She stiffened a fraction. “She was my friend,” she said.

“Is she still your friend?” he asked quietly. “You have said as little as possible even now about her⁠—little that I do not know of my own knowledge. And things being as they are, Penelope, if she is still your friend there is only one thing that I can do.”

“That is?”

“To resign from the service, and find some other profession that will enable me to support a wife.”

Both had come to a halt and she now lifted her grey eyes to his. “I see,” she said. Then after a pause: “You mean that as a police officer you will have to go on and arrest her?”

“I mean more than that, my dear. I mean that I cannot suppress what I believe to be the important evidence of a vital witness.”

“However much I begged you?”