By the time the spats were buttoned they had come to a halt in the station.
The man stood up. “Here’s my card. We may meet again.”
He jumped out of the carriage, leaving Ruddy turning his card over. It bore no address, only a name, Duke Ninevah.
“Not the Duke of,” whispered Teddy, peering over his shoulder, “so it can’t be a title.”
“Here, come on,” said Ruddy. “Let’s follow him.”
Further down the platform they saw Duke Ninevah helping a lady from a first-class carriage. She was slight and extremely stylish; even at that distance they guessed she must be beautiful. They had begun to follow when they remembered that they had left the empty pigeon boxes behind. They dashed back to find them; when they again looked up and down the platform, Duke Ninevah and his lady had vanished.
“Must be traceable,” said Ruddy. “Here, let’s leave these things at the parcel-room and clear for action. Now then, let’s use our intellecks. What does one come to the seaside for? To see the sea. We’ll find him either in it or beside it Why does one bring a lady to Brighton? To make love to her, and to make love one needs to be private. We’ve to find a private place by the sea, and then he’s cornered.”
“And what about the pierrots?”
“Let ’em wait. Humph!”
As they came down on to the promenade the waves heliographed to them. A warm south wind flapped against their faces. The air was full of voices, rising and falling and blending: ice-cream men shouting their wares; cabmen inviting hire; an evangelist, balancing on a chair and screaming “Redemption! Redemption!”; a comedian, dressed like a sultan and bawling breathlessly, “I’m the Emperor of Sahara, Tarara, Tarara”; the under-current chatter of conversation, and the laughing screams of girls as they stepped down from bathing huts and felt the first chill of the bubbling surf. Wriggling out like sea-serpents, their tails tethered to the land, were piers with swarms of insect-looking objects creeping along their backs. Gayety everywhere, and somewhere the man who knew how pleasure could be had without working! “By the sea with privacy,” Ruddy kept murmuring; the more remote their chances grew of finding him, the more certain they became that Duke Ninevah had a secret worth the knowing.