Peter wheeled round, thrusting the big lilac-coloured envelope, the last missive of the late Fay Curtis, behind his back. At the open door, a hand still on the handle, stood Teddy Pariss, recipient of the late Fay’s last communication, as yet unread.
And Teddy Pariss’s cold toad eyes were gleaming with pallid pleasure.
‘Don’t I know you?’ he said. ‘Constable?’
Still holding the big lilac envelope behind his back, Peter licked his lips a little.
‘Well, I know you, Mr Pariss,’ he answered.
‘I should bloody well hope so,’ Teddy Pariss replied. ‘I don’t spend heaven knows how much a year getting my name into the papers for nothing.’
‘I have been on duty here once or twice when you’ve had a big do,’ Peter said. ‘I expect you saw me then.’
‘So I did. I never forget a face.’
Teddy Pariss looked pleased with himself.
Peter let his rigid back muscles relax. With luck the conversation was moving in the right direction.
He smiled a little.
‘That’s pretty good,’ he said. ‘Most people only recognize a bobby when he’s in uniform. You can go up to them in civvies and they think they’ve never set eyes on you in all their life.’
‘Civvies,’ Teddy answered. ‘You out of uniform, now? Got yourself into the C.I.D., eh?’
His protuberant toad eyes flicked hastily round the room.
‘Oh, no. No need to worry,’ Peter said. ‘I just happen to be off duty.’
‘No need to worry. Why should you think I’d worry at the sight of a C.I.D. man? If any worrying’s to be done you’re the one to do it, Constable.’
Peter went taut again. He swallowed.
‘Trespassing in your office, is it, Mr Pariss?’ he said. ‘Dare say I’ll get sent down for eight years P.D. for that.’
The jocularity sounded very forced.
But Teddy Pariss was not listening. The cold eyes were elsewhere.
‘Bloody chilly in here,’ he said at last.
He waddled towards the cinema-organ fire, bent down till the Prince of Wales check of his trousers was stretched to bursting point and clicked on a switch.
He straightened up with a grunt.
‘That’ll warm it up in a tick,’ he said. ‘Bought it specially. There’s no sense in being uncomfortable, that’s what I say.’
He stood, fat little legs apart, in front of the long fire.
A tight smile pushed its way on to his puffy face.
‘Caught you out there all right, didn’t I?’ he said.
Peter grinned ruefully. He had contrived, while Teddy Pariss was switching on the fire, to slip the big lilac envelope on to the desk three-quarters tucked under the heavy silver tray.
‘Yes,’ Teddy went on with deep satisfaction. ‘I changed my mind. Meant to go on rehearsing those damned girls till lunch-time. But I got so fed up with the stupid bitches I decided to come in here and have a bit of a lay down.’
He glanced over at the springy divan and trotting up to the desk unlocked a drawer. From it he took first a bottle of whisky and two glasses and then a piece of white card about a foot square.
He twirled this in the air.
‘Know what it is?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Peter.
He was unable to prevent himself sounding suspicious.
Teddy Pariss laughed.
‘It’s nothing to be frightened of, lad,’ he said. ‘Look.’
He held the card steady for Peter to see.
On it was written in angry capitals the two words ‘Keep Out’.
‘It’s what you might call a vital piece of office equipment,’ Teddy said. ‘I hang it on the door when I feel like it. And I take bloody good care everybody knows it means just what it says. You can stick it up on your way out.’
He tossed the card on to the desk in front of Peter.
‘Yes, I suppose there are times when you want a bit of peace,’ Peter said.
For want of anything better to say.
‘There are times when I want a bit of peace,’ Teddy answered, ‘and there are times when I want a piece of bit.’
He looked over again at the bouncy divan and smirked.
Peter smiled.
There are people who demand ingratiation. And usually get it.
But Peter’s tribute to this universal law was wasted. Teddy Pariss had turned his back. He was leaning forward grunting at the big electric fire.
‘Damned thing,’ he muttered. ‘Even this has gone wrong now. What a bloody place. You come here for a couple of days just to see the Miss Valentines off properly, and what happens? They mess up every damned thing.’
