“Then why, in Heaven’s name, didn’t you get on to me?”

“You?” said Dimble.

For one moment, the first for many years, Mark saw himself exactly as a man like Dimble saw him. It almost took his breath away.

“Look here,” he said. “You don’t . . . it’s too fantastic! You don’t imagine I knew about it! You don’t really believe I send policemen about to man-handle my own wife!” He had begun on the note of indignation, but ended by trying to insinuate a little jocularity. If only Dimble would give even the ghost of a smile: anything to move the conversation on to a different level.

But Dimble said nothing and his face did not relax. He had not, in fact, been perfectly sure that Mark might not have sunk even to this, but out of charity he did not wish to say so.

“I know you’ve always disliked me,” said Mark. “But I didn’t know it was quite as bad as that.” And again Dimble was silent, but for a reason Mark could not guess. The truth was that his shaft had gone home. Dimble’s conscience had for years accused him of a lack of charity towards Studdock and he had struggled to amend it: he was struggling now.

“Well,” said Studdock in a dry voice, after the silence had lasted for several seconds, “there doesn’t seem to be much more to say. I insist on being told where Jane is.”

“Do you want her to be taken to Belbury?”

Mark winced. It was as if the other had read the very thought he had had in the Bristol half an hour ago.

“I don’t see, Dimble,” he said, “why I should be cross-questioned in this way. Where is my wife?”

“I have no permission to tell you. She is not in my house nor under my care. She is well and happy and safe. If you still have the slightest regard for her happiness you will make no attempt to get into touch with her.”

“Am I some sort of leper or criminal that I can’t even be trusted to know her address?”

“Excuse me. You are a member of the N.I.C.E. who have already insulted, tortured, and arrested her. Since her escape she has been left alone only because your colleagues do not know where she is.”

“And if it really was the N.I.C.E. police, do you suppose I’m not going to have a very full explanation out of them? Damn it, what do you take me for?”

“I can only hope that you have no power in the N.I.C.E. at all. If you have no power, then you cannot protect her. If you have, then you are identified with its policy. In neither case will I help you to discover where Jane is.”

“This is fantastic,” said Mark. “Even if I do happen to hold a job in the N.I.C.E. for the moment, you know me.”

“I do not know you,” said Dimble. “I have no conception of your aims or motives.”

He seemed to Mark to be looking at him not with anger or contempt but with that degree of loathing which produces in those who feel it a kind of embarrassment-as if he were an obscenity which decent people are forced, for very shame, to pretend that they have not noticed. In this Mark was quite mistaken. In reality his presence was acting on Dimble as a summons to rigid self control. Dimble was simply trying very hard not to hate, not to despise, above all not to enjoy hating and despising, and he had no idea of the fixed severity which this effort gave to his face. The whole of the rest of the conversation went on under this misunderstanding.

“There has been some ridiculous mistake,” said Mark.

“I tell you I’ll look into it thoroughly. I’ll make a row. I suppose some newly enrolled policeman got drunk or something. Well, he’ll be broken. I . . .”

“It was the chief of your police, Miss Hardcastle herself, who did it.”

“Very well. I’ll break her then. Did you suppose I was going to take it lying down? But there must be some mistake. It can’t . . .”

“Do you know Miss Hardcastle well?” asked Dimble. Mark was silenced. And he thought (quite wrongly) that Dimble was reading his mind to the bottom and seeing there his certainty that Miss Hardcastle had done this very thing and that he had no more power of calling her to account than of stopping the revolution of the Earth.

Suddenly the immobility of Dimble’s face changed, and he spoke in a new voice. “Have you the means to bring her to book?” he said. “Are you already as near the centre of Belbury as that? If so, then you have consented to the murder of Hingest, the murder of Compton. If so, it was by your orders that Mary Prescott was raped and battered to death in the sheds behind the station. It is with your approval that criminals-honest criminals whose hands you are unfit to touch-are being taken from the jails to which British judges sent them on the conviction of British juries and packed off to Belbury to undergo for an indefinite period, out of reach of the law, whatever tortures and assaults on personal identity you call Remedial Treatment. It is you who have driven two thousand families from their homes to die of exposure in every ditch from here to Birmingham or Worcester. It is you who can tell us why Place and Rowley and Cummingham (at eighty years of age) have been arrested, and where they are. And if you are as deeply in it as that, not only will I not deliver Jane into your hands, but I would not deliver my dog.”

“Really-really,” said Mark. “This is absurd. I know one or two high-handed things have been done. You always get some of the wrong sort in a police force-specially at first. But-I mean to say-what have I ever done that you should make me responsible for every action that any N.I.C.E. official has taken-or is said to have taken in the gutter press?”

“Gutter press!” thundered Dimble, who seemed to Mark to be even physically larger than he was a few minutes before. “What nonsense is this? Do you suppose I don’t know that you have control of every paper in the country except one? And that one has not appeared this morning. Its printers have gone on strike. The poor dupes say they will not print articles attacking the people’s Institute. Where the lies in all the other papers come from you know better than I.”

It may seem strange to say that Mark, having long lived in a world without charity, had nevertheless very seldom met real anger. Malice in plenty he had encountered, but it all operated by snubs and sneers and stabbing in the back. The forehead and eyes and voice of this elderly man had an effect on him which was stifling and unnerving. At Belbury one used the words “whining” and “yapping” to describe any opposition which the actions of Belbury aroused in the outer world. And Mark had never had enough imagination to realise what the “whining” would really be like if you met it face to face.

“I tell you I knew nothing about it,” he shouted.

“Damn it, I’m the injured party. The way you talk, anyone would think it was your wife who’d been ill treated.”

“So it might have been. So it may be. It may be any man or woman in England. It was a woman and a citizen. What does it matter whose wife it was?”

“But I tell you I’ll raise hell about it. I’ll break the infernal bitch who did it, if it means breaking the whole N.I.C.E.”

Dimble said nothing. Mark knew that Dimble knew that he was now talking nonsense. Yet Mark could not stop. If he did not bluster, he would not know what to say.

“Sooner than put up with this,” he shouted, “I’ll leave the N.I.C.E.”

“Do you mean that?” asked Dimble with a sharp glance. And to Mark, whose ideas were now all one fluid confusion of wounded vanity and jostling fears and shames, this glance once more appeared accusing and intolerable. In reality it had been a glance of awakened hope: for charity hopes all things. But there was caution in it: and between hope and caution Dimble found himself once more reduced to silence.

“I see you don’t trust me,” said Mark, instinctively summoning to his face the manly and injured expression which had often served him well in headmasters’ studies.

Dimble was a truthful man. “No,” he said after a longish pause. “I don’t quite.”