“You can can that stuff,” retorted Miss Vavasour. “I know your sort. You'd talk the hind leg off a donkey. But I can tell you this: if Jim Tallboy thinks he's going to get round me by sending his flash friends to shoot off a lot of hot air, he's mistaken.”
“My dear Miss Vavasour, will nothing rid you of this misapprehension? In other words, you got me all wrong. I'm not here to forward Tallboy's interests in any way–except, perhaps, by offering the suggestion that this office is possibly not the most suitable spot for interviews of a personal and confidential kind. If I might presume to advise you, would not an appointment for some other place and time–?”
“Ah!” said Miss Vavasour. “I dare say. But if a fellow won't answer your letters or come and see you, and you don't even know where he lives, what is a girl to do? I'm sure I don't want to make trouble.”
Here Miss Vavasour sniffed and applied a small handkerchief carefully to her made-up eye-lashes.
“Good heavens!” said Bredon. “How unkind and abominable!”
“You may well say so,” said Miss Vavasour. “It's not what anybody would expect of a gentleman, is it? But there! When a fellow's telling the tale to a girl it's one thing, and when he's got her into trouble it's another. A girl doesn't hear so much about him marrying her then. Well, you tell him he's got to do it, see? Or I'll scream my way into old Pym's office and make him. A girl's got to look after herself these days. I'm sure I only wish I had somebody to do it for me, and now poor Auntie's dead, I haven't got a soul to stick up for me.”
The handkerchief came into play again.
“But, my dear girl,” said Bredon, “even Mr. Pym, great autocrat as he is, couldn't make Tallboy marry you. He's married already.”
“Married?” Miss Vavasour took away the handkerchief revealing a pair of perfectly dry and very angry eyes, “the dirty beast! So
that's
why he never asked me to his home. Talking a lot of eye-wash about only one room and his landlady being very particular. I don't care, though. He's got to do it. His wife can divorce him. Goodness knows she's got cause. I've got his letters.”
Her eyes turned, irresistibly, to her large and ornate handbag. It was a false move and she realized it instantly and gazed appealingly at Bredon, but he knew where he was now.
“So you've got them there with you. That was very–far-sighted of you. See here, Miss Vavasour, what's the use of talking like this? You may just as well be frank with me. Your idea was to threaten to show those letters to Mr. Pym if Tallboy didn't pay up, wasn't it?”
“No, of course it wasn't.”
“You're so devoted to Tallboy that you always carry his correspondence about with you?”
“Yes–no. I never said I'd got the letters with me.”
“No? But you've admitted it now, you know. Now, you take the advice of a man double your age.” (This was a generous estimate, for Miss Vavasour was an easy twenty-eight.) “If you make a disturbance here, nothing will happen, except that Tallboy will possibly lose his job and have no money at all for you or anybody. And if you try to sell him those letters–there's a name for that, and it's not a pretty one.”
“That's all very well,” said Miss Vavasour, sullenly, “but how about this trouble he's got me into? I'm a mannequin, see? And if a girl's got to chuck her job, and her figure ruined for life–”
“Are you sure you're not mistaken about that?”
“'Course I'm sure. What do you take me for? An innocent?”
“Surely not,” said Bredon. “No doubt Tallboy will be ready to come to a suitable arrangement. But–if I may presume to advise you–no threats and no disturbance. And–forgive me–there are other people in the world.”
“Yes, there are,” said Miss Vavasour, frankly, “but they're not so keen to take over a girl with encumbrances, if you know what I mean. You wouldn't yourself now, would you?”
“Oh, me? I'm not in the running,” said Bredon, with perhaps more promptness and emphasis than was quite complimentary. “But, speaking generally, I'm sure you'll find it better not to make an explosion–not here, at any rate. I mean to say, you know, that's the point. Because this is one of those old-fashioned firms that don't like anything unpleasant or–er–undesirable to happen on their premises.”
“You bet they don't,” said Miss Vavasour, shrewdly, “that's why I'm here.”
“Yes, but take it from me, you'll do no good by making a fuss. Really not. And–ah! here is the missing gentleman. I'll be pushing along. Hullo, Tallboy–I've just been entertaining the lady in your absence.”
