Miss Bogden pressed him further and was finally told that it was unethical for solicitors to disclose confidential information. Miss Bogden was not satisfied with this answer. With each rebuttal her determination grew and was reinforced by the snide enquiries of her girls. Her mind worked slowly but it worked steadily too. She followed the line from the bank to her typing service and from there to Mr Cadwalladine and from Mr Cadwalladine to Corkadales, the publishers. The secrecy with which the entire transaction had been surrounded intrigued her too. An author who had to be contacted by phone, a solicitor...With less flair than Frensic, but with as much perseverance, she followed the trail as far as she could, and late one evening she realized the full implications of Mr Cadwalladine's refusal to tell her where the typescript had been sent. And yet Corkadales had published the book. There had to be someone in between Cadwalladine and Corkadales and that someone was almost certainly a literary agent. That night Cynthia Bogden lay awake filled with a sense of discovery. She had found the missing link in the chain. The next morning she was up early and at the office at half past eight. At nine she telephoned Corkadales and asked to speak to the editor who had handled Pause. The editor wasn't in. She called again at ten. He still hadn't arrived. It was only at a quarter to eleven that she got through to him and by then she had had time to devise her approach. It was a straightforward one.
'I run a typing bureau,' she said, 'and I have typed a novel for a friend who is anxious to send it to a good literary agent and I wondered it...'
'I'm afraid we can't advise you on that sort of thing,' said Mr Tate.
'Oh I do understand that,' said Miss Bogden sweetly, 'but you published that wonderful novel Pause O Men for the Virgin and my friend wanted to send her novel to the same agent. It would be so good of you if you could...'
Responding to flattery Mr Tate did.
'Frensic & Futtle of Lanyard Lane?' she repeated.
'Well, Frensic now,' said Mr Tate, 'Miss Futtle is no longer there.'
Nor was Miss Bogden. She had put the phone down and was picking it up to dial Directory Enquiries. A few minutes later she had Frensic's number. Her intuition told her that she was getting close to home. She sat for a while staring into the depths of the solitaire for inspiration. Should she phone or...Mr Cadwalladine's refusal to say where the manuscript had gone persuaded her. She got up from her typewriter, asked her senior 'girl' to take over for the day, drove to the station and caught the 11.55 to London. Two hours later she walked down Lanyard Lane to Number 36 and climbed the stairs to Frensic's office.
It was fortunate for Frensic that he was lunching with a promising new author in the Italian restaurant round the corner when Miss Bogden arrived. They came out at two fifteen and walked back to the office. As they climbed the stairs Frensic stopped on the first landing.
'You go on up,' he said, 'I'll be with you in a moment.' He went into the lavatory and shut the door. The promising new author climbed the second flight. Frensic finished his business and came out and he was about to go on up when he heard a voice.
'Are you Mr Frensic?' it asked. Frensic stopped in his tracks.
'Me?' said the promising young author with a laugh. 'No I'm here with a book. Mr Frensic's downstairs. He'll be up in a minute.'
But Frensic wasn't. He shot down to the ground floor again and out into the street. That ghastly woman had tracked him down. What the hell to do now? He went back to the Italian restaurant and sat in a corner. How on earth had she managed to find him? Had that Cadbloodywalladine...Never mind how. The thing was what to do about it. He couldn't sit in the restaurant all day and he was no more going to confront Miss Bogden than fly. Fly? The word took on a new significance for him. If he didn't turn up at the office the promising young author would...To hell with promising young authors. He had asked that dreadful woman to marry him and...Frensic signalled to a waiter.
'A piece of paper please.' He scribbled a note of apology to the author, saying he had been taken ill and handed it with a five pound note to the waiter, asking him to deliver it for him. As the man went out Frensic followed and hailed a taxi. 'Glass Walk, Hampstead,' he said and got in. Not that going home would do him any good. Miss Bogden's tracking powers would soon lead her there. All right, he wouldn't answer the door. But what then? A woman with the perseverance of Miss Bogden, a woman of forty-five who had painstakingly worked her way towards her quarry over the months...such a woman held terrors for him. She wouldn't stop now. By the time he reached his flat he was panic-stricken. He went inside and locked and bolted the door. Then he sat down in his study and tried to think. He was interrupted by the phone. Unthinkingly he picked it up. 'Frensic here,' he said.
'Cynthia here,' said that pebbledashed voice. Frensic slammed the phone down. A moment later, to prevent her calling again, he picked it up and dialled Geoffrey's number.
'Geoffrey, my dear fellow,' he said when Corkadale answered, 'I wonder if...'
But Geoffrey didn't let him finish. 'I've been trying to get hold of you all afternoon,' he said. 'I've had the most extraordinary manuscript sent to me. You're not going to believe this but there's some lunatic in a place called of all things Bibliopolis...I mean can you beat that? Bibliopolis, Alabama...Well anyway he calmly announces that he is our late Peter Piper and will we kindly quote fulfil the obligations incurred in my contract unquote and publish his novel, Search for a Lost Childhood. I mean it's incredible and the signature...'
'Geoffrey dear,' said Frensic lapsing into the affectionate as a prophylactic against Miss Bogden's feminine charms and as a means of preparing Corkadale for the worst, 'I wonder if you would do me a favour...'
He spoke fluently for five minutes and rang off. With amazing rapidity he packed two suitcases, telephoned for a taxi, left a note for the milkman cancelling his two pints a day, took his chequebook, his passport and a briefcase containing copies of all Piper's manuscripts, and half an hour later was carrying his belongings into Geoffrey Corkadale's house. Behind him the flat in Glass Walk was locked and when Cynthia Bogden arrived and rang the bell there was no reply. Frensic was sitting in Geoffrey Corkadale's withdrawing-room sipping a large brandy and implicating his host in the plot to deceive Hutchmeyer. Geoffrey stared at him with bulging eyes.
'You mean you deliberately lied to Hutchmeyer and to me for that matter and told him that this Piper madman had written the book?' he said.
'I had to,' said Frensic miserably. 'If I hadn't, the whole deal would have fallen through. Hutchmeyer would have backed out and where would we have been then?'
'We wouldn't be in the ghastly position we are now, that I do know.'
'You'd have gone out of business,' said Frensic. 'Pause saved you. You've done very nicely out of the book and I've sent you others. Corkadales is a name to be reckoned with now.'
'Well, I suppose that's true,' said Geoffrey, slightly mollified, 'but it's going to be a name that will stink if it gets out that Piper is still alive and didn't write...'
'It isn't going to get out,' said Frensic, 'I promise you that.'
Geoffrey looked at him doubtfully. 'Your promises...' he began.
'You'll just have to trust me,' said Frensic.
'Trust you? After this? You can rest assured that if there's one thing I'm not going to do...'