Mr Campion & Others Page 15

  ‘Neat,’ muttered Mr Campion. ‘That wireless stunt, I mean.’

  ‘It was.’ Oates was still impressed. ‘The use of the names made it sound so natural. What was the code exactly? Do you know?’

  His host pulled a dictionary from a shelf at his side and turned over the leaves until he came to a small section at the end.

  ‘It’s childish,’ he said. ‘Funny how these people never do any inventing if they can help it. Look it all up.’

  The chief took the book and read the heading aloud.

  ‘The More Common British Christian Names and Their Meanings.’

  He ran his eyes down the columns.

  ‘Gregory,’ he read. ‘A watcher. Good Lord, that was to tell ’em Blower was on their track, I suppose. And Mattie … what’s Mattie?’

  He paused. ‘“Diminutive of Matilda”,’ he said at last. ‘“Mighty Battle Maid”. I don’t get that.’

  ‘Dangerous, indignant and female,’ translated Mr Campion. ‘It rather sums up Philip Graysby’s Auntie Flo, don’t you think?’

  It was after the chief had gone and he was alone that Juliet phoned. She was jubilant and her clear voice bubbled over the wire.

  ‘I can’t thank you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to say. Aunt Florence is perfectly marvellous about everything. And I say, Albert …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Philip says we can keep Swan if we have him at the country house. We’re going to be married quite soon, you know. Our reconciliation rather hurried things along … Oh, what did you say?’

  Mr Campion smiled. ‘I said I’ll have to send you a wedding present, then,’ he lied.

  There was a fraction of silence at the other end of the wire.

  ‘Well, darling … it would be just too terribly sweet if you really wanted to,’ said Miss Fysher-Sprigge.

  7

  The Frenchman’s Gloves

  MR ALBERT CAMPION was considering the hundred and fifteenth unintelligible oil painting under the muslin-shaded lights of the Excelsior Gallery’s stuffiest room, and wondered if it was honest reaction or merely age which made him yearn for an occasional pair of gluey-eyed, human-faced dogs by old Mr Landseer. A pathetic sigh at his shoulder recalled him to his duty as a nursemaid. He glanced at Felicity apologetically.

  ‘Do you like this?’

  ‘Tremendously,’ said Miss Felicity Carrington stoutly, adding, with a touch of candour induced by sheer physical exhaustion, ‘if you do.’

  A memory of his own youth returned to Mr Campion enlighteningly.

  ‘My dear child,’ he said, ‘my dear child, you’re not enduring this for my sake, are you?’

  Felicity blushed, bringing it home to her escort that the fashion in nineteen-year-olds had changed. He felt kindly disposed towards ‘Alice’s girl’, who had been handed over to him to amuse for the afternoon. She was certainly extraordinarily pretty. The first time he had seen her, he remembered, she had been bald, toothless and crimson in the face at a christening party, and he was gratified to see what Time could do.

  ‘Let’s get this straight,’ he suggested. ‘I thought you told me you wanted to go to a picture gallery to see something modern? I trust you didn’t do that to put me at my ease?’

  ‘Well,’ Felicity’s large grey eyes were honest, ‘Mother did hint that you were frightfully clever, and it occurred to me that you might take a bit of living up to. A picture gallery seemed the only safe bet. Don’t be annoyed. I only wanted to put you into a good mood.’

  Mr Campion’s lean face split into a smile.

  ‘That’s a mistake,’ he said, piloting her towards the door. ‘That’s mistake number one in the art of being taken out. Never try to please the man beside you. It gives him a sense of superiority, and superiority breeds discontent. What would you really like to do? Eat ice-cream?’

  The girl regarded him seriously. It appeared she was giving the question earnest thought, so that he found her final pronouncement surprising.

  ‘What I’d like most, more than anything else in the world,’ she said at last, ‘is to go to the Hotel Balsamic and have some tea.’

  ‘The Balsamic?’ he echoed blankly. ‘You’ve got the names muddled. You mean the Berkeley.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I mean the Balsamic. I’d rather go there to tea than anywhere else on earth.’

  ‘You’re not only original, my girl; you’re unique, I should think,’ said her escort, obediently handing her into a cab. ‘Ever been there before?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid I haven’t. I know it’s not very gay.’

