Miss Teatime sat primly on a chair near the centre of the room, her handbag on her knee.
Trelawney walked slowly to one of the windows, where he remained with his back towards her.
“As a preliminary to our discussion...” she began.
He spun round. “Oh, it’s to be a dicussion, is it? How nice. Will you begin, or shall I?”
“Please do not be childish. I was saying that as a preliminary I should like to ask you not to use any more of those jolly jack tar expressions. I have suffered a number of courtships in my life, but never before one which made me seasick.”
“You’ll have something worse than seasickness to worry about before I’ve finished with you, woman.” He had flushed, and yet he spoke quite calmly and deliberately.
“Threats will serve the interest of neither of us,” Miss Teatime replied. “They are ill mannered and unbusinesslike.”
“I suppose that as a professional swindler you are all for the smooth approach?”
Miss Teatime sighed. “There you go again, Mr Trelawney. Abuse will get us nowhere.”
“So you don’t deny being a swindler, then?”
“That is not what is worrying you. It was the word ‘professional’ on which you laid stress, I noticed. If the acquisition of smoothness will allay your jealousy and bad temper, do for goodness’ sake stop imagining that amateurism is a virtue.”
He leaned back against the wall and folded his hands. High in one cheek a nerve throbbed spasmodically.
“What did you come here for?”
“For compensation, Mr Trelawney. I do not consider that I have been fairly treated.”
“You don’t cons...”
She raised a hand. “No, please let me finish. Your intention was to acquire a valuable motor boat by handing to a distressed family what you knew to be a worthless cheque. It was a very shabby design, which was thwarted thanks only to my having invented both the boat and the family’s distress.
“Thus your gain was an easy conscience, and it was I who accomplished it.
“But what did I receive in return?
“No one can compute the worth of an easy conscience; it is a priceless commodity. And so when I decided to draw a fee that would little more than cover my expenses, it hurt rather than embarrassed me to find that you had lied about putting five hundred pounds at my disposal.
“For that hurt, I believe I am fully entitled to recompense, and if you will now be good enough to write me a cheque—a genuine cheque this time—for five hundred pounds, I shall be much obliged, Mr Trelawney.”
Miss Teatime drew herself a little more erect in her chair, smoothed her skirt and stared solemnly out of the window.
Trelawney said nothing for several seconds. He was grinning as he explored one nostril with the tip of his middle finger. When he had finished, he looked at the finger and wiped it on the wall behind his back.
He walked across and sat in a chair facing her, three feet away. He leaned forward and nodded.
“All right. Joke over. Now just what is it you think you’re up to?”
She turned to him and raised her eyebrows. “This is not a joke, Mr Trelawney. I have told you quite simply what I require.”
“Do you mean to say,” he said slowly and with no trace now of amusement, “that you have the bloody neck to come out here and try and drag money out of me after what’s happened?”
“I do,” said Miss Teatime.
“You know what you are, don’t you? You’re a prissy-mouthed, four-eyed, chiselling bitch, and you can go to hell!”
She looked at him appraisingly.
“If you really feel that we have arrived at the exchange of compliments stage, I can only assure you that the choice between an hour of your company, Mr Trelawney, and being sewn for a week in a sack of discarded boil dressings would be by no means easy to make.”
“Cow!”
She shrugged and looked at her watch.
“I advise you not to waste further time on thinking up expletives. You lack the talent. If you will write me out that cheque at once, a great deal of trouble will be avoided—for you in particular.”
Watching her all the time, he moved his chair a little closer. There was menace now in his quietness, in the slow, deliberate manner of his watching and listening. With the tip of his tongue he felt his upper lip.
“Go on,” he said. “This trouble...Tell me.”
“The situation,” said Miss Teatime, “is not without a certain piquancy. I shall come to that aspect in a moment. First, though, let us acknowledge a few facts of which you imagine I am unaware.
“I have known for some little time that your intentions towards me are strictly dishonourable. You are doubtless vain enough to have supposed that I would not guess, but it really was not very difficult.
“I also happen to know—although I claim no personal credit for this—that you have already successfully imposed on the credulity of at least two other women. I know their names. One was called Reckitt, the other Bannister. And I know that the police are looking for the man who enginered their disappearance. For you, in fact.”
Trelawney, crouched on the edge of his chair as if in readiness to spring, was staring straight into her eyes. She looked back calmly.
“Now here is the amusing thing,” she went on. “Or at least I hope you will see the humour of it because then you might stop glaring quite so unpleasantly. The only reason why you have not been arrested is that I have personally vouched for your integrity. There, now—what do you think of that?”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“Oh, dear, you are so curmudgeonly...”
“What did you tell them?”
“That you are a bluff and honest sea-dog, of course. A sincere suitor. A gentleman whose handwriting bears not the faintest resemblance to that of the villain whose letters to poor Mrs Bannister have been discovered by the police.”
After a long silence, Trelawney’s hunched frame relaxed. He leaned back into his chair.
“In other words, you thought you’d set up a nice little line in blackmail.”
“Your moral judgments are as odious as your maritime metaphors. Kindly keep both to yourself.”
“I don’t believe this nonsense about letters.”
Unhurriedly, Miss Teatime opened her bag. She handed the photograph to Trelawney without comment.
He looked at it, then raised his eyes. “You say you’ve told them this isn’t my writing?”
“Emphatically.”
“And that Commander Jack Trelawney’s a fine chap who wouldn’t hurt a fly?”
“By a great effort of will, yes.”
“So I am not suspected of the awful crimes the police imagine have been committed?”
“No.”
He smiled. It was like a crack running across ice.
“Oh, dear,” sighed Miss Teatime, “you are so woefully transparent, Jackie boy.”
“Am I?”