Richardson Scores Again by Basil Thomson Page A

I’ll go and hunt him up this evening and listen to his words of wisdom. If you don’t mind I’ll go down and telephone for the address of that servants’ registry.” 
    â€œI’ve one question to ask you, Mr. MacDougal, while your nephew is out of the room,” said Foster. “Is he the kind of young man who runs into debt?
    â€œNot more than other young men of his age, I think. I make him a small allowance over and above his naval pay, and it is very seldom that he comes to me for more. When he does I always give it to him.”
    â€œDo you know whether he has any entanglements with young women?”
    â€œNot that I have heard of. Why do you ask me that? Has he said anything to you about it?”
    â€œOnly because if he had it would account for the scrape he seemed to have got into in Portsmouth.”
    Richardson knocked at the door and said that the statement was ready for signature. Foster accompanied him downstairs. Ronald Eccles was in the act of disconnecting the telephone, after having come to a satisfactory arrangement with the registry office. He went down with them to the kitchen where the statement was read over to him.
    â€œHave you anything to add to it?” asked Foster.
    â€œNot that I can think of. I’m ready to sign it.”
    When the two police officers were in the street on their way to the Tube station, Foster asked Richardson what he thought of the statement.
    â€œIt sounded a bit thin, sir, but I think we shall find that it was correct.”
    â€œYou think so? If you’re right it means that we’re up against a gang. First the thief in the hotel who stole his pocket-book; then a car thief who posed as a detective; and then the man he arrested in the public-house. It means that they read the uncle’s letter in the pocket-book and came straight off here to steal the money and plant the pocket-book where Mr. Symington found it in order to throw suspicion on the nephew. Such things have happened, we know, but they are so rare that for me it is easier to believe that that young man was lying. Remember, he wouldn’t give me the name and address of the young woman he said he went to see. A man who has something to hide is generally unscrupulous about lying. We shall see what the Somerset police say about his statement.”

Chapter Four
    T HERE WERE two good reasons why Dick Meredith seldom used the lift to his flat on the fourth floor: he had a strong dislike for the pert, red-haired lift-boy, and in running upstairs there was always a sporting chance of meeting the girl who lived in the flat above him—in an eyrie to which the lift did not go. Artfully he had wormed her name out of the hall porter—Miss Patricia Carey—but that was all that the porter knew about her. He himself knew even less, for an occasional meeting on the stairs, when he stood aside to let the vision pass, can scarcely be counted as acquaintance.
    Dick Meredith took his practice at the Bar seriously. He knew the story which Lord Chancellor Cairns used to tell about himself—how he owed his start to sticking to his chambers when every other barrister on his staircase had gone to Epsom on Derby Day, and the halting footsteps of a solicitor’s clerk sounded on the stairs; how, after trying door after door, they had stopped on his landing, and the knuckles of a solicitor’s clerk, carrying an urgent brief marked £5 5 s ., had summoned him to the door—a brief which was the foundation of his fortunes. No solicitor’s clerk had yet blundered into Dick Meredith’s chambers with a brief intended for another counsel, but he had appeared before a Judge in Chambers, shaking at the knees, and he went on circuit religiously and had had his modest share of dock briefs, even succeeding by a stroke of luck in getting a Yorkshire jury to find a persistent housebreaker “not guilty.”
    On a memorable afternoon he was plodding up the