“Beautiful creature, isn’t she?” said Estcourt. “Brains of a rabbit. Rumor has it that she’s going to marry Lord Leconbury. That was Leconbury in the doorway.”
“He doesn’t look a very nice sort of man to marry,” remarked Tuppence.
Estcourt shrugged his shoulders.
“A title has a kind of glamor still, I suppose,” he said. “And Leconbury is not an impoverished peer by any means. She’ll be in clover. Nobody knows where she sprang from. Pretty near the gutter, I daresay. There’s something deuced mysterious about her being down here anyway. She’s not staying at the Hotel. And when I tried to find out where she was staying, she snubbed me—snubbed me quite crudely, in the only way she knows. Blessed if I know what it’s all about.”
He glanced at his watch and uttered an exclamation.
“I must be off. Jolly glad to have seen you two again. We must have a bust in town together some night. So long.”
He hurried away, and as he did so, a page approached with a note on a salver. The note was unaddressed.
“But it’s for you, sir,” he said to Tommy. “From Miss Gilda Glen.”
Tommy tore it open and read it with some curiosity. Inside were a few lines written in a straggling untidy hand.
I’m not sure, but I think you might be able to help me. And you’ll be going that way to the station. Could you be at The White House, Morgan’s Avenue, at ten minutes past six?
Tommy nodded to the page who departed, and then handed the note to Tuppence.