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So if you feel like speculating the family fortune you know what to do,' Smithfield suggested,
blowing out two individual fine streams of smoke lazily through his nostrils.
'So where does that leave us?'
'It leaves us with a middleman job. Sell to the highest bidder. Does that strain your
imagination?'
'Didn't I say...'
'Less lemon in the drink. The trouble is I've got bile on the stomach.'
'You amaze me,' Jamesborough interposed.
'Don't trouble yourself on my behalf,' Smithfield grinned sarcastically, 'I was born with it.'
'Do we know who this middleman is?'
'No, we don't, but 7 do,' Smithfield replied. 'A nasty bugger. Operates out of Switzerland. As
they all do. . .'
Smithfield stopped as Sir Arthur suddenly stared upwards, his mouth open. For a fleeting
second Smithfield thought it was a heart attack. Then he saw the broad-bladed fan had
stopped turning.
'Damn it!' Sir Arthur exclaimed, 'there's been a power cut.'
At this point there came a firm knock on the door. On a call from Sir Arthur, the door
opened and a girl came in, a girl whom a casual observer might have mistaken for Frances
Haroldsen. She set papers down in front of Sir Arthur.
'These have just come in.'
'Thank you, Miss . .er. You know, I don't think I've seen you around before.'
'No you haven't, Sir Arthur. I'm new. My name's Maisie. Maisie Cooke.'
'Well, thank you, Maisie. Ah ha!'
As soon as the girl had withdrawn, Sir Arthur continued:
'You know, I have an idea.'
'You know, that girl reminds me of somebody,' Smithfield said, more
i
to himself than to the others, staring up at the now stationary fan.
'I was thinking, Smithfield, that it would be a good idea to infiltrate these people in
Cambridge,' Sir Arthur concluded, with what he felt to be a well-earned smile.
Chapter 52
The party was well muffled up against the cold, because the curling rink close by the Derby
Hotel in Davos, Switzerland, lay by early afternoon in the shadow of a February day.
Everything looked innocent enough, and for the most part it was. Whenever someone with a
surge and a slide set off a curling stone across the cleared patch of smooth ice, someone
else rushed alongside the moving stone, polishing the ice ahead of it with a small soft
broom, attempting to fine-tune the shot.
The party was made up of many nationalities, and the game was thus accompanied by
ejaculated monosyllables in many languages. Because of the cold it lasted for little more
than an hour, whereon the party broke up, its members moving away in sundry directions,
proving that its composition had no directly sinister purpose. Two chunkily-built men wearing
woolly caps stamped their way to the nearby Derby Hotel, where one of them said tersely to
the receptionist:
'The usual, Fraulein.'
The two went into a small lift which took them to the second floor, where they were soon
casting off their outer garments in a suite of rooms that was one of the larger sets
possessed by the hotel. There was a tap on the outer door of the suite. It was a maid with a
tray on which there were two glasses of hot gluwein.
Outside the hotel the lights of Davos were going on. Skiers were returning from the upper
slopes. They could be seen in the main street with skis slung over their shoulders, walking
with extreme clumsiness in their unyielding boots. Below the municipal conference hall,
horses with dressed tails pulling sleighs with bells were arriving back from afternoon trips
through woods and side valleys where mountain taverns were kept prosperous by the
never-failing stream of visitors that arrives each year in Davos over the winter.
Here and there were armed policemen dressed in fur hats and big fur overcoats, who had
little idea of what might be going on at the Derby Hotel, just as the amiable proprietor of that
hotel had little idea of what might be going on, or the maid who had just delivered the two
glasses of reAgluwein at one of the largest of the hotel suites. While outside on the curling
rink the two men who now sipped the gluwein had looked similarly bulky, with their outer
garments removed it could be seen that while one was genuinely bulky with a great chest on
him, for the other the bulkiness had been mere padding. The second man was actually quite
thin, of middle height with close-cropped grey hair, and with a curious bird-like posture that
made him look as if he was about to become airborne whenever he moved. It was Boulton,
the Professor of Geostrophics from Cambridge.
As soon as the man with the big chest had removed his woolly cap it was apparent that one
was in the presence of a big personality. The effect was greatly enhanced by the
combination of piercing blue eyes, a bronzed face and a bald skull. Normally the
big-chested man was to be found on the upper snowfields, where he invariably ran the
slopes straight as a bullet, after choosing their gradients with circumspection a measure of
caution he took good care to hide from his acquaintances, just as he took care to hide many
things from his acquaintances, and more still from the authorities.
But it was the shape of his skull that really caught the eye, a shape which students of
anthropology would immediately characterise as Neanderthal, by which experts mean large
and box-like, not primitive. This is a matter on which a whole treatise might be written, but
which is most easily comprehended by watching a sculptor at work with clay. About two
hundred and fifty pounds of clay go into a full-sized statue of a person, of which the first two
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