What he knew, rightly used at the right moment, was dynamic enough, but he lacked evidence and he did not see how to get evidence. The Council meeting was at hand and he was finding it each day more difficult to grin with cheerful assurance at the mutely questioning Wattercouch. He felt distinctly unassured.
The facts were clear enough to him. Verity now approved of the Baths because they were to be erected on the site of Simpson’s Buildings, and Verity owned that dilapidated pile. He did not own it publicly because respectable aldermen do not own slum property; he owned it in the name of Mr. Sylvester Lamputt, Verity’s second cousin, a man of straw; and Sam knew that he owned it because he had a good memory, he remembered a conversation between Lamputt and Mr. Travers, which he had overheard, and all the present circumstances pointed to the relations of Lamputt with Verity being as they had been when Sam was in the estate agent’s office.
Verity was aware that retail profits are higher than wholesale, and small retail than large retail; that when, for instance, a poor woman buys an ounce of tea she pays a higher rate for it than when a rich woman buys a pound or ten pounds, and similarly that when a family rents a room in a slum property it pays immensely more for it proportionately than when a cotton king rents a warehouse in the centre of the city. But it is dignified to let a warehouse to a cotton king, and disreputable to let single rooms in Hulme, so second cousin Lamputt was the putative owner of Simpson’s Buildings. Sam smiled at the ludicrous thought of the burly alderman sheltering behind the shrivelled form of his second cousin Lamputt. It was like trying to hide a bull behind a weasel.
But he did not smile often in those days. He paid a visit, at dusk, to Simpson’s Buildings, and breathed softly lest Simpson’s Buildings should collapse upon him. Obviously, the alderman was finding his market in the nick of time. It eliminated doubt, but did not provide proof.
He knew that in the matter of Simpson’s Buildings, Lamputt was identical with Verity, but he wanted evidence, and to get evidence he must rely upon the dullness of Mr. Lamputt, and did not think that he was dull. The totem of Lamputt was certainly a ferret, and Sam credited the ferret tribe with nimble wit. He had to be more nimble, then.