Free Half a Crown by Jo Walton Page A

the Lancashire was coming into his vowels as it always did when he was agitated. Bannister was trying to get him on the defensive, and he wasn’t having it. He took a deep breath. “Bring Miss Royston in here immediately. We’re leaving.”
    Bannister nodded to the bobby, who left the room. “He’s just fetching her now,” he said. “What are Miss Royston’s political convictions?”
    “She’s an eighteen-year-old girl, she’s about to come out, she doesn’t have two political thoughts a year,” Carmichael said. “She won’t be old enough to vote for seven or eight years.”
    “A lot of the people we pulled in last night were young, the men especially,” Bannister said. “And some of the British Power ringleaders move in debutante circles. The connections seem to go very high.”
    He was drawing breath to go on, but Carmichael interrupted, tired of all this. “No doubt there’s a detailed report on all this on my desk at the Watch.”
    The bobby came back into the room with Elvira following him. She was limping and looked filthy and exhausted.
    “Uncle Carmichael,” she said, her voice wavering but determined not to cry, reminding Carmichael a great deal of how she had been when she was seven years old and had fallen down in the street outside her father’s house in Camden Town. She looked at Bannister with loathing, and stood beside Carmichael, as far from Bannister as she could be in the small room.
    “Soon get you away from this, Elvira,” he said. “Do you have the papers, Bannister?”
    Bannister hesitated. “I wanted to ask a few more questions,” he said.
    “Most Metropolitan officers find it to their advantage to cooperate with us,” Carmichael said, silkily. “Or you might find the price of noncooperation is rather high. If you get on the wrong side of me you might end up spending the rest of your career directing traffic in John O’Groats, or something considerably worse.” It would have given Carmichael no pleasure to ruin the man’s career, but he had done a lot worse.
    “Yes, sir,” Bannister said, his face wooden. “But this isn’t a Watch matter, is it? It’s a personal matter. You’re asking us to free Miss Royston unconditionally, not to transfer her into Watch custody. She looks to me like a crucial piece in the investigation. She and …” He peered at his notes. “Sir Alan Bellingham.”
    “I’ll take her into Watch custody if it’ll speed this up,” Carmichael said. Once in Watch custody the bureaucratic procedures were under his own control.
    “That’s hardly proper procedure,” Bannister said.
    Carmichael loathed the layers of red tape and “proper procedure” that surrounded everything these days. “Transfer her to Sergeant Evans’s Watch custody then. I assume that’s all right with you, Evans?”
    “Perfectly, sir,” Evans said. He leaned forward and took the papers from Bannister’s hand. “Where do I sign?”
    “Give those back at once!” Bannister demanded.
    Sergeant Evans held on to the papers for a moment, deliberately, then smoothed them between his fingers, scanned them, and signed at the bottom. “We’ve had about enough of your lip,” he said, handing them back. “We’re leaving.”
    Bannister handed Elvira’s identity card to Sergeant Evans.
    “Come on, sir, let’s get out of here,” Evans said, taking it.
    Carmichael glowered at Bannister, who looked back impassively. “Come on, Elvira.” He offered her his arm, which she took hesitantly.
    “Tuppenny ha’penny Hitler,” Evans said, as they left. “You were too soft on him, sir. Making himself important for the sake of it, trying to humiliate you because for once he had a bit of power. That’s what’s wrong with the country these days, too many men like him, sucking up when they have to and putting the boot in when they don’t. Now the Watch may have its dirty jobs to do from time to time—”
    “The Watch can be just as bad,” Carmichael said, cutting him