  ‘Gay?’ Mr Campion considered. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘The Balsamic is respectable, comfortable, worthy, florid, English, unutterably decent, but gay – no. I hear they’ve met the changing mode with a small unsprung dance-floor and a string band, but if it’s food you’re after, the French pastries should be excellent. Do you still want to go there?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Felicity, adding abruptly: ‘Tell me about your mysteries. You’re terribly clever at clearing them up, aren’t you?’

  Mr Campion leant back in a corner of the taxi and stretched his long legs.

  ‘I’m brilliant,’ he said, regarding her soberly from behind his horn-rimmed spectacles. ‘Positively uncanny. I can’t hide it. My best friends are always telling me. Don’t run away with the suspicion that I’m vain, either. I simply happen to have X-ray eyes and all sorts of staggering personal gadgets of that sort. Nor am I proud. I’ll show you my methods. For instance, I deduce from certain phenomena, obviously invisible to you but stunningly clear to me, that you, young woman, have been buttering me up all the afternoon with intent to convert my power to possible use in the near future. I deduce, further, that you have a small private mystery that you’d like cleared up, and that that mystery is connected with the venerable old Balsamic. Am I right?’

  Felicity sat in her corner, silent and reproachful. She was at the small-cat stage, with enormous eyes, a pointed chin, and a little delicate neck rising up out of a scarlet choker.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Mr Campion was contrite. ‘When I get a chance to do my trick I can’t resist it. Any opening goes to my head like wine. What’s up? Lost something?’

  Felicity’s triangular mouth opened hesitantly.

  ‘I haven’t,’ she began. ‘But …’

  ‘Not A Friend?’ said Mr Campion firmly. ‘I’m sorry, but as part of your educational system I cannot pass that. This is Rule Two. Avoid A Friend. He or she is a Mrs Harris whom no one likes. A Friend is dead. A Friend is a myth who never ought to have existed. As an alibi he’s worse than being caught with the silver in a sack.’

  The girl sat up.

  ‘You think you’re clever, don’t you?’ she said with sudden spirit. ‘Do you know what I think of you? I think you’re bogus. A silly, oldish fraud.’

  Her companion sighed and settled down.

  ‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘I knew the ice must break if only the pressure was great enough. Now that we understand one another, what’s the trouble? Who has lost what?’

  Felicity was mollified.

  ‘I’m not taking anything back yet,’ she said warningly, ‘but I admit I did have a purpose in trying to put you in a useful frame of mind. It’s Madeleine. Madeleine was at school with me, at Paddledean, and we’re still great friends. She’s living over here with some English godparents down in Cornwall, but of course they haven’t any authority at all. I mean, her father is the real court of appeal. So when she got engaged and the wretched Roundels became so difficult she had to write to him and …’

  ‘Wait,’ said Mr Campion hastily. ‘Wait. My trick doesn’t seem to be working. Let’s do it again. Begin with Madeleine. Madeleine who?’

  ‘Madeleine Gerard.’

  ‘I see. She’s living in Cornwall with some English godparents. She’s a Frenchwoman?’

  ‘Well, of course!’

  Mr Campion looked hurt.

  ‘There’s no “of course” about it,’
he said firmly. ‘That’s the worst of you amateurs. You take my astounding gifts for granted after the first performance. Well now, Madeleine Gerard, French, young, educated at Paddledean, and living with English people in Cornwall, has got herself engaged. So far, that’s all right. Then we come to someone called Roundel. There can hardly be two families in Cornwall with that all-embracing name, so I take it you mean Sir Nigel Roundel and his good lady? They have, I seem to remember, about seventeen daughters and one small male lamb and heir called Henry, who must be about twenty. Madeleine, I take it, has got engaged to Henry? Unofficially, no doubt.’

  Felicity laughed.

  ‘I do take it back. You’re not bad,’ she said. ‘You’re right, even down to the part about it being unofficial. The Roundels are hopelessly old-fashioned and County in the worst sense of the word. Also they’ve got it in their heads that Henry is the most important thing on earth. The trouble is that both Henry and Madeleine are under age, and whereas the Roundels don’t exactly say, or even think, that Madeleine isn’t perfectly suitable, they want to make sure. You do see, don’t you?’

