‘Who she is?’ echoed the old lady, her eyes crinkling. ‘My good man, you don’t mean to say you haven’t even met? But how touchingly romantic! I thought you young people managed things very differently these days. Still, this is charming. Tell me more. You just looked at each other, I suppose? Dear me, this takes me back to the nineties.’
Campion regarded her helplessly. She was like some elderly yellow kitten, he thought suddenly, all fluff and wide smile.
‘Who is she?’ he repeated doggedly.
‘Why, the child, of course,’ said Lady Laradine infuriatingly. ‘Little What’s-her-name. Jennifer, isn’t it? To be presented next year when there won’t be such a crush. You know perfectly well who I mean. Don’t stand there looking like a fish. Roberta’s sister, Dorothea’s youngest daughter. So pretty. Like some sort of flower, don’t you think?’
‘A daughter?’ said Campion flatly. ‘She lives here, then?’
‘Of course she does. Where should she live but with her mother?’ Her ladyship’s eyebrows seemed in danger of disappearing altogether. ‘A child of seventeen living alone? Whatever next! She’s a charming little thing, although I’ve never had any patience with schoolchildren myself. Still, she’s far too young for you. Put it out of your mind. Let me see, what was I going to tell you?’
This was a secret Mr Campion never learnt. Lady Laradine, who had hitherto accredited him with excellent manners, was deeply disappointed in him. He stared blankly at her for a moment and then, turning away abruptly, strode across the room, passing behind the tent, to the door half-hidden behind it which led out into the house.
Lady Laradine saw the top of the door open and close and assumed that her victim had passed through it, which was just the kind of silly mistake which long experience had taught Mr Campion that most people were wont to make.
The long evening went on according to the programme the hostess had arranged, but there were certain additions to it which were not on her schedule at all. At half-past one in the morning a weary and somewhat stiff Mr Campion made his way gingerly out of the concealing folds at the back of the psychometrist’s tent and, slipping into the house, walked quietly down to the little study where he had first met the girl in green.
He went inside and sat down in a wing-chair in the darkest corner. Presently he heard her coming as he knew she would. Her dress brushed the step and he heard her quick intake of breath as she closed the door behind her and, crossing into his line of vision, flung herself down on her knees before the bureau drawer.
‘I say,’ said Mr Campion, ‘I suppose you know what you’re doing with that chap downstairs? I don’t trust him myself.’
This time his interruption was greeted with interest if not respect. Jennifer Pendleton-Blake screamed and swung round, her eyes terrified. Even so, however, her words were unexpected.
‘What do you know?’ she demanded.
‘Quite a lot.’ Mr Campion rose stiffly to his feet. ‘I’ve been standing on one foot, half smothered by dusty black velvet, for an hour and a half.’
The girl gaped at him and he had the grace to look ashamed.
‘I’ve been listening,’ he said. ‘What did you give that fellow to – er – “psychomet?” I couldn’t see. Letters?’
She nodded miserably.
Mr Campion coughed.
‘I don’t want to seem unduly inquisitive,’ he said, ‘but I’m out to help in any way I can. Who were they from?’
Jennifer Pendleton-Blake turned back to the drawer and turned over its contents. The nape of her neck was pink and her shoulders were quivering.
‘I don’t know,’ she said helplessly. ‘That’s just it, I don’t know!’
Mr Campion knelt down on the floor beside her and looked into the drawer, which contained as fine a collection of sentimental relics as ever he had set eyes upon. There were several little bundles of letters tied up with different coloured ribbons, a choice selection of dead flowers, a university scarf or two, and quite a quantity of chocolate box lids.
He glanced at the seventeen-year-old at his side and surprised her looking half her age. Inspiration came to him.
‘Jennifer,’ he said sternly, ‘these are not yours.’
‘No,’ she whispered, her lips trembling.
‘Whose are they? Roberta’s?’
‘Yes.’
Mr Campion lent her the handkerchief out of his breast pocket.
‘Let’s discuss this,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I think I’m getting the hang of it. I’ll tell you the story as I see it and you correct me when I go off the rails.’
