Ed Loyce

Loyce runs a television sales and service shop in a town where everyone knows him, which makes the afternoon's horror worse: a stranger's body dangles from a lamppost and the whole street walks past it as if it were civic decoration. His mounting hysteria isolates him from Fergusson, Potter, Jenkins, and the rest, who treat his panic as illness or drink. His refusal to accept the collective blindness is what drives the story toward its question of what, exactly, everyone else is pretending not to know.