"But, before you pinched the money out of Charters's safe, didn't you examine it at all on the off-chance that it might be counterfeit? Didn't that ever occur to you?"
Again Serpos shrugged his shoulders. "I examined it, yes," he admitted. "But it looked quite genuine to me. I know nothing about such matters."
"And so," pursued H.M., tapping his pencil softly in measured beats on the top of the skull, "a moderately good fraud would deceive you, hey?"
"Obviously."
"In fact, you're as innocent as a babe unborn about all the higher jugglery of bogus money and the tricks of forgers?"
"Quite so."
H.M. tapped the pencil with soft beats against the skull, and then put it down.
"You're a damned liar, son," he said harshly. "One of the first things we learned about you was that, before you came to this job, you worked in a bank."