"He's down the street at the Harvard Club, having lunch with some dreary man from Washington — at least, that's what he said he was doing," she added darkly. "Lately, I've had my suspicions as to what Milton is doing when he tells me he's doing something else, if you know what I mean. Why?"
"I might want to get in touch with him this afternoon," Uttershaw said casually, but his eyes returned rather conspiratorially to the Saint as he was finishing the sentence. "Well — I enjoyed our talk. Let's meet again soon."
"Very soon," Simon promised.
He sat down again as Uttershaw sauntered out, and saw that Mrs Ourley was following this departure with a tinge of speculation that had not been in her oestrous gaze before.
"Now, why do you suppose he might want to find Milton?" she asked.
She was talking more to herself than to him, but the eyes that she swung back towards him were no longer vacant.
"And he was having lunch with you… Is it something about the iridium?" she asked sharply.
Anyone could have noticed the change in her tone, the steel showing through the whipped cream, the spikes under the feathers.
Simon reached for his coffee and took a sip.
"That's rather obvious, isn't it?" he said calmly. "You know that I'm gunning for the black market. You know that Alien Uttershaw was about the biggest dealer in iridium before the shortage. So I guess the subject may have been just accidentally mentioned."