“Ring up.”
“O.K. What’s that parcel you’ve been carting about all day?”
“I’ll show you when you’ve rung up.”
A policeman answered from The Dolphin and said that Alleyn was at the Yard. Peregrine got through with startling promptitude.
“I’ve done this thing,” he said. “Would you like me to bring it over to you?”
“I would indeed. Thank you, Jay. Remembered anything new?”
“Not much, I’m afraid.” The telephone made a complicated jangling sound.
“What?” Alleyn asked. “Sorry about that twang. What did you say? Nothing new?”
“Yes!” Peregrine suddenly bawled into the receiver. “Yes. You’ve done it yourself. I’ll put it in. Yes. Yes. Yes.”
“You sound like a pop singer. I’ll be here for the next hour or so. Ask at the Yard entrance and they’ll send you up. ’Bye.”
“You’ve remembered?” Emily cried. “What is it? You’ve remembered.”
And when Peregrine told her, she remembered, too.
He re-opened his report and wrote feverishly. Emily unwrapped her parcel. When Peregrine had finished his additions and swung round in his chair he found, staring portentously at him, a water-colour drawing of a florid gentleman. His hair was curled into a cockscomb. His whiskers sprang from his jowls like steel wool and his prominent eyes proudly glared from beneath immensely luxuriant brows. He wore a frock coat with satin reveres, a brilliant waistcoat, three alberts, a diamond tie-pin and any quantity of rings. His pantaloons were strapped under his varnished boots, and beneath his elegantly arched arm his lilac-gloved hand supported a topper with a curly brim. He stood with one leg straight and the other bent. He was superb.
And behind, lightly but unmistakably sketched in, was a familiar, an adorable façade.
“Emily? It isn’t—? It must be—?”
“Look.”
Peregrine came closer. Yes, scribbled in faded pencil at the bottom of the work: Mr. Adolphus Ruby of The Dolphin Theatre. “Histrionic Portraits” series, 23 April 1855.
“It’s a present,” Emily said. “It was meant, under less ghastly circs, to celebrate The Dolphin’s first six months. I thought I’d get it suitably framed but then I decided to give it to you now to cheer you up a little.”
Peregrine began kissing her very industriously.
“Hi!” she said. “Steady.”
“Where, you darling love, did you get it?”
“Charlie Random told me about it. He’d seen it in one of his prowls in a print shop off Long Acre. Isn’t he odd? He didn’t seem to want it himself. He goes in for nothing later than 1815, he said. So, I got it.”
“It’s not a print, by Heaven, it’s an original. It’s a Phiz original, Emmy. Oh we shall frame it so beautifully and hang it—” He stopped for a second. “Hang it,” he said, “in the best possible place. Gosh, won’t it send old Jer sky high!”
“Where is he?”
Peregrine said, “He had a thing to do. He ought to be back by now. Emily, I couldn’t have ever imagined myself telling anybody what I’m going to tell you so it’s a sort of compliment. Do you know what Jer did?”
And he told Emily about Jeremy and the glove.
“He must have been demented,” she said flatly.
“I know. And what Alleyn’s decided to do about him, who can tell? You don’t sound as flabbergasted as I expected.”
“Don’t I? No, well—I’m not altogether. When we were making the props Jeremy used to talk incessantly about the glove. He’s got a real fixation on the ownership business, hasn’t he? It really is almost a kink, don’t you feel? Harry was saying something the other day about after all the value of those kinds of jobs was purely artificial and fundamentally rather silly. If he was trying to get a rise out of Jeremy, he certainly succeeded. Jeremy was livid. I thought there’d be a punch-up before we were through. Perry, what’s the matter? Have I been beastly?”
“No, no. Of course not.”
“I have,” she said contritely. “He’s your great friend and I’ve been talking about him as if he’s a specimen. I am sorry.”
“You needn’t be. I know what he’s like. Only I do wish he hadn’t done this.”
Peregrine walked over to the window and stared across the river towards The Dolphin. Last night, he thought, only sixteen hours ago, in that darkened house, a grotesque overcoat had moved in and out of shadow. Last night— He looked down into the street below. There from the direction of the bridge came a ginger head, thrust forward above heavy shoulders and adorned, like a classic ewer, with a pair of outstanding ears.
“Here he comes,” Peregrine said. “They haven’t run him in as yet, it seems.”
“I’ll take myself off.”
“No, you don’t. I’ve got to drop this stuff at the Yard. Come with me. We’ll take the car and I’ll run you home.”
“Haven’t you got things you ought to do? Telephonings and fussings? What about Trevor?”
“I’ve done that. No change. Big trouble with Mum. Compensation. It’s Greenslade’s and Winty’s headache, thank God. We want to do what’s right and a tidy bit more but she’s out for the earth.”
“Oh dear.”
“Here’s Jer.”
He came in looking chilled and rather sickly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know you had—oh hullo, Em.”
“Hullo, Jer.”
“I’ve told her,” Peregrine said.
“Thank you very much.”
“There’s no need to take it grandly, is there?”
“Jeremy, you needn’t mind my knowing. Truly.”
“I don’t in the least mind,” he said in a high voice. “No doubt you’ll both be surprised to learn I’ve been released with a blackguarding that would scour the hide off an alligator.”
“Surprised and delighted,” Peregrine said. “Where’s the loot?”
“At the Yard.”
Jeremy stood with his hands in his pockets as if waiting for something irritating to occur.
“Do you want the car, Jer? I’m going to the Yard now,” Peregrine said and explained why. Jeremy remarked that Peregrine was welcome to the car and added that he was evidently quite the white-haired Trusty of the Establishment. He stood in the middle of the room and watched them go.
“He is in a rage?” Emily said as they went to the car.
“I don’t know what he’s in but he’s bloody lucky it’s not the lock-up. Come on.”
Alleyn put down Peregrine’s report and gave it a definitive slap. “It’s useful, Fox,” he said. “You’d better read it.”
He dropped it on the desk before his colleague, filled his pipe and strolled over to the window. Like Peregrine Jay, an hour earlier, he looked down at the Thames and he thought how closely this case clung to the river, as if it had been washed up by the incoming tide and left high-and-dry for their inspection. Henry Jobbins of Phipps Passage was a waterside character if ever there was one. Peregrine Jay and Jeremy Jones were not far east along the Embankment. Opposite them The Dolphin pushed up its stage-house and flagstaff with a traditional flourish on Bankside. Behind Tabard Lane in the Borough lurked Mrs. Blewitt while her terrible Trevor, still on the South Bank, languished in St. Terence’s. And as if to top it off, he thought idly, here we are at the Yard, hard by the river.
“But with Conducis,” Alleyn muttered, “we move west and, I suspect, a good deal further away than Mayf air.”
He looked at Fox who, with eyebrows raised high above his spectacles in his stuffy reading-expression, concerned himself with Peregrine’s report.
The telephone rang and Fox reached for it “Super’s room,” he said. “Yes? I’ll just see.”
He laid his great palm across the mouthpiece. “It’s Miss Destiny Meade,” he said, “for you.”
“Is it, by gum! What’s she up to, I wonder. All right. I’d better.”
“Look,” cried Destiny when he had answered. “I know you’re a kind, kind man.”
“Do you?” Alleyn said. “How?”