Lord Foxbridge Butts In (12 page)

“I don’t see how,” Professor Beran frowned at his handiwork, wondering if he should give it to me after all, “It’s just an argument about a family matter, something about an inheritance.”

“Really?” I leaned over his shoulder to read the transcript, “I was hoping for something more exotic.”

“Just because they’re foreign doesn’t mean they’re involved in international espionage,” Beran grinned up at me, those inky eyes dancing with amusement, “Even we Czechs have mothers, and brothers to fight with.”

“You’re from Czechoslovakia?” I looked at him in surprise, “But your accent is flawless!”

“That’s because I was born and raised in Chipping Norton, you silly boy,” he reached over and pinched my leg, “My father is from Czechoslovakia. Though it was Bohemia when he left.”

“If you two are just going to flirt with each other, I have better things to do than watch you,” ffinch-Winship said, not unkindly, standing up and slapping Beran on the back, “We’ll have a game of backgammon after dinner tonight, Miles? Nice to see you again, Foxbridge, and thanks for lunch.”

“Thank you so much for your help, Professor,” I shook his hand warmly.

“We’re not in college anymore, Foxbridge,” he corrected me gently, “We’re fellow clubmen, here.  ffinch-Winship will do. Cheerio!”

“Are you really flirting, or was he joking?” I asked, feigning innocence.

“Of course I was, weren’t you?” he asked a little warily.

“Not yet; and you won’t have to ask when I do, I’m not very subtle,” I promised, “I’ll show you when we’re done with this transcript. Now, what’s it all about?”

Professor Beran — Miles, I mean — had been correct in his estimation of the conversation: it was deadly dull, full of references to unknown persons, rehashes of childhood slights, and which one of them Mother liked best. The deeper-voiced chap, who was called Georg, was disgruntled about the sum of his inheritance, implying that the higher-voiced chap, Johan, had taken more than his fair share; but the sums mentioned were quite small, no more than a couple hundred pounds.  It just wasn’t the sort of thing that someone would break someone else’s neck over.

“It is possible that the argument and the murder are unrelated,” Miles suggested, “Well over an hour had passed between your hearing the argument and finding the body.”

“But what were they doing there in the first place?” I was deeply dissatisfied with how things were unfolding.  It was all so dreadfully
unromantic
.”Who in the world breaks into an empty office to have an argument about an inheritance?”

“I imagine they were there for some other reason,” Miles laughed, “Family rows break out in their own time.”

“That makes some sense,” that stopped me, “I don’t even know if they broke in, they may have had some legitimate reason for being there. I’ll have to ask Twister.”

“You like this Twister chap, don’t you?” he looked at me closely.

“Why do you say that?”

“The look on your face when you said his name.”

“Really?” I was stunned, “I had no idea I looked any certain way when I say his name.”

“Does he like you?” Miles tilted his head at me, the flirtation gone from his eyes, replaced by concern.

“He
will
,” I grinned, “Sooner or later.  And in the meantime, I am not planning to play Penelope to his Ulysses and spend the next ten years weaving  in my room.”

“You’ll be entertaining suitors?” he arched his eyebrow at me.

“A boy has to make his hay while the sun shines, what?” I poured us another round of drinks, and lifted my glass in a toast, “And speaking of hay, would you care to roll in some with me?”

“You really
aren’t
very subtle, are you?” he actually blushed.

“Are you staying here at the club?” I inquired, wondering whose bed was closest, mine or his.

“I am, but it’s a shared room,” he looked a little startled, so much so that I wondered if I should slow down a bit.

“Hmm,” I thought a moment, realizing we couldn’t go back to my rooms, not with Twister expected to drop in at any minute — unless he already
had
dropped by, I could phone Pond and find out...

“I hope you won’t think me a prude,” Miles interrupted my scheming, “But it’s a bit early in the day for that sort of thing, surely?”

“You
are
a bit of a prude,” I reached out and grasped his knee briefly, “But I think it’s sweet.  Why don’t we have dinner tonight?  The dining-room at my hotel is excellent.  Come around a little after eight and I’ll show you around the place.  It used to be a club, you know.  Quite like
this
place.”

“All right,” he said after a short pause to think about whether my hotel was too suggestive a setting, “Is it formal?”

“Oh, we wear anything from smoking jackets to white tie at Hyacinth House.  But I bet you look absolutely spiffing in white tie.  We might go to a show after?”

“Sounds lovely,” he smiled shyly at me.

I took my leave of him and of the O&C, and walked slowly back to Hyacinth House.  It struck me as funny that he’d come all over coy at the last minute, when it was he who started flirting in the first place.  But I suppose he’d expected to flirt a little while longer before leading to a more laden form of communication;  that’s me all over: impatient and pushy, grabbing after what I want instead of waiting for it to come to me.

Except in the case of Twister, it seemed.  I was quite content to wait him out, drawing out the flirtation over weeks, or months if that’s how long it took.  In fact, I didn’t
want
him to succumb to my wiles all at once, I wanted to work for it a bit. That was so unlike my usual
modus operandi
that it presented me with a bit of a puzzle; I worried at it like a cat with a ball of yarn all the way up St. James’s Street, into my rooms, into a bath, and into the underpinnings of my evening clothes.

I was enjoying my afternoon tea in my shirtsleeves, my stockinged feet on the pouf in front of the empty fireplace, when Twister finally condescended to pay his call.  Pond seemed to have been expecting him, since there were already two cups and a pot of sliced lemon on the tray, with a walnut cake too big for me to manage on my own.

“Take a pew,” I waved negligently at him as he came in, not getting up from my chair.  But behind the louche facade, I was feeling a couple of butterflies doing a warmup foxtrot in my tummy.  Miles was on to something: my feelings for Twister
were
rather more serious than I had hitherto thought, “And tell me, before you stuff your maw with cake, was there any sign of a break-in on the office door, or did they have a key?”

