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THAT ROYLE GIRL
45

Clarke started slightly at this information. "Did he! . . . Where is it, Arthur?"

"Police were called to a flat near the lake on one of those streets near Wilson Avenue. They found her there. They've got him, and another girl, in a flat near to it. Denson's calling from Ketlar's room in the flat."

"Hmhm," said Calvin and got out of bed, stripping his pajamas from his strong, lean body; and he began to dress with deliberate, determined movements. "Sorry he had to knock up Emily and you."

"Oh, we weren't asleep," Arthur replied, aware that Calvin's mind was not really concerned with the small disturbance to Emily and him. "You're going down, I suppose."

"Yes. Do you want to lend me a car?"

"Course. Anything else?"

"Think not, thanks," Calvin said, in his restrained way, neither by voice nor gesture expressing the emotion under which he labored. Yet Todd, watching his slow, exact hands, which never hastened and never fumbled at shoe-eye or button, discerned the underlying agitation.

"What did Calvin say about it?" Emily interrogated her husband when he returned to her.

"Nothing," Arthur reported.

"But he must have said something, when you woke him up to tell him to go to a case where a man has killed his wife."

"He didn't say a thing," Arthur insisted. "But don't worry. He'll attend to that interloper."

"What interloper do you mean?" Emily asked.

"Ketlar, who's come and killed his wife in Calvin's country. Oh, Calvin will see to him."

Emily would not let this pass. "It's no more Calvin's country than it's ours or any one's else, Arthur!"

"Don't you think it," her husband warned her.