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    “But you can’t kidnap people just to get to know them!”
    I want to know you very much. I wouldn’t have a chance in London. I’m not clever and all that. Not your class. You wouldn’t be seen dead with me in London.
    “That’s not fair. I’m not a snob. I hate snobs. I don’t pre-judge people.”
    I’m not blaming you, I said.
    “I hate snobbism.” She was quite violent. She had a way of saying some words very strong, very emphatic. “Some of my best friends in London are—well, what some people call working class. In origin. We just don’t think about it.”
    Like Peter Catesby, I said. (That was the young man with the sports car’s name.)
    “Him! I haven’t seen him for months. He’s just a middle-class suburban oaf.”
    I could still see her climbing into his flashy M.G. I didn’t know whether to trust her.
    “I suppose it’s in all the papers.”
    I haven’t looked.
    “You might go to prison for years.”
    Be worth it. Be worth going for life, I said.
    “I promise, I swear that if you let me go I will not tell anyone. I’ll tell them all some story. I will arrange to meet you as often as you like, as often as I can when I’m not working. Nobody will ever know about this except us.”
    I can’t, I said. Not now. I felt like a cruel king, her appealing like she did.
    “If you let me go now I shall begin to admire you. I shall think, he had me at his mercy, but he was chivalrous, he behaved like a real gentleman.”
    I can’t, I said. Don’t ask. Please don’t ask.
    “I should think, someone like that must be worth knowing.” She sat perched there, watching me.
    I’ve got to go now, I said. I went out so fast I fell over the top step. She got off the drawers and stood looking up at me in the door with a strange expression.
    “Please,” she said. Very gently and nicely. It was difficult to resist.
    It was like not having a net and catching a specimen you wanted in your first and second fingers (I was always very clever at that), coming up slowly behind and you had it, but you had to nip the thorax, and it would be quivering there. It wasn’t easy like it was with a killing-bottle. And it was twice as difficult with her, because I didn’t want to kill her, that was the last thing I wanted.
     
     
    She often went on about how she hated class distinction, but she never took me in. It’s the way people speak that gives them away, not what they say. You only had to see her dainty ways to see how she was brought up. She wasn’t la-di-da, like many, but it was there all the same. You could see it when she got sarcastic and impatient with me because I couldn’t explain myself or I did things wrong. Stop thinking about class, she’d say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.
    I don’t hold it against her, she probably said and did some of the shocking things she did to show me she wasn’t really refined, but she was. When she was angry she could get right up on her high horse and come it over me with the best of them.
    There was always class between us.
     
     
    I went into Lewes that morning. Partly I wanted to see the papers, I bought the lot. All of them had something. Some of the tripe papers had quite a lot, two had photographs. It was funny, reading the reports. There were things I didn’t know before.
     
     
    Longhaired blonde, art-student Miranda Grey, 20, who last year won a major scholarship to London’s top Slade School of Art, is missing. She lived in term-time at 29 Hamnet Rd., N.W.3, with her aunt, Miss C. Vanbrugh-Jones, who late yesterday night alerted the police.
    After class on Tuesday Miranda phoned to say she was going to a cinema and would be home soon after eight.
    That was the last time she was seen.
     
     
    There was a big photo of her and beside it it said: Have You Seen This Girl?
    Another paper gave me a good laugh.
     
     
    Hampstead residents have been increasingly concerned in recent months about prowling “wolves”