Miss Pendleton-Blake rewarded him with a pathetic acquiescing sniff.
‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said, ‘but you seem all right. Anyway, things can’t be worse.’
Mr Campion ignored the somewhat dubious compliment.
‘When a young woman feels she’s grown up, but has only just arrived at that eminence, she often finds herself at a temporary disadvantage,’ he began with a certain amount of oracular tact. ‘I mean, for instance, when she is faced with the exacting problem of finding something really interesting to take to a psychometrist I can sympathise with her difficulty.’
The, young lady looked at him gratefully.
‘That was just it,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t anything belonging to anyone whom I really wanted to know something about and I did feel a bit out of it, young and flat, you know. I’m not even presented yet. So I suddenly thought of Roberta’s drawer up here, where I knew she kept all Tommy’s letters. I thought I’d just get them, hear the low-down on Tommy and put them back. I didn’t dream that the fortune-teller would be such a beast.’
‘He wouldn’t give them back to you?’
‘Why, no. It was most peculiar.’ Jennifer’s face was the complete picture of youthful reproach. ‘I put the packet in an envelope and sealed it, as he told me to. He stuck the envelope under the crystal. He told me a lot of silly stuff that obviously wasn’t true and then he gave me what I naturally thought was the envelope back. I didn’t examine it there, but when I got up here again I found it was only this.’
She opened her green handkerchief and produced a wad of neatly folded newsprint.
Mr Campion regarded the package gravely and with distaste.
‘You went back to him, naturally?’ he said. ‘I heard the whole of that interview. You had to wait your turn to see him, of course. It must have been a trying experience.’
‘It was filthy,’ said Jennifer violently. ‘Did you hear him laugh at me and say I’d made a mistake? Then he congratulated me on my sister’s engagement and said he’d be seeing me again. He meant me to realise that he knew all about everything, you see. It wasn’t until just now, though, that I realised the frightful thing. Those letters weren’t Tommy’s. They must have been Bobby Dacre’s, or one of her other silly undergrads. They’re always writing stupid letters to her because she’s so frightfully pretty. Cagliostro must have looked at the letters I gave him and saw that they were written to her and not signed by Tommy, who, as everybody knows, is her fiancé. Now he’ll keep them and make a row. What shall I do?’
Mr Campion grinned.
‘Hold on a minute,’ he said. ‘He can’t do much, you know, not in this case, although I can conceive a situation in which his little conjuring trick might prove decidedly awkward. Who cares who has been writing to Roberta? Not Tommy.’
‘Oh, no, not Tommy.’ Jennifer was contemptuous. ‘But it might be frightfully awkward if he went to Tommy’s perfectly revolting uncle. He’s a horror. He’s just straining at the leash to make an objection to the engagement. Everybody knows that. If this filthy fortune-teller so much as approached him he’d make it an excuse. Besides, you know how frightfully prurient everybody over forty is.’
‘Are they?’ said Mr Campion, feeling the dangerous age was uncomfortably close.
‘Oh, yes!’ said Miss Pendleton-Blake. ‘What shall I do?’ she added after a pause. ‘Try and buy them back before he goes?
’
Mr Campion regarded her with affection.
‘You’re what my more vulgar friends would call a proper little mug, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Our pal Cagliostro isn’t so dumb. He certainly knows how to pick his clients. Now look here, we will do that. We’ll do just what you say. We’ll try to buy them back. But we’ll need witnesses and, as we don’t want publicity, we’ll want the right witnesses. Oates will have to leave his bed, and it serves him right. Look here, can we be certain of keeping Cagliostro here another hour?’
Jennifer glanced up at the sunburst clock over the mantelshelf.
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘He’s due to leave in ten minutes or so now. Perhaps he’ll just take the money quietly and give them back.’
‘In view of a rather horrid little tale I heard the other day I think he’ll take the money and not give them back,’ he said. ‘And if we don’t have the right kind of witnesses there may be a row, which is not what we want at all.’
The girl in the green frock shivered.
‘Who’s going to keep him here, then?’ she said. ‘You don’t know these entertainers. They’ll never stay a second after their time is up. Is it so terribly important?’