“No sign of a break-in,” Twister threw his hat on the table by the door and fell comfortably into the chair across from me, snatching up a piece of cake and taking a polite-sized bite, “Oh, good cake, this.”

“So who would have keys to that office?” I considered the problem, “Previous tenants?  Prospective tenants?  What about the estate agents, are any of them missing a brother?”

“How do you mean ‘brother’?  Figuratively or literally?”

“
Quite
literally,” I grinned like a Cheshire cat, “While you were off doing whatever it is policemen do in the afternoons, I was at the Oxford & Cambridge Club getting my scribblings translated.  What do you think of
that
?”

“I think you shouldn’t be sharing this information with all and sundry, and leave it to the police whose proper work it is.”

“P’shaw,” I picked up the sheets of O&C writing-paper from the table by my elbow and handed them over to him, “I saved your people hours of labour on the taxpayers’ shilling.”

“But
my
people would keep the information they translated
confidential
,” Twister said very seriously, “Who'd you give your scribbles to?  How do you know you can trust them to keep it quiet?”

“Professors ffinch-Winship and Beran, both of Merton College, Oxford.  The former is a professor of linguistics and the latter a professor of modern languages, specializing in the Slavics.  It was ffinch-Winship who taught me phonetic writing in the first place.”

“And you just
happened
to run into him?”

“I’m lucky, I guess,” I shrugged, “I mean, I went to the O&C to dig up someone to translate my phonetics for me, it was pure luck that it was the man who taught it to me in the first place.  Even purer luck that his good friend Professor Beran is not only fluent in Czech — the language my through-the-wall men were speaking, by the way — but is
himself
Czech.  Or at least his father is.  How
about
that?”

“I’ll be sure to ask your pick for Ascot,” he said in a mocking tone, “And the Grand National. We should put your dumb luck to work.”

“You already have,” I smirked at him, “Right there in your hand.  Seven pages of translated transcription, at no cost to the Yard.”

“But they’re just squabbling about money,” he said after a few moments’ silent reading, “That’s not at all what I was expecting.”

“Nor what I was expecting,” I agreed, “I was sure it would be espionage, or anarchist plots, or
some
thing dastardly.”

“You read too many pulps, Foxy,” Twister looked at me sternly.

“Yes, well,” I couldn’t stay recumbent while I was puzzling things out, so I got up and started to pace in front of the sofa, or rather circling it, “You say the office door wasn’t broken into, and so that means either the door was sitting around unlocked — which not only seems unlikely but begs the question of how the killer locked the door behind him when he left — or else the men had a key.  We know now that the men were Czechs, they were brothers, and their names are Georg and Johan.  Compare that to a list of people who have keys to that office, and you have our mysterious gentlemen.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Twister put down my pages and opened his own notebook, “The men who leased that office before its current vacancy were not Czechs, nor were they named Georg or Johan — nor even George or John.  Richard Little and Francis Bickersteth.  They aren’t brothers, either, unless there’s something their mothers aren’t telling them.”

“What about their staff?  What about the tenants before them?  What about the estate agents?” I fired at him.

“Slow down, boy,” he laughed at me, flipping through his notebook, “I haven’t looked into previous tenants yet, and Little-Bickersteth Investments didn’t have a staff except for a typist who came in to do their correspondence once a week, name of Lavender Briggs.”

“Leaving the estate agents as our main avenue of investigation,” I dipped my oar in to show I was paying attention.

“Yes, but unfortunately it’s not so much an avenue as a railway junction.  The estate agents are numerous and there’s a high turnover, it’s one of those massive agencies where they treat it like a sales job.  Bright young men coming and going all the time, none of them knowing a thing about the buildings they’re renting or the people they’re renting them to, or even who owns them.  The secretary, Miss
 Murchison, who’s the only person in that madhouse who knows anything about the place, says that there are no keys missing — but that it would be very easy for
any
agent, past or present, to check one out and have a copy cut before returning it.  It’ll be like emptying the Thames with a teaspoon to follow up on all the possible people who’ve had hold of that particular office’s key.  But we have people working on it.”

“Seven maids with seven mops, to sweep for half a year?” I joked, “Or seven cops with seven teaspoons?”

“To bail from now to Doomsday,” he shook his head grimly, “But we’ll start looking for any Czechs named Georg or Johan as we go through.”

“You’re welcome,” I inclined my head grandly, “But wait a minute, I keep forgetting there was a body. 
He
must be either Georg or Johan.  It should be easy to find his brother.”

“How did you
forget
there was a body, when
you’re
the one who found it?” he goggled at me in disbelief.

“I was so preoccupied by the translation,” I offered as a fairly lame excuse, “And I was avoiding mentioning it to ffinchWinship and Beran.”

“But you
did
eventually mention it?” he parsed my choice of words with uncanny precision.

“I had to, eventually, but only in passing.  After I mentioned you and Scotland Yard, they got a little shirty with me, so I had to give them the rest of the story.”

“Why would I or the Yard make them shirty?” he wondered.

“Well, I
did
sort of trick them into doing your job for you,” I suggested, “And with the Slavic element, I may have ruffled some communist sympathies.”

“Hmm,” he didn’t seem convinced by the explanation, “Be that as it may, the forgotten body is indeed forgettable.  The man had nothing on him, his pockets were completely empty, not so much as a bus-ticket to give us a clue who he was.  Most of his clothes were ready-made from large British retailers; in the garments that
might
have been traceable, the labels had been forcibly removed.  Whoever killed him went over him with a fine-toothed comb to make sure we wouldn’t be able to identify him easily.”