Fellow Passenger by Geoffrey Household Page A

took my place under the benches. Business was brisk and the beadle less fruity than usual. He did his best, but he could not help catching the boredom of his customers. Three-quarters of them were doing the cathedral and chapter house because it was part of their coach tour and they had paid for it - the remaining quarter, younger and more earnest, because it was their self-imposed duty. The collecting-box did well, especially from a party of North Americans who were far more fascinated by the beadle than the architecture. And quite right, too. I sympathized with their transatlantic humanity. I once spent six months in Madrid without ever entering the Prado. Shameful, of course, but I was so occupied by enjoyment of the living that I never had time.
     
    One man remained sketching while parties came and went. He was of a type strangely common in these days, with a fleshy, full face of coarse complexion, and black, untidy hair that looked as if it had never been combed by anything else but greasy finger-tips. Yet the breed is pure British without a trace of Mediterranean blood. I have a theory that many of them are dark Scots who have taken to the arts, eaten too much starchy food and gone to seed.
     
    He was wearing a dark-blue turtle-neck sweater, with coat and trousers. It was a coat and they were trousers, and that was about all you could say of them, for they had neither definite colour nor shape. He was not concentrating on his sketch. Whenever the hall was empty, he padded across to the open door, looked out and listened.
     
    At the lunch hour he had a word with ‘Erbert and was permitted to stay on and finish his work. Having seen his restlessness when he thought he was alone, I did not altogether like that. Sketching was not his real interest, though, as I could see when he had his back to me, he was thoroughly competent. He had two different styles - one architecturally exact and one unintelligible. Both seemed to me dull.
     
    As soon as the hall was closed for lunch, he whipped a pair of cotton gloves out of his pocket and set to work on the collecting-box with a skeleton key. The box had a general iron-bound air of being built to withstand the mediaeval thief, but possessed a quite ordinary lock. Though my artist had not, I think, any professional qualifications as a cracksman - beyond some practice and a draughtsman’s neatness of touch - he had the box open in a couple of minutes.
     
    The position was obviously packed with opportunities for my escape, though how to take advantage of them I did not yet know. I jumped up from the pile of furniture, regardless of minor crashes.
     
    ‘We’ve had our eyes on you for some time, my lad,’ I said, advancing down the stairs with the kindly, confident air of the police. After all, I had had some time to study them.
     
    My shot went right home. He didn’t protest or ask for pity. He just sank into himself, burning and sulky and resigned to the inevitable.
     
    ‘It’s not as if I were robbing an individual,’ he said, with a good, educated accent.
     
    ‘And all right so long as it goes into your pocket, what?’
     
    ‘If you put it like that, yes,’ he answered, looking at me with sudden insolence.
     
    I remembered that I was unshaven for at least a day longer than he, and that my suit was a good deal dustier than that of a plain-clothes detective.
     
    ‘And what about all the church offertory boxes?’ I asked him. ‘I tell you, I’m sick of sitting up all night for you under pews and tombstones.’
     
    After that I had him where I wanted him - running through in imagination the prison sentence ahead. He obeyed without question when I told him to take off his gloves and lock the box up again. It occurred to me that I was a far more likely criminal than he, and that the guilt had better be settled before we went any further. I forced down his fingers on the inside of the box before he shut it up.
     
    ‘I’ll tell that to my solicitor,’ he