Читать книгу Flowers for the Judge - Margery Allingham - Страница 5

However, although a wonder may degenerate into a funny thing after the proverbial nine days and may well become nothing but an uneasy memory after twenty years, the odd disappearance of Tom Barnabas in nineteen eleven created a sort of precedent in the firm, so that in the curious paradoxical way in which the mind works no one thought very much of it when in nineteen thirty-one Paul R. Brande, one of the directors, did not show up for a couple of days.

Gina Brande sat on the couch before the fire in her big sitting room in the top flat on the Sunday evening after Paul went. “Shop tea” was in progress. This function was part of the Barnabas tradition. On Sunday evenings all through the winter it was the custom of the cousins and Miss Curley to meet together to take tea and hold an inquest on the Sunday papers. Sometimes outsiders were present; perhaps a privileged author or visiting American or, on rare occasions, old Caldecott, that patriarch of agents who had known the Old Man.

When Paul had brought Gina back from New York and the firm had recovered from the shock of having a woman and a foreigner on the door-step, she had taken over the responsibility of providing the fire and the meal for the gatherings from John’s aged housekeeper and the meetings had moved up from the flat below. It was typical of the two principal directors of the firm that they should have snapped up the lease of the house next door to the office, converted its unsuitability into three flats at considerable expense, and had settled down to live in the Holborn backwater, each convinced that they should or could desire no more.

John Widdowson, managing director, senior cousin, and son of the Old Man’s eldest sister, took the centre flat as befitted his position, although in size it would have better suited Paul and Gina, who were quartered above.

The ground floor and basement had been more or less wished upon Mike Wedgwood, the youngest cousin and junior director. Barnabas, Limited did things like that in the holy conviction that through minor discomforts their dignity and prestige were upheld.

The tea party was almost at an end, and as yet no one had referred to Paul. The general feeling seemed to be that the gathering was very peaceful without his crimson-faced didacticism.

Gina had folded herself on the big white sofa with its deeply buttoned back and exaggerated curves. As usual, she looked odd and lovely and unexpected amid that sober gathering.

When Pavlov, the décor man, spoke of her as “the young Bernhardt,” he did her a little less than justice. Her small-boned figure, tiny hands and feet, and long modern neck would have disappeared into nothingness in the corsets and furbelows of the ’eighties. Her head was modern, too, with its wide mouth, slanting grey eyes and the small straight nose whose severity was belied by the new coxcomb coiffure which Lallé had created for her and which brought her dark chestnut hair forward into a curl faintly and charmingly reminiscent of the “bang” of the last century.

She was wearing one of her own dresses. The firm, or rather John Widdowson in the person of the firm, had not countenanced his cousin’s wife continuing her career in England, and she now only designed for herself, and sometimes for Pavlov, in a strictly dignified and semi-amateur way.

The narrow gown, in a heavy dark green and black silk, accentuated her foreignness and her chic, which was so extraordinarily individual. At the moment she looked a little weary. John’s weekly diatribe against the firm of Cheshunt, who flooded the book market with third-, fourth-and fifth-rate novels and advertised the figure of their mighty output with bland self-satisfaction, had seemed even a little longer and heavier than usual.

Curley sat in the corner by the fire. Her plump hands were folded on her knee and her very pale blue eyes were quiet and contemplative behind her spectacles.

Miss Florence Curley was easily the least distinguished-looking person in the room. Her iron-grey hair was not even tidy and her black velvet dress was of that variety of ill-cut, over-decorated and disgracefully expensive garments which are made in millions for the undiscerning. Her shoes were smart but looked uncomfortable, and she wore three rings which had obviously been her mother’s. But Curley was the firm. Even John, glancing at her from time to time, hoped devoutly that she would outlast him.

Long ago she had been the Old Man’s secretary, in the days when a lady typist was still a daring innovation, and, with the tradition of female service and unswerving loyalty to the dominant male still unshattered behind her, she had wedded herself to the firm of Barnabas, Limited as to a lover.

Thirty years later she loved the business as a son and a master. She knew more about its affairs than a roomful of ledgers, and understood its difficulties and cherished its triumphs with the insight of a first nurse.