‘Terribly,’ said Mr Campion.
‘Then we’re sunk.’ There was a wail in the young voice. ‘Nothing on heaven or earth can detain people like that.’
A beautiful idea came to Mr Campion.
‘I know someone who could detain anything,’ he murmured, and went off in search of Lady Laradine.
At four o’clock in the morning Superintendent Oates sat in a small room on the first floor of Mrs Pendleton-Blake’s house and regarded Mr Campion with a certain thoughtfulness. He was contented to know that in a cab speeding through the quiet streets Cagliostro the Second sat sullen and resigned between two unsympathetic and sleepy police officers.
Opposite the Superintendent stood Mr Campion, looking very wide-awake and wearing an almost intelligent expression. Jennifer Pendleton-Blake was clinging to his arm, her eyes dancing.
‘It might be him,’ said the Superintendent grudgingly and ungrammatically. ‘His papers do show that he only came over from the States at the beginning of the month. Anyway, it was the fairest cop I ever saw. He played straight into our hands. Never having met this little lady before, he felt he was quite safe from any trap, I suppose. He was more astounded than afraid when we walked in on him. Well, we’ll keep the publicity right down; it’s easy in this sort of case. You played your part very cleverly, Miss.’
Jennifer smiled.
‘He was exhausted when I got to him,’ she said frankly. ‘Edith Laradine had been with him for a whole hour, you know. She did the really clever thing by keeping him here. She’s wonderful.’
The Superintendent cocked an eye towards the door.
Through the heavy panels and down two flights of stairs the steady murmur of Lady Laradine’s remarkable voice reached them faintly as she recounted her experience to her friend and hostess. Oates listened for a moment and shook his head like an airedale.
‘Yes,’ he said heavily. ‘Yes, indeed. She is. Wonderful is the word.’
Jennifer laughed.
‘You were, pretty clever, weren’t you, bless you,’ she said, glancing up at Mr Campion.
‘Him?’ said the Superintendent. ‘Him?’
Mr Campion remained affable and blandly uninformative until, good nights having been said, they taxied back to Campion’s flat together for a nightcap. Then the Superintendent’s dignity gave out sufficiently to permit him to ask a direct question.
‘Simple, my dear chap,’ he said. ‘Your police experts are wonderful.’
Oates made an unofficial remark.
‘You come off it,’ he said after a bit. ‘You know and I know that the chances are a hundred to one on this Cagliostro fellow being the same man I was telling you about last week. We shan’t be able to prove it, I don’t suppose, but it’s clear enough. How did you do it? Luck again?’
‘Luck?’ protested Mr Campion in pained astonishment. ‘My good policeman, when you actually meet brilliant detective work don’t let its unfamiliarity blind you to its merit. Luck indeed! It was pure deduction and intelligent investigation, backed up by old-fashioned listening at doors.’
‘Yes, I know all that.’ Oates was irritated in spite of his satisfaction. ‘Once you decided to watch your man, the thing was child’s play. You spotted his game at once. It was a clever one, mind you. He must have made a point of keeping all letters handed in to him and taking a look at them, giving back the uninteresting ones as soon as his client spotted his “mistake”, as he called it. He had a dozen of those little fake packets ready, all shapes and sizes. You spotted that trick all right because you actually saw, or rather heard, him doing it, but what on earth made you suddenly decide to watch a man who was simply entertaining at some wretched party at which you happened to be?’
‘I didn’t happen to be at the party,’ objected Mr Campion with feeling. ‘I went there deliberately and at tremendous personal sacrifice in order to find him. I was looking for him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you told me to, my dear chap.’ Mr Campion leaned back in the taxicab and spoke with weary patience. ‘Cagliostro is the only Society fortune-teller to visit these shores regularly every October. As soon as you told me that story the other day it was obvious that he was the man you wanted, providing your tale had any foundation in fact. I wanted to find out if it had, so I went and had a look at Cagliostro at work. Is that clear?’
‘Yes,’ said Oates hastily. ‘Yes, old man. Don’t get excited. Yes, I see that. But why a fortune-teller? I didn’t mention a fortune-teller. The idea never entered my head.’
