Mr Hive selected a half-crown from the withdrawn handful of change. The girl smiled happily at it and made a pick from the emblems on her tray. A plump little forearm nestled for a moment upon the lapel, old-fashionedly broad, of Mr Hive’s jacket. He felt a glow of pleasure, an almost fatherly benignity. He allowed a palmed penny to clink into the collection can and surreptitiously returned the half-crown to his pocket.
“Delighted to be of assistance, my dear!”
The girl popped prettily back into the doorway from which she had accosted him and, with a final flourish of his hat, Mr Hive was on his way.
The woman he had been following was now out of sight. He made what haste he could, consistent with courtesy, and side-stepped from time to time into the roadway to gain an extra yard or two whenever there was a gap in the traffic. This was a fairly perilous manoeuvre because the pedestrians were stubbornly disinclined to break ranks in order to let him rejoin them; it was rather like trying to haul oneself over the gunwales of an over-crowded lifeboat.
At last, anxious, out of breath and smarting from having been grazed by the tailboard of a truck, Mr Hive spotted again the patch of bright lime green that was his quarry’s hat. It was bobbing along in a tide of heads twenty yards away on the opposite side of the road.
Mr Hive pressed forward, but made no attempt to cross the road. By keeping close to the kerb, he was able not only to maintain progress but to preserve an almost uninterrupted diagonal view of the respondent (no, no—the Subject—he’d really have to master this new terminology). And by the time she disappeared through a doorway he had no difficulty in seeing that she had entered the Market Street branch of Flaxborough Public Library.
A minute later, Mr Hive also was in the building. He mounted a short flight of stairs, pushed open a glass door and found himself by a counter. Behind it, perched in a sort of dock, a straight-haired young woman was ready with a quick-freeze stare.
Mr Hive affected not to notice.
There was a hiss. It sounded like “Tickets?”
Mr Hive gave a confident, member-of-the-committee nod and patted his breast pocket.
The young woman raised no further objection but as he walked on into the room he had the impression that his arrival had given her a shock of some kind. Covertly, he glanced down at his trousers. No, nothing amiss there. Anyway, it had been something higher up that disturbed her, he thought. Odd...
There were some dozen people at the shelves, all draped in the attitude of slightly awed self-consciousness characteristic of book borrowers. Silence was almost absolute, and several glances of censure were earned by the sucking noises of satisfaction that emanated from an old man in the Biology Section who had come in for a warm at Havelock Ellis.
Mr Hive made a quick survey. The Subject was not in the room. Then he noticed a second glass door. It was marked REFERENCE. He walked nearer and peered through.
The woman in the green hat was bent, half kneeling, to a shelf close to the floor in which a number of slender but over-size volumes were stacked. She seemed to be replacing one. Mr Hive noted that its binding was pale blue and tooled in gold. He thought it lay about eighth from the end of the row.
The woman got up and straightened her dress. As he had done several times before during the past three days, Mr Hive took stock of her figure. It was plump but certainly not fat, with a lively curvaceousness which, though modified by strictly fashionable clothing, made direct appeal to Mr Hive’s sense of beauty. He much regretted that his calling imposed so tenuous a relationship between him and his Subjects. It was a mean, unnatural way of earning a living. How he longed sometimes to break cover, sweep up to the Subject and grasp her hand, crying: Madame, I am Hive, the detective, at your service! Take supper with me and you shall have my secrets!
She was reaching for the door. He stepped quickly aside and masked himself with a book. She walked past, behind him, with short purposeful steps. As he heard her turn by the counter and pause, her wake of perfume eddied around him. That, too, he liked about her. Lots of scent—very feminine. Most of them scarcely smelled at all nowadays.
In the empty reference room, Mr Hive stooped and pulled out the book in the pale blue cover. It was one of a selection of operatic scores. The Bartered Bride. An appreciative smile lifted the corners of Mr Hive’s Menjouesque moustache. He riffled speedily through the pages of the score.
The scrap of paper was nearly at the end. He read its message without removing it, then closed and replaced the book. The whole operation had taken only twenty or thirty seconds. Mr Hive felt distinctly encouraged; this was one of his better days.
A middle-aged woman with a little girl stood outside the door. Mr Hive pulled it back and stood aside with a flourish to let them pass.
The, woman thanked him mournfully and began to advance into the reference room, ushering the child before her. Then, quite suddenly, she stopped and stared, first unbelievingly, then with disgust and horror, at Mr Hive.
Painfully disconcerted as he was, Mr Hive recognized in the silent convolutions of the woman’s mouth an opportunity for lip-reading practice. It gave him no trouble at all.
Filthy beast...
Clutching the child to her skirts, she gazed angrily about her as if in search of some strong-armed champion. Mr Hive saw that his wisest course was prompt disengagement. He strode towards the exit.
As he approached the counter, he noticed that the librarian who had hissed at him was now in anxious conference with a tall, angular, bald-headed man, doubtless a senior colleague well versed in the handling of filthy beasts.
Both looked up together. The man made a movement suggestive of challenge.
Mr Hive avoided looking at him and marched straight for the door. It would not have surprised him in the least to hear the clanging of an alarm bell and the rushing descent of steel shutters. But nothing happened and he was soon safely immersed in the throng of Market Street.
Was there any point in again picking up the trail of the Subject? He thought not. The message she had implanted in the third act of The Bartered Bride was specific as to the time and place of her assignation.
Anyway, he wanted to get back as soon as possible to the privacy of his lodgings. The long bedroom mirror seemed to hold the best hope of his being able to solve the mystery of the outraged women in the library.
Had he unknowingly collected some horrid stigmata? A mark of plague? Delicately, Mr Hive ran fingertips over his cheeks. An intimation of evening stubble; nothing more. He thrust from his mind a certain ridiculous but disturbing suspicion dating from his boyhood reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Mr Hive eased the slim gold pocket watch from its fob and pressed the catch. The outer case sprang open to reveal the twin information that the time was a quarter to five and that the watch had been presented ‘To Mortimer Hive, In Appreciation—Roly’ over the arms of the Marquess of Grantham. It was the arms of the Marchioness, a muscular and predatory lady from Wisconsin, that Mr Hive had cause chiefly to remember (“It was like a night in the python house,” he had averred afterwards to the Granthams’ family solicitor) but he bore old Roly no illwill and still treasured the watch that had accompanied his fee.