In the office she was accepted as a benevolent and omniscient intelligence which was one of the firm’s more important assets. Outside the firm she was feared, respected and faintly resented. Yet she looked a rather stupid, plain old woman sitting there by the fire.

It was very warm in the room, and John rose to his feet.

“I shall go back to it, I think, Gina,” he said. “Tooth’s new one is an odd sort of jumble, but I want to finish it. I’m having him up tomorrow.”

John always spoke of “having authors up” when he meant that he had invited them to an interview. It was a traditional phrase of the Old Man’s.

Miss Curley stirred. “Mr. Tooth is a very self-opinionated young man, Mr. Widdowson,” she ventured, and added, with apparent irrelevance: “I saw him lunching with Phillips of Denver’s last week. They were at school together, I think.”

John, who followed her line of thought, turned round.

“It’s not as good as his first book,” he said defensively.

“Oh, no. It’s not,” Miss Curley agreed. “Second books never are, are they? Still, I think he’s got something in him. I shouldn’t like to see him leave us. I don’t like Denver’s.”

“Quite,” said John, dry to the point of curtness. “I’ll finish it,” he added. “It may be just possible.”

He moved over to the door, an impressive, interesting-looking person with his tall, slender figure, little dried-up yellow face and close-cropped white hair.

On the threshold he paused and looked back.

“Where is Paul? Do you know, Gina? Haven’t seen him since Thursday. Off to Paris again, I suppose.”

There was a moment’s awkward pause, during which Curley smiled involuntarily. Paul, with his hustle methods, his bombast and his energy, while infuriating his cousin contrived to amuse her. John’s remark was his first direct reference to the Tourlette biography affair, and everyone in the room recalled Paul’s excited, unconvincing voice rising above the din at the September cocktail party:

“I tell you, my dear fellow, I was so thrilled, so absolutely annihilated, that I just rushed off down to Croydon and got a ’plane—didn’t even remember to snatch a bag or tell Gina here—simply fled over there and bought it!”

The fact that the Tourlette biography had proved of about the same interest to the British and American publics as the average first book of free verse, and that Barnabas, Limited had dropped a matter of five hundred pounds on the transaction, lent point to the comment.

Gina stirred. All her movements were very slow, and she turned her head with graceful deliberation before speaking.

“I don’t know where he is. He hasn’t been home since Thursday.”

The quiet voice with the unexpected New England accent betrayed no embarrassment or resentment at either the question or the fact.

“Oh, I see.” John also did not seem surprised. “If he comes in tonight you might tell him to drop in and see me. I shall be reading all the evening. I’ve had a most extraordinary letter from Mrs. Carter. I wish Paul would learn not to enthuse to authors. It goes to their heads and then they get spiteful if a book doesn’t sell.”

His voice died on a plaintive note and the door closed softly behind him.

Ritchie began to laugh, a dry little cackle of which nobody took the least notice. He was out of the circle, leaning back in a chair in the shadows, a quiet, slightly melancholy or, if one felt sentimental, pathetic figure.

Ritchie Barnabas, brother of the transported Tom, was the only cousin who had received no share of the business under the Old Man’s will. He had been younger in nineteen hundred and eight, of course, but not so young as Mike, who had been a baby, nor so young as Paul, who was still at school, nor even so very much younger than John himself. His own explanation of this mystery was never sought, but a clause in the will which charged the beneficiary cousins to “look after” Richard Barnabas threw some light on the Old Man’s opinion of this nephew.

It was characteristic of the firm, and perhaps of publishing generally, that they fulfilled this charge by supplying Ritchie with a small room at the top of the building, a reasonable salary and the title of “The Reader.” He shared the work with some twenty or thirty clergymen, maiden ladies and indigent schoolmasters scattered all over the country, but his was the official post and he lived in a world of battered manuscripts on which he made long and scholarly reports.

Like some thin and dusty ghost he was often seen on the stairs of the office, in the hall, or tramping home with long flapping strides through the network of gusty streets between the sacred cul-de-sac and his lodgings in Red Lion Square.

No one considered him and yet everyone liked him in the half-tolerant, half-condescending way with which one regards someone else’s inoffensive pet.

