"Allow me to do the talking this time, would you?" Margo scowled.

Morgan-Ash decided that amounted to consent, and got out of the car.

He wanted to talk to the officer himself because Margo's notions of how to conduct a conversation with the police seemed to stem from some sort of deep-rooted adolescent resentment. He'd found that, despite appearing to be in her early fifties, Margo had a strong tendency to rebel against authority simply because it was authority. Richard had no such inclination, himself. Not because he had any greater respect for authority-qua-authority than she did. He probably had even less.

But if there was one advantage to having been an officer in one of Britain's paratrooper regiments, as a young man, it was that he took authority for granted. "What seems to be the problem, officer?" He made no attempt to disguise his pronounced accent. First, because he couldn't anyway. Richard had the sort of upper class English accent that was so deeply ingrained he doubted if he could disguise it to save his life. Having attended Eton himself, he was skeptical that its storied playing fields had much to do with Britain's military prowess.

For sure and certain, not one of the very tough paras he'd commanded in the field had ever attended the school or even dreamed of doing so.

They came from a completely different class altogether. But the school was superb at drumming in the proper accent. Besides, it would probably help. Decades of movie-watching, he'd found, had ingrained most Americans with the attitude that a man who spoke English with that sort of accent was a legitimate sort of fellow.