‘Lefarge was right,’ thought the detective, as he strolled up the Avenue de l’Alma. ‘Boirac telephoned from Charenton at 2.30 on Tuesday. However, I may as well go through with the business.’
He turned his steps therefore towards the head office of the Avrotte Pump Construction Company. Repeating Lefarge’s tactics, he watched till he observed Boirac leave. Then he entered the office and asked if he could see M. Dufresne.
‘I am afraid not, monsieur. I believe he has gone out,’ answered the clerk who had come over to attend to him. ‘But if you will take a seat for a moment I shall ascertain.’
La Touche did as he was asked, looking admiringly round the large office with its polished teak furniture, its rows of vertical file cabinets, its telephones, its clicking typewriters, and its industrious and efficient-looking clerks. Now La Touche was not merely a thinking machine. He had his human side, and, except when on a hot scent, he had a remarkably quick eye for a pretty girl. Thus it was that as this eye roamed inquisitively over the room, it speedily halted at and became focused on the second row of typists, a girl of perhaps two or three-and-twenty. She looked, it must be admitted, wholly charming. Small, dark, and evidently vivacious; she had a tiny, pouting mouth and an adorable dimple. Plainly dressed as became her businesslike surroundings, there was, nevertheless, a daintiness and chicness about her whole appearance that would have delighted an even more critical observer than the detective. She flashed an instantaneous glance at him from her dark, sparkling eyes, and then, slightly elevating her pert little nose, became engrossed in her work.
‘I am sorry, monsieur, but M. Dufresne has gone home slightly indisposed. He expects to be back in a couple of days, if you could conveniently call again.’
La Touche hardly felt a proper appreciation of the clerk’s promptness, but he thanked him politely and said he would return later. Then, with a final glance at an averted head of dark, luxuriant hair, he left the office.
The chief clerk’s absence was a vexatious delay. But, though it would hold up his work on the alibi for a day or two, he might begin on one of the other points which had occurred to him during the journey to Paris. There was, for example, the tracing of the carter who brought the cask from the Gare du Nord to the rue Cardinet. He would see what could be done on that.