  ‘I do indeed.’ Campion, who had met Sir Nigel and had a vivid memory of that sturdy old gentleman, spoke with understanding. ‘So Madeleine wrote to her papa. Where does he live, by the way?’

  ‘In Vaux.’ Felicity was warming up to her subject and he was glad to note that all trace of restraining respect had vanished from her manner. ‘That was a blow. You see, he’s old-fashioned, too, and apparently he had some other idea for Madeleine’s future. He’s pretty rich, I think. Anyway, he wrote back a very stiff letter to Madeleine and everything was rather awkward. Madeleine and Henry stuck to their guns, however, and finally, after a lot of excitement and polite letters in bad English to Sir Nigel, followed by rather rude ones in worse French to Monsieur Gerard, it’s been arranged that there shall be a luncheon party at Claridge’s tomorrow for the parents to meet and discuss things. M. Gerard is in London now, and the Roundels are coming up from Cornwall tonight.’

  ‘Madeleine,’ she continued, ‘has been staying with us since the beginning of the week and the tension is pretty high. It’s a dreadful set-out. Apparently Madeleine’s father hadn’t been to England for fifteen years and feels he’s making an enormous concession in coming as far as London to see the Roundels, and the Roundels feel it’s monstrous that they should have to come to London to see M. Gerard, whom they insist on regarding as illiterate and “in trade”. The whole affair has been nearly shipwrecked half a dozen times, but Madeleine and Henry are convinced that if only the meeting comes off it’ll be perfectly all right. Everything hinges on the lunch, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Food sounds to me to be the only hope,’ said Mr Campion dryly. ‘Let us trust not a forlorn one. What has Madeleine lost? The meal ticket?’

  Felicity did not reply immediately. The taxi had pulled up at the discreet entrance of the Balsamic Hotel, and not until that vast foyer had swallowed them up did she return to the subject.

  As they settled themselves at one of the tea-tables in the gloomy Palm Garden and glanced round at the three other adventurous couples who had braved that dignified wilderness of napery, she spoke again.

  ‘It doesn’t look a – a fishy place, does it?’ she said candidly.

  ‘Fishy?’ Mr Campion was startled. ‘My dear child, nothing more questionable than a sly Episcopal pun in Greek can ever have enlivened these revolting tomato-and-ormolu walls. Look here, let’s get back to Madeleine. She’s beginning to worry me. What can the poor girl have lost here, of all unlikely places?’

  Felicity raised her large eyes to his. ‘Her father, of course, silly,’ she said.

  Campion blinked.

  ‘Dear me, that’s almost vital, isn’t it? His patience with Sir Nigel as a correspondent gave out, I suppose. How very unfortunate for young love, though. Hasn’t there been any word of explanation? Has Papa simply not turned up here?’

  ‘Oh no, it’s nothing ordinary like that.’ There was an engaging directness in the young eyes. ‘You see, he’s lost in the hotel. He’s staying here – at least, that’s what the management says. But he didn’t come to call for Madeleine as he promised on Tuesday night. She waited for him, feeling rather scared because she knew he was angry with her, and on Wednesday she called up this hotel, where he had booked rooms. They admitted he was staying here, but they said he’d gone out. She left a message, but he didn’t answer it, and since then she hasn’t heard a word. This morning she was so nervy that she called here. The people at the office place were awfully polite but not very helpful. They simply repeated what they’d said before.’

  Felicity hesitated and added with sudden naîveté. ‘Madeleine’s very young and rather shy, so I don’t suppose they thought she was very important. She asked Mother’s advice, and Mother, she said, thought it was safest to leave him alone and just trust that he’ll turn up at Claridge’s. It’s terribly unkind of him, though, isn’t it? I mean, he must realise what the suspense is like for Madeleine.’

  Her companion considered the case of the harsh French parent.

  ‘Gerard,’ he said at last. ‘What sort of business had Père Gerard over here?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s very rich in that quiet French way and has something to do with precious stones, I think.’

  Mr Campion bolted a small portion of buttered tea-cake and swallowed hard.

