‘Well, it was wonderful of you to go to all that trouble for me instead of telling me to go fish in my burn. I’ll do as much for you some day.’
‘Are the fish in your burn biting?’
‘There’s hardly any burn, and the fish are cowering in the deepest recesses of the remaining pools. That is why I am reduced to taking an interest in cases that aren’t worth a flicker of real interest in busy places like South West One.’
But he knew that that was not so. It was not boredom that had driven him to this interest in B Seven. This—he had almost said—alliance. He had a curious feeling of identification with B Seven. Not in the sense of being one, but in the sense of having an identity of interests. This, in view of the fact that he had seen him only once and knew nothing whatever about him, was highly unreasonable. Was it perhaps that he had thought of B Seven as also wrestling with demons? Had the feeling of personal interest, the championship, begun in that?
He had supposed that B Seven’s Paradise had been oblivion. He had supposed that because of the whisky-sodden fug in the compartment. But the young man had not after all been sodden. He had not indeed been very drunk. Just tipsy. His flying backwards fall against the solid round bulk of the basin had been the kind of thing that might happen to anyone. His so-strangely guarded Paradise had not after all been oblivion.
He caught his attention back to what Williams was saying.
‘ What’s that?’
‘I forgot to say that the sleeping-car attendant is of the opinion that Martin was seen off by someone at Euston.’
‘Why is this an afterthought?’
‘Well, I gather that he wasn’t much of a help anyway, the sleeping-car chap. He seemed to treat the whole thing as a personal insult, the sergeant who was there said.’