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"I've heard more original remarks than that," he said. "But if it's any help
to you, I don't know what you mean either. I didn't say the pajamas had any
name embroidered on them or did I?"
She sank back on to the edge of the chair, her hands clasped in her lap, not
comfortably or relaxed, but as if she had only paused there in the expectation
of having to move again.
He slid a cigarette forward in his pack and offered it to her. In the same
solicitous way, he lighted it for her and then lighted one for himself. He
drew slowly at it, not savoring the smoke, and looking at her, and wondering
why in a world so sadly in need of beauty he should have to be talking to her
in this way and know that this was the only way to talk, and that was how it
was and there was nothing else to do.
He said, with a slight but sincere shrug: "This isn't a fight. It might have
been a beautiful honeymoon. But maybe it just wasn't in the cards. Anyway,
it'll have to wait now."
She said: "I suppose so."
He said: "It's no use stalling much more. You were supposed to have made up
your mind about telling me something. Have you made up your mind?"
She winced and looked down at the tangling and untangling fingers in her lap.
She looked up at him, and then down again at her hands. Her mouth barely
moved.
She said: "Yes."
"Well?"
"I'll tell you."
He waited.
"I'll tell you," she said, "sometime this afternoon."
"Why not now?"
"Because . . ."
The Saint took a great interest in the tip of his cigarette.
"Barbara," he said, "it may not occur to you that I'm giving you a lot more
breaks than the rules provide. I never was a nut on technicalities, but the
fact remains that you're a technical acces-sory. You know the man I want to
talk to, the man who holds the key to most of this dirty business. You know
that everything you keep back is helping him to get away
with literally murder. And you spend the hours you've been here alone
struggling with your conscience to arrive at the tremendous decision that
you'll tell me all about it at your own convenience."
"No," she said.
"I don't want you to think I'm getting tough with you, but I've known police
matrons who developed bulging muscles just from persuading wayward girls that
they ought to unburden their hearts in the interests of right and justice. And
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I'm sure that wouldn't appeal to you at all."
She made a thin line of her mouth and gazed back at him defiantly.
"You sound as if you'd said all this before."
"Maybe I have," he admitted equably. "But it doesn't make it any less true.
Believe it or not, I've only got to pick up that phone and call a certain gent
by the name of Inspector John Henry Fernack to have you taken into what is so
charmingly referred to as 'custody'. Custody is a place out of the earshot of
any unofficial person who might be too inquisitive; and it isn't a very
pleasant place. In Custody, almost anything can happen, and often does." He
blew a thoughtful streak of smoke at the ceiling. "You can still make your own
choice, but I wish you'd make the right one."
The moment's flare had died out of her as if it had never happened.
She said, as if she were repeating a lesson that she had worked out for
herself until it became an obsession: "I've got to tell this person first.
I've got to tell htm that I'm going to tell you. I've got to give him a
chance. He he's been the kindest person I ever met. I was nothing I was
practically starving I'd have done anything when I met him. He . . . he's been
very good to me. Always. I want to do what's right, but I couldn't just give
him to you like that. I couldn't be a Judas. At least they give foxes a start,
don't they?"
Simon considered the question gravely, as though he had all the time in the
world. He felt as if he had. He felt as if she was important, in a way that
was important only to him; and there-was always a little time for important
things.
"They do," he said. "But that's only because they want the fox to run longer
and give the valiant sportsmen a better chase. If they were just being noble
and humane, they'd simply shoot him as quickly and accurately as possible,
thereby saving him all the agonies of fear, flight, hope, and final despair.
Of course that wouldn't be quite so sporting as letting him run his heart out
against a pack of hounds, but the eventual result would be the same."
"Sometimes the fox gets away," she said.
"The fox never gets away in the end," he said kindly. "He ma get away a dozen
times, but there'll always be a thirteenth time when he makes one little
mistake, and then he's just a trophy for somebody to take home. It's almost
dull, but that's how it is."
"They've never caught you."
"Yet."
He went to the window and peered out. The sky was already darkening with the
limpid clarity of sunset, the hour when it seems to grow thinner and deeper so
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