There was a police officer standing on the other side of the table.
The room began to whirl, and Thomas Patrick caught the door frame to
steady himself.
“Well?” he said. His voice did not sound like his own.
Mary was standing now, he could see through a sort of black mist,
standing and searching his face with reddened, terrified eyes. Then he
was in the room, and the policeman had closed the door and was putting
him into a chair.
“Better sit down a minute,” he was saying. “No hurry.” And to Mary: “You
haven’t a bit of liquor in the house, have you? He needs it.”
“No.”
His head cleared a little, and he looked again at Mary, this strange,
frozen Mary who never came near him, but stood staring with those
dreadful eyes.
“I went out for a walk,” he said. “Then I got tired and sat down, and—”
“All right, son,” the officer broke in. “We’ll have all that, later—no
need of worrying the wife, y’understand.”
Suddenly Mary spoke.
“Pat!” she said tensely, “for God’s sake speak up. Tell him you didn’t
even know this Lily Elliot; tell him to go home and let us go to bed.
Get him out of here. What’s he doing here, worrying us to death? We’re
not criminals.”
It was about the Elliot girl. Then the Chief— The mist was going, and
wariness crept into his blue Irish eyes. It was a political frame-up, a
stall. The opposition was behind this. Well, let them get something from
him if they could.
“I’m not talking, one way or the other,” he said cannily.
“Pat!”
“I’m not talking, I tell you,” he addressed the policeman stubbornly.
“I’m not playing dirty politics for anybody, and you can chase that up
an alley and kill it!”
But it seemed the policeman was not trying to make him talk. It
appeared, too, that all that was wanted of him was to go somewhere, and
that Mary was to go to bed and not to worry. Long after, all that came
back to him, wiped out though it had been by the events that followed.
He remembered kissing Mary, and the frightened desperate way in which
she had clung to him, and a police car waiting around the corner, and
that silent drive to the City Hall.
It was only when he got to the City Hall that he knew he was under
arrest.
“What for?” he demanded, feverishly. “I’ve got a right to know, haven’t
I?”
“You’ll be able to do your talking in a minute,” some one said.
Then he was in the detective board room, with Stuart, the Chief of
detectives across a table from him, and half a dozen newspaper men
standing round. Some of them he knew, and there was curiosity in their
eyes, and pity.
Pity? For what?