50 After tidying up, I went methodically around the flat, drawing curtains, checking windows, and locking and bolting all the doors. I even managed to fix the front door. "What are you doing?" Sandra asked, looking tired in the kitchen. "Pulling up the drawbridge." "Oh." Despite the hassle of tidying up the horrific mess, she seemed a great deal more focused and in command of herself, and when I had finished securing the entire flat, she said, "The police will want a list of what's gone. I will help you make it." "Thanks." We started on the dining room add made reasonable progress, with me putting the empty drawers back in the sideboard while trying to remember what each had once contained and Sandra writing down my dictation. I had been given a significant amount of cutlery and china over the years. A warmth for anything that belonged to my parents. My pleasure in owning it seemed to have vanished with the goods. Instead of be

52 When we had all finished eating, Sandra brought a tray of coffee. I invited the two policemen to relax on the settee, and we all paid the detective chief inspector kindly accolades as she cleared the table. "I almost forgot to tell you, Mr. Noone," Nelson said, "and it may not even matter. But a couple of interesting details came to my attention, and I would be remiss if I failed to share them." “Please do.” "We have continuously supposed that there are two unexplained couples involved in this case," said Nelson, "but that might not be true, sir." "Why’s that?" "One couple," Nelson said, "the so-called Mediterranean couple, were purportedly buzzed into Tina's residence by a neighbour, apparently after asserting to have a key to Tina’s flat. Detectives are clearly fascinated by the Mediterranean couple, and police artists have even created e-fits of them. The other couple met Tina Davis several times at the

Under arrest?" the Home Secretary cried. "Are you stupid? I am a Home Secretary! A representative of the Cabinet! I am a fragment of the Government!! Do you comprehend??""Yes!" Nelson said."I cannot be under arrest!" the Home Secretary continued. "I cannot be incarcerated! I cannot be put on trial! Don't you know anything?""I do understand," said Nelson calmly, "that no man's job designation seats him above the rules.""Ha!" the Home Secretary replied, whose pallid face was becoming more sanguine with each occurring second. "We become the law! We are the law! The directive is ours! It is not to be expended in opposition to us!"Sandra, Nelson, and I gaped in incredulity as the manacled man carried on. Alderman, progressing gradually, appeared from the bedroom and began to move toward us. The Home Secretary didn't seem to perceive; he just stormed on."We're the administration!" he bellowed. "We make the regulations. So clearly we cannot r

"But why?" Sandra demanded, "I cannot believe you are willing to give up, so easily.""When I said, I was going to drop it, what I meant was that the Home Secretary angle has been shut off to me, but there are more than one way to skin a cat.""Please, Quintus, tell me, what you are planning to do?""Very well. Unless I'm reading it entirely incorrect, the crime concerned as much personality elimination as bodily slaying. What could be the reason? It seems to me that Tina must have been doing something her managers found unbearable, something that made her a burden rather than an advantage, and I don't think she was very careful about it.""Go on," Sandra pressed."She was besieged for a three-branched attack: first, to quieten her forever; second, to make sure she would never be contemplated well-thought-of, though she may have been much more than that; and third, to warn her co-workers of the significances of pursuing the trail she chose."

"The three theories," I began, "are positively conceivable. Assuming what we recognise, we may deliberate them quite believable. But they are still theoretical. In extra words, they may be precise, but their correctness is by no way established. As such, they signify three areas of indecision. However, I do not regard these doubts as major flaws in our case, both because in all three examples, several reasonable replacements exist, and because these propositions are all efforts to respond consequential, or even relating, questions. We may never find acceptable responses to all these distant inquiries, but the fundamental of our case is built on solutions to other, more dominant, questions. Do you understand?" "I do," Sandra replied, "but I don't see where you're going with it." "I think Tina Davis was assassinated," I continued. "I think MI6 played a main role in her death, and I think so founded on deliberations dispassionate of these doubts. I think Tina was doing