Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories by Margery Allingham Page A

Norwich station.
    “How tragic missing him after all,” she said. “Still, I’m so glad you went, dear. Tell me, did you see Ernestine?”
    To the best of his knowledge Philip had never told a direct lie in his life, but truth is a graceful mistress, capable of many disguises.
    “Yes,” he said softly. “I saw her. Only for a moment. She went away almost as soon as I recognised her.”
    “What was she like?”
    Dorothy’s old eyes were bright and childlike in her excitement.
    Philip put his thin arm round her.
    “A creature of romance,” he said, “but not the type who could ever have satisfied me.”

He Preferred Them Sad
    Of all the unpleasant people I have ever met I think Mr. Walter Cough took the ultimate palm for downright greasy villainy.
    I met him years ago in the days when I was earning a precarious living along with a crowd of other art-students in a nest of picturesque, but draughty, studio rooms overlooking the Bayswater Canal.
    We had a joint agent at that time, a lazy, pink-faced young man as impecunious as we were. When one barren Friday he dropped in to say that if I would design a letter heading incorporating four angels, a couple of cornucopias, a mountain or so, and the title of a certain company in Old English caps, and take my sketch to Mr. Walter Cough, Inkermann Avenue, by six o’clock that evening, there was a very good chance that I should receive cash on the spot for my trouble, I got down to work immediately.
    I did not like Walter Cough when I first set eyes on him in his smug little sitting-room with the cotton curtains, the plastic flowers and the overwhelming smell of stale cooking.
    After he had insulted my drawing and beaten me down for it I liked him still less. But afterwards he grew friendly and told me about his nefarious profession.
    I conceived a positive loathing for him and would have taken my work away in a fine burst of outraged virtue had I had my bus fare back to the studio and something to eat when I got there.
    As it was, I took the money rather shamefacedly and he went on talking.
    He was a plump, pale man nearing fifty-five, with an unctuous manner which gave place at times to a ghoulish humour larded over with conceit.
    He was eating when I came in. It was a dreadful meal, consisting of ham, bloaters and jam washed down with great cupfuls of black tea from a pale blue enamel pot.
    He didn’t offer me any, but kept me standing in front of him with my drawing propped up against a sticky jampot. He wouldn’t make up his mind about it at first and I was wondering why, because there was not much in it to like or dislike, when it occurred to me that he was keeping me as long as he could because he wanted an audience. Since I wanted to sell the drawing I encouraged him to talk.
    “You didn’t want the address of your office on it, did you?” I ventured.
    He chuckled and winked at me.
    “This is the only office I’ve got and the only office I need,” he said. “That’s the beauty of my business. It’s the only warehouse, too.” He waved a podgy hand to the great cupboard in the corner. “That’s my stock in there. I do my business by sheer personality. You’d be surprised what a lot of mugs there are in the world. There’s one born every minute, that’s what Shakespeare says. Ever heard of Shakespeare?”
    I said I had but that I didn’t recognise the quotation.
    “I was in the gutter once,” he went on, his eyes popping at me. “You wouldn’t think that to look at me now, would you?”
    I didn’t think it would be politic to tell him what I thought, looking at him then, and doubtless he took my silence for admiration for he nodded at me with great complacency.
    “I used my head,” he said. “Open that cupboard over there. Go on, open it.”
    I did as I was told, and when the cupboard door creaked open I found that it was full of the most villainously bound red and gold hymn-books I had ever seen. I fancied myself as something of a connoisseur