window.
Trelawney said nothing for several seconds. He was grinning as he explored one nostril with the tip of his middle finger. When he had finished, he looked at the finger and wiped it on the wall behind his back.
He walked across and sat in a chair facing her, three feet away. He leaned forward and nodded.
“All right. Joke over. Now just what is it you think you’re up to?”
She turned to him and raised her eyebrows. “This is not a joke, Mr Trelawney. I have told you quite simply what I require.”
“Do you mean to say,” he said slowly and with no trace now of amusement, “that you have the bloody neck to come out here and try and drag money out of me after what’s happened?”
“I do,” said Miss Teatime.
“You know what you are, don’t you? You’re a prissy-mouthed, four-eyed, chiselling bitch, and you can go to hell!”
She looked at him appraisingly.
“If you really feel that we have arrived at the exchange of compliments stage, I can only assure you that the choice between an hour of your company, Mr Trelawney, and being sewn for a week in a sack of discarded boil dressings would be by no means easy to make.”
“Cow!”
She shrugged and looked at her watch.
“I advise you not to waste further time on thinking up expletives. You lack the talent. If you will write me out that cheque at once, a great deal of trouble will be avoided—for you in particular.”
Watching her all the time, he moved his chair a little closer. There was menace now in his quietness, in the slow, deliberate manner of his watching and listening. With the tip of his tongue he felt his upper lip.
“Go on,” he said. “This trouble...Tell me.”
“The situation,” said Miss Teatime, “is not without a certain piquancy. I shall come to that aspect in a moment. First, though, let us acknowledge a few facts of which you imagine I am unaware.
“I have known for some little time that your intentions towards me are strictly dishonourable. You are doubtless vain enough to have supposed that I would not guess, but it really was not very difficult.
“I also happen to know—although I claim no personal credit for this—that you have already successfully imposed on the credulity of at least two other women. I know their names. One was called Reckitt, the other Bannister. And I know that the police are looking for the man who enginered their disappearance. For you, in fact.”
Trelawney, crouched on the edge of his chair as if in readiness to spring, was staring straight into her eyes. She looked back calmly.
“Now here is the amusing thing,” she went on. “Or at least I hope you will see the humour of it because then you might stop glaring quite so unpleasantly. The only reason why you have not been arrested is that I have personally vouched for your integrity. There, now—what do you think of that?”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“Oh, dear, you are so curmudgeonly...”
“What did you tell them?”
“That you are a bluff and honest sea-dog, of course. A sincere suitor. A gentleman whose handwriting bears not the faintest resemblance to that of the villain whose letters to poor Mrs Bannister have been discovered by the police.”
After a long silence, Trelawney’s hunched frame relaxed. He leaned back into his chair.
“In other words, you thought you’d set up a nice little line in blackmail.”
“Your moral judgments are as odious as your maritime metaphors. Kindly keep both to yourself.”
“I don’t believe this nonsense about letters.”
Unhurriedly, Miss Teatime opened her bag. She handed the photograph to Trelawney without comment.
He looked at it, then raised his eyes. “You say you’ve told them this isn’t my writing?”
“Emphatically.”
“And that Commander Jack Trelawney’s a fine chap who wouldn’t hurt a fly?”
“By a great effort of will, yes.”
“So I am not suspected of the awful crimes the police imagine have been committed?”
“No.”
He smiled. It was like a crack running across ice.
“Oh, dear,” sighed Miss Teatime, “you are so woefully transparent, Jackie boy.”
“Am I?”
“You are saying to yourself: Knock this lady off as well and all will be hunky-dory.”
“It does seem a damn good idea. In fact, I’m sold on it.”
She shook her head. “No, I do not think you are, really. Already there has crept into that incommodious mind
