Killer Dolphin Read Online Free PDF Page B

there in front of me, I was knocked all of a heap.”
    “Not only by them, I understand. You were half-drowned, half-drunk, dressed up in a millionaire’s clobber and not knowing whether the owner was making a queer pass at you or not.”
    “I’m almost certain, not.”
    “His behaviour, on your own account, seems to have been, to say the least of it, strange.”
    “Bloody strange but not, I have decided, queer.”
    “Well, you’re the judge,” said Jeremy Jones. He bent over his work-table and made a delicate slit down a piece of thin cardboard. He was building a set to scale for a theatre-club production of
Venice Observed.
After a moment he laid aside his razor-blade and looked up at Peregrine. “Could you make a drawing of it?” he said.
    “I can try.”
    Peregrine tried. He remembered the glove very clearly indeed and produced a reasonable sketch.
    “It
looks
O.K.,” Jeremy said. “Late sixteenth century. Elaborate in the right way. Tabbed. Embroidered. Tapering to the wrist. And the leather?”
    “Oh, fine as fine. Yellow and soft and wrinkled and old, old, old.”
    “It may be an Elizabethan or Jacobean glove but the letter could be a forgery.”
    “But why? Nobody’s tried to cash in on it.”
    “You don’t know. You don’t know anything. Who was this chum Conducis bought it from?”
    “He didn’t say.”
    “And who was M.E. whose dear grandma insisted it had belonged to the Poet?”
    “Why ask me? You might remember that the great-
great
-grandmother was left it by a Mrs. J. Hart. And that Joan Hart—”
    “Née Shakespeare, was left wearing-apparel by her brother. Yes. The sort of corroborative details any good faker would cook up. But, of course, the whole thing should be tackled by experts.”
    “I told you: I said so. I said wouldn’t he take it to the V. and A., and he gave me one of his weird looks; furtive, scared, blank—I don’t know how you’d describe them—and shut up like a clam.”
    “Suspicious in itself.” Jeremy grinned at his friend and then said: “ ‘
I would I had been there.
’ ”
    “Well, at that, ‘
it would have much amazed you.
’ ”
    “ ‘
Very like. Very like.
’ What do we know about Conducis?”
    “I can’t remember with any accuracy,” Peregrine said. “He’s an all-time-high for money, isn’t he? There was a piece in one of the Sunday supplements some time back. About how he loathes publicity and does a Garbo and leaves Mr. Gulbenkian wondering what it was that passed him. And how he doesn’t join in any of the joy and is thought to be a fabulous anonymous philanthropist. A Russian mum, I think it said, and an Anglo-Rumanian papa.”
    “Where does he get his pelf?”
    “I don’t remember. Isn’t it always oil? ‘Mystery Midas’ it was headed and there was a photograph of him looking livid and trying to dodge the camera on the steps of his Bank and a story about how the photographer made his kill. I read it at the dentist’s.”
    “Unmarried?”
    “I think so.”
    “How did you part company?”
    “He just walked out of the room. Then his man came in and said the car was waiting to bring me home. He gave me back my revolting, stinking pocket-book and said my clothes had gone to the cleaner and were thought to be beyond salvation. I said something about Mr. Conducis and the man said Mr. Conducis was taking a call from New York and would ‘quite understand.’ Upon which hint, off I slunk. I’d better write a sort of bread-and-butter, hadn’t I?”
    “I expect so. And he owns The Dolphin and is going to pull it down and put up, one supposes, another waffle-iron on the South Bank?”
    “He’s ‘turning over the idea’ in his mind.”
    “May it choke him,” said Jeremy Jones.
    “Jer,” Peregrine said. “You
must
go and look at it. It’ll slay you. Wrought iron. Cherubs. Caryatids. A wonderful sort of pot-pourri of early and mid-Vic and designed by an angel. Oh God, God, when I think of what could be done with