Police detectives I’ve heard talk are always saying, “It was a funny coincidence that broke that case,” or “It was just that I got all the breaks that time.” It seems to me to happen too often not to imply something else. It’s almost as if a powerful magnetic field forms itself out of the concentrated stuff of guilt, drawing the people involved in the pattern unconsciously together, without apparent reason or awareness, and that when the pattern is once definitely established, the seeming coincidences that finally make a coherent whole really are not accidental at all.
Or there’s no other way I can explain what happened the day I went up to Philadelphia. It took me so long to get Colonel Primrose on the phone up there, and tell him I was coming and about Myron, that I missed the train I w
