‘I’m not worried to death. I’m just annoyed.’
‘You mean people are fighting shy—’
‘Of having their teeth attended to by a possible murderer? Yes.’
‘How cruelly unfair!’
‘It is, rather. Because frankly, Jane, I’m a jolly good dentist. And I’m not a murderer.’
‘It’s wicked. Somebody ought to do something.’
‘That’s what my secretary, Miss Ross, said this morning.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘Miss Ross?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Big—lots of bones—nose rather like a rocking horse—frightfully competent.’
‘She sounds quite nice,’ said Jane graciously.
Norman rightly took this as a tribute to his diplomacy. Miss Ross’s bones were not really quite as formidable as stated, and she had an extremely attractive head of red hair, but he felt, and rightly, that it was just as well not to dwell on the latter point to Jane.
‘I’d like to do something,’ he said. ‘If I was a young man in a book I’d find a clue or I’d shadow somebody.’
Jane tugged suddenly at his sleeve.
‘Look, there’s Mr Clancy—you know, the author—sitting over there by the wall by himself. We might shadow him.’
‘But we were going to the flicks?’
‘Never mind the flicks. I feel somehow this might be meant. You said you wanted to shadow somebody, and here’s somebody to shadow. You never know. We might find out something.’
Jane’s enthusiasm was infectious. Norman fell in with the plan readily enough.
‘As you say, one never knows,’ he said. ‘Whereabouts has he got to in his dinner? I can’t see properly without turning my head, and I don’t want to stare.’
‘He’s about level with us,’ said Jane. ‘We’d better hurry a bit and get ahead and then we can pay the bill and be ready to leave when he does.’
They adopted this plan. When at last little Mr Clancy rose and passed out into Dean Street, Norman and Jane were fairly close on his heels.
‘In case he takes a taxi,’ Jane explained.
But Mr Clancy did not take a taxi. Carrying an overcoat over one arm (and, occasionally allowing it to trail on the ground), he ambled gently through the London streets. His progress was somewhat erratic. Sometimes he moved forward at a brisk trot, sometimes he slowed down till he almost came to a stop. Once, on the very brink of crossing a road, he did come to a standstill, standing there with one foot hanging over the kerb and looking exactly like a slow-motion picture.
His direction, too, was erratic. Once he actually took so many right-angle turns that he traversed the same streets twice over.
Jane felt her spirits rise.
‘You see?’ she said excitedly. ‘He’s afraid of being followed. He’s trying to put us off the scent.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Of course. Nobody would go round in circles otherwise.’
‘Oh!’