"To do any special windows?" Richards asked, after a moment's thought.
"Number 5 Britt Lane."
"Ho!" said Richards, amused. "I'd pay him to do them!"
"Why?"
"That bastard is never pleased. There's no hanky-panky about this, is there?"
"Neither hanky nor panky. Nothing is going to be abstracted from the house, and nothing upset. I'll go bail for that. Indeed, if it will make you any happier, I'll put the contract in writing."
"I'll take your word for it, sir. And your man can have the privilege of doing Mr. Flipping Lloyd's windows for nothing." He lifted his mug. "Here's to the old eyesright. What time will your pupil be coming along tomorrow?"
"Ten o'clock do?"
"Make it half-past. Your valentine goes out most mornings about eleven."
"That's very thoughtful of you."
"I'll get my early windows done and meet him at my place—3 Britt Mews—at half-past ten."
It was no use trying to telephone Tad Cullen again tonight, so Grant left a message at the Westmorland asking him to come to the flat as soon as he had had breakfast in the morning.
Then he at last had dinner, and went thankfully to bed.
As he was falling asleep a voice in his head said, "Because he knew that there was nothing to write on."
"What?" he said, coming awake. "Who knew?"
"Lloyd. He said, 'On what?' "
"Yes. Well?"
"He said it because he was startled."
"He certainly sounded surprised."
"He was surprised because he knew that there was nothing to write on."
He lay thinking about it until he fell asleep.
Tad arrived, very washed and shining, before Grant had finished breakfast. His soul was troubled, however, and he had to be coaxed out of a contrite mood ("Can't help feeling that I walked out on you, Mr. Grant") before he was any good to anyone. He cheered up at last when he found that there were definite plans for the day.
"You mean you were serious about window cleaning? I thought it was only a—a sort of figure of speech, maybe. You know, like, 'I'll be selling matches for a living if this goes on.' Why am I going to clean Lloyd's windows?"
"Because it is the only honest way of getting a foot inside the house. My colleagues can prove that you have no right to read a gas-meter, or test the electricity, or the telephone. But they cannot deny that you are a window-cleaner and are legally and professionally getting on with your job. Richards—your boss for today—says that Lloyd goes out nearly every day about eleven, and he is going to take you there when Lloyd has gone. He'll stay with you and work with you, of course, so that he can introduce you as his assistant who is learning the trade. That way you will be accepted without suspicion and left alone."
"So I'm left alone."
"On the desk in the big room that occupies most of the first floor there is an engagement book. A large, very expensive, red-leather affair. The desk is a table one—I mean that it doesn't shut—and it stands just inside the middle window."
"So?"
"I want to know Lloyd's engagements for the 3rd and 4th of March."
"You think maybe he travelled on that train, 'm?"
"I should like to be sure that he didn't, anyhow. If I know what his engagements were I can find out quite easily whether he kept them or not."
"Okay. That's quite easy. I'm looking forward to that window cleaning. I've always wondered what I could do when I get too old for flying. I might as well look into the window trade. To say nothing of looking into a few windows."
He went away, blithe and apparently forgetful that half an hour ago he was "lower than a worm's belly," and Grant looked round in his mind for any acquaintances that he and Heron Lloyd might have in common. He remembered that he had not yet rung up Marta Hallard to announce his return to town. It might be a little early in the day to break in on Marta's slumbers, but he would risk it.
"Oh, no," Marta said, "you didn't wake me. I'm halfway through my breakfast and having my daily dose of news. Every day I swear that never again will I read a daily paper, and every morning there is the blasted thing lying waiting for me to open it and every morning I open it. It upsets my digestive juices, and hardens my arteries, and my face falls with a thud and undoes five guineas' worth of Ayesha's ministrations in five minutes, but I have to have my daily dose of poison. How are you, my dear? Are you better?"
She listened to his answer without interrupting. One of Marta's more charming characteristics was her capacity for listening. With most of his other women friends silence meant that they were preparing their next speech and were merely waiting for the next appropriate moment to give utterance to it.
