“My dear Caroline,” I said. “There’s no doubt at all about what the man’s profession has been. He’s a retired hairdresser. Look at that moustache of his.”
Caroline dissented. She said that if the man was a hairdresser, he would have wavy hair—not straight. All hairdressers did.
I cited several hairdressers personally known to me who had straight hair, but Caroline refused to be convinced.
“I can’t make him out at all,” she said in an aggrieved voice. “I borrowed some garden tools the other day, and he was most polite, but I couldn’t get anything out of him. I asked him point blank at last whether he was a Frenchman, and he said he wasn’t—and, somehow, I didn’t like to ask him any more.”
I began to be more interested in our mysterious neighbour. A man who is capable of shutting up Caroline and sending her, like the Queen of Sheba, empty away must be something of a personality.
“I believe,” said Caroline, “that he’s got one of those new vacuum cleaners—”
I saw a meditated loan and the opportunity of further questioning gleaming from her eye. I seized the chance to escape into the garden. I am rather fond of gardening. I was busily exterminating dandelion roots when a shout of warning sounded from close by and a heavy body whizzed by my ears and fell at my feet with a repellent squelch. It was a vegetable marrow!
I looked up angrily. Over the wall, to my left, there appeared a face. An egg-shaped head, partially covered with suspiciously black hair, two immense moustaches, and a pair of watchful eyes. It was our mysterious neighbour, Mr. Porrott.