round the edges. More recently it had been torn across into two ragged pieces, and then carefully mended again with gum and Sellotape. The torn edges had been matched as tenderly as possible, but the slash still made a savage scar across the young, alert, fastidious face.
George looked from the photograph to the woman behind the desk.
“Yes,” she said. “I fished it out of his wastepaper basket and mended it and kept it. I don’t quite know why. Leslie has never been particularly close to me, but I did see him grow up, and I didn’t like to see the last traces of him just wiped out, like that. That may help you to understand what had happened between them.” She added: “It’s two years old, but it’s the only one he happened to have here in the office. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be any use looking for any of those he had at home.”
George could imagine it. A much-photographed boy, too, most likely. He saw bonfires of cherubic babies, big- eyed toddlers, serious schoolboys, earnest athletes, self-conscious young men-about-town, Armiger’s furnace fed for hours, like a Moloch, on images of his son.
“Thank you, Miss Hamilton. I’ll see that you have it back,” was all he said.
The face was still before his eyes as he went out to his car. Leslie Armiger was not visibly his father’s son. Taller, with long, fine bones and not much flesh. Brown hair lighter than his father’s curled pleasantly above a large forehead, and the eyes were straight and bright, with that slight wary wildness of young and high-mettled creatures. The same wonder and insecurity was in the long curves of his mouth, not so much irresolute as hypersensitive. No match for his father, you’d say on sight, if it came to a head-on clash either of wills or heads. But in spite of the ceremonial destruction of his image, young Leslie was still alive; the bull had pawed the ground and charged for the last time.
It was just four o’clock, and Dominic was walking up Hill Street on his way to the bus stop. Since he had to pass the main police station it was his habit to call in, on days when he hadn’t biked to school, on the offchance that George might be there with the car, and ready to go off duty; and sometimes he was lucky. To-day George picked him up at the corner and took him to the office with him while he filed his latest report; then they drove home together.
“One little call to make,” said George, “and then we’ll head for our tea. You won’t mind waiting a minute for me? It won’t take long.”
“And then you’ve finished for the day?” Dominic’s anxious eyes were searching his face surreptitiously, and trying to read the mind behind it. He would have liked to ask right out if anything positive had turned up, if Kitty was safely and irrevocably out of the affair; but how could he? They had had a family code for years in connection with George’s work, governed by rules none the less sacred for being unformulated; and once already to-day he’d been warned off from infringing them. One did not ask. One was allowed to listen if information was volunteered, and to suggest if participation was invited, but never to ask; and a silence as inviolable as the confessional sealed in all that was said within the framework of a case. He contained the ache within him, and waited faithfully, but it hurt.
“Don’t know yet, Dom, it’ll depend on what I get here.” He was turning into the empty parking-ground of The Jolly Barmaid. “If my man’s here I shan’t be five minutes, whatever the outcome may be.”
But it did not take even five minutes, for Turner was sitting in the curtained public bar, cigarette on lolling lip, devouring the racing results, and it needed only one good look at Leslie Armiger’s photograph to satisfy him.
“That’s him. That’s the young bloke who come asking for Mr. Armiger. Stood on the doorstep to wait for him, but I saw him in a good light when he first come in. Different clothes, of course, but that’s him all right, I’d know him anywhere.”
“You’d swear to him?”
“Any time you like, mate. About five to ten he walked in, and Mr. Armiger come out to him, and that’s the last I saw of ‘em.”
“Thank you,” said George, “that’s all I wanted to know.”
He pocketed the photograph and went back to the car thinking grimly: Home by ten, were you, my lad! So you’ve solved the problem I’ve always wanted to get straightened out, how to be in two places at once. Now I wonder if you’ll be willing to tell me how it’s done?
CHAPTER VI.
LESLIE ARMIGER WAS not a happy liar. There was almost as much relief as fright in his eyes as he looked from the photograph to George’s face and back again. Jean came to his side, and he put his arm round her for a moment, with a curiously tentative gesture of protection, as though he had wanted to clasp her warmly, and either because of George’s presence or his own predicament or her aloofness he could not.
“The best thing you can do now,” said George sternly, “is tell me everything. You see what happens when you don’t. You, too, Mrs. Armiger. Wouldn’t it have looked infinitely better if you’d told the truth in the first place, rather than leave it to come out this way?”
“Now wait a minute!” Leslie’s sensitive nostrils were quivering with nervous tension. “Jean had nothing to do with this. She hasn’t got a time sense, never did have. She merely made one of her vague but confident guesses, saying I was in by ten.”
“And picked on a time and a few details that matched your story word for word? That tale was compounded beforehand, Mr. Armiger, and you know it as well as I do.”
“No, that isn’t true. Jean simply made a mistake, , , “
“So you backed up her statement rather than embarrass her? Now, now, you can do better than that. Have you forgotten that your statement and hers were made at the very same moment, something like a mile apart? My boy, you’re positively inviting me to throw the book at you.”
“Oh, Christ!” said Leslie helplessly, dropping into a chair. “I’m no good at this!”
“None at all, I’m glad you realise it. Now suppose we just sit round the table like sensible people, and you tell me the truth.”
Jean had drawn back from them, hesitating for a moment. She said quietly: “I’ll make some coffee,” and slipped out to the congested kitchenette on the landing; but George noticed that she left the door open. Whatever her private dissatisfactions with her husband, she would be back at his side instantly if the law showed signs of getting tough with him.
“Now then, let’s have it straight this time. What time did you really come home?”
“It must have been about ten to eleven,” said Leslie sullenly. “I did go to that pub of his, and I did ask to see
