the place for an hour or two whenever she felt like it. Her flat in Cromwell Road can't be more than a mile away; so she would have walked to it at least once to collect some of her things. But she hasn't; therefore, they must be keeping her a prisoner.'
There may be some other explanation. Anyhow, just on the chance that you are right, I can't afford to lose the bulk of our bag by having the place raided before Saturday.'
'I am right. I know I'm right. And you must raid the place, C.B.' Barney argued desperately. 'This girl has put up a wonderful show. She has displayed magnificent courage; but now she is in the soup. You can't just leave her there. And some of these swine must live in the place. Just think what they may be doing to her.'
'If I am thinking of the same thing as you are, she'll come to no harm from it. She probably won't even mind very much.'
'What the hell d'you mean?'
C.B. sighed. 'I'm sorry to have to disillusion you but, to set your mind at rest, it is best that you should know the truth. Before her marriage, Mary Morden was a prostitute.'
Barney rose slowly to his feet. The blood had suffused his cheeks and his eyes had become unnaturally bright. Suddenly he blurted out, 'I don't believe it! You're lying! You're lying for some purpose of your own.'
'Sit down!' Verney's voice, for once, was sharp. 'I am not in the habit of lying to the members of my staff. Perhaps the word prostitute was a little strong; but I used it deliberately in order to bring you back to a truer sense of values. If I remember rightly, she said she was a cabaret girl. Anyhow, she told me herself that she had come up the hard way and had had to throw her morals overboard in order to earn a living. And that, within the meaning of the act, is prostitution. She told me this in reply to my telling her that the Satanist creed was the glorification of sex, and that she would not stand a dog's chance of getting anywhere with her investigation unless she was prepared to go to bed with at least one man, and probably more, whom she would have no reason whatever to like. She said that she had done that before and was ready to do it again, if that would give her a chance to nail her husband's murderers. So, you see, you have no need to harrow yourself with visions of her being held down and raped.'
For a long minute Barney remained silent, then he said: 'I suppose you are right. But what you've just told me came as a bit of a shock, and it is going to take me a little time to get used to the idea of her being so very different from what I thought her.' Then he stood up, and added, 'Well, I'd better be going, Sir, and get down to some work.'
'That's the spirit,' C.B. nodded. 'I shall be back on Friday night. Come in on Saturday at midday and I'll let you know about the final arrangements for the raid. I'll have you sworn as a temporary Special Constable so that you can take part in it.'
Thank you, Sir; but I'd rather not. From now on I'd prefer to stick to my major mission of narking on the Reds, and keep out of this other business.'
'I'm afraid that is not possible. You'll be needed to identify Ratnadatta, and to substantiate certain portions of the statement we shall take from Mary Morden. As far as she is concerned, I think you should look at it that she is doing no more and no less than what quite a number of other brave women did during the war - putting a good face on some rather unpleasant experiences as the price of outwitting the enemy, gaining his confidence and bringing home the goods. It is important, too, that we should endeavour to get hold of the negative and all the copies of that photograph of her and Ruddy; and, if they can be found, you would be the most suitable person to take charge of them at once; so I think you had better go in with the police.'
A ghost of Barney's old grin momentarily lit up his face. 'Yes, I can well imagine a bawdy-minded copper trying to slip one in his pocket if he got the chance. I'll do as you wish, then, and make getting hold of the photographs my special task.'
When Barney had left him, C.B. thoughtfully refilled his pipe. He felt far from happy at having given away Mary Morden's past, but he had seen no other means of dealing with the situation that had arisen. Personally he had no doubts at all that Mary had gone willingly to the house in Cremorne on Saturday night, and that she had remained there because she believed that doing so would give her the chance she had been seeking to win the confidence of the Satanists; therefore the only danger she was in was that she might give herself away, and that was no greater risk than she had run when making her earlier visits to the place.
But Barney, not knowing the true facts about Mary, had naturally viewed the situation very differently, and the acute anxiety he had displayed on her account had made it evident that he was in love with her. It was that which had shown C.B. the red light. Knowing that Barney was not only brave and resourceful but, under the skin, a wild Irishman, there had emerged the possibility that he might take the law into his own hands and attempt, unassisted, Mary's rescue.
Such an attempt Verney regarded as not only unnecessary but both liable to upset Mary's campaign and almost certainly doomed to failure; above all, the last thing he wanted was for the Satanists to be prematurely alarmed by a one-man raid, as that would mean losing the bulk of the bag. Therefore, the only way to make certain of preventing Barney from ruining the whole coup had been to tell him that, even if for the next few days Mary had to submit to being treated as though she was an inmate of a brothel, her early life had conditioned her to come through that mentally unharmed, and that she had actually expected that she might have to lend herself with apparent willingness to such treatment.
Barney meanwhile, having gone down in the lift, was walking, without thinking where he was going, along the street, desperately trying to reconcile his feelings for Margot with what he had just learnt about Mary.
During his long abortive watch for her in Cromwell Road the previous night, the belief that she was out dancing with some other man had brought home to him the fact that he really was in love with her; and, since his discovery that morning that she had been carried off by Ratnadatta, the thought of what she might be going through as a prisoner of the Satanists had made him aware that he loved her desperately. But now? Could one possibly love a girl who had been a prostitute?
To do so was against all a man's natural instincts. If one really loved a girl one wanted her for keeps. That meant marriage, and through the generations male mentality had been fashioned to demand that the future mother of a man's children should be chaste. Basically that was his own view, but he recognized that standards of morality had grown far more lax since women had claimed equal rights with men in almost every sphere of life and, like most men of his age, he would have been quite ready to ignore the past if, on asking a girl to marry him, she had confessed to having already had a lover, or even several, providing they had been genuine love affairs and she had not made herself cheap. But for a girl to sell her body for money to anyone who cared to buy it, to go to bed night after night with a succession of different men, most of whom she did not even know by name, was a totally different matter. The thought of Mary's having led such a life made him squirm, and he could not bring himself to believe that she had really ever done so.
There then came into his mind the first night that he had taken her to dinner at the Hungaria and how, in the
