"A particularly smelly beach, let me say," Carley observed. "Do you know that fat blonde with the mauve powder and the uplift brassiere who runs that Sports Wear shop next the Anne Boleyn? She's one of the things on your beach."
"How?"
"She lived at the same boarding-house in London as the Sharpes, it seems; and she has a lovely story as to how Marion Sharpe once beat a dog half to death in a rage. Her clients loved that story. So did the Anne Boleyn customers. She goes there for her morning coffee." He glanced wryly at the angry flush on Robert's face. "I needn't tell you that she has a dog of her own. It has never been corrected in its spoiled life, but it is rapidly dying of fatty degeneration through the indiscriminate feeding of morsels whenever the fat blonde is feeling gooey."
There were moments, Robert thought, when he could very nearly hug Ben Carley, striped suits and all.
"Ah, well, it will blow over," said Carley, with the pliant philosophy of a race long used to lying low and letting the storm blow past.
Robert looked surprised. Forty generations of protesting ancestors were surprised in his sole person. "I don't see that blowing over is any advantage," he said. "It won't help my clients at all."
"What can you do?"
"Fight, of course."
"Fight what? You wouldn't get a slander verdict, if that's what you're thinking of."
"No. I hadn't thought of slander. I propose to find out what the girl was really doing during those weeks."