both intimate evidence of his private life and a possible source of exposure he urgently wants to contain.

Origins and Invitation

The arrangement begins when a Wednesday squash game between Jason and Palinurus is disrupted by a double booking. Jason is disappointed; Palinurus appears relaxed, declines the offer of a drink, and explains that he has made other plans with a woman he sometimes sees. He then hesitantly asks whether Jason might be interested in joining them. The proposal is explicit enough to surprise Jason, who initially treats it as a curiosity as well as an opportunity.

Jason places his interest in the context of Helen’s pregnancy. He says that Helen had become uncomfortable with sex early in the pregnancy and that their sexual life had diminished, while he was accustomed to greater regularity. His account thus frames the invitation as a response to an existing strain in his marriage, not as the result of a courtship with Dolores. It also gives the encounter a practical arrangement: Palinurus already knows Dolores and introduces Jason into an existing connection.

When Jason meets her, Dolores is waiting in the back seat of Palinurus’s car. He remembers her as very pale, with long black hair, and says she looked like an advert for a vampire movie; she looks him over and nods. Jason objects to the prospect of sex in the centre car park, fearing that a rocking, steamed-up car might draw the attention of young men nearby. Palinurus instead drives them to Moscow House, while Jason and Dolores begin to get acquainted in the back seat.

The Wednesday Routine

Jason describes Dolores as exceptionally attractive and says that he was initially uneasy that Palinurus might also direct sexual interest towards him. In Jason’s telling, Palinurus did not: the arrangement remained heterosexual, and although a threesome necessarily involved some physical contact between the men, Jason insists that nothing about it became kinky. That qualification reveals how he wants Dalziel to understand the encounter: as sex shared with Dolores, rather than as a sexual relationship between the two men.

The meetings settle into a repeated pattern. On Wednesdays, Jason and Palinurus meet Dolores in the centre car park, get into Palinurus’s car, and keep their heads down as they drive along The Avenue. They spend about an hour at Moscow House, then return to the car park and go home separately. The routine depends on movement between ordinary public places and a private destination, with the car providing both transport and a brief, enclosed space in which Jason and Dolores can meet.

Jason calls the arrangement harmless and says it kept him satisfied, which in turn meant that he bothered Helen less. He also acknowledges that simply stopping might have made Helen suspicious. The affair therefore serves two purposes in his account: it meets his own sexual needs and helps him manage the appearance of normality in his marriage. He expects it to end after Helen has the twins and their sex life returns to normal. That anticipated limit makes the arrangement seem temporary to him, though the later events prevent it from ending quietly.

The Night Palinurus Disappears

On the night Palinurus fails to arrive, Jason waits in the centre car park. After some time Dolores gets into his car and says that something must have happened. She has her mobile phone and tries calling Palinurus, but it is switched off; she then calls his shop and receives no answer. Jason borrows her phone to call Palinurus’s home and speaks to his wife, who has not heard from him either. Their private arrangement has suddenly become the setting for an anxious search, and Jason’s contact with Palinurus’s household passes through the same secret connection that brought him and Dolores together.

Jason later singles out his use of Dolores’s mobile as a mistake, saying he should have gone into the centre and used the payphone. His regret is tied to the possibility that this choice may connect him to what followed, although his account does not establish what consequence he feared or whether the call affected the investigation. The phone is no longer merely a convenient means of reaching the missing man; in retrospect, Jason sees it as a detail that might expose his presence and his relationship with Dolores.

Eventually, they drive along The Avenue past Moscow House. They become seriously worried when they see a police car turning into the drive, return to the car park, and separate. Jason says that events then seemed to be falling apart. He insists that he had no knowledge of Palinurus’s plans and that he and Dolores expected another ordinary Wednesday-night meeting. His description establishes the sequence of their discovery and retreat, but it remains his own account, offered after Palinurus’s death and shaped by his fear of suspicion.

Secrecy and Aftermath

In the days that follow, Jason keeps his head down, hoping that nothing will lead the police to him. He recognizes that this self-protection may sound selfish in light of what happened to Palinurus, but argues that there is nothing he can do for the dead man. He presents Dolores as able to confirm that neither of them knew what Palinurus intended. The relationship thus becomes entangled with a second, urgent concern: not simply the loss or disappearance of their regular partner, but the danger that the concealed meetings will become known.

Jason’s final appeal to Andrew Dalziel is directed at protecting his marriage. He worries about what Helen might suffer if she learned of the meetings and asks whether the matter has to come out, offering to do anything if Dalziel will help keep it from her. The request gives the relationship its clearest consequence: what Jason had treated as a manageable arrangement now threatens the domestic life it was supposed to spare from friction. Dolores and the Wednesday routine are no longer safely compartmentalized; the night Palinurus fails to appear brings the secret into the orbit of the police and leaves Jason trying to control who else will learn it.