Read Online From London Far by Michael Innes - Free Book Online Page A

behind a sufficiently massive chimney stack. Then he dropped down himself. But as he did so his glance travelled back the way they had come. Only an upper corner of the scene of his recent adventures was now visible. And even as he looked it disappeared, as if irresistibly sucked outwards and down. A cloud of smoke, a mass of flying debris and dust had taken its place, and in the instant of this appearance the shattering sound of the explosion followed. And with a quaint device , thought Meredith at his most random, the banquet vanishes … The reverberations died away into subsidiary rumbling scarcely registered by the outraged ear. The air was dust and fume. And suddenly Meredith cried out. ‘The Titian!’ he exclaimed in agony. ‘The Titian and the Giotto–’
    ‘I don’t think we need worry.’ The girl’s face, now a battlefield of sweat and grime, was close to his. ‘The birds are flown – in quite a little fleet of pantechnicons. And you may be sure that they’ve taken all that’s really first class with them.’
    ‘You really think so?’ Meredith peered at her hopefully. All of a sudden he looked about him and his face expressed horrified despair. ‘But the Juvenal! The Juvenal, ma’am–’
    The girl smiled. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I brought it along with me.’ And from the torn opening of her frock she produced what was to Meredith a miraculously familiar leather wallet. ‘It wasn’t difficult to guess it was important. But I’m terribly sorry I had to jettison the dispatch-case you had it in. It was just when we ran–’
    ‘My dear young lady–’ began Meredith. Words failed him. ‘My dear,’ he said, and kissed her rapturously on a sooty nose.

 
     
V
    They came down to earth prosaically enough through an unfastened trapdoor and a staircase leading past sundry dingy offices. The demolition of which Mr Bubear’s organization had engineered the appearance was sufficiently commonplace; a couple of blocks away nobody was at all disturbed. That Meredith and the girl ought to have gone at once and given an account of themselves was undoubted. But an unspoken agreement – perhaps to the simple effect that for the moment they had had enough – took them in the opposite direction. Their clothes were tattered and covered with dust; their faces were begrimed. This in itself excited little remark. But the fact that they were respectfully followed by a brace of bloodhounds did occasionally attract the curious eye, and Meredith, who saw no practicable means of casting off these now faithful companions, felt that it would be pleasant to find a taxi. That a bus conductor could be persuaded to harbour the creatures was unlikely, and the vision of them on an escalator and in a crowded tube was something wilder still… ‘I wonder’, said Meredith, speaking for the first time since they had gained the street, ‘if by any chance we could find a cab?’
    ‘Most improbable, I should say.’ The girl replied briskly, but her voice was tired. ‘I wonder what the creatures are called? Perhaps we might call them Giotto and Titian. Unless you would prefer Landseer and Fuseli.’
    Meredith looked at the girl in alarm – for, having quite forgotten his own bemused reference to those eminent academicians, he found her remark as suggestive of mental derangement as she had a little time before found his. ‘Are you sure’, he said, ‘that you feel fit to walk? We could report–’
    ‘Quite fit.’
    ‘Then perhaps I may escort you home?’
    ‘Escort?’ The girl looked at him quaintly and burst into pleasant laughter. ‘I’m so sorry – but somehow it sounded odd after all our caperings. And I haven’t got a home in London, I’m afraid.’
    ‘Nothing at all?’
    ‘Quite nothing. Those people brought me here in a lorry, rather uncomfortably jammed up with a bad marble after the Capri Adonis .’
    Meredith’s brow darkened. ‘The damned scoundrels!’ And he looked about him as if a policeman had