The first two saw no profit in answering questions. At the third address I happened on an underworked twenty-year-old who ran pale long fingers through clean shoulder-length curls while he looked with interest at my offering. He pulled out a turquoise thread and held it up to the light.
‘This is silk,’ he said.
‘Real silk?’
‘No possible doubt. This was expensive fabric. The pattern is woven in. See.’ He turned the piece over to show me the back. ‘This is remarkable. Where did you get it? It looks like a very old lampas. Beautiful. The colors are organic, not mineral.’
I looked at his obvious youth and asked if he could perhaps seek a second opinion.
‘Because I’m straight out of design school?’ he guessed without umbrage. ‘But I studied fabrics. That’s why they took me on here. I know them. The designers don’t weave them, they use them.’
‘Then tell me what I’ve got.’
He fingered the turquoise strip and held it to his lips and his cheek and seemed to commune with it as if it were a crystal ball.
‘It’s a modern copy,’ he said. ‘It’s very skillfully done. It is lampas, woven on a Jacquard loom. There isn’t enough of it to be sure, but I think it’s a copy of a silk hanging made by Philippe de Lasalle in about 1760. But the original hadn’t a blue-green background, it was cream with this design of ropes and leaves in greens and red and gold.’
I was impressed. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I’ve just spent three years learning this sort of thing.’
‘Well… who makes it now? Do I have to go to France?’
‘You could try one or two English firms but you know what—’
He was brusquely interrupted by a severe-looking woman in a black dress and huge Aztec-type necklace who swept in and came to rest by the counter on which lay the unprepossessing rag.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked. ‘I asked you to catalog the new shipment of passementerie.’
‘Yes, Mrs Lane.’
‘Then please get on with it. Run along now.’
‘Yes, Mrs Lane.’
‘Do you want help?’ she asked me briskly.
‘Only the names of some weavers.’
On his way to the passementerie my source of knowledge spoke briefly over his shoulder. ‘It looks like a solitary weaver, not a firm. Try Saul Marcus.’
‘Where?’ I called.
‘London.’
‘Thanks.’
He went out of sight. Under Mrs Lane’s inhospitable gaze I picked up my rag, smiled placatingly and departed.
I found Saul Marcus first in the telephone directory and then in white-bearded person in an airy artist’s studio near Chiswick, West London, where he created fabric patterns.
He looked with interest at my rag but shook his head.
I urged him to search the far universe.
‘It might be Patricia Huxford’s work,’ he said at length, dubiously. ‘You could try her. She does — or did — work like this sometimes. I don’t know of anyone else.’
‘Where would I find her?’
‘Surrey, Sussex. Somewhere like that.’
‘Thank you very much.’
Returning to Pont Square, I looked for Patricia Huxford in every phone book I possessed for Surrey and Sussex and, for good measure, the bordering southern counties of Hampshire and Kent. Of the few Huxfords listed, none turned out to be Patricia, a weaver.
I really needed an assistant, I thought, saying good-bye to Mrs Paul Huxford, wife of a double-glazing salesman. This sort of search could take hours. Damn Chico, and his dolly-bird protective missus.
With no easy success from the directories I started on directory inquiries, the central computerized number-finder. As always, to get a number one had to give an address, but the computer system contemptuously spat out Patricia Huxford, Surrey, as being altogether too vague.
I tried Patricia Huxford, Guildford (Guildford being Surrey’s county town), but learned only of the two listed P. Huxfords that I’d already tried. Kingston, Surrey: same lack of results. I systematically tried all the other main areas; Sutton, Epsom, Leatherhead, Dorking… Surrey might be a small county in square-mile size, but large in population. I drew a uniform blank.
Huxfords were fortunately rare. A good job she wasn’t called Smith.
Sussex, then. There was East Sussex (county town Brighton) and West Sussex (Chichester). I flipped a mental coin and chose Chichester, and could hardly believe my lucky ears.
An impersonal voice told me that the number of Patricia Huxford was ex-directory and could be accessed only by the police, in an emergency. It was not even in the C.O. grade-one class of ex-directory, where one could sweet-talk the operator into phoning the number on one’s behalf (C.O. stood for calls offered). Patricia Huxford valued absolute grade-two privacy and couldn’t be reached that way.
In the highest, third-grade, category, there were the numbers that weren’t on any list at all, that the exchanges and operators might not know even existed; numbers for government affairs, the Royal Family and spies.
I yawned, stretched and ate cornflakes for lunch.
While I was still unenthusiastically thinking of driving to Chichester, roughly seventy more miles of arm-ache, Charles phoned from Aynsford.
‘So glad to catch you in,’ he said. ‘I’ve been talking to Thomas Ullaston, I thought you’d like to know.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed with interest. ‘What did he say?’
‘You know, of course, that he’s no longer Senior Steward of the Jockey Club? His term of office ended.’
‘Yes, I know.’
I also regretted it. The new Senior Steward was apt to think me a light-weight nuisance. I supposed he had a point, but it never helped to be discounted by the top man if I asked for anything at all from the department heads in current power. No one was any longer thanking me for ridding them of their villain: according to them, the whole embarrassing incident was best forgotten, and with that I agreed, but I wouldn’t have minded residual warmth.
‘Thomas was dumbfounded by your question,’ Charles said. ‘He protested that he’d meant you no harm.’
‘Ah!’ I said.
‘Yes. He didn’t deny that he’d told someone about that morning, but he assured me that it had been only one person, and that person was someone of utterly good standing, a man of the utmost probity. I asked if it was Archibald Kirk, and he gasped, Sid. He said it was early in the summer when Archie Kirk sought him out to ask about you. Archie Kirk told him he’d heard you were a good investigator and he wanted to know how good. It seems Archie Kirk’s branch of the civil service occasionally likes to employ independent investigators quietly, but that it’s hard to find good ones they can trust. Thomas Ullaston told him to trust you. Archie Kirk apparently asked more and more questions, until Thomas found himself telling about that chain and those awful marks… I mean, sorry, Sid.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘go on.’
‘Thomas told Archie Kirk that with your jockey constitution and physical resilience — he said physical resilience, Thomas did, so that’s exactly where Kirk got that phrase from — with your natural inborn physical resilience you’d shaken off the whole thing as if it had never happened.’
‘Yes,’ I said, which wasn’t entirely true. One couldn’t ever forget. One could, however, ignore. And it was odd, I thought, that I never had nightmares about whippy chains.