6. Do you prefer the murder to have taken place in a milieu which seems (a) exotic (b) sordid (c) much like your own and the people next door’s?

7. If (c) do you prefer the case to reveal that beneath the surface life was (a) as apparently respectable as on the surface (b) a hidden cesspit of vice and degradation?

Nobbs enjoyed the survey. ‘ “Do you prefer a female corpse to be naked, or to be clad in underclothes?” ’ he repeated to Goldwasser. ‘That’s what I call a good question, mate. That’s what I call a good question.’

Goldwasser, his heart heavy, sought refuge from Nobbs and his own questions in several new volumes of IQ tests which a friend in America had sent him. They were beautiful questions, with beautiful answers, and for a few hours they made the world’s more horrible contents seem infinitely remote and insignificant. And the results gave his graph for the quarter a slight and credible upward gradient.

14

The Security Committee, which was Nunn, was much occupied with the problem of Riddle, the Head of the Political Department. The Committee, or rather Miss Fram, took up copies of the minutes of all the other committees and filed them in a filing cabinet labelled, for security reasons, ‘Sporting Records.’ When Nunn could spare the time from squash and rugby he browsed through them, looking for any signs of security weakness. What he saw confirmed his instinctive distrust of four of the Heads of Departments – Macintosh, Goldwasser, Rowe, and Riddle. It was difficult to put one’s finger on it exactly, but to the trained eye of an old security hand there was something dissident about those four, some residual permanent narkedness, something irreducibly antipathetic to the general idea of champagne, picture hats, official handshakes, and curtsies in shapeless silk dresses. Nunn had met their type before. Sportingly tolerant though one was, one could not but be put on one’s guard by the lack of enthusiasm with which such people scrummed down on the rugby field. One could tell a man’s general character pretty accurately from the way he scrummed down. Nunn had never seen Macintosh, Goldwasser, Rowe, or Riddle scrum down, but one could tell pretty well the way a man would scrum down from his general character.

Nunn could hardly have seen Riddle on a rugby field, of course, since she was a woman. Nunn thought about her carefully, and the longer he thought about her, the more she seemed to be the worst of the lot. In the records her name turned up increasingly often attached to undesirable minority opinions. Here she was opposing a recommendation that the Director’s little girl should present the Queen with a bouquet. There she was arguing against the hiring of a red carpet and a canvas awning to put outside the main entrance, against compulsory practice for all staff in official handshaking. The more detailed the arrangements for the royal visit became, the less effort she seemed to be making to hide her extraordinary opinions.