perhaps, had tested the ground.
When the Italian police closed in on Mrs. Gray and the other two, he turned and ran for it, doubtless because in Italy he did not have the same diplomatic privilege as in England.
The Italian police did not use their guns until, in the Way of the Tombs, he began to use his.
He fell and died by the tomb of Aulus Veius, a magistrate, appropriately enough.
It is always hard for a writer to rehabilitate a villain, or a person he has regarded as a villain, even a minor one. One has lived with the villain, one has set ideas about the villain, one is loath to discard them.
But facts are facts, and facts from Chief Inspector Hope cannot be ignored.
I am bound therefore to record that Mrs. Caroline Gray, now living quietly once more at the Bower Hotel, was not a money-grabbing traitor. I must state, though reluctantly, that she knew nothing of Mrs. Dawson’s activities, and that the tip-off came first from a terrified Bardoni to the Italian police, who passed it on to England.
Thereafter, Mrs. Caroline Gray acted under directions from the Special Branch of Scotland Yard. They have little to do with Criminal Investigations Departments, such as the police who interviewed me.
They detect espionage and such important things. They don’t deal in petty crime like murders, bank robberies, and train robberies.
They are cats that walk alone.
For me, the slice of terror, which is all that it was, lay in the thickness of the slice: the peasant is surrounded by more than he imagines. Behind the eyes which observe him are yet others, which observe those eyes in their turn, and behind the predators slithering in the undergrowth are yet others, stalking the predators. The slice is thick and fearful.
We live in dangerous times. All one can do is keep the spear ready, and a feeble thing it is, touch the amulet, and hope for the best, and trust that, as in my case, the tribe can after all protect not only the tribe but the individual.
There is no harm in hoping.
To be on the safe side, I always, even now, keep a red geranium on the window sill.
Note
Since I have to make the best I can of my dolt of a so-called father-in-law, and ghastly mother-in-law, I have changed all the names and one or two other circumstances in this story. It is not even published under my own name.
