‘The strip, of course. Two objects called Tolly and Snib. I can’t remember whether they are ducks or rabbits.’
So Grant had to wait until Pat had finished with Tolly and Snib, and by that time both Laura and Tommy had taken themselves off, the one to the kitchen and the other to out-of-doors, so that he was left alone with the silent child on the mat, endlessly rearranging her treasures. He took the tidily-folded paper from Pat ceremoniously, and as Pat went away he unfolded it with controlled interest. It was a Scottish edition and apart from the ‘middles’ the paper was crammed with the most parochial of news, but there seemed to be nothing about yesterday’s railway event in it. To and fro he went, through the jungle of unimportances, like a terrier routing through bracken, and at last he came on it: a tiny paragraph at the bottom of a column, down among the bicycle accidents and the centenarians. ‘MAN DIES IN TRAIN’, said the inconspicuous heading. And under the heading was a succinct statement:
On the arrival of the Flying Highlander at its destination yesterday morning it was found that one of the passengers, a young Frenchman, Charles Martin, had died during the night. It is understood that the death was due to natural causes, but since the death occurred in England, the body is being returned to London for an inquest.
‘ French!’ he said aloud, and Bridget looked up from her playthings to watch him.
French? Surely not! Surely not?
The face, yes. Perhaps. The face quite likely. But not that writing. That very English, schoolboy writing.
Had the paper not belonged to B Seven at all?
Had he just picked it up? In a restaurant where he was having a meal before boarding the train, perhaps. The chairs of station dining-rooms were habitually strewn with the discarded papers of those who had eaten there. Or in his home, for that matter; or his rooms or wherever he lived. He might have come by the paper in a score of casual ways.
Or, of course, he might be a Frenchman who was educated in England, so that the round untidy script was substituted for the slanting elegant spidery handwriting of his inheritance. There was nothing fundamentally incompatible with B Seven having been the author of those pencilled lines.
All the same, it was an oddity.