Every year he was granted three weeks’ holiday, and on these occasions he was never missed. Only the increasing height of the piles of manuscript in his dusty room bore witness to the genuineness of his absence.

There was a vague notion among the junior members of the staff that he spent these holidays reading in his lodgings, but no one was interested enough to find out. The cousins simply said and thought “Where’s Ritchie? Oh, on holiday, of course ...” and dismissed him for the more important matter that was always on hand.

There had been from time to time sentimental young women, although these were not encouraged in the firm, who saw in Ritchie a romantic and mysterious figure with some secret inner life too delicate or possibly too poetic for general expression, but always in time they gave up their investigations. Ritchie, they discovered, had the emotional outlook of a child and the mind of a schoolboy. He was also not even particularly unhappy.

Now, when he had finished laughing, he rose and walked over to Gina.

“I shall go too, now, my dear,” he said, smiling down at her with the mildest of blue eyes.

There was a minute pause, and he added charmingly:

“A delicious tea.”

Gina’s grey eyes narrowed as she smiled back at him.

“Sweet person, Ritchie,” she said, and gave him her hand.

He took it for a moment, and then, after nodding to Curley, grinned broadly at Mike, whom he had always liked, and wandered off to find the door.

The three who were left smiled after he went out, but in a most kindly way. The warm silence remained unbroken for some time. Outside the first waves of the fog were creeping down from the park, but as yet its chill dirtiness had not penetrated into the gracious room.

Miss Curley sat in her corner, placid and apparently lost in thought. Those who knew her were used to Curley “staring through them” and her habit was a time-honoured joke in the office. She found it very useful. Her faded blue eyes were difficult to see behind the gold-rimmed spectacles, and it was, therefore, never easy to be sure whether they were focused upon one or not.

At the moment she was looking at Mike with steady inquisitiveness.

Michael Wedgwood was the son of the Old Man’s youngest and favorite sister. His place in the firm had been assured to him since his childhood. He had been barely seven years old at the time of his uncle’s death.

As she watched him Miss Curley reflected that his early training might easily have spoilt him altogether. A little boy brought up in cold blood to be a fitting member of any old-established publishing firm, let alone Barnabas, Limited, might have turned out to be a prig or a crank or worse. But there had been mitigating circumstances. The firm had suffered during the war and the Old Man’s fortune had been very much divided, so that although the young Michael had been to the right schools he had never had quite enough money, and, in Miss Curley’s opinion, there was a sobering quality in poverty greatly to be prized.

Mike had missed the war by a few months and had been actually in training at school when the Armistice was signed. Looking at him, sprawled out in the deep armchair opposite her, Curley wondered if he had not always just missed the big things. Until now she had seen him as an unscathed, untried sort of person. He was twenty-eight or nine, she supposed; kindly polite, good-looking, dependable and quiet; but, although she had understood his popularity, hitherto he had always seemed to her to be a slightly unsatisfactory being. It was as though all the vital part of him had been allowed to atrophy while his charm, his ease and his intelligence had occupied his full stage.

Curley’s faded eyes did not blink. He was certainly good-looking. In his full manhood he had more of the Old Man’s size and dignity than any of the cousins. The Barnabas features were there, too, the bright, sharp dark eyes, the strong characterful nose and the thin sensitive mouth. Curley’s heart warmed towards him.

Now that the suspicions she had entertained for the past few weeks had virtually become a certainty, he had gained tremendously in interest for her, and, curiously, had also gone up considerably in her estimation.

She stole a glance at Gina, resting superb and quiet upon the high-backed couch.

“She doesn’t know for certain yet.” Curley’s thoughts ran placidly on. “He’s been careful not to say anything. He wouldn’t, of course. People don’t nowadays. The passions frighten them. They go on fighting them as though they were indecent. So they are, of course. So are lots of things. But the Old Man—” her lips curled in a faint reminiscing smile, “—he’d have got her. It wouldn’t have been nice, his cousin in the firm, but he’d have got her. That was where he was different from these nephews.”

