Читать книгу Murder Must Advertise. A Detective Story онлайн

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“Thanks frightfully.”

“Well, cheerio!” Mr. Ingleby returned to his own room.

“He won't stay the course,” he said to himself. “Goes to a damned good tailor, though. I wonder—”

He shrugged his shoulders and sat down to concoct a small, high-class folder about Slider's Steel Office Tables.

Mr. Bredon, left alone, did not immediately attack the subject of margarine. Like a cat, which, in his soft-footed inquisitiveness, he rather resembled, he proceeded to make himself acquainted with his new home. There was not very much to see in it. He opened the drawer in his writing-table and found a notched and inky ruler, some bitten-looking pieces of india-rubber, a number of bright thoughts on tea and margarine scribbled on scraps of paper, and a broken fountain-pen. The bookcase contained a dictionary, a repellent volume entitled Directory of Directors, a novel by Edgar Wallace, a pleasingly got-up booklet called All about Cocoa, Alice in Wonderland, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, the Globe edition of the Works of Wm. Shakespeare, and five odd numbers of the Children's Encyclopædia. The interior of the sloping desk offered more scope for inquiry; it was filled with ancient and dusty papers, including a Government Report on the Preservatives in Food (Restrictions) Act of 1926, a quantity of rather (in every sense) rude sketches by an amateur hand, a bundle of pulls of advertisements for Dairyfields commodities, some private correspondence and some old bills. Mr. Bredon, dusting fastidious fingers, turned from this receptacle, inventoried a hook and a coat-hanger on the wall and a battered paper-file in a corner, and sat down in the revolving-chair before the table. Here, after a brief glance at a paste-pot, a pair of scissors, a new pencil and a blotting-pad, two scribbling-blocks and a grubby cardboard box-lid full of oddments, he propped up the Dairyfields guard-book before him, and fell to studying his predecessor's masterpieces on the subject of Green Pastures Margarine.