"I'm afraid it was."
"Oh dear. How did that happen, then?"
"I understand she was manhandled while taking part in a peaceful demonstration."
"There could be two views about that, though, couldn't there?"
"I'm sure there could."
"Bitten any more policemen recently, has she?"
I refused to answer.
Luck resumed. "And you don't ask her: Emma, why aren't
"No, I don't, Mr. Luck. Miss Manzini and I don't speak to each other that way."
I was being pompous and knew it. Luck had that effect on me.
"All right. So you don't talk to each other," he blurted. "Same as you don't know where she is." He appeared to be losing his temper. "All right. In your highly personal, highly privileged Treasury opinion, how does your friend Dr. Lawrence Pettifer, in July this year, come to be flogging off your Emma's jewellery at two-thirds what
"The jewellery was Miss Manzini's to dispose of as she wished. If she had given it to the milkman I could not have raised a finger." I saw a means to strike at him and seized it gratefully. "But surely your Mr. Guppy has already provided you with your solution, Mr. Luck?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Wasn't it July when Guppy claims he saw Pettifer approach my house? A Sunday? There's your burglar for you. Pettifer approaches the house and finds it empty. On Sundays there are no staff around. Miss Manzini and I have gone out for lunch. He forces the window, enters the house, goes to her apartment, and helps himself to the jewellery."
He must have guessed that I was teasing him, for he had coloured. "I thought you said Pettifer didn't steal," he objected suspiciously.
"Let's say you have given me reason to revise that opinion," I replied suavely as the tape recorder gave a choke and stopped rotating.
"Leave it like that a minute, will you, please, Oliver," Bryant ordered sweetly.
Luck had already reached out to change the tape. Now, somewhat ominously, I thought, he removed his hand and laid it beside its companion on his lap.
"Mr. Cranmer, sir."
Bryant was standing close beside me. He had cupped his hand on my shoulder in the traditional gesture of arrest. He was stooping, and his lips were not an inch from my ear. I had forgotten physical fear till now, but Bryant was reminding me of it.
"Do you know what this means, sir?" he asked me, very quietly, as he gave my shoulder a painful squeeze.
"Of course I know. Take your hand off me."
But his hand didn't budge. The pressure of it increased as he continued speaking.
"Because this is what I'm going to be doing to you, Mr. Cranmer, sir, unless I have a lot more of the collaboration I spoke about than I am getting from you at the present time. If you don't play ball with me very soon, I'm going to fake any pretext, bend any evidence, as the old song goes, and I'm going to make it my personal business to see you spend the remaining best years of your life looking at a very boring wall instead of at Miss Manzini. Did you hear that, sir? I didn't."
"I can hear you perfectly well," I said, trying in vain to shake off his hand. "Let go of me." But he held me all the more firmly.
"Where's the money?"
"What money?"
"Don't 'what money' me, Mr. Cranmer, sir. Where's the money you and Pettifer have been salting away in foreign bank accounts? Millions of it, the property of a certain foreign embassy in London."
"I've no idea what you're talking about. I have stolen nothing, and I am not in league with Pettifer or anybody else."
"Who's AM?"
"'Who?"
"AM who's all over Pettifer's diary in his lodgings. Phone AM Brief AM Visit AM"
"I have absolutely no idea. Perhaps it means morning. And PM means afternoon."
I think in a different place he would have hit me, for he lifted his eyes to the mirror as if appealing for permission.
"Where's your pal Checheyev, then?"
"Who?"
"Don't give me bloody who again. Konstantin Checheyev is a Russian cultural gentleman, formerly of the Soviet, then Russian, embassy in London."
"I've never heard the name in my life."
"Of course you haven't. Because what you are doing to
"I don't give a damn what you think."
