The Toff and the Fallen Angels

he was too shocked and numbed. He saw other figures, men and women, hurrying towards the reeling man, was aware of cars pulled up in the road, saw a man leap from one with a small fire-extinguisher in his hand.

The sight seemed to revive Rollison. He pulled his own extinguisher from its clips beside the brake, and turned to look at Angela, suddenly alarmed lest she was hurt. She looked more startled than scared, her eyes and mouth open wide and round. He opened his door and jumped out, opened her door and said : “Get out, quick!” and strode to the front of the car. The bent and broken bonnet was now a mass of foam, there was an evil stench of the chemical and a smell also of burning. But the flames were out, and a little man with the remains of a huge cigar still jutting out beneath his hooked nose, was lowering his extinguisher.

“I got it,” he said with satisfaction.

“I can’t even begin to thank you,” Rollison said, looking towards the once reeling man who was standing in the middle of a small group.

“Who wants thanks?” the Good Samaritan said. “You’d do the same for me. You okay, sir?”

“I’m—yes, thanks. I’m fine. I hope—”

“You in a hurry to go any place? I’ll be glad to take you.”

“I’d better wait for the police to come here,” said Rolli-

son, “but if you could take my passenger—”

“Sure, sure, be glad to,” the cigar-smoker said. “That’s if you’re okay, Miss.”

It was not until Angela was being driven away in a sky-blue Jaguar that Rollison wondered whether he should have let her go, whether the helpful motorist could possibly have known who had put the explosive in the car. It was too late to stop her, and a police car was already pulling up, while a policeman was standing in the road, urging the traffic on. Very little had been tossed into the air, the metal of the bonnet was too strong. The man nearest the explosion had covered his face in time to escape the full effect of a billow of steam from the burst radiator, and was comparatively unhurt.

The engine, which had taken the full force of the explosion, was wrecked. Oil was dripping out of the sump, and there was a strong smell of petrol.

Wired to the base of the self-starter was a scrap of red cardboard.

“So they used dynamite,” remarked a policeman. It was the fair-haired Detective Sergeant Adams, who had seen Anne Miller. He shook his head lugubriously. “A chance in a million, Mr. Rollison, that you’re not in hospital by now.”

“If not in a morgue,” added Rollison lightly. “Sergeant, need I stay? I didn’t see who put it there, but you may find a passer-by who noticed someone. May I leave the rest to you?”

“You have been in touch with Mr. Grice of the Yard, sir, haven’t you?”

“I saw him only an hour ago.”

“And where can we find you, sir?”

Rollison gave him the Gresham Terrace address, then espied a taxi putting down a passenger a few houses along the street. Pushing through the crowd he ran towards it. It was not until he sat back, heavily, that the shock waves struck him. For a few moments he was very cold and shivery, and his forehead and upper lip were beaded with sweat. He was halfway towards Gresham Terrace before he began to feel acute anxiety for Angela. What on earth had possessed him, to allow her to go off with a stranger?

Turning out of the far end of Gresham Terrace as his cab turned in at the end nearer Piccadilly, was a sky- blue Jaguar. Relief surged over him.

Waiting for him at the open door of his flat were Jolly and Angela—Angela holding a glass of brandy. She looked pale and shaken, but her voice was calm enough. Jolly, very solicitous, ushered him to his favourite armchair, and brought him whisky and a soda-syphon.

“As Miss Angela said you weren’t likely to be long, I’ve timed dinner for seven-fifteen, sir,” he said. “And Miss Angela will be staying.”

“If that’s all right with you, Uncle Richard,” Angela said demurely.

Rollison looked at her anxiously. She had a tiny cut on her right temple, where blood had dried, and a reddish bruise on her left cheek.

“What makes you think you’ve solved the case?” he asked.

She did not answer at once, but sniffed the bouquet from the large glass.

He wondered if he should have given her more time to recover, whether she was really in a condition to answer and to think. Then he reminded himself that she was very tough indeed, as well as highly intelligent. He did not press her, but waited, sipping his whisky, grateful in a perverse way for her prolonged silence.

At last, she said : “I don’t really think there’s any doubt, Rolly. Sir Douglas himself is behind it all. Look what I found in a drawer in his wardrobe.”

She opened her handbag and took out three nylon stockings, all full of runs and all odd-shaped, as if they had been used to adorn something very different indeed from a leg; it was easy to imagine that they had been pulled over a man’s face and had lost their shape. As Rollison fingered the stockings, Angela dipped again into her handbag, and this time drew out a pair of big, dark blue cotton gloves—the kind of gloves a man might wear if he wanted to grip a handle tightly, yet was anxious not to leave fingerprints.

Angela was looking eagerly into Rollison’s face, waiting for his approval. He smiled at her thoughtfully, and asked :

Was the drawer locked?”

“Yes, but I found his keys.”

“Where?” asked Rollison.