"
"Do you mean to say," said the Major--"I am now supposing that all your
ridiculous ideas are true, and that Miss King will really--"
He hesitated.
"Kill Simpkins?" said Meldon. "That's what you want done, isn't it?"
"Do you mean to say that you think the judge will go out of his way to
encourage her to commit another crime?"
"It's not the business of a judge to prevent crime," said Meldon. "You
mustn't mix him up with the police. The police have to see that people
don't do what's wrong. Judges have to punish them afterwards for what
the police fail to stop them from doing. The judge won't step out of
his proper sphere and start doing police work. If he did there'd be
endless confusion. And besides that, I don't expect the judge will
think that she means to kill Simpkins. He doesn't understand as we do
that she is acting in the interests of her art. She probably, in fact
certainly, hasn't told him what she told me--that she has come to
Ballymoy with the intention of going on with her work. He'll think
that the narrow shave she had over the Lorimer affair will have given
her a lesson, and that from now on she'll want to settle down and live
a quiet, affectionate kind of life.
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