Tallboy, his eyes burning in a very white face and his lips twitching, looked at Bredon for a moment or two in silence. Then:
“Thanks very much,” he said, in a stifled tone.
“No, don't thank me,” said Bredon. “The gratification is entirely on my side.”
He went out and shut the door upon the pair of them.
“Now, I wonder,” said Mr. Bredon, reverting to his own detective personality as he went slowly upstairs to his room, “I wonder if it's possible that I'm all wrong about our friend Victor Dean. Can it be that he was merely a common or garden blackmailer, intent on turning his colleague's human weaknesses to his own advantage? Would that be worth cracking a fellow's skull for him and hurling him down a staircase, iron, one, murderers for the use of? The chap who could probably tell me is Willis, but somehow the good Willis is deaf as an adder to my well-known charm of speech. Is it any use sounding him again? If only I could be sure that he was not the gentleman who sandbagged my poor brother-in-law Charles and that he was not still harbouring designs upon my unworthy carcase. Not that I mind having designs harboured on me, but I don't want to make a confidant of the fellow I'm after, like the fat-headed hero in one of those detective stories where the detective turns out to be the villain. If only I had ever seen Willis engaged in any game or sport, I should know better where I stood, but he seems to despise the open-air life–and that in itself, if you come to think of it, is sinister.”
After a little more thought, he went along to Willis' room.
“Oh, I say, Willis,” he said, “am I disturbing you?”
“No. Come in.”
Willis looked up from a sheet of paper which bore the engaging headlines: “
MAGNOLIA-WHITE, MAGNOLIA-SOFT
–that's what they'll say of your hands.” He looked depressed and ill.
“See here, Willis,” said Bredon, “I want your advice. I know we don't seem to hit it off very well–”
“No–it's my fault,” said Willis. He seemed to struggle with himself for a moment, and then brought his words out with a rush, as though they had been violently forced from him: “I fancy I owe you some sort of apology. I appear to have been mistaken.”
“What exactly did you have against me? I never could make out what it was, to tell you the truth.”
“I thought you belonged to Victor Dean's beastly doping and drinking crowd, and thought you were trying to get Pamela–Miss Dean–in among them again. She tells me that's not the case. But I saw you there with her, and now she tells me it's my fault that you–that you–oh, hell!”
“What
is
the matter?”
“I'll tell you what's the matter,” said Willis, violently. “You went and forced yourself on Miss Dean–God knows what you told her, and she won't tell me. You made out you were a friend of her brother's, or something–was that true, to start with?”
“Not quite, as you put it. I made Miss Dean's acquaintance over a matter connected with her brother, but I had never met him, and she knows that.”
“What had it got to do with him, then?”
“I'm afraid I can't tell you that.”
“It sounds damned queer to me,” said Willis, his face darkening with suspicion. Then he seemed to recollect that he was supposed to be making an apology, and went on:
“Well, anyway, you took her to that disgusting place down there by the river.”
“That's not altogether true, either. I asked her to take me, because I couldn't very well have got in without an introduction.”
“That's a lie; I got in all right.”
“Miss Dean told them to let you in.”
“Oh!” Willis was disconcerted for a moment. “Well, in any case, you had no business to ask a decent girl to do anything of the kind. That was exactly what Dean and I had trouble about. A house like that is no fit place for her, and you know it.”
“I do; and I regretted the necessity which compelled me to ask her to go there. You may have noticed that I took care nothing should happen to her.”
“I don't know that,” grumbled Willis.
“You aren't a very good detective,” said Bredon with a smile. “You must take my word for it that she was quite safe.”
“I won't take your word, but I'd take hers. She says so, and I suppose I've got to believe it. But if you're not an out-and-out rotter yourself, why did you want to be taken there?”
“That's another thing I can't tell you. But I can offer you one or two reasonable explanations that might fit the case. I might be a journalist, commissioned to write an inside story about the newest kind of night-club. Or I might be a detective, engaged in tracking down dope-smugglers. Or I might be a zealot with a new brand of religion, trying to save the souls of post-war society sinners. Or I might be in love with somebody–say, if you like, the notorious Dian de Momerie–and threatening to commit suicide unless I got an introduction to her. I present you with those four solutions on the spur of the moment, and I dare say I could think of others, if I was put to it.”
