All right, Parsons, thank you. Come on, Richard. We’ll go across to my room.’
‘What shall I say, sir,’ said Parsons, ‘if they come again?’
‘Give them a drink of beer and pack them off with specious, high-sounding promises.’
‘Very good sir.’
They crossed the north and south quadrangles, meeting only a belated undergraduate trailing out in a bright orange dressing-gown to his bath, and climbed once more the staircase to Fen’s study. Here Fen applied himself to the telephone, while Cadogan smoked lugubriously and inspected his nails. In the house of Sir Richard Freeman on Boar’s Hill the bell jangled. He reached peevishly for the instrument.
‘Hello!’ he said. ‘What? What! Who is it…? Oh, it’s you.’
‘Listen, Dick,’ said Fen, ‘your damned myrmidons are chasing a friend of mine.’
‘Do you mean Cadogan? Yes, I heard about that cock-and-bull story of his.’
‘It’s not cock-and-bull. There was a body. But, anyway, it’s not that. They’re after him for something he did in a grocery store.’
‘Good heavens, the fellow must be cracked. First toyshops and now grocers. Well, I can’t meddle in the affairs of the City Constabulary.’
‘Really, Dick…’
‘No, no, Gervase, it can’t be done. The processes of the law, such as they are, can’t be held up by telephone calls from you.’
‘But it’s Richard Cadogan. The poet.’
‘I couldn’t care less if it was the Pope…Anyway, if he’s innocent it’ll be all right.’
‘But he isn’t innocent.’
‘Oh, well, in that case only the Home Secretary can save him…Gervase, has it ever occurred to you that Measure for Measure is about the problem of Power?’
‘Don’t bother me with trivialities now,’ said Fen, annoyed, and rang off.
‘Well, that was a lot of use,’ said Cadogan bitterly. ‘I may as well go to the police-station and give myself up.’
‘No, wait a minute.’ Fen stared out into the quadrangle. ‘What was the name of that solicitor – the one Mrs Wheatley saw?’
‘Rosseter. What about it?’
Fen tapped his fingers impatiently on the window-sill. ‘You know, I’ve seen that name somewhere recently, but I can’t remember where. Rosseter, Rosseter…It was – Oh, my ears and whiskers!’ He strode to a pile of papers and began rummaging through them. I’ve got it. It was something in the agony column of the Oxford Mail – yesterday, was it, or the day before?’ He became inextricably involved in news-sheets. ‘Here we are. Day before yesterday. I noticed it because it was so queer. Look.’ He handed Cadogan the page, pointing to a place in the personal column.
‘Well,’ said Cadogan, ‘I don’t see how this helps.’ He read the advertisement aloud:
‘“Ryde, Leeds, West, Mold, Berlin. Aaron Rosseter, Solicitor, 193A Cornmarket.” Well, and what are we to conclude from that?’
‘I don’t exactly know,’ said Fen. ‘And yet I feel somehow I ought to. Holmes would have made mincemeat of it – he was good on agony columns. Mold, Mold. What is Mold, anyway?’ He went to the encyclopedia and took out a volume. After a moment’s search: ‘“Mold,”’ he read. ‘“Urban district and market town of Flintshire. Thirteen miles from Chester…centre of important lead and coal mines…bricks, tiles, nails, beer, etc.…” Does that convey anything to you?’
‘Nothing at all. It’s my opinion they’re all proper names.’
‘Well, they may be.’ Fen restored the book to its place. ‘But if so, it’s a remarkable collection. Mold, Mold,’ he added into tones of faint reproof.
‘And in any case,’ Cadogan went on, ‘it’ll be the wildest coincidence if it’s got anything to do with this Tardy woman.’
‘Don’t spurn coincidence in that casual way,’ said Fen severely. ‘I know your sort. You say the most innocent encounter in a detective novel is unfair, and yet you’re always screaming out about having met someone abroad who lives in the next parish, and what a small world it is. My firm conviction,’ he said grandiosely, ‘is that this advertisement has something to do with the death of Emilia Tardy. I haven’t the least idea what, as yet. But I suggest we go and see this Rosseter fellow.’
‘All right,’ Cadogan replied. ‘Provided we don’t go in that infernal red thing of yours. Where on earth did you get it, anyway?’
Fen looked pained. ‘I bought it from an undergraduate who was sent down. What’s the matter with it? It goes very fast,’ he added in a cajoling tone.
‘I know.’
‘Oh, all right then, we’ll walk. It’s not far.’
Cadogan grunted. He was engaged in tearing out Rosseter’s advertisement and putting it in his pocket-book. ‘And if nothing comes of it,’ he said, ‘I shall go straight to the police, and tell them what I know.’
‘Yes. By the way, what did you do with those tins you stole? I’m feeling rather peckish.’
‘They’re in the car, and you leave them alone.’
‘Oughtn’t you to adopt a disguise?’
‘Oh, don’t be so stupid, Gervase…It’s not the being arrested I mind. They’re not likely to do more than just fine me. It’s all the bother of explaining and arranging bail and coming up before magistrates…Well, come on, let’s go, if you think it will do any good.’
The Cornmarket is one of the busiest streets in Oxford, though scarcely the most attractive. It has its compensations – the shapely, faded façade of the old Clarendon Hotel, the quiet gabled coaching yard of the Golden Cross, and a good prospect of the elongated pumpkin which is Tom Tower – but primarily it is a street of big shops. Above one of these was 193A, the office of Mr Aaron Rosseter, solicitor, as dingy, severe, and uncomfortable as most solicitor’s offices. What was it, Cadogan wondered, which made solicitors so curiously insensible to the graces of this life?
A faintly Dickensian clerk, with steel-rimmed spectacles and leather pads sewn to the elbows of his coat, showed them into the presence. The appearance of Mr Rosseter, though Asiatic, did not justify the Semitic promise of his baptismal name. He was a small, sallow man, with a tremendous prognathous jaw, a tall forehead, a bald crown, horn-rimmed spectacles, and trousers which were a little too short for him. His manner was abrupt, and he had a disconcerting trick of suddenly whipping off his glasses, polishing them very rapidly on a handkerchief which he pulled from his sleeve, and restoring them with equal suddenness to his nose. He looked a trifle seedy, and one suspected that his professional abilities were mediocre.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘and may I know your business?’ He examined the rather overwhelming presence of Gervase Fen with faint signs of trepidation.
Fen
