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.The stereotype was the opposite of the truth.For silent persons you would do better to seek out creative intellectuals.Frank Briers began to talk about the case.There would be big trouble if he didn’t get the whole thing cut and dried within weeks, if not days.‘Shall you?’ Humphrey asked.‘I wouldn’t bet on it, if I were you.’ Briers wasn’t given to pretending.‘It may be one of the messy ones.’He broke off: ‘You got in on the ground floor, of course.I saw your statement, it’s in the dossier, there’d be something wrong if it wasn’t.I wanted to see you before, but I had to get things organised.You might like to know how far we’ve gone.Perhaps it’s about half an inch.Anyway we can talk.You’re a pretty good security risk, aren’t you? No one’s been able to put you inside yet, at any rate.’Humphrey had realised, early in their acquaintance, that Briers was imaginative, subtle, sensitive.When he had first had to co-operate with Humphrey he had seen documents with Humphrey’s rank and name spelled out in full.Lieutenant-Colonel Humphrey Leigh.He had begun by calling Humphrey Colonel.He discovered in minutes that that frayed Humphrey’s nerves, and never did it again.Along with his excessive energy, he had what a week or two before the murder had been called the manners of the heart.But he also had a simpler taste for a kind of gallows or penal humour.That could be disconcerting, but one got acclimatised, Humphrey thought.After all, Briers wouldn’t have become a top-class policeman if he were benign all the way through.Humphrey tried to get back to their personal relationship.‘It’s some time since we last met, isn’t it?’ he said.‘How is Betty now?’‘It’s going very much as I told you.We have to live with it, that’s all.’ Briers’ wife, quite young, had been physically stricken.It wasn’t a marriage break-up, but a clinical fatality.He didn’t wish to talk about it, but Humphrey felt that that wasn’t the reason for constraint between them, if there was some.With a man so professionally affable, it was hard to judge.‘How far have we gone?’ Briers reverted to his own question and proceeded to answer it.Though the words streamed out, there was, as Humphrey took for granted, an orderly mind behind them.There was also an admirable memory – which again Humphrey took for granted – since he had one of the same sort himself.It was a deflating reflection that you couldn’t do any kind of intelligence work, police work, without it.There was no substitute.Files, dossiers, computers were all dead unless there was a human memory near.Which was why intelligence operations got less penetrating, or sillier, once they grew outside the range of a single mind.Frank Briers was tabulating his answers.To begin with, he went over them exactly as he had done with his colleagues.Time of murder, cause of death, head-battering after death.There Briers, without Humphrey being aware of it, cut off.He didn’t give any hint of the speculations he had let fall to the inner trio on the Monday afternoon.‘One thing is certain,’ he did say firmly, in good spirits, ‘whoever did it wasn’t just scum off the streets.The papers got it all wrong.Everyone gets everything wrong in a mess like this.It stands to sense he wasn’t just a hooligan.He could have been a professional.He’d studied the geography.He was working in gloves, or else he wiped off all the prints.We haven’t found one yet anywhere in the house.Of course, he seems to have gone bonkers after he killed her.He didn’t need to beat her head in.That’s not professional.But it’s been known to happen.’‘What was he after?’Briers asked, sharply: ‘What do you think?’‘I haven’t the remotest idea.’‘Nor have we yet.’ They hadn’t yet identified what objets d’art Lady Ashbrook had possessed and what had been taken.Maria was the only source of information so far.Some silver had gone.The pictures had been left.‘He was sensible enough for that.Impossible to get rid of.By the by, how valuable are they?’‘I’m only guessing.You’d have to get someone to do an expertise.’ Humphrey was betraying his tinge of linguistic pedantry: that was what expertise meant.He was irked by the English knack of appropriating a French word and using it blandly wrong.‘I guess ten or twenty thousand pounds the two, maybe more.’‘Pointless,’ said Briers.‘He couldn’t sell them.’At that time, Humphrey wasn’t certain that his friend was concealing some of his thoughts, nor what they were.Briers had a gift for talking at some distance off the point with complete openness.He did tell Humphrey the discovery that there had been three hundred pounds’ worth of notes in Lady Ashbrook’s drawing-room and that she was said to pay her bills in currency.Humphrey interrupted [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]