Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark

loose factors, small as that number is.”
    “Will you help me to launch a new search?”
    “Oh, no. Not now.”
    “Oh, yes. Now, Dr. Murray,” said pretty Lacey. “Now,” she repeated.
    “Call me Joe,” he said.
    “Joe,” she said, “now,” she said.
    Joe was the youngest son of a prosperous family. He was now in his sixties, not too tall, fairly slim. He had never married again after his young wife had died while he was teaching at Cambridge. He was a virtual and ardent zoologist and in fact took up a zoologist’s interest in many human affairs outside of his personal life. About Lucan he appeared to feel as he spoke, almost zoologically. What species was Lucan? Joe was all the more curious on this score, in that he had been a friend of Lucan’s. How he regretted not having had long conversations with Lucan outside of topics such as baccarat, craps, poker, vingt-et-un, and the possible winner of the three thirty.
    Now that he came to think of it, he had never thought of Lucan, so that when the scandal broke and Lucan did not step forward to clear himself it did seem to Joe as if Lucan could possibly be, in a way hitherto partly concealed from his acquaintances, bad-tempered to a degree that was outside of human, and was something else. Well, he reflected, that’s perhaps another way of saying that poor Lucan was mad. Lucan besides was a silk purse, and it was useless to expect such an object to turn into something so good, so true, as a sow’s ear. “You know,” Joe said then to Lacey, “I think there must have been an accomplice, a hit man.” “Why do you think so?”
    “I knew Lucan. Not closely, but enough. When we were undergraduates. He had no imagination, or at least very little. Now, think of what he claimed in his letters and statements to his friends and on the phone to his mother the night of the murder. He said he was passing the house in Lower Belgrave Street where his wife and children were staying, when he saw from the pavement a man in the basement attacking his wife, and went to the rescue, and got all bloodied. It is the question of his seeing a man. To someone of limited imagination it would be a natural excuse-a man. The man was most probably, in fact, the man prominent in his mind and memory, the hit man, the accomplice.”
    “The police network failed,” said Lacey, “to produce any man on the run that night. They found no accomplice. There was no light in the basement, and nothing could be seen, from the street, anyway.”
    “The police didn’t find Lucan, either. They were slow throughout. If you’d like to leave your notes with me, and any cuttings that are contemporaneous with the crime, I’ll give a bit of thought to the subject. Now, my dear, you’ll stay for a bite, won’t you? My helper puts it ready in the microwave, and there’s always more than enough for two.”
    Lacey accepted the invitation and made herself at home at the kitchen table. She told Joe how she was separated from her husband, awaiting a divorce; there was no real fault on either side but that was how it was. Joe told her she was good-looking, perhaps even prettier than her mother had been at her age. He remembered Maria Twickenham quite well, she had been around and knew Lucan, “though not intimately.” But who had known Lucan intimately?
    “Lucan-who knew him really?” Joe said.
    “His wife? His parents?”
    “Only partially-none of them could have known him, fully.”
    “He talked previous to the murder about murdering his wife.”
    “Yes, well, talk . . . People often talk that way. It doesn’t mean anything, necessarily; in fact, quite the opposite. It could be argued that if he intended the murder he wouldn’t have talked about it.”
    “I want you to come with me and see that priest I mentioned in my letter. Is he still at the same parish?” “Father Ambrose? I got a Christmas card. Yes.”
    “You’ll come with me?”
    “I don’t know about that. And there’s Benny