"Have supper with me tonight. I'll be alone," she said when she had heard about Clune and his recovered health.
"Make it early next week, can you? How is the play going?"
"Well, darling, it would be going a lot better if Ronnie would come up-stage now and then to talk to me instead of to the audience. He says it emphasises the detachment of the character to practically stamp on the floats and let the front stalls count his eyelashes, but I think myself it's just a hangover from his music-hall days."
They discussed both Ronnie and the play for a little, and then Grant said: "Do you know Heron Lloyd, by the way?"
"The Arabia man? Not to say know; no. But I understand he's almost as much of a hogger as Ronnie." "How?"
"Rory—my brother's boy—was mad to go exploring in Arabia—though why anyone should want to go exploring in Arabia I can't imagine—all dust and dates—anyway, Rory wanted to go with Heron Lloyd, but it seems that Lloyd travels only with Arabs. Rory, who is a nice child, says that that is because Lloyd is so Arabian that he is plus royaliste que le roi, but I think myself—being a low-minded creature and a rogue and vagabond—that he is just suffering from Ronnie's trouble and wants the whole stage."
"What is Rory doing now?" Grant asked, skating away from Heron Lloyd.
"Oh, he's in Arabia. The other man took him. Kinsey-Hewitt. Oh, yes, Rory wouldn't be put off by a little thing like a snub. Can you make it Tuesday: the supper?"
Yes, he would make it Tuesday. Before Tuesday he would be back at work, and the matter of Bill Kenrick, who had come to England full of excitement about Arabia and had died as Charles Martin in a train going to the Highlands, would have to be put behind him. He had only a day or two more.
He went out to have a hair-cut, and to think in that relaxed hypnotic atmosphere of anything that they had left undone. Tad Cullen was lunching with his boss. "Richards won't accept anything for this," he had said to Tad, "so take him out to lunch and give him a thundering good one and I'll pay for it."
"I'll take him out all right and be glad to," Tad said, "but I'm damned if I'll let you pay for it. Bill Kenrick was my buddy, not yours."
So he sat in the warm, aromatic air of the barber's shop, half dive, half clinic, and tried to think of something that they could still do to find Bill Kenrick's suitcases. But it was the returning Tad who provided the suggestion.
Why, said Tad, not Agony-advertise for this girl.
"What girl?"
"The girl who has his luggage. She has no reason to be shy—unless she's been helping herself to the contents, which wouldn't be unknown. But Bill is a—was a better picker than that. Why don't we say in capital letters: 'BILL KENRICK'—to catch the eye, get it?—and then just, 'Any friend get in touch with Number what's-it.' Is there anything against that?"
No, Grant could think of nothing against that, but his eye was on the piece of paper that Tad was fishing from his pocket.
"Did you find the book?"
"Oh, yes. I had only to lean in and pick it up. That guy doesn't do any homework, it seems. It's the dullest list of engagements outside a prison. Not a gardenia from start to finish. And no good to us anyway."
"No good?"
"He was busy, it seems. Will I write out that advertisement for the papers?"
"Yes,
do. There's paper in my desk."
"Which papers shall we send it to?"
"Write six, and we can address them later."
He looked down at Tad's child-like copy of the entries in Lloyd's engagement book. The entries for the 3rd and 4th of March. And as he read them the full absurdity of his suspicions came home to him. What was he thinking of? Was his mind still the too impressionable mind of a sick man? How could he ever have dreamed that Heron Lloyd could possibly have been moved to murder? Because that was what he had been thinking, wasn't it? That somehow, in some way that they could not guess, Lloyd had been responsible for Bill Kenrick's death.
He looked at the crucial entries, and thought that even if it were proved that Lloyd had not kept these particular engagements it would be fantastic to read into that absence any more than the normal explanation: that Lloyd had been indisposed or had changed his mind. On the night of the 3rd he had apparently attended a dinner.
