Tanner’s Virgin

I was tying a shoe. I turned to ask a wordless question, and she gri

I brushed her lips with mine, finished tying the shoe, crossed to the window. The damn thing was stuck, and I was convinced I was making a hellish amount of noise. Just as I yanked it open the doorbell sounded.

I looked at Julia. She shrugged. “It’s me,” I said. “I raced around the block in excess of the speed of light and got back before I started.”

She told me I was daft. The flat was on the first floor, which would have been a blessing if we were in the States. We weren’t, though. I crouched on the sill, tensed myself to avoid a flowerbed, and dropped ten or twelve feet to the ground. I landed on my feet, which was not surprising, and I stayed on them, which was. Then I headed down the narrow alley to the street behind.

It was still raining. I made my way around the block, solemnly cursing Nigel for not having had the common decency to sleep another half hour. Of course, I thought, the doorbell would have awakened him in any event, but by then we might have at least finished.

I plodded dutifully through the rain. All things come round to him who will wait, I comforted myself. Nigel Stokes was going to give a matinee performance that afternoon, and so would his sister and I, and this time we wouldn’t have an audience.

At the final corner, I stopped and drew a long breath. I needed some sort of story, obviously. I couldn’t very well say I’d been out to get a morning paper, or Nigel might well ask why I hadn’t brought it back with me. He might also wonder why I’d gone off without my jacket or umbrella. I thought for a moment and decided to tell him I’d spent the past few hours at an all-night café in Piccadilly. It had been clear when I left, I would say, and he could chide me for being a foolish American who didn’t know that one had to carry a brollie rain or shine, since rain was always a danger, and I could laugh along with him, and-

And I rounded the corner, and the street was cluttered with police cars, and half the policemen in London were beating a path to Nigel’s door.

Chapter 5

I looked at all those policemen, and I turned around and walked back around the corner. It never occurred to me to wonder why they were there. I certainly hadn’t expected them, but it was patently obvious that they had come for me, and that it was more than illegal entry that had brought them. I walked quietly round the corner and down the street and around another corner, and although it went right on raining I was no longer bothered by it. There but for the grace of coitus interruptus, thought I, go I, down the drain.

I offered a silent prayer of gratitude for Nigel’s early rising and Julia’s modesty. A brief prayer. After all, it was only decent that something went right for a change, and on balance I was still far behind. I was coatless and brollieless and wanted for murder by the most efficient police force in the free world. And I couldn’t turn myself in and try to prove my i

How much did they know? It was important to find this out before I did anything, and it was also important to get as far from London as possible before they spread the alarm. If they knew no more about me than that I had been a guest of Nigel and Julia Stokes, then I could leave the country more or less as pla

I took a bus to Portsmouth some seventy miles southwest of London. The trip took two hours and I spent them both with my face hidden in a morning newspaper. There was nothing in the paper about me or Mr. Hyphen. In Portsmouth I ate eggs and chips at a horrible café and went to a movie house. I saw the last half of an old Doris Day movie, a short on lobster trapping, a UPA cartoon, a slew of commercials, coming attractions for something, and the first half of the Doris Day movie. I stayed and saw the last half over a second time in the hope that they would change the ending this time through and let Rock Hudson lay her, but they didn’t and he didn’t. After my experiences with Phaedra and Julia, I was left with the feeling that the movie was true to life.

I went to another café and had steak and chips and some very bitter coffee, then found another cinema and saw an Italian thing in which everyone laid everyone else but no one enjoyed it much. Least of all the audience. When it ended I wasn’t hungry, so I went straight on to another theater and saw an English film based on the Great Train Robbery. The police were magnificently efficient in the film and everyone got caught at the end, so this one did even less for my morale than the other two. I was begi

I read them in the lavatory of a side-street pub. They did not make me very happy. It was all my own fault, of course. I had left fingerprints all over the murder flat, mainly because it never occurred to me not to. I didn’t suspect that the English authorities would have my prints on file. Evidently they had obtained them a while back from Washington, because the body of Arthur Hook had not been discovered until shortly after midnight, and they could hardly have run a check through Washington that quickly.

It was fingerprints that put them onto me, but it was the two useless guns that told them where to look for me. The police identified them as theatrical props, routed people out of bed to check out various prop departments, and had them co

Someone knocked on the lavatory door. I grunted in-articulately and went on reading. According to both articles, I was a Jacobite fanatic and known terrorist, and a variety of odd theories were advanced as probable explanations of my co

This last bothered me. If I was going to get out of England, I was going to need help, and other members of the Jacobite League seemed like my best chance. They share my hope of chasing Betty Battenberg off the throne and restoring the venerable House of Stuart. There were any number of loyal men in the Scottish Highlands who would have sheltered me, but it looked as though that was precisely where the Yard would look first.

Another knock at the door. I folded the papers, grunted again, gave the loo an u

The Jacobites were out, I decided. And now that Nigel had been picked up, the Flat-Earth people might well be under surveillance. Even if this weren’t the case, I couldn’t quite see ru