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McGrath did not now want to go. The interview had generated a curious warmth, almost an intimacy, and McGrath wanted Ducane to comfort him. He also wanted to find out from Ducane just how gravely his misdemeanour was likely to be regarded, but he could not sufficiently collect his wits to ask the right questions. He stood staring down, opening and closing his pink mouth a little, like a kitten.
'Good day,' said Ducane.
'Thank you, Sir, thank you very much, Sir,' said McGrath.
He turned and rather slowly left the room. The little fly accompanied him.
Well, well, well, thought Ducane, leaning back in his chair.
It was probably true that what McGrath had told him about Radeechy and the girls was the substance of what he had told the newspaper men. There was certainly enough there to make an excellent story. About one of the girls, Helen of Troy, there was apparently something which McGrath was concealing, but it might be that this something had been concealed from the newspaper too. McGrath might simply have mentioned her to the journalists because, as he said to Ducane, her nom de guerre had 'struck' him, and it added a picturesque detail. And of course the concealed something might be perfectly i
About the blackmail, Ducane could not make up his mind.
While he had been questioning McGrath he had been led to conjecture that McGrath himself was the blackmailer, or at least a blackmailer. The idea now seemed to him less obvious.
McGrath had perhaps the personality to be a blackmailer, but, Ducane judged, only to be a small one. Ducane could imagine McGrath leering at Radeechy and suggesting respectfully that the pittance he was paid for the 'shopping' might be somewhat increased. And he could imagine Radeechy, half amused, increasing it. And he could see that McGrath, upon the death of the goose that laid the golden eggs, might well be carried away by the impulse to make a last packet out of, his poor employer. What he could not imagine was McGrath extracting enormous sums of money from Radeechy. McGrath would not have the nerve, and also he was not quite unpleasant enough.
It was probably true that he had been quite fond of Radeechy and in a way fascinated by him. But if McGrath's blackmail was petty it could scarcely count as a motive for Radeechy's suicide. Was there someone else, the real blackmailer, behind McGrath?
Ducane reminded himself that the purpose of the inquiry was to discover whether there was any 'security interest' in the case. Since Radeechy had no official access to secret material, the mere fact that he had put himself into a position to be blackmailed and possibly was being blackmailed, need not itself suggest such an interest, were it not that his suicide remained unexplained. If Radeechy had, ex hypothesi, been persuaded to procure and hand over secret material, and if he feared exposure, and even if he did not, here was a quite sufficient motive for suicide. On the other hand, there was not a shred of evidence that Radeechy had done so, he appeared to have no close relations with anyone who might have passed such material to him, those who knew him best did not see such conduct as being in his character, and Ducane was in clined to agree with them. Of course one did not know what price Radeechy might not have been prepared to pay to conceal some particular thing, perhaps some thing of which McGrath had not spoken, and which McGrath did not know, on the assumption that there was another and more important blackmailer in the picture. But Ducane did not seriously imagine that Radeechy had been spying. There was something else behind it all. He thought, my main task is to find out why he killed himself. And he thought, it may all be terribly simple, he may have done it just because of his wife. And if it is terribly simple it is going to be terribly hard to prove!
There had been no suggestion that Mr and Mrs Radeechy were other than 'devoted' and there was evidence to suggest that they had been happily married. The motive might indeed lie here. How Mrs Radeechy coped with the goings on with the 'girls' Ducane simply could not imagine; but he now understood enough about the mystery of married couples to know that there is practically nothing with which those extraordinary organisms ca
At this point Ducane began to think about Jessica. The co
Ducane knew, and knew it in a half-guilty, half-a
Sometimes they seemed to him the most corrupting influences in his life.
What Ducane was experiencing, in this form peculiar to him of imagining himself as a judge, was, though this was not entirely clear in his mind, one of the great paradoxes of morality, namely that in order to become good it may be necessary to imagine oneself good, and yet such imagining may also be the very thing which renders improvement impossible, either because of surreptitious complacency or because of some deeper blasphemous infection which is set up when goodness is thought about in the wrong way. To become good it may be necessary to think about virtue; although unreflective simple people may achieve a thoughtless excellence. Ducane was in any case highly reflective and had from childhood quite explicitly set before himself the aim of becoming a good man; and although he had little of thA demoniac in his nature there was a devil of pride, a stiff Calvinistic Scottish devil, who was quite capable of bringing Ducane to utter damnation, and Ducane knew this perfectly well.