Curley’s old mouth pouted contemptuously as she considered them: John with his irascibility, his pomposity and his moments of sheer obstinacy; Paul lathering and shouting and making an exhibition of himself; and now the dark horse Mike, who had never really wanted anything before. Would any of them go out bald-headed for their desires, sweeping away obstacles and striding over impossible barriers to attainment, to get clean away with it in the end as the Old Man had done time and time again? Curley did not think so.

Mike was leaning back, his head partly in the shadow, so that only sometimes when the fire flickered was his face visible. Curley felt that he was very careful of his expression on these occasions.

Gina did not glance in his direction, but she was aware of him. Curley knew that by the studied calm, by the odd suggestion of tension which anybody but her, one of the most unemotional of women, must have found unbearable.

They were “in love,” then. A ridiculous but illuminating phrase, Miss Curley reflected, suggesting “an uncomfortable state.” It was a very awkward thing to have happened to either of those self-possessed, intelligent young people. Mike had been woken up under his skin, Miss Curley saw with satisfaction. The fever was upon him all right. It showed painfully through his ease and politeness, turning him from a slightly austere personality into something infinitely more appealing and helpless, and at the same time somehow shameful.

Of the girl Curley was not so sure. Her poise was extraordinary. The older woman speculated upon her possible attitude towards her husband. Of course she could hardly entertain much affection for him. There might possibly be somewhere in the world a woman thick-skinned enough to be able to ignore the series of small exposures which was Paul’s life, but not Gina. His fake enthusiasms and windy lies, which were always being found out, his unconvincing braggartry—surely no physical passion could counteract the blast of these upon a sensitive intelligence.

Besides, what consideration did Paul give Gina? His mind was fully occupied in the hopeless and, in the circumstances, ridiculous task of putting himself over big. Where did she think he was now, for instance? Rushing off on some wild-goose chase, throwing his importance at the head of some dazzled scribbler, to return on the morrow drunk with enthusiasm for his own cleverness, only to be sobered and left sulky by the common sense of his elder cousin.

No. If Gina had ever loved him, a possibility which Curley was inclined to doubt, she could not possibly do so now.

Her reflections and speculations were cut short by an intrusion into the warm paper-strewn sanctuary. At a glance from Gina, Mike had leapt to answer the flat buzzing of the door-bell. There was the murmur of polite greetings in the hall and he returned with the newcomer.

Curley knew of Mr. Albert Campion by repute alone and was therefore quite unprepared and a little shocked when he came wandering in behind Mike. His slender, drooping figure, pale ingenuous face and sleek yellow hair were rendered all the more indefinite by the immense and unusually solid horn-rimmed spectacles he chose to affect.

“Party over?” he enquired regretfully, casting an eye over the dismantled tea-table and scattered chairs. “What a pity!”

He shook hands with Curley and Gina, and sat down, crossing his long thin legs.

“No tea? No party? It must be business then,” he chattered on, smiling affably. “Cheap, clean and trustworthy, fifteen months in last place and a conviction at the end of it. Detective work of all kinds undertaken at short notice.”

He paused abruptly. Curley’s eyes were upon him in frozen disapproval.

Mr. Campion had the grace to look abashed. Gina came to his rescue.

“You haven’t met Mr. Campion before, have you, Curley? He gets some people down, but most of us grow used to him in time.”

“It’s an affliction,” said the pale young man, with engaging embarrassment. “A form of nervousness. Think of it as a glass eye and it won’t bother you any more.”

Curley was only partly disarmed. The world in which she lived was besprinkled with consciously funny young men, most of them ill-mannered nincompoops. The difference between the newcomer and the average specimen dawned upon her slowly. In every case the flow of nonsense was in the nature of a protective covering, she knew, but here it was the reality which was different. Mr. Campion had more than poverty of intelligence to hide.

Meanwhile he was still talking.

“As an American, Gina, you have a thrill coming to you. We are on the eve of a real old London particular, with flares in the streets, bus-conductors on foot leading their drivers over the pavements into plate-glass windows, and blind beggars guiding city magnates across the roads for a small fee. It’s pretty bad in the Drury Lane vicinity now. I’m wallowing in old-world romance already.”