  ‘We’re not discussing Edmond Gerard by any chance, are we?’ he said. ‘The Edmond Gerard?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the man. Do you know him?’

  ‘I know of him.’ Mr Campion was thoughtful. ‘He’s a very famous and distinguished person in an exclusive sort of way. I heard his name the other day. Oh yes, he’s rumoured to have the governing interest in Bergère Frères, who are an enormous jewel firm with houses in London, Paris and Amsterdam, but he’s far too magnificent to worry his head about business. Dear me, the bluff Sir Nigel must have put a large riding-boot right into it. “In trade” indeed! My hat, that’s going to be a sensational luncheon!’

  ‘If it comes off,’ said Felicity gloomily. ‘I don’t care how important he is, he’s been a pig to Madeleine. It’s so odd, because he’s very fond of her, although he’s so strict, and she adores him. Her mother died when she was a child. That’s why his behaviour is so unreasonable. What are you thinking?’

  Mr Campion was frowning.

  ‘It is unreasonable,’ he said. ‘Thunderingly unreasonable. Almost unlikely. The hotel people said quite definitely that he was staying here, you say?’

  ‘Yes, they told Madeleine so this morning. He’s been here since Tuesday. Can’t you find out where he is and if he’s going to turn up at Claridge’s tomorrow?’

  She looked very young and hopeful seated before him, natural colour in her cheeks, and in her eyes an engaging faith in his power to work small miracles. Campion was touched and, what was more, his curiosity was aroused.

  ‘There is one way of finding out a little,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t altogether approve of this as a method, but if one suspects the front door may be closed in one’s face the intelligent caller slopes quietly round to the back.’

  He took a card from his case as he spoke and, scribbling a few lines upon it, beckoned to a waiter.

  ‘Is Ex-Inspector Bloomer still here?’

  ‘Yes, sir. No trouble, I hope, sir?’

  ‘I hope not too,’ agreed Mr Campion affably. ‘If it’s convenient I’ll meet him in the foyer in five minutes. Rule Number Three,’ he continued, turning to his pupil as the man went off. ‘Never forget an Old Face, especially if it’s in the Force. Bloomer – don’t be misled by his name – was quite an ornament in the City police some years ago. I don’t mean anything flashy, mind you. Bloomer was always something solid and good. When he retired he received the job of house detective here as a man in a different profession might receive a quiet country rectorship. He’s the man for our money. I’ll be back in ten minutes. You needn’t save me an éclair.’
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  His time estimate proved entirely wrong, as it happened. To his surprise he found the ex-inspector not only ready but eager to discuss M. Edmond Gerard. Bloomer had aged and widened in his three years at the Balsamic, and his close-cropped hair was white, but he still possessed that blue-eyed innocence of expression which his visitor remembered so well.

  ‘Come into my office,’ he invited, as soon as Gerard’s name was mentioned. ‘It’s a cosy little place; sound-proof door, too. You can’t be too discreet in this house. To tell you the truth I’m glad someone’s going to bring the subject up. Three days is a long time for an elderly bloke to wander about London, without his luggage, say what you like.’

  Campion controlled his question until the sound-proof door closed behind them, but once there he put it with some force. ‘Do you mean to say Edmond Gerard hasn’t slept here since Tuesday?’

  ‘He hasn’t slept here at all,’ said Bloomer cheerfully. ‘The management tells me not to be fussy, but he was a respectable, oldish cove, you know; not at all the type to go off gallivanting. He came in early on Tuesday, took up his reservations, and went out without leaving a message. That’s all we’ve seen of him. At five-fifteen a Hatton Garden firm called Bergère Brothers rang through and asked if he’d come in. The clerk told them no, but promised to phone when he did arrive. He didn’t show up all night. In the morning, just when we were going to ring them, Bergère’s phoned again. We said we were alarmed and they shut us up at once. They said he was a director of their firm and that they would take full responsibility for making inquiries at the hospitals and so on. They were very insistent that it wasn’t necessary to call the police, and, between you and me, we weren’t keen on that idea ourselves.’

  He grinned. ‘We’re slightly la-di-dah here, you know. In our opinion the police are a very common lot.’