“Is this it?” Bredon fished in his waistcoat pocket and produced the onyx scarab, which he had unaccountably neglected to return to Pamela Dean.
“That’s it, sir. A comical-looking thing, ain’t it? Like it might be a beetle or such. It was lying in a dark corner under the iron staircase and at first I thought it was just a pebble like the other one.”
“What other one?”
“Well, sir, I found a little round pebble in the very same place only a few days before. I said at the time, ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s a funny thing to find there.’ But I reckon that one must have come from Mr. Atkins’s room, him having taken his seaside holiday early this year on account of having been ill, and you know how people do fill up their pockets with sea-shells and pebbles and such.”
Bredon hunted in his pocket again.
“Something like that, was it?” He held out a smooth, water-rounded pebble, about the size of his thumbnail.
“Very like it, sir. Did that come out of the passage, sir, might I ask?”
“No-I found that up on the roof.”
“Ah!” said Mrs. Crump. “It’ll be them boys up to their games. When the Sergeant’s eye is off them you never know what they’re after.”
“They do their drill up there, don’t they? Great stuff. Hardens the muscles and develops the figure. When do they perform? In the lunch-hour?”
“Oh, no, sir. Mr. Pym won’t have them running about after their dinners. He says it spoils their digestions and gives them the colic. Very particular, is Mr. Pym. Half-past eight regular they has to be on duty, sir, in their pants and singlets. Twenty minutes they has of it and then changed and ready for their dooties. After dinner they sets a bit in the boys’ room and has a read or plays something quiet, as it might be, shove ha’penny or tiddley-winks or such. But in their room they must stay, sir; Mr. Pym won’t have nobody about the office in the dinner-hour, sir, not without, of course, it’s the boy that goes round with the disinfectant, sir.”
“Ah, of course! Spray with Sanfect and you’re safe.”
“That’s right, sir, except that they uses Jeyes’ Fluid.”
“Oh, indeed,” said Mr. Bredon, struck afresh by the curious reluctance of advertising firms to use the commodities they extol for a living. “Well, we’re very well looked after here, Mrs. Crump, what?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Mr. Pym pays great attention to ’ealth. A very kind gentleman, is Mr. Pym. Next week, sir, we has the Charwomen’s Tea, down in the canteen, with an egg-and-spoon race and a bran-tub, and bring the kiddies. My daughter’s little girls always look forward to the tea, sir.”
“I’m sure they must,” said Mr. Bredon, “and I expect they’d like some new hair-ribbons or something of that sort-”
“It’s very kind of you, sir,” said Mrs. Crump, much gratified.
“Not at all.” A couple of coins clinked. “Well, I’ll push off now and leave you to it.”
A very nice gentleman, in Mrs. Crump’s opinion, and not at all proud.
It turned out precisely as Mr. Willis had expected. He had tracked his prey from Boulestin’s, and this time he felt quite certain he had not been spotted. His costume-that of a member of the Vehmgericht, with its black cassock and black, eyeleted hood covering the whole head and shoulders-was easily slipped on over his every-day suit. Muffled in an old burberry, he had kept watch behind a convenient van in Covent Garden until Bredon and Pamela Dean came out; his taxi had been in waiting just round the corner. His task was made the easier by the fact that the others were driving, not in a taxi, but in an enormous limousine, and that Bredon had taken the wheel himself. The theatre rush was well over before the chase started, so that there was no need to keep suspiciously close to the saloon. The trail had led westward through Richmond and still west, until it had ended at a large house, standing in its own grounds on the bank of the river. Towards the end of the journey they were joined by other cars and taxis making in the same direction; and on arrival they found the drive a parking-place for innumerable vehicles. Bredon and Miss Dean had gone straight in, without a glance behind them.
Willis, who had put on his costume in the taxi, anticipated some difficulty about getting in, but there was none. A servant had met him at the door and asked if he was a member. Willis had replied boldly that he was and given the name of William Brown, which seemed to him an ingenious and plausible invention. Apparently the club was full of William Browns, for the servant raised no difficulty, and he was ushered straight in to a handsomely furnished hall. Immediately in front of him, on the skirts of a crowd of people drinking cocktails, was Bredon, in the harlequin black and white which had been conspicuous as he stepped into his car after dinner. Pamela Dean, in an exiguous swan’s-down costume representing a powder-puff, stood beside him. From a room beyond resounded the strains of a saxophone.
“The place,” said Mr. Willis to himself, “is a den of iniquity.” And for once, Mr. Willis was not far wrong.
He was amazed by the slackness of the organization. Without question or hesitation, every door was opened to him. There was gambling. There was drink in oceans. There was dancing. There were what Mr. Willis had heard described as orgies. And at the back of it all, he sensed something else, something that he did not quite understand; something that he was not precisely kept out of, but to which he simply had not the key.
He was, of course, partnerless, but he soon found himself absorbed into a party of exceedingly bright young people, and watching the evolutions of a danseuse whose essential nakedness was enhanced and emphasized by the wearing of a top hat, a monocle and a pair of patent-leather boots. He was supplied with drinks-some of which he paid for, but the majority of which were thrust upon him, and he suddenly became aware that he would have made a better detective had he been more hardened to mixed liquors. His head began to throb, and he had lost sight of Bredon and Pamela. He became obsessed with the idea that they had departed into one of the sinister little cubicles he had seen-each heavily curtained and furnished with a couch and a mirror. He broke away from the group surrounding him and began a hurried search through the house. His costume was hot and heavy, and the sweat poured down his face beneath the stifling black folds of his hood. He found a conservatory full of amorous drunken couples, but the pair he was looking for was not among them. He pushed open a door and found himself in the garden. Cries and splashes attracted him. He plunged down a rose-scented alley beneath a pergola and came out upon an open space with a round fountain-pool in the centre.
A man with a girl in his arms came reeling past him, flushed and hiccuping with laughter, his leopard-skin tunic half torn from his shoulders and the vine-leaves scattering from his hair as he ran. The girl was shrieking like a steam-engine. He was a broad-shouldered man, and the muscles of his back gleamed in the moonlight as he swung his protesting burden from him and tossed her, costume and all, into the pool. Yells of laughter greeted this performance, renewed as the girl, draggled and dripping, crawled back over the edge of the basin and burst into a stream of abuse. Then Willis saw the black-and-white harlequin.
He was climbing the statue-group in the centre of the pool-an elaborate affair of twined mermaids and dolphins, supporting a basin in which crouched an amorino, blowing from a conch-shell a high spout of dancing water. Up and up went the slim chequered figure, dripping and glittering like a fantastic water-creature. He caught the edge of the upper basin with his hands, swung for a moment and lifted. Even in that moment, Willis felt a pang of reluctant admiration. It was the easy, unfretted motion of the athlete, a display of muscular strength without jerk or effort. Then his knee was on the basin. He was up and climbing upon the bronze cupid. Yet another moment and he was kneeling upon the figure s stooped shoulders-standing upright upon them, the spray of the fountain blowing about him.