Mike shrugged his shoulders and his dark eyes twinkled lazily.

“I hope you enjoy it,” he said. “As a motorist, its romance leaves me cold. You’ll hate it, Gina. It has the same effect upon the skin and clothes as a train journey from Paris to the south in midsummer.”

“I see. Just another little British trick to entertain the foreigner.”

The girl spoke absently, and for the first time Mr. Campion saw that the constraint in the atmosphere was not due to Miss Curley’s presence alone.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen,” he said cheerfully, “the Professor is here. The ballon she is about to mount. Bring out your misfortunes. Lost anything, Gina?”

There was a moment’s awkward silence, and whereas Miss Curley’s astute mind took in the whole situation, Mr. Campion, who was not in possession of the facts, perceived that he had made a gaffe. Mike glanced at Gina imploringly. Miss Curley leant forward.

“If you three want to talk business, my dear, I’ll get my things.”

Gina hesitated, and a faintly deeper colour spread over her face. It was the first trace of embarrassment to destroy her poise, and was all the more expressive because of its restraint.

“It’s not exactly that, Curley,” she said. “I don’t know—you might be able to help us in a way—and yet—”

She broke off deliberately. Miss Curley leant back in her chair.

“I’ll stay,” she said firmly. “It’s about Paul, isn’t it? He’ll turn up, my dear. He always does. All the cousins like to disappear now and again. It’s quite a tradition in the family.”

She had broken the ice completely, and there was a hint of relief in Mike’s laugh.

“A sort of affectation,” he murmured. “Good old Curley! You see through us all, don’t you?”

Miss Curley eyed him. “I see,” she said dryly.

“Wait a minute for Mastermind to catch up,” said Mr. Campion protestingly. “What’s happened to Paul?”

Gina turned slowly towards him, two bright spots of colour in her face.

“I suppose it’s just foolishness,” she said, “but I asked Mike to get you to come over for a sort of unofficial talk. Paul hasn’t been around since last Thursday, and after all, he does live here—and—and—”

“Quite,” said Campion, hurrying to the rescue. “I see your point perfectly. Whereas it’s one thing to call in the police, it’s quite another to pretend you haven’t noticed your husband’s absence for three days.”

“Exactly.” She looked at him gratefully and went on talking, the hint of pride in her soft lazy voice making it extraordinarily appealing. “I suppose some wives would have gone haywire by this time, but with me—I mean with us—it’s different. We—well, we’re post-war people, Albert. Paul leads his own life, and so do I, in a way.”

She paused wretchedly, only to hurry on again, forcing herself at her fences.

“What I’m trying to say is, there’s nothing really unusual in Paul going off for a day or two like this without thinking to tell me, but I’ve never known him to stay away quite so long without my hearing even indirectly of him, and this morning I felt I ought to—well—just mention it to somebody. You do understand it, don’t you?”

“Ye-es,” said Mr. Campion a little dubiously.

The heavy white lids closed over the girl’s eyes for a moment.

“It’s not unheard of,” she said, half defiantly. “Lots of people do the same sort of thing in our crowd. He may be anywhere. He may turn up tonight or tomorrow or next week, and I shall feel a fool for making such a fuss.”

“Let me get this straight.” Mr. Campion’s precise voice was as friendly as any in the world. “I take it the dear fellow may easily have gone to a cocktail do, drifted on to an all-night binge with some of the gang, and finished up with a hang-over at a week-end house-party.”

“Yes,” said the girl eagerly, anxious, it seemed, to convince herself. “Or he may have rushed over to Paris about this exhibition scheme he’s so keen on. But even so, I don’t see why he should have taken so long about it.”

Mr. Campion pricked up his ears. “Is that the rare manuscript exhibition at Bumpus’s in February?” he enquired.

Mike rose to give Gina a light. “Yes. Paul’s putting his weight into it. It’s going to be a stupendous affair. Practically the whole of the Leigh Collection will be on view.”

“But not The Gallivant, I suppose?” murmured the visitor, venturing Miss Curley’s disapproving stare.

“No, I’m afraid not.” Mike seemed genuinely regretful. “Paul put up the suggestion, I believe, but John vetoed it promptly. The firm of Barnabas is hanging on to its past.”

