Grant hesitated; analysing, as always, just exactly what he did feel.
‘I find vanity repellent. As a person I loathe it, and as a policeman I distrust it.’
‘It’s a harmless sort of weakness,’ Tad said, with a tolerant lift of a shoulder.
‘That is just where you are wrong. It is the utterly destructive quality. When you say vanity, you are thinking of the kind that admires itself in mirrors and buys things to deck itself out in. But that is merely personal conceit. Real vanity is something quite different. A matter not of person but of personality. Vanity says “I must have this because I am me”. It is a frightening thing because it is incurable. You can never convince Vanity that anyone else is of the slightest importance; he just doesn’t understand what you are talking about. He will kill a person rather than be put to the inconvenience of doing a six months’ stretch.’
‘But that’s being insane.’
‘Not according to Vanity’s reckoning. And certainly not in the medical sense. It is merely Vanity being logical. It is, as I said, a frightening trait; and the basis of all criminal personality. Criminals—true criminals, as opposed to the little man who cooks the accounts in an emergency or the man who kills his wife when he finds her in bed with a stranger—true criminals vary in looks and tastes and intelligence and method as widely as the rest of the world does, but they have one invariable characteristic: their pathological vanity.’
Tad looked as though he were only half-listening because he was using this information on some private reference of his own. ‘Listen, Mr Grant,’ he said, ‘are you saying that this guy Lloyd isn’t to be trusted?’
Grant thought that over.
‘I wish I knew,’ he said at last. ‘I wish I knew.’
‘We-e-ll!’ said Tad. ‘That sure puts a different look on things, don’t it!’