Tears of indignation were watering her eyes. 'How dare you call Professor Morgan a fossil!'
I jumped round to the other side of the desk and grabbed her arm. She let herself be guided gently back to the seat. She said, 'Dean Morgan isn't the sort of person to do something like that.'
'People like the Dean are exactly the sort of people who do things like that.'
'Whose side are you on?'
I sighed. 'If you hire me I'm on your side. But only so long as you are hiring me to find out the truth and not to ignore evidence that might damage someone's reputation. You have to understand where I stand. This is a dangerous town and if you send me out there to do your business you owe it to me to tell me everything you know. I'll do my best for you, I'll even put myself in danger if I think the case merits it, but all the same you have to do your best by me. That's fair, isn't it?' It was an old, old spiel and I'd used it a thousand times before. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, but I don't think I'd had a client yet who told me everything she knew and the bits they forgot to mention were always the ones that caused all the trouble.
'Do you really think he's gone off with a woman?'
'I don't think anything at the moment. Tell me about the Bad Girl.'
Gretel flinched. 'H ... h ... how did you know about her?'
'You mentioned her, remember?'
'Oh.'
'Yes. Oh.'
'She was bad!'
'Yes, I know, and you are good and so was the Dean.'
Gretel leaned forward across the desk as if there might be someone listening behind the door. 'We hated her really and none of us would speak to her. She was an orphan, you see, they found her on the church steps — no really! They really did! We couldn't stop laughing when we heard, we thought it only happened in nineteenth- century novels. And there she was on a Sunday-school scholarship! But that's ridiculous, isn't it, because they are only supposed to be for holy people but who knows where she came from? For all we knew her father could have been a dirty old donkey-man like yours!' She stopped and leaned back. 'But we don't talk about her.'
'Yeah I can see how hard it is for you.'
'And she had no sense of humour, either! After we laughed at her she wouldn't talk to us. I mean, just imagine it! Putting on airs like that and thinking you're a somebody when you don't even have a mum or dad! So then Clarissa — that's me and Morgana's friend - called her a chimney sweep and, dear Lord! Do you know what she did? She punched Clarissa in the mouth. Unbelievable! So of course we had to report her. It was for her own good, wasn't it? That's when she made the allegations.'
'What allegations?'
'Well ... you know!'
'About the Dean?'
'She was a lying bitch.'
'What did he do? Make a pass at her?'
'Not only him, quite a few of them. Men! I don't know. See a girl in a short skirt and they can't control themselves, worse than goats, aren't they? But it wasn't true of course.'
'Oh of course.'
'No really!'
'How do you know?'
She rolled her eyes as if the answer was obvious. 'Oh come on, Dean Morgan wasn't like that!'
'So you keep saying. What did this girl look like?'
'Oh I don't know. Tall I suppose, with long blonde hair, and ... and ...'
'Was she pretty?'
She sniffed. 'She might have been, I suppose, in a cheap, slatternly sort of way —'
'Very pretty? Sexy even?'
'Some people said so but I could never see it myself.'
'But she wore a short skirt?'
'How do I know what she wore! I can't remember.'
'You just told me she did.'
'No I didn't.'
'OK, forget it, what was her figure like?'
She flushed. 'Oh please!'
'Come on, you're a grown-up, aren't you? Tell me what she was like!'
'But ... but I don't ... how am I supposed
'She had a figure like an hour-glass, didn't she?'
'See, you're just like all the rest, typical!'
'All the rest of what?'
'Men.'
'Which men? The ones at the college?'
She didn't answer.
'Look you might as well tell me, I'll find out anyway. She was blonde and cute and had curves in all the right places, yes? And she was a bit wild and all those dusty pieces of human parchment at Lampeter in their silly black hats drooled like dogs at a butcher's window whenever she appeared, isn't that right?'
Gretel banged her fist on the desk. 'No it wasn't like that! It wasn't, it wasn't!'
'And all the rest of you girls were jealous and so you ganged up on her —'
'No! We didn't! She was a horrid, low-class orphan and she had to leave and we all said good riddance!' And with that, Gretel stormed out.
About half an hour after Gretel left for her haunting tutorial the Philanthropist's butler turned up. I was sitting staring at the ceiling doing a rough piece of mental arithmetic — it's an exercise I frequently do with my clients and involves guessing certain building dimensions then working out the approximate size of the client's belfry and then computing the amount of bats in it. Then I put clients in order of bat population. Gretel had just gone straight into the charts at number one.
The butler wore an old-fashioned coat, a bit like the ones worn by the Beefeaters in the Tower of London but black in colour as opposed to red. He also wore a stubby top-hat like a sawn-off stovepipe. He had mutton-chop whiskers, reading specs perpetually in his hands, a face that managed to be intelligent, obsequious and calculating all at the same time, and he spoke with an artificial plum in his mouth in a language that was vaguely reminiscent of Jeeves and yet which couldn't quite disguise, for all the exaggerated English country manor of it, his Welsh origins. If I'd ordered a Welsh butler straight from a catalogue he would have been it.
We shook hands and he told me he represented the Philanthropist who had recently purchased the old sanatorium and he had come on an errand on his behalf. I offered him some rum and he accepted and I duly filled up two glasses.
'The Philanthropist is a great collector of various things — ornaments, antiques, knick-knacks and memorabilia ...'
'How charming.'
'Indeed. In particular he is an avid collector of all sorts of memorabilia concerning a certain nightclub singer, one known to you, I'm sure. Myfanwy Montez.'
I managed to keep almost all trace of a reaction at bay but there was the slight narrowing of the eyelids and the tightening of my grip upon the rum tumbler. I don't know which one he noticed. It hardly mattered.
His voice had a wheedling, insinuating tone that I took exception to. 'Yes I see the name is not without an effect on you.'
'What do you want?'
'My master has bought up a lot of the usual stuff on the market. Signed record covers, posters, programmes, evening gowns, etcetera. But he finds his hunger undiminished. He is looking for something more intimate and personal, evidence of the private Myfanwy rather than the public persona. It is known that you had an affair with her
I stood up and walked around the desk and took hold of his glass and pulled it out of his hand.
