'I know. You'd tell me when you felt like it. But it's too late for that now. Maybe it was always too late… But there was a time when the suspects were very vague. I even wasted a few minutes suspecting you. Oh, not as an active killer — I couldn't really visualise you garrotting Gabriel with your own strong hands, and besides a police surgeon decided soon afterwards that Gabriel was getting the tourniquet on his tonsils at about the time when you would have been trying to persuade an unfriendly head waiter that it wasn't your fault if your host sneaked out without paying for dinner. And also I'd collided with Cokey in the rneantime. But somebody sent Cokey; and somebody sent Varetti — at least, I'm guessing that it was that fugitive from a tango tournament who rescued Cokey after I'd tied him up. It could conceivably have been you who was the master mind; but after some profound meditation I decided that you just didn't have that much brain."
Her eyes smouldered like tar pits as she glared at him, and he realised that things happened to her beauty under stress.
He had a fleeting instant of wondering whether it was right for him to destroy so much loveliness piece by piece as he was doing, even to achieve what he had to achieve.
Then he thought about nameless men dying in foxholes or plunging out of the sky in naming fortresses, and knew that it was still all right.
He said: "Believe it or not, I thought about Titania too. She makes sillier noises than you do, but she's a lot shrewder and tougher. I could see Milton with a mistress as ornamental as you, and I could see him going to all these lengths to get back a little of his own life. But I could just as well see Titania taking the last colossal step to get rid of Milton, whom she hates and despises, and at the same time make herself even richer and stronger than before. But what was wrong with that was that if she'd had the real master-mind cunning she wouldn't have stuck her neck out so far. She wouldn't have been so specific, and she wouldn't have dragged Linnet in. She wouldn't have made it so easy for the suspicion to be transferred to herself. So that was something else that didn't connect. I could see her as a phenomenally vicious and nasty woman with a great hate and jealousy in her complicated brain; but she wasn't subtle enough… All that's just a lot of wordage now, of course, because I know all the answers."
"You're just talking," she said.
His lean face was untouched and impassive.
"I know the answers, and I can practically prove them. The police will put the rest of it together. There's only one person who could have done all these things. Who stole Uttershaw's iridium, and created the shortage at the same time as he set up his own black market with inside information. Who had Gabriel Linnet killed, because I was too damn smart and couldn't keep my stupid mouth shut. Who fixed you up for me, to make sure I wouldn't have an alibi for that murder. Who left that suitcase at your apartment, and who sent Varetti and Walsh with a key to pick it up, and who let them out of your closet a little while ago and sent them off to the Algonquin to pick it up again."
He smiled pleasantly at her, sipping his cigarette again while he measured her for his penultimate thrust.
"And," he said, "I know who's been planning to kill you at any convenient moment now, besides killing me."