"Pioneer Society, Normandie, 7:15" the entry read. At 9:30 the following morning a Pathé Magazine film unit were due to arrive at 5 Britt Lane and make him into number something-or-other of their Celebrities at Home series. It would seem that Heron Lloyd had more important things to think of than an unknown flyer who claimed to have seen ruins in the sands of Arabia.
"But he said, 'On what?' " said that voice in him.
"All right, he said, 'On what?' A fine world it would be if one was going to be suspected, if one was going to be judged, by every unconsidered remark!"
The Commissioner had once said to him: "You have the most priceless of all attributes for your job, and that is flair. But don't let it ride you, Grant. Don't let your imagination take hold. Keep it your servant."
He had been in danger of letting his flair bolt with him. He must take a pull on himself.
He would go back to where he was before he saw Lloyd. Back to the company of Bill Kenrick. Back from wild imaginings to fact. Hard, bare, uncompromising fact.
He looked across at Tad, nose to paper and pursuing his pen across the page with it as a terrier noses a spider across a floor.
"How was your milk-bar lady?"
"Oh, fine, fine," said Tad, absent-minded and not lifting his glance from his handiwork.
'Taking her out again?"
"Uh-huh. Meeting her tonight."
"Think she will do as a steady?"
"She might," Tad said, and then as he became aware of this unusual interest he looked up and said: "What's this all about?"
"I'm thinking of deserting you for a day or two, and I'd like to know that you won't be bored if left to your own devices."
"Oh. Oh, no; I'll be all right. It's time you took some time off to attend to your own affairs, I guess. After all, this is not trouble of yours. You've done far too much as it is."
"I'm not taking time off. I'm planning to fly over and see Charles Martin's people."
"People?"
"His family. They live outside Marseilles."
Tad's face, which had looked blank for a moment, grew animated again.
"What do you think you'll get from them?"
"I'm not doing any thinking. I'm just beginning from the other end. We've come to a blank wall where Bill Kenrick is concerned—unless his hypothetical girl-friend answers that advertisement, and that won't be for two days at the very least—so we'll try the Charles Martin end and see where we get from there."
"Fine. What about me coming with you?"
"I think not, Tad. I think you had better stay here and be O.C, the Press. See that all these are inserted and pick up any answers."
"You're the boss," Tad said in a resigned way. "But I sure would like to sec Marseilles."
"It's not a bit the way you picture it," Grant said, amused.
"How do you know how I picture it?"
"I can imagine."
"Oh, well, I suppose I can sit on a stool and look at Daphne. What funny names girls have in this neck of the woods. It's a bit draughty, but I can count up the number of times people say thank you for doing other people service."
"If it's iniquity you're looking for, you'll find as much on a Leicester Square pavement as you will on the Cannebière."
"Maybe, but I like my iniquity with some ooh-la-la in it."
"Hasn't Daphne got any ooh-la-la?"
"No Daphne's very la-di-da. I have an awful suspicion that she wears wooden underwear."
"She would need it in a milk-bar in Leicester Square in April. She sounds a nice girl."
"Oh, she's fine, fine. But don't you stay too long away, or the wolf in me will prove too strong and I'll take the first plane out to Marseilles to join you. When do you plan to go?"
"Tomorrow morning, if I can get a seat. Move over and let me reach the telephone. If I get an early-morning service I can, with a piece of luck, get back the following day. If not, then Friday at the latest. How did you get on with Richards?"
"Oh, we're great buddies. But I'm a bit disillusioned."
"About what?"
"About the possibilities of the trade." "Doesn't it pay?"
"I expect it pays off in coin but not any other way, take it from me. All you can see from outside a window, believe it or not, is your own reflection in the glass. What arc the names of those papers you want me to address these things to?"
Grant gave him the names of the six newspapers with the largest circulations, and sent him away with his blessing to employ his time as he saw fit until they met again.
"I certainly wish I was going with you," Tad said once more as he was leaving, and Grant wondered if seeing the South of France as one big honky-tonk was any more absurd than seeing it as mimosa. Which was what it was to him.
"France!" said Mrs. Tinker. "When you've only just come back from foreign parts!"
