(no subject)
'Do you mind if I ask you a question? Weren't you tempted to let him go?'
Sam's been waiting for the right moment to ask that question. She hadn't known much about the Beaumont chap who'd apparently committed the murder, but he'd definitely been someone with a highly important job. The sort of job that might help Britain win the war, or at least prevent the German invasion that might still come any day now. But Mr Foyle had had Beaumont arrested anyway -- and while Sam couldn't help but admire him for it, she was dying to know if he'd had even the slightest bit of regret in doing so.
Judging by Mr Foyle's expression when she asks the question, it's clear that he might've had more than a few bits of regret about it.
'Yes,' he says at last, rather matter-of-factly. 'Yes, I was. Hanging him is not going to do anybody much good. And he had a point, I suppose, but, well...I'm a policeman. I'm here to do a job, simple as that. If I start bending the rules I might as well pack it in.'
To Sam, this makes sense. It's simple, straightforward, truthful. The sort of thing she's come to expect from DCS Foyle, really. Though as she pulls the car up in front of the hospital where Sergeant Milner's being looked after, she can't help but voice the nagging little thought in the back of her mind.
'Yes,' she says, trying to sound as matter-of-fact as Mr Foyle had, 'but she was a German.'
(That's the thing that sticks in her mind the most. The whole country's at war with Germany. She and Mr Foyle both could have been killed by the bomb that that German plane dropped on Judd's pub. And yet Mr Foyle's just arrested an Englishman -- by all appearances, a patriotic chap with a part to play in the war effort -- for doing the very thing that most people she knows would be more than happy to turn a blind eye to.)
Mr Foyle's reply, though, puts paid to her own doubts.
'Well, the war doesn't make any difference at all,' he says firmly. 'She was a human being; she was murdered. Murder is murder. You stop believing that and we might as well not be fighting the war -- because you end up like the Nazis.'
And there's no way to argue with that, is there?