A Wreath for Rivera

“There’s a medium to all things,” Fox pronounced somberly. “I beg pardon, Mr. Alleyn.”

“Not at all, Br’er Fox. The bedroom, Gibson.”

But there wasn’t anything much to the purpose in Gibson’s meticulous account of Rivera’s bedroom unless the revelation that he wore black satin pyjamas with embroidered initials could be called, as Alleyn suggested, damning and conclusive evidence as to character. Gibson produced the spoil of the wall safe and they examined it. Alleyn took the ledgers and Fox the bundle of correspondence. For some time there was silence, broken only by the whisper of papers.

Presently, however, Fox brought his palm down on his knee and Alleyn, without looking up, said: “Hullo?”

“Peculiar,” Fox grunted. “Listen to this, sir.”

“Go ahead.”

How tender [Mr. Fox began] is the first burgeoning of love! How delicate the tiny bud, how easily cut with frost! Touch it with gentle fingers, dear lad, lest its fragrance be lost to you forever.

“Cor’!” whispered Detective-Sergeant Scott.

You say [Mr. Fox continued] that she is changeable. So is a day in spring. Be patient. Wait for the wee petals to unfold. If you would care for a very special, etc.

Fox removed his spectacles and contemplated his superior.

“What do you mean by your ‘etc.,’ Fox? Why don’t you go on?”

“That’s what it says. Etc. Then it stops. Look.”

He flattened a piece of creased blue letter paper out on the desk before Alleyn. It was covered with typing, closely spaced. The Duke’s Gate address was stamped on the top.

Alleyn said, “What’s that you’re holding back?”

Fox laid his second exhibit before him. It was a press-cutting and printed on paper of the kind used in the more exotic magazines. Alleyn read aloud:

Dear G.P.F.: I am engaged to a young lady who at times is very affectionate and then again goes cold on me. It’s not halitosis because I asked her and she said it wasn’t and wished I wouldn’t harp on about it. I am twenty-two, five-foot-eleven in my socks and well built. I drag down £550 per annum. I am an A grade motor-mechanic and I have prospects of a rise. She reckons she loves me and yet she acts like this. What should be my attitude?

Spark-plug.

“I should advise a damn’ good hiding,” Alleyn said. “Poor old Spark-plug.”

“Go on, sir. Read the answer.” Alleyn continued:

Dear Spark-plug: Yours is not as unusual a problem as perhaps you, in your distress of mind, incline to believe. How tender is the first burgeoning —!

“Yes, here we go again. Yes. All right, Fox. You’ve found, apparently, a bit of the rough draft and the finished article. The draft, typed on Duke’s Gate letter-paper, looks as if it had been crumpled up in somebody’s pocket, doesn’t it? Half a minute.”

He opened his own file and in a moment the letter Félicité had dropped from her bag at the Metronome had been placed beside the other. Alleyn bent over them. “It’s a pot-shot, of course,” he said, “but I’m ready to bet it’s the same machine. The s out of alignment. All the usual indications.”