The Gallivant, that precious manuscript of Congreve’s unpublished play, set down by his own hand and never printed even in his unsqueamish age, had come into the possession of the firm of Barnabas very early in its dignified career. There had been something vaguely unsavoury in the story of its acquisition, some unpleasant business of the gift of a few pounds to a starving antiquary, but that was ancient history and half forgotten.

The present grievance, shared by scholars and collectors alike, was the fact that, through a certain Puritan streak in Jacoby Barnabas, the late Old Man himself, the manuscript was never permitted to be copied or even read. John respected his uncle’s wishes, and it remained therefore one of the firm’s assets only.

“Too bad,” said Mr. Campion aloud, and forgot The Gallivant as he returned to the main subject. “No line on Paul anywhere at all, then?” he said slowly. “You don’t know where he went on Thursday night, for instance?”

Gina shook her head. “No. As a matter of fact, I expected him home that evening. We—er—we had some things to discuss, and I arranged a quiet meal here for seven-thirty. When he didn’t show up by nine o’clock I got peevish and went out.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Campion was studying her face. “When you say you went out—you didn’t go to look for him?”

“Oh, no, of course not.” Her cheeks were flaming. “I phoned down to Mike and we went off to the Academy to see the revival of ‘Caligari.’ ”

Something made Mr. Campion glance at his friend. He caught the man with the visor up and a warning light flashed through his brain.

Mr. Campion was old-fashioned enough to take the marriage contract seriously, but he was also sufficiently sophisticated to know that the nicest people fall in love indiscriminately and that while under the influence of that pre-eminently selfish lunacy they may make the most outrageous demands upon their friends with no other excuse than their painful need.

It suddenly occurred to him that what Gina probably needed most was a reliable and discreet enquiry agent capable of handling divorce, and was on the point of telling her so in the friendliest of fashions when he was saved from the blunder by a remark from Miss Curley.

“Where do you think he is, Gina?” she said baldly. “Running round the lovely Mrs. Bell?”

Once again Gina flushed, but she laughed as she spoke:

“No, Curley, I know he’s not. As a matter of fact, I phoned this morning and asked her if he was down there. Oh, no, if it was only something like that it would be simply my own affair, wouldn’t it? I mean it would be quite unpardonable of me to discuss it like this. No, I can’t think where he is. That’s why I’m telling someone. I mean, I’m all right. I can amuse myself. I can come down on Mike to take me around.”

She smiled shyly at the other man.

“Of course,” he said abruptly. “You know that. At any time.”

“Oh, my hat!” reflected Mr. Campion, just as Miss Curley had done. “A genuine passion. She hasn’t even been told.”

His interest in the affair promptly revived.

“I say,” he began diffidently. “I don’t want to be inquisitive, but I must ask this. Any row between you and Paul?”

“No.” Her slanting grey eyes met his squarely. “None at all, at the moment. That’s another thing that made me wonder. I saw him for a moment in the office on Thursday afternoon. He’d been lunching with Caldecott and he said then that he’d come here for dinner and we’d talk. No one seems to have seen him after four. He wasn’t in his room when Miss Netley took some letters for him to sign just before five. I know that because she phoned me on Friday morning to ask if she should do them herself, as they ought to go off. John phoned to ask where he was, too. He was offended with Paul for being ‘so damned offhand,’ as he called it.”

She paused, a little breathless, and sat up on the couch, the glowing end of a cigarette between her fingers as she glanced round for an ashtray.

Mike rose and came towards her, his cupped hand held out.

“I’ll take it—and chuck it in the fire,” he said hastily.

She drew back in surprise. “Not like that. It’ll burn you,” she protested.

He did not speak, but nodded to her, his whole body expressing urgency and unconscious supplication. It was a ridiculous incident, so trivial yet curiously disquieting.

Bewildered and half amused, the girl dropped the burning fragment into the hand and Campion glanced away involuntarily so that he might not see the man’s satisfaction at the pain as he carried the stub over to the fire.

