Leyland looked round, suddenly on the alert. It was only as he looked round that he noticed how insecure was their privacy. The rain had stopped some time since, and there was no reason why an interloper should not be standing outside, listening through one of the numerous chinks in the wall behind them. Gripping Bredon’s arm, he darted out suddenly, and rounded the corner of the building. There was nobody there. But close to the wall lay a cigarette-end, flattened and soiled as if it had been trodden by a human foot. And as Leyland picked it up a faint spark and a thin stream of smoke shewed that it had been trodden on only a moment before, not quite successfully. “Callipoli,” he read, examining the stump. “Not the sort of cigarette one buys in the village. It looks to me, Bredon, as if we were on the track of something fresh here. We’ll leave that cigarette-stump exactly where we found it.”
Chapter XI.
The Generalship of Angela
“Angela,” said Bredon when he found her, “I’ve got a job of work for you.”
“Such as?”
“All you’ve got to do is to make Brinkman and Pulteney open their cigarette-cases for inspection without knowing that they’re doing it.”
“Miles, it won’t do. You know I can’t work in blinkers. There’s nothing I dislike so much as a want of complete confidence between husband and wife. Sit down and tell me all about it. You’d better make sure of the door first.” And she turned down the little shutter which protected their keyhole on the inside.
“Oh, all right,” said Bredon, and told the story of their recent alarms. “It almost must be somebody in the house. Brinkman and Pulteney are both cigarette-smokers, and of course it would be easy for me to cadge a cigarette by saying I’d run short. But that just might put the mysterious gentleman on his guard. And I don’t want to hang about picking up fags. So what you’ve got to do is to lead round the conversation in such a way that we can have an opportunity of finding out what cigarettes each of them smokes without his suspecting anything.”
“Why not pinch some from their rooms?”
“It might work. But since people took to smoking all kinds of vile cigarettes at the end of the war, one doesn’t trouble to carry one’s own brand about. One buys them at the local shop. These Callipolis are an oddity, but there probably aren’t many more where they came from, and the safest place to look for them is inside somebody’s breast-pocket. Anyhow, you might try.”
“Sort of salted almonds game?” said Angela reflectively. “All right, I will. Don’t you try your hand at it; sit there and back me up. Meanwhile, you’d better go down and have a pick-me-up at the bar, because I’m going to dress for dinner.”