Charity Ends At Home

“He’s with Hardy-Livingstone. You know him. Drives an Alvis.”

“You can’t just drop in on people like that. They aren’t hotel keepers.”

“Tony won’t mind. His wife won’t either.”

She looked at him bleakly. “What is it you’re going to do in Leicester?”

“Something to do with...with machinery. It wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

“It means something to me that without any warning you clear off to stay the night with some people or other I’ve never heard of.”

“But you have heard of him. Tony Wilcox. Bloody hell, you met him at the firm’s dinner a year ago. Two years, maybe.”

“Two years ago?”

“Yes.”

“You went on your own two years ago. I was having that sinus operation.”

“Well, three, then. What the hell does it matter?”

“Quite a lot, judging from the way you’re taking refuge in obscenities. It’s always the same when you’ve something to hide.”

Palgrove’s gaze went to the ceiling. “Oh, for Christ’s sake...”

It was, on the face of it, a fairly standard quarrel. The neighbours would not have given it much of a rating even if they had heard it, which they hadn’t. One fortuitous eavesdropper there was, however, whom the wrangle impressed. He was the boy from Dawson’s, delivering the evening newspaper. This boy had been reared in the very proper belief that rows were the prerogative of ordinary folk and had no place in the well-ordered lives of the sort of people who lived in Brompton Gardens. So when he heard coming through the slightly open window of Mrs Palgrove’s posh lounge some of the familiar expletives of home, he loitered in wonderment.

Which, for Mr Palgrove, was to prove unfortunate.

Chapter Five

By the time Mr Hive judged that to descend from his room would no longer entail the risk of being waylaid by his landlady, aggressively hospitable and redolent of fishcakes, he had consumed three-quarters of a bottle of gin. He was now quite confident that even if Mrs O’Brien had not yet cleared away such remnants of her daunting evening meal as she had been unable to coax and bully down the gullets of her other ‘gentlemen’, he at least was proof against persuasion.

It so happened that his optimism was not put to the test. Mrs O’Brien was off patrol, safely detained in her back kitchen by the gossip of a visiting neighbour.

Closing the street door as softly as he could behind him, Mr Hive set down upon the step the huge camera case that he had hugged close, for fear of its bumping the bannisters, during his tiptoe descent of the stairs. He touched his lilac silk cravat, stroked his moustache, and drew on one glove. He then slung the strap of the case over his left shoulder and walked as briskly as the load would allow to where he had parked, a few yards down the road, his small and elderly motorcar.

The car drew up five minutes later in the cobbled yard of the Three Crowns Hotel.

Mr Hive’s was the first arrival of the evening in the bar known as the Chandler’s Room, a name that survived from days when corn merchants in particular frequented it, passing around their little canvas bags of grain samples and swallowing Hollands-and-water from mugs as big as drench buckets. It was a low, panelled room that received little light from the narrow lane outside, but in recent years more lamps had been set in the ceiling while a rhubarb-pink glow emanated from the mirrored alcove behind a modern bar. The roof beams were genuine enough; their bowed and blackened oak gave the impression that the room was being gradually squashed by the rambling old house above and would one day admit only customers prepared to drink lying down.

Mr Hive, who was as yet nowhere near that extreme, nevertheless had to incline his head once or twice as he crossed from the door to the bar.

There was no one behind the bar. Mr Hive put his case down on the floor and rested one foot on it while he peered through a doorway into the further room from which he supposed service would arrive.

A girl—appraised by Mr Hive at once as a delicious girl, with ripe lips parted in helpful inquiry, plump white arms, and a positive reception committee of bosom—rose from a table where she had been writing in a ledger and came towards him.

Mr Hive removed his hat and kissed the bunched fingertips of his right hand.

He had intended to stay on gin, but that, he saw, would not now be suitable.

“I wonder, my dear, if you would be good enough to let me have some brandy?”

“What, to take out?” The barmaid, quite unused to circuitous gallantry, supposed that Mr Hive must be a doctor wanting restorative for somebody collapsed in the street.

He smiled. “I am scarcely likely to wish to consume it away from premises graced by so charming a person as yourself!”

She worked this one out, then turned to reach down a bottle. “Single?”

“No; a double, I fancy, would be more appropriate.” He gazed contentedly down her cleavage while she measured the drink.

She set the glass on a pink tissue mat and pushed nearer a jug of water and a soda siphon. “Seven shillings, please, sir.”

Mr Hive made a small, elegant bow of the head and drew a handful of change from his hip pocket. He held the coins in the extended palm of one hand and made unhurried selection from them. The operation served to display slim, dean and dexterous fingers, also faultlessly laundered cuffs whose gold links were in the semblance of