the lounging one said.
“Let me take him.” The plea was harsh, and urgent.
The other shook his head almost indifferently. He was long and loose-limbed and casual, dressed in a tweed jacket and flannels. It was impossible to tab him. He might have been an intercollegiate miler or a minor poet, until you ran into that cool and unruffled deadliness in the eyes. He had that indefinable something about him which enables you to tell the master craftsman from the apprentice in any trade, whether you know anything about it or not. There was something British about his speech.
“All right,” the pug said reluctantly. He looked hungrily at me, and then at the girl. “You want me to ask her some more?”
I waited, feeling the hot tension in the room. It was going to be rough if he started asking her some more. I wasn’t any hero, and didn’t want to be one, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you could watch for very long without losing your head, and with Tweed Jacket you probably never lost it more than once.
Tweed Jacket’s amused gaze flicked from me to the girl and he shook his head again. “Waste of time,” he said. “He’d scarcely be here, under the circumstances, unless the rules have changed. Might go through the rooms, though, and have a dekko at the ash trays. You know his brand of cigarettes.”
The pug went out, managing to bump against me and push me off balance with a hard shoulder as he went past. I said nothing. He turned his face a little and we looked at each other. I remembered the obscene brutality of the way he was holding and hitting her, and the yearning in the stare was mutual.
There was silence in the room except for Shannon Wayne’s stirring on the sofa. She sat up. The whole side of her face was inflamed and her eyes were wet with involuntary tears. The bathing suit was one of the old ones with shoulder straps and one of them was torn loose so the front of it slanted downward across a satiny breast. She fumbled at the strap, watching Tweed Jacket with fear in her eyes. The button was gone. She held it together and went on enduring.
Tweed Jacket apparently found us tiresome in the extreme. He crushed out his cigarette, whistling a fragment of the “Barcarolle” from The Tales of Hoffman. The pug came out of the last room.
“Water haul,” he said, spreading his hands.
Tweed Jacket’s eyebrows raised. “Beg pardon?”
“Nothing. Nobody here for a long time, from the looks of it.”
“Right.” Tweed Jacket unfolded himself languidly and stood up.
The pug looked at me, his hazel eyes bright with wickedness. “How about Big Boy? We better ask him, hadn’t we?”
“Rather unnecessary. I’d suggest you stick to business, old boy.”
There was no longer any doubt as to who was boss, but the pug wanted me so badly he tried once more. “This is a quiet place to ask, and he might know Macaulay.”
Tweed Jacket waved him toward the door. “Quite unlikely,” he said. His eyes flicked over the girl’s figure again with that same cool amusement. “I’d say his interest in Macaulay was vicarious, to say the least. Vive le sport.” They went out.
In the dead silence I could hear their footsteps retreating along the pier, and in a moment the car started. I breathed deeply. I was pulled tight and soaked with sweat. Tweed Jacket’s urbane manner covered a very professional sort of deadliness, and it could easily have gone the other way. Only the profit motive was lacking. He simply didn’t believe Macaulay was here.
I turned. She was still holding the front of the bathing suit. “Thank you,” she said, without any emotion whatever, and looked away from me. “I’m sorry you had to become involved. As soon as I can change, I’ll drive you back to town.”
I walked over in front of her, so mixed up now I didn’t know anything. “It’s all right,” I said. “But I wonder if you’d tell me what this is all about? And why you threw that gun in the lake?”
She looked through the place I’d have been standing if I had existed. “Really,” she said coldly, “I thought you had that all figured out.”
She was about as beautiful when she was angry as at any time. I tried to filter that out of my mind and look at her objectively. It wasn’t easy.
What had changed the picture? Nothing had really happened