'The Highlands may be foreign parts, but the South of France is merely an extension of England."
"It's a very expensive extension, I've 'eard. Roonous. When was you expectin' to be back? I got a loverly chicken from Carr's for you."
'The day after tomorrow, I hope. Friday at the latest."
"Oh, then it'll keep. Was you wantin' to be called earlier tomorrow mornin', then?"
"I'll be away before you come in, I think. So you can have a late morning tomorrow."
"A late mornin' wouldn't suit Tinker, it wouldn't. But I'll get me shoppin' done before I come in. Now you see and take care of yerself. No burning the candle at both ends and comin' back lookin' no better than when you went away to Scotland in the beginnin'. I 'ope it keeps fine for you!"
Fine indeed, Grant thought, looking down at the map of France next morning. From that height on this crystal morning it was not a thing of earth and water and crops. It was a small jewelled pattern set in a lapis-lazuli sea; a Fabergé creation. Not much wonder that flyers as a species had a detached attitude to the world. What had the world —its literature, its music, its philosophies, or its history— to do with a man who saw it habitually for the thing it was: a bit of Fabergé nonsense?
Marseilles, at close quarters, was no jeweller's creation. It was the usual noisy crowded place filled with impatient taxi-horns and the smell of stale coffee; that very French smell that haunts its houses with the ghosts of ten million coffee-brewings. But the sun shone, and the striped awnings flapped a little in the breeze from the Mediterranean, and the mimosa displayed its pale expensive yellow in prodigal masses. As a companion picture to the grey and scarlet of London it was, he thought, perfect. If he ever was rich he would commission one of the best artists in the world to put the two pictures on canvas for him; the chiaroscuro of London and bright positive blaze of Marseilles. Or perhaps two different artists. It was unlikely that the man who could convey the London of a grey day in April would also be able to paint the essence of Marseilles on a spring noon.
He stopped thinking about artists and ceased to find Marseilles either bright or positive when he found that the Martin family had left the suburb only the week before for parts unknown. Unknown, that was,
to the neighbours. By the time that he had, with the help of local authorities, discovered that "parts unknown" merely meant Toulon, a great deal of precious time had been wasted, and still more was wasted in journeying to Toulon and finding the Martins among its teeming inhabitants.
But in the end he found them and listened to the little they had to tell. Charles was a "bad boy," they said, with all the antagonism of the French for someone who had apostatised from that supreme god of the French idolatry, the Family. He had always been a wilful, headstrong creature and (crime of crimes in the French calendar) lazy. Bone-lazy. He had gone away five years ago after a small trouble over a girl—no, no, he had merely stabbed her— and had not bothered to write to them. They had had no news of him in all those years except that a friend had run into him in Port Said about three years ago. He was doing pavement deals in second-hand cars, the friend said. Buying up crocks and selling them after he had tinkered with them a little. He was a very good mechanic; he could have been a very successful man, with a garage of his own and people working for him, if he had not been so lazy. Bone-lazy. A laziness that was formidable. A laziness that was a disease. They had heard nothing more of him until they had been asked to identify his body.
Grant asked if they had a photograph of Charles.
"Yes, they had several, but of course they were of Charles when he was much younger.
They showed him the photographs, and Grant saw why Bill Kenrick, dead, looked not too unlike the Charles Martin that his family had remembered. One thin dark man with marked eyebrows, hollowed cheeks and straight dark hair looked very like any other similar young man when individuality was quenched. They did not even have to have the same colour of eyes. A parent receives a message saying: Your son is dead as the result of a regrettable accident; would you please identify him as your son and arrange for the burial. The bereaved parent is presented with his dead son's papers and belongings and is asked to identify the owner as his son. There is no question in his conditioned mind; he accepts what he sees, and what he sees is what he expected to see. It would not occur to him to say: Are this man's eyes blue or brown?
In the end, of course, it was Grant who submitted to questioning. Why was he interested in Charles? Had Charles after all left some money? Was it that Grant was looking for the legal heirs, perhaps?