lover during the night hardly merited the expense of the engagement ring. Only a madman would make such a quixotic gesture and her pride refused the notion that the one man to propose to her since her divorce had been off his head.
No, there had to be another motive and as she recalled the events of those splendid twenty-four hours it slowly dawned on her that the one consistent theme had been the novel Pause O Men for the Virgin. In the first place her fiance had posed as Geoffrey Corkadale, in the second he had reverted to the question of the typescript too frequently for it to be coincidental, and thirdly there had been the code d'amour. And the code d'amour had been the telephone number she had had to call for information while typing the novel. Cynthia Bogden called the number again but there was no reply, and when a week later she tried again the line had been disconnected. She looked up the name Piper in the phone directory but no one of that name had the number 20357. She called Directory Enquiries and asked for the address and name of the number but was refused the information. Defeated in that direction, she turned to another. Her instructions had been to forward the completed typescript to Cadwalladine & Dimkins, Solicitors and to return the handwritten draft to Lloyds Bank. Miss Bogden phoned Mr Cadwalladine and was puzzled by his apparent inability to remember having received the typescript. 'We may have done,' he said, 'but I'm afraid we handle so much business that...'
Miss Bogden pressed him further and was finally told that it was unethical for solicitors to disclose confidential information. Miss Bogden was not satisfied with this answer. With each rebuttal her determination grew and was reinforced by the snide enquiries of her girls. Her mind worked slowly but it worked steadily too. She followed the line from the bank to her typing service and from there to Mr Cadwalladine and from Mr Cadwalladine to Corkadales, the publishers. The secrecy with which the entire transaction had been surrounded intrigued her too. An author who had to be contacted by phone, a solicitor...With less flair than Frensic, but with as much perseverance, she followed the trail as far as she could, and late one evening she realized the full implications of Mr Cadwalladine's refusal to tell her where the typescript had been sent. And yet Corkadales had published the book. There had to be someone in between Cadwalladine and Corkadales and that someone was almost certainly a literary agent. That night Cynthia Bogden lay awake filled with a sense of discovery. She had found the missing link in the chain. The next morning she was up early and at the office at half past eight. At nine she telephoned Corkadales and asked to speak to the editor who had handled Pause. The editor wasn't in. She called again at ten. He still hadn't arrived. It was only at a quarter to eleven that she got through to him and by then she had had time to devise her approach. It was a straightforward one.
'I run a typing bureau,' she said, 'and I have typed a novel for a friend who is anxious to send it to a good literary agent and I wondered it...'
'I'm afraid we can't advise you on that sort of thing,' said Mr Tate.
'Oh I do understand that,' said Miss Bogden sweetly, 'but you published that wonderful novel Pause O Men for the Virgin and my friend wanted to send her novel to the same agent. It would be so good of you if you could...'
Responding to flattery Mr Tate did.
'Frensic & Futtle of Lanyard Lane?' she repeated.
'Well, Frensic now,' said Mr Tate, 'Miss Futtle is no longer there.'
Nor was Miss Bogden. She had put the phone down and was picking it up to dial Directory Enquiries. A few minutes later she had Frensic's number. Her intuition told her that she was getting close to home. She sat for a while staring into the depths of the solitaire for inspiration. Should she phone or...Mr Cadwalladine's refusal to say where the manuscript had gone persuaded her. She got up from her typewriter, asked her senior 'girl' to take over for the day, drove to the station and caught the 11.55 to London. Two hours later she walked down Lanyard Lane to Number 36 and climbed the stairs to Frensic's office.
It was fortunate for Frensic that he was lunching with a promising new author in the Italian
