"If you don't trust me enough to tell me the whole truth, nothing."
"I trust you as much as you trust me!" she said fiercely. "You know how much that is! Now, if you please, let's banish the whole subject. Do you mean to come home to dinner tonight?"
He was looking rather narrowly at her, and did not answer. She repeated the question; he replied in his usual cold way: "No, I shall dine in town. I may be late back. Expect me when you see me."
Chapter Nine
Sergeant Hemingway left Greystones in a thoughtful mood. An exhaustive search had failed to discover the hiding-place of any weapon, but one fact had emerged with which he seemed to be rather pleased.
"Though why I should be I can't tell you," he said to Glass. "It makes the whole business look more screwy than ever. But in my experience that's very often the way. You start on a case which looks as though it's going to be child's play, and you don't seem to get any further with it. By the time you've been at work on it a couple of days you've collected enough evidence to prove that there couldn't have been a murder at all. Then something breaks, and there you are."
"Do you say that the more difficult a case becomes the easier it is to solve?" asked Glass painstakingly.
"That's about the size of it," admitted the Sergeant. "When it's got so gummed up that each new fact you pick up contradicts the last I begin to feel cheerful."
"I do not understand. I see around me only folly and sin and vanity. Shall these things make a righteous man glad?"
"Not being a righteous man, I can't say. Speaking as a humble flatfoot, if it weren't for folly and sin and vanity I wouldn't be where I am now, and nor would you, my lad. And if you'd stop wasting your time learning bits of the Bible to fire off at me - which in itself is highly insubordinate conduct, let me tell you - and take a bit of wholesome interest in this problem, you'd probably do yourself a lot of good. You might even get promoted."