Mr Campion seemed to be at a loss, but suddenly he smiled.
‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘Of course. I forgot. You didn’t see the significance of the maid’s story, did you? She insisted that her mistress had definitely said “It’s no use. It’s written in ink. He saw it in ink.” Now is it clear?’
The Superintendent swore.
‘You make me tired,’ he said. ‘I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life. That statement was plain idiotic.’
Campion nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It was. But the maid wasn’t idiotic. The maid was a sensible girl, a good witness; you said so yourself. That’s why it occurred to me that she must have made a simple, ordinary little mistake, the kind of mistake a sensible person might make. Don’t you see, Oates, what her mistress really said was “He saw it in the ink. It is written in the ink.”’
Oates was silent. ‘Even so I don’t see –’ he began.
Mr Campion chuckled in the darkness.
‘You don’t patronise fortune-tellers. If you did you’d know that, while some of them look at cards or peer into crystals, others read secrets mirrored in a pool of black ink. When you told me that story I thought of fortune-tellers, and when I looked into Cagliostro’s tent this evening the first thing I saw was a black crystal. Then I knew I was on the right track. The unpleasant little trick he tried to play on that adorable guffin, Jennifer, put him slap into my hands. There you are, sir, it’s in the bag. When do I get my illuminated address?’
‘Eh?’ said Oates, and after a second or so of consideration began to laugh. ‘I’ll hand it to you,’ he said. ‘You get all the luck, but you have a sort of flair, I’ll admit. You’ll have to excuse the five thousand words.’
Mr Campion handed him his cigarette case.
‘Not at all,’ he said firmly. ‘I want my reward. Either the address or you take Lady Laradine round the Black Museum for me.’
Oates accepted the cigarette.
‘I’ll do the homework,’ he said resignedly. ‘After all, life’s short.’
11
The Meaning of the Act
‘TRIVIAL, VULGAR, PETTIFOGGING, puerile, footling. At times even dirty,’ said Lance Feering, taking up his glass. ‘I don’t want to be hypercritical, old boy, but that’s how I se
e this life of yours. It repels me. My stomach turns at it. I gag … You see what I mean?’
‘The light is filtering through,’ agreed Mr Albert Campion affably, as he flattened himself against the ornate tiles behind him. ‘Criminology does not appeal to you tonight.’
They were in the famous bar of the Pantheon Hall of Varieties, more affectionately known as the Old Sobriety, in Rupert Street. It was almost the last of the great music-halls and, as usual, the small circular room with its wide window giving on to the auditorium was crowded. Lance was in form. He was demanding a considerable favour from his old friend and, since such was his temperament, the experience was making him truculent.
‘Of course you batten on it, I know,’ he continued vigorously. ‘It’s a mania with you. It’s got into your blood like a bacillus. That’s why I asked you to come along tonight to this ungodly hole.’ He paused. ‘I thought you’d like it,’ he added, glancing anxiously under his thick brows at the tall thin figure beside him.
‘Quite,’ murmured Mr Campion, bending forward to look through the window across the dark stalls to the boxes beyond. ‘He’s still sitting up there.’
‘So I should hope. There’s still a turn to go before the lady comes on, isn’t there?’ Lance set down his glass hastily and took a look himself. ‘Good Lord, we don’t want to lose him. Shall we go back?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ His companion surveyed the small bent figure in the second tier box. ‘He’s all right. He seems to be enjoying himself.’
‘That’s what I mean. That’s why the whole thing is so repellent,’ Lance sounded querulous. ‘Why shouldn’t he have a night or two on the tiles if he wants to? I shouldn’t have dreamed of stalking the poor old badger if Marguerite hadn’t been so insistent and so frightened. You haven’t met Marguerite, have you?’
‘His daughter?’
‘Yes,’ Lance was unusually laconic. He sighed. ‘A beautiful woman frightened out of her wits can be very demoralising. She’s got bone, Campion, exquisite bone.’
‘I thought you designed stage sets?’ remarked Mr Campion unsympathetically. ‘Still, we won’t go into that. Why is this poor bony female afraid?’
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