“Andrews — Warden,” he said. “It’s practically an anagram. But I almost missed it. And then the signed photograph in his study. I knew it was familiar — it kept worrying me. But I was looking at it the wrong way. I kept thinking it had to be somebody, and so I never could place it. It took a long time before I realised that it was just like somebody. Like somebody else... What was she?”
“My sister,” she said.
It was as if speech were a strange thing, as if she had never spoken before.
He nodded.
“Yes, of course.”
“When did you know?” she asked, still with that curious preciseness, as if the forming of words was a conscious performance.
“It sort of came gradually. I was all wrong most of the time. Eventually I knew it must have been a woman, because all the ashtrays were emptied. So there wouldn’t be any cigarette-ends with lipstick on them. But then I had the wrong woman. It all hit me together when I found out that you’d never said anything about that scene in the office that I walked in on — when Flane told Ufferlitz he was going to fix him. Naturally that should have been the first thing you’d think of, if you were just an ordinary person. But you never said a word about it.”
“How could I?” she said. “I’d done it, and I didn’t want to be caught, but I didn’t want anyone else to get in a jam because of me.”
He drew again at his cigarette.
“Do you want to tell me the rest of it?”