"That's a nice one, isn't it?" she said, her eyes seeking Danny's in the mirror. But even as she looked she saw the eyes, focused on the middle of her back, widen to a wild stare. She swung round. "What's the matter?" she asked. But Danny apparently did not hear her; the focus of his eyes did not alter. Suddenly he snatched the cigarette-holder from his mouth, pitched the cigarette into the fireplace, and sprang to his feet with wild gropings about him.
"My hat!" he said. "Where's my hat? Where the hell's my hat!"
"It's on the chair behind you," she said, amazed. "What's biting you?"
Danny snatched the hat and fled out of the room as if all the fiends in the lower regions were on his heels. She heard him pitch himself down the stairs, and then the front door closed with a bang. She was still standing with startled eyes on the door when she heard him coming back. Up the stairs he came, three at a time, as lightly as a cat, and burst into her presence.
"Gimme tuppence," he said. "I haven't got tuppence."
Mechanically she reached out for the very expensive and rather beautiful handbag that had been one of his presents to her, and produced two pennies. "I didn't know you were that broke," she said in an effort to goad him into explanation. "What do you want them for?"
"You go to blazes!" he snapped, and disappeared again.
He arrived at the nearest call-box slightly breathless but exceedingly pleased with himself, and without condescending to anything so mundane as a consultation with the telephone directory, demanded to be connected with Scotland Yard. During the subsequent delay he executed a neat shuffle on the floor of the call-box as a means of expressing at once his impatience and his triumph. At last — there was Grant's voice at the end of the wire.
"I say, Inspector, this is Miller speaking. I've just remembered where I saw that guy you were talking about. 'Member?…Well, I travelled in a race train to Leicester with him, end of January, I think it was…Sure? I remember as if it was yesterday. We talked racing, and he seemed to know quite a lot about it. But I never saw him before or since…Eh?…No, I didn't see any bookmaking things…Don't mention it. I'm pleased to be able to help. I told you my brain didn't go back on me for long!"
Danny quitted the box and set out, a little more soberly this time, to smooth down an outraged and abandoned female in a beaded evening frock, and Grant hung up his receiver and expelled a long breath. A race train! The thing had all the fittingness of truth. What a fool he had been! What a double-dyed infernal fool! Not to have thought of that. Not to have remembered that though Nottingham to two-thirds of Britain may mean lace, to the other third it means racing. And of course racing explained the man — his clothes, his visit to Nottingham, his predilection for musical comedy, even — perhaps — the gang.