But they were coming out of the garage. Brett, flinging the map on the seat beside him, exclaimed softly. Majendie, dear old-fashioned fellow to the last, was perched at the wheel of an enormous black box, thirty years old if it were a day, and wanting only oak and brass and lilies to make it the complete hearse. Brett was quite sure, however, that the engine wouldn’t grumble at the hills. He gave them a fair start, then followed.

Majendie, he thought. Majendie? The doubt and uncertainty which had wreathed him from his first appearance had by no means finally cleared in Brett’s mind. There were the letters from Olga, for instance. He didn’t need to wait for a report to tell him that they were genuine. Majendie couldn’t have fabricated them overnight. He might have had them stored against such a contingency. Brett shook his head. What was he to make of Olga’s unprecedented Saturday night excursion, if not that she was slinking out to post them—omitting the formality of a stamp. It was, in fact, only too easy to see Majendie as the victim of circumstances. The dressing case? No more than that. Common Law and the Common Man? A legal complication arising from the course of normal business. Even Kellett’s. That record—de Reszke, indeed! How much more likely to have been some other ancient tenor. Geoffrey’s advances to Stephanie could bear the simplest, and his original, interpretation. There could be an excuse for those number plates. If the vans had really been waiting, if he had not in his suspicious way read too much into too little, why should it follow that Richborough was their destination? Suppose, he thought, they never started. Beddoes might be sitting at this moment, vainly repining for liberty. Brett could well imagine the assumed spaniel eyes of reproach in store, if that should prove the case; not that spaniels had such cerulean eyes. On the other hand the disappointment might be so sharp as to pierce, for once, that triple bronze of slang and twang and flippancy, and present him, for no effort, the cunningly sought and long despaired of prize, a piece of Beddoes’ mind.

The road out of Folkestone climbed; a long slithering climb. He had to stare hard to keep sight of the old black fly crawling ahead. Did every criminal drive such a deadly respectable vehicle? Why not, he asked himself, overtake, leave him standing, give him up, make for Richborough? But there was still the cameo, the tainted present, the affronting bribe, its very paltriness aggravating the offence, with all its contemptuous assessment of his price. Majendie, somehow, somewhere had offended in a double sense; and Brett was clinging to him for a double satisfaction.