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rather gently, as if she were some old fragile object that needed careful handling.

IX

    One morning some days later James arrived at the shop to find his uncle and Miss Caton in a state of considerable agitation. It appeared that the premises had been broken into during the night and a number of things stolen.
    Humphrey was wringing his hands as he sat on a Hepplewhite chair in the room at the back of the shop, recounting the losses in a tone of lamentation.
    ‘Those quails,’ he moaned, ‘ah, those quails!’
    ‘You don’t mean …’
    ‘Yes, my dear boy, I do mean … those quails.’
    They had been Chinese and rather valuable, James remembered. He was a bit vague about their provenance and altogether rather nervous about the Chinese things, not knowing much about them and not really liking them, though he had never dared confess this to his uncle.
    ‘I’ve just made a cup of tea,’ said Miss Caton, who was crouching near the gas-ring. ‘This will do you good – a strong cup of tea with plenty of sugar. I learnt that when I was doing first aid during the war – treatment for shock.’
    Humphrey glanced distastefully at the tan-coloured liquid in the thick white cup and waved it aside. ‘No, thank you, Miss Caton – I really couldn’t drink it – and where did you get that terrible cup?’
    ‘It’s the one I have my elevenses and my tea out of every day,’ she said briskly.
    Humphrey took his mid-morning coffee elsewhere if he was not at a sale and was seldom on the premises in the afternoon either, so he had probably never noticed his typist drinking from the thick serviceable cup.
    ‘Well, Miss Caton,’ he said, ‘I can only hope that nobody has ever seen you drinking from such a monstrosity. It would hardly be a good advertisement, would it?’
    ‘I take my tea in the back,’ she said, on the defensive, ‘so no customer could have seen me.’
    ‘And you, James – do you drink from such a cup?’ asked his uncle sternly.
    ‘I don’t know,’ James mumbled. ‘I suppose I may have done on occasion.’
    Humphrey exclaimed in horror.
    ‘Perhaps a cup of China tea,’ Miss Caton persisted, ‘though it wouldn’t have the same reviving effect, and without milk or sugar it might well be too acid for you in your present condition.’
    James felt they were wasting time, though he was not sure what they ought to be doing. He felt ineffectual and guilty at having arrived after the others, as if he could have prevented the theft by having come ten minutes earlier. Now Miss Caton pressed the rejected cup of strong tea on him and he found himself drinking it almost as a punishment. It was not at all nice and by now not even hot. The tea at the Leopard Dining Rooms had been better than this.
    ‘What about the police?’ he suggested.
    ‘Oh, I’ve done all that,’ said Miss Caton. ‘I discovered the theft, you see, when I arrived. At quarter past eight,’ she added a little smugly. ‘The CID came immediately in response to my 999 call. Two most charming men, in plain clothes, of course. They told me I’d done quite right not to touch anything. It’s so horrid to think of those burglars touching our lovely things with their nasty rough hands.’
    ‘It’s quite likely that the thieves were men of taste,’ said Humphrey, ‘or at least of some knowledge. They took the very best netsuke, you know. That ram …’ He moaned again. ‘So they would probably not have had rough hands.’
    ‘Perhaps Miss Caton didn’t mean it literally,’ James suggested.
    ‘Well, no, perhaps not in the literal sense of labouring men who work with their hands. In any case they would have been wearing gloves – such delicate objects as those quails would require most careful handling.’
    There was a call from the shop. ‘Anyone here?’
    ‘Good heavens, is the door open?’ said Humphrey. ‘Go and see who it is, James, while I get on with this inventory. Miss Caton, will you take dictation on to the typewriter,