And he didn't like to think about it.

"Don't be disturbed," the Queen said. "Please. I only want to help
you, Sir Kenneth; you know that."

"Well, of course I do," Malone said. "But--"

"Heavens to Betsy," she said. "Sir Kenneth, what kind of a detective
are you?"

"What?" Malone said, and added at once, "Your Majesty." He knew
perfectly well, of course, that Miss Thompson was not Queen Elizabeth
I--and he knew that Miss Thompson knew what he thought.

But she didn't mind. Politeness, she held, was the act of being
pleasant on the surface, no matter what a person really thought.
People were polite to their bosses, she pointed out, even though they
were perfectly sure that they could do a better job than the bosses
were doing.

So she insisted on the surface pretense that Malone was going through,
treating her like a Queen.

The psychiatrists had called her delusion a beautifully rationalized
one. As far as Malone was concerned, it made more sense than most of
real life.

"That's very nice of you, Sir Kenneth," the Queen said. "But I ask you
again, what kind of detective are you? Haven't you got any common
sense at all?"

Malone hated to admit it, but he had always had just that suspicion.
After all, he wasn't a very good detective. He was just lucky. His
luck had enabled him to break a lot of tough cases. But some day
people would find out, and then--

"Well," the Queen said, "at the very least you ought to _act_ like a
detective." She sniffed audibly. "Sir Kenneth, I'm ashamed that a
member of my own FBI can't do any better than you're doing now."

Malone blinked into the screen. He did feel ashamed in a vague sort of
way, and he was willing to admit it. But he did feel, wistfully, that
it would be nice to know just what he was being ashamed of. "Have I
been missing something?" he said.

"Outside of the obvious," the Queen said, "that you've been missing
your notebook--or rather Mike Fueyo's notebook--"

"Yes?" Malone said.

"You certainly have," the Queen said. "Don't you see what happened to
that notebook? You've been missing the only possible explanation."

"But there isn't any," Malone said. "Unless Miss Francis has it."

Her Majesty gave him a bright smile. "There!" she said.

"There, what?" Malone said.

"I knew you could do it," the Queen said. "All you had to do was apply
your intelligence, and you'd come up with just the fact you needed."

"What fact?" Malone said.

"That Miss Fr