She made a little grimace. At that moment, even more inescapably than at any other, she looked as if she was on the point of bursting into tears.
"Oh, go to hell!" she said.
Her hand slipped through his fingers and she sank back into the corner of the cab. It moved away.
Simon Templar stood and watched it until the stream of traffic swallowed it up. And then he said "Hell and damnation!" with a meticulous clarity which caused the commissionaire to unbend in a glance of entirely misdirected sympathy before he resumed his thaumaturgical production of taxis.
2
After which various things happened that Simon Templar would have been very edified to know about.
Mr Algernon Sidney Fairwearher was sitting in the smoke room of his paralyzingly respectable and conservative club finishing an excellent cigar and enjoying a sedate post-prandial brandy and soda and the equally sedate post-prandial conversation of an august bishop, a retired ambassador and a senile and slightly lecherous baronet, when he was summoned to the telephone.
"This is Valerie," said the voice on the wire. "I'm frightfully sorry to bother you and all that, but I rather wanted your advice about something. Do you mind terribly? It's about Johnny."
"What exactly do you want my advice about?" asked Mr Fairweather uncomfortably. "That man Templar hasn't been pestering you again, I hope?"
"No — at least, not exactly," she answered. "I mean, he's quite easy to get on with really, and he simply throws money about, but he does ask rather a lot of questions."