'I'm afraid that is not possible. You'll be needed to identify Ratnadatta, and to substantiate certain portions of the statement we shall take from Mary Morden. As far as she is concerned, I think you should look at it that she is doing no more and no less than what quite a number of other brave women did during the war - putting a good face on some rather unpleasant experiences as the price of outwitting the enemy, gaining his confidence and bringing home the goods. It is important, too, that we should endeavour to get hold of the negative and all the copies of that photograph of her and Ruddy; and, if they can be found, you would be the most suitable person to take charge of them at once; so I think you had better go in with the police.'
A ghost of Barney's old grin momentarily lit up his face. 'Yes, I can well imagine a bawdy-minded copper trying to slip one in his pocket if he got the chance. I'll do as you wish, then, and make getting hold of the photographs my special task.'
When Barney had left him, C.B. thoughtfully refilled his pipe. He felt far from happy at having given away Mary Morden's past, but he had seen no other means of dealing with the situation that had arisen. Personally he had no doubts at all that Mary had gone willingly to the house in Cremorne on Saturday night, and that she had remained there because she believed that doing so would give her the chance she had been seeking to win the confidence of the Satanists; therefore the only danger she was in was that she might give herself away, and that was no greater risk than she had run when making her earlier visits to the place.
But Barney, not knowing the true facts about Mary, had naturally viewed the situation very differently, and the acute anxiety he had displayed on her account had made it evident that he was in love with her. It was that which had shown C.B. the red light. Knowing that Barney was not only brave and resourceful but, under the skin, a wild Irishman, there had emerged the possibility that he might take the law into his own hands and attempt, unassisted, Mary's rescue.
Such an attempt Verney regarded as not only unnecessary but both liable to upset Mary's campaign and almost certainly doomed to failure; above all, the last thing he wanted was for the Satanists to be prematurely alarmed by a one-man raid, as that would mean losing the bulk of the bag. Therefore, the only way to make certain of preventing Barney from ruining the whole coup had been to tell him that, even if for the next few days Mary had to submit to being treated as though she was an inmate of a brothel, her early life had conditioned her to come through that mentally unharmed, and that she had actually expected that she might have to lend herself with apparent willingness to such treatment.
Barney meanwhile, having gone down in the lift, was walking, without thinking where he was going, along the street, desperately trying to reconcile his feelings for Margot with what he had just learnt about Mary.
During his long abortive watch for her in Cromwell Road the previous night, the belief that she was out dancing with some other man had brought home to him the fact that he really was in love with her; and, since his discovery that morning that she had been carried off by Ratnadatta, the thought of what she might be going through as a prisoner of the Satanists had made him aware that he loved her desperately. But now? Could one possibly love a girl who had been a prostitute?
To do so was against all a man's natural instincts. If one really loved a girl one wanted her for keeps. That meant marriage, and through the generations male mentality had been fashioned to demand that the future mother of a man's children should be chaste. Basically that was his own view, but he recognized that standards of morality had grown far more lax since women had claimed equal rights with men in almost every sphere of life and, like most men of his age, he would have been quite ready to ignore the past if, on asking a girl to marry him, she had confessed to having already had a lover, or even several, providing they had been genuine love affairs and she had not made herself cheap. But for a girl to sell her body for money to anyone who cared to buy it, to go to bed night after night with a succession of different men, most of whom she did not even know by name, was a totally different matter. The thought of Mary's having led such a life made him squirm, and he could not bring himself to believe that she had really ever done so.
There then came into his mind the first night that he had taken her to dinner at the Hungaria and how, in the taxi afterwards, when he had tried to kiss her, she had accused him of treating her like a tart. Her then seemingly unreasonable outburst was now explained, and with bitter cynicism he recalled the saying that there was 'no prude so great as a reformed whore'. Yet she had been far from prudish on that last evening when they had been up in her flat together and, as they lay embraced upon the sofa for a while, she had returned his caresses with a fervour equal to his own.
Even so, C.B.'s horrible revelation did provide the basis for the intense sympathy she had shown for girls whom men paid to make use of without a thought of what might happen to them afterwards should they get in the family way, and it now caused Barney to wonder if such a misfortune had ever befallen her. It was certainly a possibility and, if so, as from the secret report on Morden's death he knew that Teddy had been married for four years, she must have been very young at the time, anyway not more than nineteen.
Visualizing her at that age in such straits wrung his heart with pity, and he recalled C.B.'s remarking that she had 'come up the hard way'. In an intelligent woman, given a reasonable amount of money, present appearances were nothing to go by, and her natural alertness of mind would have enabled her to make the best of any education she had been given. But perhaps she had been brought up in a slum and driven on to the streets by a drunken father before she was old enough to stand up for herself.
But no, that did not fit in with her having been a cabaret girl, and C.B. had made it clear that she had been not actually a professional prostitute, but a glamour-girl who needed a bit of extra money. That implied that she had not exposed herself to such depths of degradation but, theoretically at least, was guilty of a greater degree of moral turpitude; and Barney could not make up his mind if that made matters better or worse.
As far as the present was concerned, he had to acknowledge the justice of C.B.'s defence of her. 'Coming up the hard way' implied that she had derived little enjoyment from her youthful promiscuity; so it was fair to assume that anything of a similar nature that she might have let herself in for with a crew of depraved Satanists would mean for her a highly disagreeable experience. Yet she did not stand to better herself from it in any way. She had gone into the ring prepared to face this punishment in a gallant fight against evil and for no other reason.
For that, who could blame her? He certainly had no right to do so. They had met on the 5th April, barely a month ago, and the affaire on which they had tentatively entered had not developed into anything worthy of the name until the previous week. There had not yet been a hint on either side that she might soon consent to become his mistress, much less that they should become engaged; so she was perfectly free to dispose of herself as she saw fit and he had not the faintest grounds for thinking of her as being unfaithful to him.
After blindly walking the streets for over an hour he pulled himself together and decided that he must get her out of his mind by throwing himself headlong into his routine work. On Saturday he must take part in the raid. He would see her then, and would have to do so on several occasions afterwards while the papers concerning the prosecutions arising out of the raid were prepared. At such times he would endeavour to mask the mixed emotions it was certain she would arouse in him by a display of cheerful friendliness; but he would excuse himself on the plea of urgent work from making any further private dates with her. Then as soon as the case was over, he would no longer have to see her at all, so the sooner he practised forgetting her, the better.