"You were shaved when you arrived at Miss Clay's cottage. How was that?"
"Carry my shaving things in the car. Have to, when you have a beard like mine."
"So you had no breakfast that morning?"
"No, I was planning to get breakfast from Chris. I don't eat breakfast anyway. Just coffee, or orange juice. Orange juice in England. My God, your coffee — what do you think they do to it? The women, I mean. It's —»
"Leaving the coffee aside for a moment, shall we come to the main point? Why did you tell the sergeant on duty that you had slept at Sandwich?"
The man's face changed subtly. Until then he had been answering at ease, automatically; the curves of his broad, normally good-natured face slack and amiable. Now the slackness went; the face grew wary, and — was it? — antagonistic.
"Because I felt there was something wrong, and I didn't want to be mixed up in it."
"That is very extraordinary, surely? I mean, that you should be conscious of evil before anyone knew that it existed."
"That's not so funny. They told me Chris was drowned. I knew Chris could swim like an eel. I knew that I had been out all night. And the sergeant was looking at me with a Who-are-you-and-what-are-you-doing-here expression."
"But the sergeant had no idea that the drowning was more than an accident. He had no reason to look at you in that way."