kindly⁵, for he was a fairman: “You couldn’t know that it was important.”
It wasn’t, he knew, any good to pass on his own anger and frustration⁶ by blaming it on the boy.
How should the boy have known? Part of his training was to uphold discipline, to make sure thathis superiors were only accosted⁷ at the proper times and in the proper places. If the girl had said itwas important or urgent, that would have been different. But she hadn’t been, he thought,remembering his first view of her in the office, that kind of girl. A slow thinker. A girl probablydistrustful of her own mental processes.
“Can you remember exactly what happened, and what she said to you, Pierce?” he asked.
Pierce was looking at him with a kind of eager gratitude⁸.
“Well, sir, she just come up to me when everyone was leaving and she sort of hesitated amoment and looked round just as though she were looking for someone. Not you, sir, I don’tthink. Somebody else. Then she come up to me and said could she speak to the police officer, andshe said the one that had given evidence. So, as I said, I saw you were busy with the chiefconstable so I explained to her that you were engaged just now, could she give me a message orcontact you later at the station. And I think she said that would do quite well. I said was it anythingparticular….”
“Yes?” Hardcastle leaned forward.
“And she said well not really. It was just something, she said, that she didn’t see how it couldhave been the way she’d said it was.”
“She didn’t see how what she said could have been like that?” Hardcastle repeated.
“That’s right, sir. I’m not sure of the exact words. Perhaps it was: ‘I don’t see how what she saidcan have been true.’ She was frowning and looking puzzled-like. But when I asked her, she said itwasn’t really important.”
Not really important, the girl had said. The same girl who had been found not long afterwardsstrangled in a telephone box….
“Was anybody near you at the time she was talking to you?” he asked.
“Well, there were a good many people, sir, filing out, you know. There’d been a lot of peopleattending the inquest. It’s caused quite a stir, this murder has, what with the way the Press havetaken it up and all.”

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