It had come to him.

He knew now who it was that Heron Lloyd reminded him of.

It was Wee Archie.

This was so unexpected and so ridiculous that he sat down on the chair by his desk and began to laugh.

What had Wee Archie in common with that elegant and sophisticated creature who was Heron Lloyd?

Frustration? Of a surety not. The fact that he was an Auslander in the country of his devotion? No; too far-fetched. It was something nearer home than that.

For it was of Wee Archie that Lloyd had reminded him. He had no doubt of that now. He was experiencing that inimitable relief that comes when one has remembered a name that has eluded one.

Yes, it was Wee Archie.

But why?

What had that incongruous pair in common?

Their gestures? No. Their physique? No. Their voices? Was that it?

‘Their vanity, you fool!’ said that inner voice in him.

Yes; that was it. Their vanity. Their pathological vanity.

He sat very still, considering this; not amused any longer.

Vanity. The first requisite in wrong-doing. The constant factor in the criminal mind.

Just supposing that—

The telephone at his elbow gave its sudden purr.

It was Tad. He had reached number eighteen, he said, and was now an old old man but the blood of pioneers was in his veins and he was pursuing the search.

‘Drop it for a little and come and eat with me somewhere.’

‘Oh, I’ve had my lunch. I had a coupla bananas and a milk shake in Leicester Square.’

‘Merciful Heaven!’ said Grant.

‘What’s the matter with that?’

‘Starch; that’s what’s the matter with it.’

‘A little starch is fine when you’re ironed out. No luck your end?’

‘No. If it was a backer he was going North to see, then the backer was merely some amateur who had money; not anyone actively engaged in Arabian exploration.’

‘Oh. Well. I’ll be on my way. When shall I ring you next?’

‘As soon as you come to the end of the list. I’ll wait here for your call.’

Grant decided to have the omelette, and while Mrs Tinker prepared it he walked about his living-room letting his mind soar into speculation and pulling it down instantly to a common-sense level, so that it behaved like telegraph lines outside a railway compartment; continually soaring and continually caught back.

If only they had a starting-point. What if Tad came to the end of the likely hotels and still drew a blank? It was only a matter of days before he would have to go back to work. He stopped speculating on vanity and its possibilities and began to reckon how long it would take Tad to cover the remaining four hotels.

But before his omelette was half finished Tad arrived in person. He was flushed and triumphant.

‘I don’t know how you ever thought of that dull little dump in connection with Bill,’ he said, ‘but you were right. That’s where he stayed all right.’

‘And which is the dull little dump?’

‘The Pentland. How did you think of that one?’

‘It has an international reputation.’

‘That one has?’

‘And English people go on going to it generation after generation.’

‘That’s what it looks like!’

‘So that is where Bill Kenrick stayed. I like him more than ever.’

‘Yeah,’ Tad said more quietly. And the flush of triumph died away. ‘I wish you’d known Bill. I sure wish you’d known him. They don’t come any better than Bill.’

‘Sit down and have some coffee to settle your milk shake. Or would you like a drink?’

‘No, thanks, I’ll have coffee. It actually smells like coffee,’ he added in a surprised way. ‘Bill checked out on the 3rd. The 3rd of March.’

‘Did you ask about his luggage?’

‘Sure. They weren’t all that interested at first. But eventually they got out a ledger the size of the Judgement Book and said that Mr Kenrick had left nothing either in the box-room or the safe.’

‘That means that he took them to a cloak-room—to a left-luggage office, that is—to be ready to his hand when he came back from Scotland. If he meant to fly when he came back, then I suppose he would leave them at Euston to be picked up on his way to the airport. If he meant to go by sea, then he may have taken them to Victoria before going to Euston. Did he like the sea?’

‘So-so. He wasn’t daffy about it. But he had a mania for ferries.’

‘Ferries?’

‘Yes. Seems it began when he was a kid at a place called Pompey—know where that is?’ Grant nodded. ‘And he spent all his time on a penny ferry.’

‘A ha’penny one, it used to be.’

‘Well, anyway.’

‘So the train-ferry might have had an interest for him, you think. Well, we can but try. But if he was going to be late in meeting you, I should think he would fly over. Would you know the cases if you saw them?’

‘Oh, yes. Bill and I shared a Company bungalow. I helped pack them. In fact one of them’s mine, if it comes to that. He just took the two of them. He said if we bought many things we could buy a suitcase to—’ Tad’s voice died away suddenly and he buried his face in his coffee cup. It was a great flat bowl of a cup, willow-patterned in pink, which Marta Hallard had brought back from Sweden for Grant because he liked his coffee out of large cups; and it made a very good screen for emotion.

‘We have no ticket to recover them with, you see. And I can’t use any official means. But I know most of the men on duty at the big terminuses, and can probably wangle our way behind the scenes. It will be up to you to spot the cases. Was Bill a labeller by nature, would you say?’

‘I expect he’d label things he was going to leave behind like that. Why, do you think, did he not have the left-luggage ticket in his pocket-book?’

‘I did think that someone else may have deposited those cases for him. The person who saw him off at Euston, for instance.’

‘The Martin guy?’

‘It might be. If he had borrowed papers for this odd masquerade, he would have to return them. Perhaps Martin was going to meet him at the airport, or at Victoria, or wherever it was that he had planned to leave England from, with the cases and collect his own papers.’

‘Yeah. That makes sense. I suppose we couldn’t Agony-advertise for this Martin?’

‘I don’t think that this Martin would be very willing to answer, having lent his papers for a piece of sharp practice and being now without identity.’

‘No. Perhaps you’re right. He wasn’t anyone who was staying at that hotel, anyway.’

‘How do you know that?’ asked Grant, surprised.

‘I looked through the book: the register. When I was identifying Bill’s signature.’

‘You’re wasted in OCAL, Tad. You should come to us.’

But Tad was not listening. ‘You’ve no idea what a queer feeling it was to see Bill’s writing suddenly like that, among all those strange names. It sort of stopped my breath.’

Grant took Lloyd’s picture of the crater ‘ruins’ from his desk and brought it over to the table. ‘That is what Heron Lloyd thinks that Bill saw.’

Tad looked at it with interest. ‘It sure is queer, isn’t it? Just like ruined sky-scrapers. You know, until I saw Arabia I thought the United States invented sky-scrapers. But some of those old Arab towns are just the Empire State on a smaller scale. But you say it couldn’t have been this that Bill saw.’

‘No. From the air it must be quite obvious what it is.’

‘Did you tell Lloyd that?’

‘No. I just let him talk.’

‘Why do you dislike the guy so much?’

‘I didn’t say that I disliked him.’

‘You don’t have to.’

Grant hesitated; analysing, as always, just exactly what he did feel.

‘I find vanity repellent. As a person I loathe it, and as a policeman I distrust it.’

‘It’s a harmless sort of weakness,’ Tad said, with a tolerant lift of a shoulder.

‘That is just where you are wrong. It is the utterly destructive quality. When you say vanity, you are thinking of the kind that admires itself in mirrors and buys things to deck itself out in. But that is merely personal conceit. Real vanity is something quite different. A matter not of person but of personality. Vanity says “I must have this because I am me”. It is a frightening thing because it is incurable. You can never convince Vanity that anyone else is of the slightest importance; he just doesn’t understand what you are talking about. He will kill a person rather than be put to the inconvenience of doing a six months’ stretch.’