He had got something out of his pursuit, at any rate. He fixed George with large and hungry eyes. Did he look like a detective-inspector? The trick, he supposed, was not to look like one, but at least George Felse would do pretty well. Tall and thin, with a lean, thoughtful face and hair greying at the temples; not bad-looking, in a pleasant, irregular way. Paddy paid his respects almost reverently, and accepted the offer of a ginger ale.
“What did you want to ask me?”
“Well—if it’s all right with you, could I come along and help you to-morrow?” It was out, and in quite a creditable tone, though he had the hardest work in the world not to embroider it with all manner of persuasions and coaxings. His conscience suffered one more convulsive struggle before he suppressed it. If he hadn’t confessed that his parents had already forbidden it, still he hadn’t told any lies. It was a matter of his adult honour, by this time, not to admit defeat.
Simon sat looking at him for a few moments with an unreadable face, almost as though his mind had wandered away to ponder other and less pleasant subjects. “It’s like this, Paddy,” he said at last, almost abruptly. “I can’t very well say yes to you, in fairness, because I’ve just said no to Dominic here. There are good reasons, you know. Space is short inside there. And then, this isn’t an entertainment, you see, it’s a bit of serious research. It wouldn’t be the thing to turn it into a spectacle. The witnesses are necessary for the record, not for their own satisfaction.”
In the few seconds of silence George and Dominic exchanged a brief, significant glance over Paddy’s averted head. The boy studied his ginger ale as though the secret of the universe lay quivering somewhere in the globule of amber light suspended in it. His face was a little too still to be quite convincing, though the air of commonsense acceptance with which he finally looked up could be counted a success.
“Well, that all makes sense. O.K., then, that’s it. You didn’t mind my asking, though?”
“Paddy, in other circumstances I don’t know a fellow anywhere I’d rather have to help me.”
“Thanks! I’ll remember that. I suppose I’d better be getting back to lunch, then. You won’t be coming?”
“No, I’m lunching here. I told your mother this morning.”
“Well, thanks for the drink.” He tilted the empty glass and slanted a quick smile up at George. “Good thing it was only ginger ale.” He rose, his face still a little wry with swallowing his disappointment.
“Why, in particular?” asked Simon curiously.
The boy divided a bright, questioning glance between them. “Didn’t you really know? You’ve got a real, live detective-inspector sitting right beside you, watching your every move. Mr. Felse would have pinched you in a flash if you’d stood me a shandy.” He waved a hand, not ungallantly. “Good-bye!” He was gone.
“Well, I’m damned!” said Simon, blankly staring. “Are you really?”
George admitted it. “But I don’t know how Paddy found out.”
“I told him,” said Dominic, a little pink with embarrassment at seeming still, at his mature age, to be boasting about his father’s profession. “When he walked back half-way here with me yesterday, after tea at the farm. We hadn’t exactly got off on the right foot with each other, I was rather casting about for acceptable lures. There was Simon—” He smiled rather self-consciously across the table at the great man. “Anyone who knows your Harappa articles almost by heart is practically in with Paddy. And the next bid seemed to be you, Dad. He was duly impressed.”
“There’s still a bit of Paddy left in me,” owned Simon. “I’m impressed. Would you, as a change from sordid modern cases, be interested in my little historical puzzler? Come up to the Place for coffee, this evening, all the family. Try your professional wits on Squire Treverra’s epitaphs. There’s no special reason why they should, but they always sound like cryptograms to me. Anyhow, the whole library is interesting. Not many such families were literate enough to amass a collection like theirs.”
“Thanks,” said George, “we should like to, very much, if Miss Rachel has no objection to being invaded.”
“Miss Rachel loves it. Surround her with personable young men, and she’s in her element.” He smiled at Dominic, presenting him gratis with this bouquet. “I’m sorry I made such shameless use of you just now. Thanks for taking it so neatly. It helped him to accept it, and frankly, I don’t think it’s going to be much of a show for kids, and I’d rather keep him out of it.”
“As a matter of fact,” confessed Dominic ruefully, “I had wanted to ask, only I didn’t quite like to. But of course it’s settled now, anyhow. I don’t mind, if it makes Paddy feel he’s had a fair hearing.”
“I’m sorry to have had to do it, all the same. I suppose it wouldn’t do to ask you to come along, after all? No, I’m afraid Paddy wouldn’t forgive a dirty trick like that, and he’ll be somewhere not far away.”
“Couldn’t possibly risk it,” said Dominic firmly.
“But it really is a pity, because we could make room for one more sound man in the team.” And lightly Simon turned his deep-brown eyes, in their shapely pits of fine wrinkles etched paler in the bronzed skin, and looked innocently at George. “So how about you, George? I’d be very glad to have you there. Will you come?”
Visitors to Treverra Place were treated to a personally conducted tour of the whole house and grounds, both of which, in their way, were well worth seeing. Miss Rachel, bright as a macaw in black silk and emeralds and a Chinese shawl, tapped her way valiantly ahead with the stick she used as an extension of her personality rather than an aid to navigation, and pointed out, even more meticulously than its beauties, the drawbacks and imperfections of her family seat. She loved visitors; they were allowed to miss nothing.
Treverra portraits filled the long galleries on the first floor, and stared from the lofty well of the staircase.
“Most of them very bad,” said Miss Rachel, dismissing them with a wave of her wand. “All local work, we were not an artistic family, but we insisted on thinking we were.” The listeners got the impression that in her own mind she had been there from the beginning. “There’s just one very nice miniature here in the parlour—a young man.”
“It would be,” said Tamsin softly into Dominic’s ear, bringing up the rear of the procession. But she said it with affectionate indulgence rather than cynically. In her own way she was very fond of her formidable old employer.
“The garden,” announced Miss Rachel, pounding across the terrace and threatening it with the silver hilt of her stick, “is a disgrace. It is quite impossible to get proper gardeners these days. I am forced to make do with one idiot boy, and three days a week from the verger at St. Mary’s. There’s positively no relying on the younger generation. Trethuan promised he’d come in to-day and pick the apricots and Victoria plums. And has he put in an appearance? He has not. Never a sign of him, and never a word of excuse.”
“Maybe he wanted to finish scything the churchyard extension today,” suggested Simon vaguely, attendant at her heels. “He left it half-done yesterday, so the Vicar says.”
“If he’s going to be a jobbing gardener in addition to verger,” insisted the old lady scornfully, “he should be one, and plan his time accordingly. He came in yesterday after noon and picked just one tree of plums, and promised he’d be in to-day to finish the job. I was talking to him in the kitchen-garden not two minutes after you left here to go home to tea, Simon, and he said he’d only had an hour to spare, and he’d just looked in to let me know he’d give me the whole of to-day. And not a sign of him. You simply cannot rely on the young people nowadays.”