The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin Read Free Book Online Page B

Where on earth did you get it, anyway?”
    Fen looked pained. “I bought it from an undergraduate who was sent down. What’s the matter with it? It goes very fast,” he added in a cajoling tone.
    “I know.”
    “Oh, all right then, We’ll walk. It’s not far.”
    Cadogan grunted. He was engaged in tearing out Rosseter’s advertisement and putting it in his pocket-book. “And if nothing comes of it,” he said, “I shall go straight to the police, and tell them what I know.”
    “Yes. By the way, what did you do with those tins you stole? I’m feeling rather peckish.”
    “They’re in the car, and you leave them alone.”
    “Oughtn’t you to adopt a disguise?”
    “Oh, don’t be so stupid, Gervase… It’s not the being arrested I mind. They’re not likely to do more than just fine me. It’s all the bother of explaining and arranging bail and coming up before magistrates… Well, come on, let’s go, if you think it will do any good.”
    The Cornmarket is one of the busiest streets in Oxford, though scarcely the most attractive. It has its compensations—the shapely, faded facade of the old Clarendon Hotel, the quiet gabled coaching yard of the Golden Cross, and a good prospect of the elongated pumpkin which is Tom Tower—but primarily it is a street of big shops. Above one of these was 193A, the office of Mr. Aaron Rosseter, solicitor, as dingy, severe, and uncomfortable as most solicitor’s offices.
    What was it, Cadogan wondered, which made solicitors so curiously insensible to the graces of this life?
    A faintly Dickensian clerk, with steel-rimmed spectacles and leather pads sewn to the elbows of his coat, showed them into the presence. The appearance of Mr. Rosseter, though Asiatic, did not justify the Semitic promise of his baptismal name. He was a small, sallow man, with a tremendous prognathous jaw, a tall forehead, a bald crown, horn-rimmed spectacles, and trousers which were a little too short for him. His manner was abrupt, and he had a disconcerting trick of suddenly whipping off his glasses, polishing them very rapidly on a handkerchief which he pulled from his sleeve, and restoring them with equal suddenness to his nose. He looked a trifle seedy, and one suspected that his professional abilities were mediocre.
    “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “and may I know your business?” He examined the rather overwhelming presence of Gervase Fen with faint signs of trepidation.
    Fen beamed at him. This person,” he said, pointing to Cadogan, “is a second cousin to Miss Snaith, for whom I believe you acted during her lifetime.”
    Mr. Rosseter was almost as startled at this dramatic revelation as Cadogan. “Indeed,” he said, tapping his fingers very rapidly on the desk. “Indeed. I’m very pleased to know you, sir. Do me the honour of sitting down.”
    Blinking reproachfully at Fen, Cadogan obeyed, though as to what honour be could be doing Mr. Rosseter in lowering his behind on to a leather chair he was not entirely clear. “I had rather lost touch with my cousin,” he announced, “during the last years of her life. Actually she was not, properly speaking, a second cousin at all.” Here Fen glared at him malevolently. “My mother, one of the Shropshire Cadogans, married my father—no, I don’t mean that exactly, or rather, I do—anyway, my father was one of seven children, and his third sister Marion was divorced from a Mr. Childs, who afterwards remarried and had three children—Paul, Arthur, and Letitia—one of whom (I forget which) married, late in life, a nephew (or possibly a niece) of a Miss Bosanquet. It’s all rather complex, I’m afraid, like a Galsworthy novel.”
    Mr. Rosseter frowned, took off his glasses, and polished them very rapidly. Evidently he did not find this funny. “Perhaps you would state your business, sir?” he barked.
    To Cadogan’s alarm, Fen burst at this point into a noisy peal of laughter. “Ha! ha!” he shouted, apparently overcome with