Trelawney tried not to believe that a horde of impostors had taken advantage of the removal of the real Mr Cambridge to hospital and seized his house.
“I am not selling boats,” he said. “I am here to buy yours.” He reached in his pocket for the letter. “On behalf of its original owner.”
“A boat,” Mr Cambridge repeated thoughtfully. He looked up. “You’re sure you don’t mean a cello?”
Trelawney stared wildly.
Mr Cambridge stepped to a corner of the room where there was, indeed, a great fat stringed instrument. He stroked it fondly. “Edwin can’t really manage it, you know, and Estella’s got her hands full with a harp at the moment. I don’t like to see it go, but...”
Trelawney cut him short by leaping tip and thrusting the letter into his hand.
Mr Cambridge looked at it. “But this is addressed to Evelyn. She’s the one who let you in, you know.”
“Read it.”
Mr Cambridge slit open the envelope.
“How very odd,” he said, three minutes later.
Trelawney took back the letter and put it in his pocket. He continued to regard Mr Cambridge in grim silence.
“There obviously has been some misunderstanding, Mr Trelawney. To me, that letter is quite incomprehensible. I’m awfully sorry.”
“Then you don’t know this...this woman?”
“I have never even heard of her.”
Trelawney nodded. He looked very angry indeed.
When he had gone, Mr Cambridge sorted among the children until he found Evelyn, whom he led by the hand into the room with all the musical instruments.
“Tell me, Evelyn,” he said, “do you know a lady called Miss Lucilla Teatime?”
“Yes,” said Evelyn.
“And who is she?”
“I don’t know
“All right.”
“Three doors up, on the other side. She was very nice.”
“But is she there now?”
“Not now. She went away. She said she was going to get married to Mr Jackman. He keeps that jeweller’s next to the paper shop at the top.”
“I see.”
“But I don’t think she ever did.”
Once the commander had been borne away on Flaxborough’s best train of the day to London, Miss Teatime quitted the platform and went at once to the Field Street branch of the Provinces and Maritime Bank.
As she entered, she received a nod of recognition from the clerk with whom she and Trelawney had arranged the opening of their joint account two days before. She smiled back at him and drew a chair to a small table set against the wall.
The clean, sharp-edged cheque book positively creaked with newness when she folded back its cover. Only one cheque had been used; it was now on its way to Twickenham. Little girls were lucky these days, Miss Teatime told herself. No one had travelled across half England with an order for her to be paid five hundred pounds when she was a child. The only bouncy thing she had ever been brought was a ball.
She dated the next cheque in the book and wrote “cash” in small, maidenly copperplate. Amount...now what should she put? To lift the full sum of dear Jack’s transfer of the previous day was feasible but crude. There were no grounds, of course, on which it could be challenged. The account was hers no less than his. And yet...No, taking the whole lump would be as bad as wiping up gravy with a piece of bread. There was too much wolfish behaviour in the world today.
She appended her neat signature, filled in the counterfoil and carefully tugged free the cheque.
“Good morning, Miss Teatime.”
(Her name remembered on only the second occasion? What a conscientious young man. What a nice bank.)
“Good morning, Mr Allen.” The name was engraved on a bronze plate set above the grille. (Bronze, not plastic: the employees of
Mr Alien picked up the cheque, glanced at it in the most cheerfully matter-of-fact way, and nodded. “Four ninety-seven, eighteen and six. Yes...I shan’t keep you a moment, Miss Teatime.”
He wheeled off his stool and disappeared through a door in the partition behind him.
Two minutes later, he was back, brisk and obliging as ever. But he was no longer holding the cheque.
He leaned forward, smiling. “If you will just go down to that end of the counter, Miss Teatime”—his head gave a slight tilt to his left—“Mr Beach will look after you.”
She looked in the direction indicated and saw a plump, friendly-seeming man standing twenty feet away. He beckoned her benignly, and showed her into an office. The office, with its orange carpet, glass and aluminium table,
