Free Half a Crown by Jo Walton Page B

off.
    “No, sir, there you’re wrong, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because we’re armed, and that means we don’t need to push people around to show we can. Like the army. We know we can, and so we don’t need to.”
    “That’s an extraordinary theory, sergeant,” Carmichael said. He knew Evans had rounded up Jews, and shot them too, when they’d tried to escape. It was impossible to escape brutality, in the Watch, but perhaps it really did seem to Sergeant Evans that brutality was better than petty humiliation.

7
     
    I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life as I was to see Uncle Carmichael in that little office. I felt my eyes positively filling up with tears at the familiar sight of him. Not that he looked pleased to see me; quite the opposite. He had his official face on, but he was quite clearly furious. I didn’t know if that was directed at my idiocy in getting myself arrested or at the red-haired Paddington officer who was clearly enjoying having the advantage on Uncle Carmichael for once. But controlled fury was a familiar mood of Uncle Carmichael’s. It made me feel as if this was only a scrape and that I could smile and apologize and get out of it unscathed. Most things were like that. Indeed, there had only been three things in my life so far where I couldn’t do that. The first was my mother walking out when I was six. The second was my father being killed when I was eight. And the third was Betsy getting herself into a mess in Zurich the year before, when we were both seventeen. Since my interview with the redheaded policeman I’d been starting to feel intimations that this arrest might be a fourth.
    I went to stand in the corner of the office, out of the way. As well as the horrible policeman and Uncle Carmichael and a bobby, there was solid old Sergeant Evans, who was Welsh, and who loved horses almost as much as I had when I was fourteen. His wife, Jean, hadtaken a kind interest in me ever since my father died. Only the week before, Betsy and I had taken her for tea in the Ritz.
    None of them looked at me while they squabbled over the papers. For a moment as he and the redhead bullied each other, Uncle Carmichael seemed his mirror image. I looked at him sideways as he made threats, wondering if I knew him at all. Then we left, the three of us stalking out with our heads held high, like a trio of affronted duchesses in a fish market. There was a police car outside, a plain black Bentley, the 1958 model with the silver grille. The driver didn’t get out, and Sergeant Evans opened the back door for me. Uncle Carmichael sat in the back next to me, and Sergeant Evans in the front next to the driver.
    “Where to?” the driver asked.
    There was a pause. “Mrs. Maynard’s?” I suggested.
    “No,” Uncle Carmichael said, abruptly. “Not yet, anyway. Betsy Maynard has broken her arm, and I need to have words with her mother. Severe words. Certainly not today. I need to talk to you.”
    “Is Betsy all right?” I asked. I could imagine all too easily how a bone could have cracked in that riot, and began to worry about how bad it was.
    Uncle Carmichael looked perhaps a shade less annoyed as he turned his head to look at me, and his voice was certainly softer. Thinking of Betsy can have that effect on people. “I spoke to her on the telephone, and she was mostly worried about you. I expect she’ll recover all right.”
    “How about going back to the Watchtower?” Sergeant Evans ventured.
    Uncle Carmichael looked at his watch, and frowned. I glanced at my own watch reflexively. It was ten to four, which seemed preposterous, even though I knew about all the hours of waiting. I should have been with Betsy having our fittings for our Court dresses. “I noticed you were limping. Do you need a doctor, Elvira?”
    “I don’t think so,” I said. “I lost a shoe, and then I banged my knee when that vile policeman pushed me. It’ll be all right.”
    “Then home, I think,” Uncle