Kintyre stubbed out his cigarette (the fifth, sixth, twentieth?) and took a deep breath. He was letting this run away with him, he thought. He was yattering like an old woman, shaken into brainlessness. It was not as if he had never encountered death before.
He groped toward the teaching of the dojo, the judo school. Judo is only in part a sport; it is also a philosophy, the Gentle Way, with many aspects, and the first thing to learn is to relax utterly. The passive man is prepared for anything, for he can himself become anything.
But it was an unreal attempt. Kintyre's interest in judo was a superficial growth of a few years; his roots lay in the West. He understood with sudden bleakness why Bruce's death had so clamped on him: once again someone he cared for was gone, and the horror he had borne for two decades stirred toward awakening.
"Don't you feel well, Dr. Kintyre?"
Harries leaned over the desk, politely concerned. "I'm sorry to put you to a strain like this. If you want to rest a while—"
"No." Kintyre mustered a degree of steadiness. "I was a bit shaken, but—Go ahead. If Bruce really was murdered, I certainly want to give you any help I can finding who did it."
The inspector regarded him thoughtfully. "You and he were pretty close, weren't you?"
"In a way. He was almost eleven years younger than I, and had lived a—limited life. Not sheltered in the usual sense, his family being poor, but limited. And he was such a peaceful fellow, and his life since entering college had been mostly books. It made him seem even younger."
Kintyre sighed. "We got to be about as friendly as one can get under such circumstances," he finished. "Maybe I looked on him as a son. Not being married, I can't be sure of that."
"Did he ever say anything which led you to believe that he might be in serious trouble?"