Peter looked at the huge glossy front of the fire. His eye ran along the thick black flex to the plug.
‘Perhaps it isn’t switched on at the wall,’ he suggested.
There was a certain satisfaction in thinking that anything as glossy as the big fire was at the mercy of human error.
Teddy Pariss swivelled his plump figure round to the wall plug.
‘Ah,’ he said.
He bent down farther and fiddled. Peter tipped Fay Curtis’s letter another quarter of an inch under the silver tray with its battery of well-sharpened pencils.
Teddy straightened up.
‘You’re wrong there, lad,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t the switch at all. Time-plug. Got a time-plug on it. Hate coming into a bloody cold room. But I fixed it to switch on too late. Thought I wouldn’t be coming in here till after lunch.’
He uncorked the whisky bottle and poured a liberal tot into one of the glasses. He let the top of the bottle hover over the second glass.
‘You interested in that letter then?’ he said.
And Peter Lassington’s pink and white face – which always made him look at least five years younger than his twenty-seven summers – flushed all over.
Teddy Pariss set down the whisky bottle without having poured out the second glass.
‘Saw you hiding it behind your back the moment I came in,’ he said. ‘Wanted to get a look at it, did you?’
Peter glanced down at the desk in front of him.
‘Come on, lad, pass it over,’ Teddy said. ‘It’s there under the tray, where you pushed it when I turned to look at that bloody fire.’
There was only one thing for Peter to do.
He reached forward, pulled out the big lilac envelope and handed it to Teddy.
Teddy looked at it. He turned it every way round in his podgy fingers.
‘Old Fay Curtis by the writing,’ he said. ‘Haven’t heard a word from her for years. But I’d know her fist anywhere.’
He shot a quick glance at Peter.
‘You know her, don’t you?’
‘Why should I know her?’
‘I’ll tell you why you should know her, lad. Because you’re a copper and you’re stationed in this area. Fay keeps a club somewhere round here. You know her.’
Only then did he let his cold toad gaze leave Peter’s still flushed face.
He reached into the silver tray and extracted from amongst the well-sharpened pencils the paperknife with the gold handle, the handle in the form of a lusciously-curved naked girl.
He flicked another glance at Peter Lassington, standing like a great lemon in front of the shabby makeshift desk.
Slowly he worked the sharp tip of the girl paperknife under the well-gummed flap of Fay’s big envelope. Peter watched the thin blade slowly bulge up the paper.
It ripped along inch by inch. When the whole top of the envelope was slit Teddy Pariss put the knife carefully back in its nest of neat pencils.
Once more he looked at Peter.
And with happy slowness he teased the big folded piece of lilac paper out of the envelope. Peter could see the sheet was covered on both sides with Fay’s writing. But it would not take many words in that sprawling, badly formed hand to fill a single side.
Teddy Pariss dropped the big envelope on to the solid blotter.
He unfolded the big sheet.
He looked straight up at Peter. He nodded dismissal. Curt and unquestionable.
As Peter wearily pushed a crooked drawing-pin into Teddy Pariss’s ‘Keep Out’ notice he heard a door shut quickly farther along the corridor.
He glanced sharply round.
And found himself looking straight at a completely undressed girl.
He gaped at her. She, standing as stock-still as he, gaped back.
After a little he realized that he knew her. She was one of the beauties, the one who had raised Teddy Pariss’s especial ire by not being very sure about the order numbers come in after five. Number Seven. She was Number Seven. The girl with the curly black hair and the plumpish figure.
They stood looking at each other for perhaps twenty seconds, though it seemed longer. The girl’s face – her wide, wide eyes, her Cupid’s bow mouth, the curls of springy black hair – seemed slowly to be impressing itself on Peter Lassington’s brain. She must be young. Not more than seventeen, probably less. Probably sixteen.
Then, in a flash, she turned, leapt back into the manager’s office and slammed the door. As Peter hurried up he heard a key turned feverishly in the lock.
A wild outburst of massed giggles followed, coming not from behind the locked door but from round the corner of the passage. Peter took a pace or two forward to see what was happening.
