The Clocks - Agatha Christie [43]
I nodded and sidled my way onwards to where a small rather rickety and very dirty staircase led up from the back of the shop. On the first floor were Orientalia, art books, medicine, and French classics. In this room was a rather interesting little curtained corner not known to the general public, but accessible to experts, where what is called “odd” or “curious” volumes reposed. I passed them and went on up to the second floor.
Here archaeological, natural history, and other respectable volumes were rather inadequately sorted into categories. I steered my way through students and elderly colonels and clergymen, passed round the angle of a bookcase, stepped over various gaping parcels of books on the floor and found my further progress barred by two students of opposite sexes lost to the world in a closely knit embrace. They stood there swaying to and fro. I said:
“Excuse me,” pushed them firmly aside, raised a curtain which masked a door, and slipping a key from my pocket, turned it in the lock and passed through. I found myself incongruously in a kind of vestibule with cleanly distempered walls hung with prints of Highland cattle, and a door with a highly polished knocker on it. I manipulated the knocker discreetly and the door was opened by an elderly woman with grey hair, spectacles of a particularly old-fashioned kind, a black skirt and a rather unexpected peppermint-striped jumper.
“It’s you, is it?” she said without any other form of greeting. “He was asking about you only yesterday. He wasn’t pleased.” She shook her head at me, rather as an elderly governess might do at a disappointing child. “You’ll have to try and do better,” she said.
“Oh, come off it, Nanny,” I said.
“And don’t call me Nanny,” said the lady. “It’s a cheek. I’ve told you so before.”
“It’s your fault,” I said. “You mustn’t talk to me as if I were a small boy.”
“Time you grew up. You’d better go in and get it over.”
She pressed a buzzer, picked up a telephone from the desk, and said:
“Mr. Colin … Yes, I’m sending him in.” She put it down and nodded to me.
I went through a door at the end of the room into another room which was so full of cigar smoke that it was difficult to see anything at all. After my smarting eyes had cleared, I beheld the ample proportions of my chief sitting back in an aged, derelict grandfather chair, by the arm of which was an old-fashioned reading or writing desk on a swivel.
Colonel Beck took off his spectacles, pushed aside the reading desk on which was a vast tome and looked disapprovingly at me.
“So it’s you at last?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Got anything?”
“No, sir.”
“Ah! Well, it won’t do, Colin, d’you hear? Won’t do. Crescents indeed!”
“I still think,” I began.
“All right. You still think. But we can’t wait forever while you’re thinking.”
“I’ll admit it was only a hunch,” I said.
“No harm in that,” said Colonel Beck.
He was a contradictory man.
“Best jobs I’ve ever done have been hunches. Only this hunch of yours doesn’t seem to be working out. Finished with the pubs?”
“Yes, sir. As I told you I’ve started on Crescents. Houses in crescents is what I mean.”
“I didn’t suppose you meant bakers’ shops with French rolls in them, though, come to think of it, there’s no reason why not. Some of these places make an absolute fetish of producing French croissants that aren’t really French. Keep ’em in a deep freeze nowadays like everything else. That’s why nothing tastes of anything nowadays.”
I waited to see whether the old boy would enlarge upon this topic. It was a favourite one of his. But seeing that I was expecting him to do so, Colonel Beck refrained.
“Wash out all round?” he demanded.
“Almost. I’ve still got a little way to go.”
“You want more time, is that it?”
“I want more time, yes,” I said. “But I don’t want to move on to another place this minute. There’s been a kind of