The Tiger In the Smoke Read Free Page B

know.’
    â€˜You go along.’ He kissed her lightly and had the door open just before the taxi stopped. As he helped her out she clung to his sleeve. The crowd on the pavement was large and hurried as usual and they were crushed together by it. Once again he saw her as he had been seeing her at intervals all the afternoon, afresh, as if for the first time. Her voice, reaching him through the bustle, sounded nervous and uncertain. The thing she had to tell him was altogether too difficult.
    â€˜I haven’t really
told
you, Geoff. I’m so muddled. I’m so
sorry
, darling.’
    â€˜Shut up,’ he said softly and thrust her gently away.
    The crush snatched her and bore her from him into the dark archway of the entrance, which was festooned like a very old theatre proscenium with swathes of fog. She turned to raise a small gloved hand to him, but a porter with a barrow and a woman with a child frustrated her, and she was swept on out of his sight as he stood watching, still with the cab door open.
    Meanwhile, Mr Albert Campion and Divisional Detective Chief Inspector Charles Luke, who was Father Superior of the second most tough police division in metropolitan London and proud of it, stood in the covered yard of the southern end of the terminus and waited. Apart from bleaching him, the years had treated Mr Campion kindly. He was still the slight, elegantly unobtrusive figure exactly six feet tall, misleadingly vacant of face and gentle of manner, which he had been in the nineteen-twenties. The easiest of men to overlook or underestimate, he stood quietly at his point of vantage behind the rows of buffers and surveyed the crowd with casual good temper.
    His companion was a very different kettle of fish. Charlie Luke in his spiv civilians looked at best like a heavy-weight champion in training. His dark face, with its narrow diamond-shaped eyes and strong sophisticated nose, shone in the murky light with a radiance of its own. His soft black hat was pushed on to the back of his close-cropped curls and his long hands were deep in his trouser pockets, so that the skirts of his overcoat bunched out behind him in a fantail.
    Members of that section of the district who had most cause to be interested in him were apt to say that ‘Give him his due, at least you couldn’t miss him. He stuck out like a lighthouse.’ He was some inches taller than his companion, but his thick-set build made him seem shorter. As usual he conveyed intense but suppressed excitement and rigidly controlled physical strength, and his bright glance travelled everywhere.
    â€˜It may be just some silly game, a woman playing the goat,’ he remarked, idly sketching in a pair of horns with his toe on the pavement. ‘But I don’t think so. It smells like the old “blacking” to me. All the same, an open mind, that’s what we want. You never know. Weddings and so on are funny times.’
    â€˜There’s a man involved, at any rate,’ objected Mr Campion mildly. ‘How many photographs have you got of him in all – five?’
    â€˜Two taken in Oxford Street, one at Marble Arch, one in the Strand – that’s the one which shows the movie advertisement which dates it as last week – and then the one with the message on the back. That’s right, five.’ He buttoned his coat and stamped his feet. ‘It’s cold,’ he said. ‘I hope she’s not late. I hope she’s beautiful too. She’s got to have something if she can’t even recognize her old man for sure.’
    Campion looked dubious. ‘Could you guarantee to recognize a man you hadn’t seen for five years from one of those snapshots?’
    â€˜Perhaps not.’ Luke put his head under an imaginary backcloth, at least he ducked slightly, and sketched in a piece of drapery with waving hands. ‘Those old photographers – mugfakers we call ’em – in the street