A sight nearly as astonishing as the naked girl met his eyes. Bert Mullens, the lugubrious stage-door keeper, was standing in his glass-walled box surrounded by a tribe of girls only slightly more clothed than the apparition of a moment before.
The giggling was coming from them. And Peter realized why almost at once. From where they were standing, surrounding the sombre Bert Mullens in a welter of limbs and bodies and bobbing heads, they must have seen their naked colleague and have guessed the reason for her sudden gasp and hasty flight.
Peter marched up to them.
‘Here, Bert,’ he said, ‘what’s going on? I saw a stark naked girl just now.’
The giggles rose to a pitch of wild squeaking.
But Bert Mullens was unexpectedly alarmed.
‘Where?’ he shouted. ‘Where? Is that one of ‘em got away?’
He looked wildly from side to side.
‘I’m responsible, you know,’ he said. ‘Responsible for ‘em all.’
Glaring balefully about, he began trying to count heads – blonde heads, dark heads, red heads, long hair, short hair, curly hair, straight hair, hair piled up high, hair sweeping down low.
He groaned in cold despair.
‘I dunno,’ he said, ‘I think there’s one missing. But I can’t be sure.’
He looked beyond the seething mass of soft limbs to Peter Lassington.
‘You know what they do?’ he said. ‘They change their hair styles. One moment you remember there’s three beehives, and then all of a sudden there’s only two. I can’t keep track of ‘em.’
He pushed his pale, fishy eyes at the face of the girl nearest to him.
‘One of you’s gone, hasn’t she?’ he demanded.
The giggles, which had been simmering gently, boiled rapturously over again.
A blonde beehive – for the time being – grabbed Bert’s arm.
‘She’s in the judges’ room,’ she squeaked. ‘She ran in there and she’s locked the door.’
‘Yes,’ said a red-head, ‘and she’s absolutely –’
Giggles intervened.
‘You’ve got a naked girl in the judges’ room,’ Peter Lassington said curtly.
Bert groaned again.
He pushed his way through the gaggle of partly dressed bodies and went up to the door which the little plump dark-haired girl had locked. He tried it.
‘Stuck fast all right,’ he said. ‘Wish we’d had the lock off this one like we had the locks off all the rest.’
He knocked thunderously at the closed door.
No answer.
‘Lindylou.’ ‘Come on, Lindylou.’ ‘We know you’re there, Lindylou.’
The girls behind Bert began chorusing happily away.
‘Oh, Lindylou Twelvetrees,’ Bert said dolefully, as if worst fears were being realized. ‘I might of known. They’re all really only bloody children, but she’s stupid with it. Come out. Come out.’
He banged on the door with both fists together in a gust of utter fury.
‘Come out, come out, or I’ll. . .’
‘What’ll you do, Bert?’
The voice in the flock of twitterers behind was unidentifiable.
In the new outburst of giggles that the suggestion aroused Bert Mullens turned to Peter.
‘It’s gone one o’clock. It’s my lunch-time,’ he said. ‘You’re a policeman, do something.’
‘Coo, a copper.’
The girls turned their attention to Peter like a flock of starlings alighting on a new perch. Bert Mullens hurried back to his box, looked despairingly at the big clock hanging just inside and the neat sandwich tin on the ledge underneath and went to stick his head out of the door leading to the street. Reluctantly he came back to the scene of activity.
‘Thought it was more Teds trying to get in,’ he said to Peter. ‘I tell you I’ve had everything today. Boys, newspapermen, advertising people, I don’t know what. Even that nasty old man with the filthy books round the corner is hanging about now. It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.’
But this outburst only had the effect of shifting the beauty queens’ volatile attention once more.
‘Poor old Bert.’ ‘Here, I’ll give you a kiss, Bertie.’ ‘Never mind, love, we’ll be gone tonight, then you can have your own girl round.’
Very quietly Peter Lassington walked away along the broad passage, past Bert’s box and out into the street. Behind him he heard a renewed assault on the locked door of the judges’ room. He breathed a long sigh of relief.