“You bastard,” said Harry Grant again. He was cool now, and the hand that reached out to grasp Jack Lett’s collar was cool, and the clenched fist that hit the other man full on the mouth was especially cool, cool with fury, coolly accurate. Lett’s lips glowed suddenly crimson, and he fell back, cursing; and the cool fist caught him again, between his ear and his streaming jaw, and he toppled backwards, senseless before he hit the ground.

“You bastard,” said Harry Grant, looking down at him. Though the room was suddenly cleaner, because Lett was no longer in it, in any active sense, Grant had a moment of flaming anger, of fury that Esther had been entrapped (as she must have been) by so swinish a gang. Then, since there was nothing left for him to hit, he relaxed, and his arm fell to his side again.

It stayed there only for a moment, until he turned, attracted by a new sound. This time it was the door. It opened awkwardly, and Charles Bannister appeared, framed within it like a blotchy painting of a man in evening dress.

He was clearly drunk, but that was not going to matter. That was just his bad luck.

Grant advanced towards him. “You bastard,” he said softly.

“Extraordinary remark to make,” said Charles Bannister owlishly. His eyes swivelled round, took in Lett’s still form on the ground, rose again with foolish surprise. “I must say–” he began, but that was not a sentence he ever finished. Grant’s fist caught him flush on the chin, and he collapsed backwards, like an elegant sack whose outlines had suddenly melted into rags.

Harry Grant stepped over them both, and made for the outer door. The whole suite was now very silent, as if waiting for his next move.

He did not know what that was to be. He found that he was still shaking with rage. He was far too angry to work any of it out, too confused and shocked to decide what to do.

“Tomorrow,” he said, addressing the air outside the suite, haranguing the elevator. “Tomorrow. Wait until tomorrow. Then I’ll break the whole story.”

Chapter Thirteen

Grant could never decide why he did not break the whole story next day, or what it was that sent him to Boston, on the midday plane, instead of filing the full account of what he had discovered, from New York. All his normal newspaper instinct urged him to send the story then and there; all his second thoughts – crowding in on him even as he walked down the single flight of stairs to his hotel room – told him to delay.

There were many such thoughts, many conflicting reasons for waiting. Lying awake that night, and watching the dawn through the curtains later, he tried to sort them out.

Perhaps he was delaying because it was too big a story to handle, without direct consultation at headquarters. It was not that he wanted to throw the whole thing in Ryan’s lap: he really felt he needed the older man’s comment and criticism, his sustaining presence, before he made up his mind how it should appear in print.