"So they inform me. I never knew him well. I–I have not seen him since I was a child."
"When did you learn he was dead?"
"Only three days ago. There was a notification from the police in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Also a long letter from a firm of solicitors-" Her breathing was quicker and her colour heightened: quite suddenly she seemed to drop her defences. "A minute ago I talked to you about fairness. I'll be fair, if you will. Is it something to do with my father? Is that why you've been spying on us?"
"Spying?"
She made a gesture of impatient helplessness. "We can't get anywhere, you can't even accuse me of anything, unless you come out and say what you mean. Yes, spying. That man," she nodded curtly towards me, "was spying on me tonight. And long before that. I thought, when I saw him as a policeman, that he seemed familiar — somehow. Now that I've seen you two together, I remember where I saw him before. He drove up to Colonel Charters's house early in the evening with you. He was the man Larry, my husband, saw driving away from the house. Larry heard then and there that he was there under a false name, and… well, we're not deaf or dumb or blind, Sir Henry Merrivale. We know who you are."
I have seldom in my life felt such a worm as under that brisk little lady's eye. But over H.M.'s face went a change like a shadow off the sun; I could not tell whether it was curiosity, or relief, or mirth.
"Ho ho ho," he said. "And so you thought the old man's hounds were bayin' on your trail, hey? Is that why you been nervous?"
She contemplated him.
"I do not think it is funny," she observed gravely. "Let me tell you something about myself. It is a little easier than I had anticipated. I was born in Germany, and I lived there until I was ten years old, when my mother died: that was just at the end of the war. I did not know what my father was doing. But I saw him kill a man once. It was horrible, because my father was very tall and handsome and pleasant. It was in our flat at Berlin. It was horrible, because his pleasantness did not change: he just took out a gun and shot the man, and afterwards some men came and took the body away. My father bought me a toy because I had been frightened. Several men came often to visit him."
Again I heard that curiously Teutonic inflection in her voice, which I had heard once or twice at the villa in Moreton Abbot. She shook some of it off, and gestured.