The return of John Widdowson a moment later restored the trend of general thought. Gina’s faithful charwoman, who had returned to do the tea things, had met him on the staircase and admitted him with her key. He nodded to Campion and glanced across at Curley.

“That book of clippings on The Shadow Line Fellowes sent us, Miss Curley; do you know where it is? It was a rather ornate little red thing, if I remember. What did we do with it? Send it back?”

Miss Curley considered. Somewhere neatly pigeonholed in her mind was the information. It was this gift for relatively unimportant detail which had made her so valuable in her youth, and now in her age her skill was a fetish.

“It’s on a shelf with a lot of other miscellany on the right of the doorway in the strong room,” she said at last, not without a certain pride.

Mike, who caught Mr. Campion’s expression of polite astonishment, hastened to explain.

“The strong room is a bit of an anachronism these days,” he said. “It’s a sort of fortified basement in the cellar at Twenty-three and dates from the days when authors insisted on being paid cash down in gold. We haven’t much use for it now, so it’s used as a junk cupboard for odds and ends we don’t want to lose—addresses and that sort of thing. It’s a very fine affair. Tin-lined walls in the best Victorian style.”

“All very interesting,” said John dryly. “Would you like to run round there and get that folder?”

Mike hesitated. The older man’s tone had been unnecessarily peremptory and he was in the mood to resent it.

“I’ll get it for you, Mr. Widdowson. I know just where it is.” Curley was already on her feet.

“Rubbish, Curley. I’ll get it. The key’s in your desk as usual, isn’t it? All right. I shan’t be a moment.”

Mike strode out of the room and John sat down in the chair he had vacated.

“Fog’s getting very thick,” he remarked, leaning forward to jab unceremoniously at the fire.

At sixty-three, John, the eldest of the cousins, was as forceful a personality as he ever had been. Campion, leaning back in the shadows, had opportunity to consider him. A spoilt child of his profession, he decided. A little tyrant nurtured in his uncle’s carefully prepared nursery. Still, he had met his battles and had fought and won them. Not a weak face, by any means.

Conversation became desultory. Curley never expanded in John’s presence, and Gina was lost in her own unhappy thoughts. Mr. Campion did his best to keep the ball rolling, but without great success, since his peculiar line in small talk was hardly appreciated by the elder man. Long silences were bound to occur, and in the last of these they heard Mike’s quick steps in the passage outside.

Just for a moment a wave of apprehension touched them all. It was swiftly gone, but the sight of the young man with the red and gilt folder in his hand was somehow reassuring.

Campion might have fancied that he was unduly jumpy had it not been for John, who, after peering at his cousin inquisitively, enquired abruptly:

“What’s the matter? Seen a ghost?”

They all glanced at the newcomer. His dark face was a little paler than usual and he was certainly breathless. However, he seemed genuinely surprised.

“I’m all right. A bit out of training, that’s all. Fog’s getting very thick outside.”

John grunted, and, taking his folder, trotted out again. Campion took up the main conversation where it had left off and spoke reassuring words.

After a while Miss Curley left, and presently Mr. Campion followed, leaving Gina and Mike by the fire. Campion had reflected upon the peculiarities of other people’s lives and had dismissed Gina and her truant husband from his mind by the time he turned in just after midnight, so that it came with all the more of a shock to him when Miss Curley dragged him from his bed at ten o’clock the following morning with a startling story.

“Miss Marchant, one of the typists, found him, Mr. Campion.” Her voice was unnaturally businesslike over the phone, and he had a vision of her, hard, cool and practical in the midst of chaos. “I sent her down to get an address file as soon as I got here, about half an hour ago. The door was locked. I gave her the key from my desk. She screamed from the basement and we all rushed down to see Mr. Paul lying there. Can you come over?”

Mr. Campion put a question and she answered it testily, as though irritated by his obtuseness.

“Yes, the strong room. Mike got the folder from it last night. Yes, the same room. Oh, and Mr. Campion—” she lowered her voice—“the doctor’s here. He seems to think the poor man’s been dead for some days.”

Again Campion put a query, and this time Miss Curley’s reply did not sound irritable. Her tone was awful, rather.

“Right in the middle of the room, sprawled out. No one could have opened that door without seeing him.”