“You might be a dope-merchant yourself,” said Willis.
“I hadn't thought of that. But if I were, I doubt if I should need Miss Dean's introduction to that particular crowd.”
Willis muttered something unintelligible.
“But I gather,” said Bredon, “that Miss Dean has more or less absolved me of being anything hopelessly corrupt. So what's the trouble?”
“The trouble is,” groaned Willis, “that you've–my God! you swine–you've thrown her over and she says it's my fault.”
“You oughtn't to say a thing like that, old son,” said Bredon, really distressed. “It's not done.”
“No–I dare say I'm not quite a gentleman. I've never been–”
“If you tell me you've never been to a public school,” said Bredon, “I shall scream. What with Copley and Smayle, and all the other pathetic idiots who go about fostering inferiority complexes, and weighing up the rival merits of this place and that place, when it doesn't matter a damn anyway, I'm fed up. Pull yourself together. Anybody, wherever he's been educated, ought to know better than to say a thing like that about any girl. Particularly when there isn't the slightest foundation for it.”
“Ah, but there is,” said Willis. “You don't realize it, but I do. I know a man's a man for a' that and all the rest of it, but people like you have a sort of glamour about them and women fall for it, every time. I know I'm as good a man as you are, but I don't look it, and that's where it is.”
“I can only assure you, Willis–”
“I know, I know. You've never made love to Miss Dean–that's what you're going to say–never by word, look or deed and so forth and so on, given her the slightest ground–bah! I know it. She admits it. It makes it all the worse.”
“I am afraid,” said Mr. Bredon, “that you are a very foolish pair of people. And I really think you must be quite mistaken in Miss Dean's feelings.”
“That's damned likely.”
“I think so. In any case, you oughtn't to have said anything to me about it. And in any case, there's nothing I can do.”
“She asked me,” said Willis, miserably, “to apologize to you and bring you–and ask you–and put the matter right.”
“There's nothing to put right. Miss Dean knows quite well that my interviews with her were merely a matter of business. And all I can say is, Willis, if you accepted any such commission, she must think you as soft as a pancake. Why on earth didn't you tell her you'd see me at the devil first? That's probably what she expected you to do.”
“Do you think so?”
“Sure of it,” said Bredon, who was not sure at all, but thought it best to appear so. “You mustn't go about creating intolerable situations, you know. It's very awkward for me, and I'm sure Miss Dean would be horribly upset if she knew what you'd been saying about her. All she meant was, I expect, that you'd taken quite a wrong view of a perfectly ordinary business acquaintanceship and been unnecessarily antagonistic and so on, and that she wanted you to put the thing straight, so that, if I needed her help again, there wouldn't be any awkwardness about it. Isn't that, in other words, what she said to you?”
“Yes,” said Willis. It was a lie, and he knew that Bredon knew that it was a lie, but he lied manfully. “Of course that was what she actually said. But I'm afraid I put another interpretation on it.”
“All right,” said Bredon, “that's settled. Tell Miss Dean that my business is progressing very well, and that when I need her kind help again I shall have no hesitation in calling her to my assistance. Now, is that all?”
“Yes, that's all.”
“You're sure–while you are about it–that there's nothing else you want to get off your chest?”
“N-no.”
“You don't sound very sure about it. You've been trying to say all this to me for some time, I dare say.”
“No, not very long. A few days.”
“Since the day of the monthly tea-party, shall we say?”
Willis started violently. Bredon, with a wary eye on him, followed up his advantage.
“Was that what you came round to Great Ormond Street that night to tell me?”
“How do you know about that?”
“I didn't know, I guessed. As I have said before, you would not make a good detective. You lost a pencil on that occasion, I believe?”
He drew the pencil from his pocket and held it out.
“A pencil? Not that I know of. Where did you find that?”
“In Great Ormond Street.”
“I don't think it's mine. I don't know. I think I've still got mine.”
“Well, never mind. You came round that night intending to apologize?”
“No–I didn't. I came round to have an explanation with you. I wanted to bash your face in, if you must know. I went round there just before ten–”
“Did you ring the bell of my flat?”