A Duke in Hand
July 1968. The eleventh Duke of Wendlesham went out for a walk in his panama hat and did not come back. The next morning brought a ransom note in cut-out letters, demanding one million pounds in used fivers.
Toby Lockhart has given up confidence tricks and sells hats now, honestly. But the Duchess wants her husband back quietly, before the newspapers and the insurers notice that he has gone, and Lady Beatrice knows a young man who understands these things.
The trail leads to a fortune-teller on Brighton’s Palace Pier and on to the Happidays Holiday Camp, where Toby is soon wearing a blue blazer and Doris is changing the sheets. The camp’s favourite entertainer is a cheerful old gentleman with a ukulele, a splendid white moustache and an answer for everything.
Then a second ransom note arrives. This one is real.
Read the opening
‘It suits me, doesn’t it?’ said the lady in the mirror.
She was a large, pleasant, prosperous lady of about sixty, from Surrey, by the sound of her, with a fur stole in July and a husband waiting outside in a Jaguar, and she was wearing a hat. It was a wide straw hat with a brim like a cartwheel, trimmed with silk cherries, a spray of green feathers and a small stuffed bird of no species known to science, and it was the most expensive hat in the shop. It was also, by some distance, the most unsuitable hat I had ever seen on a human head. It made her look like a fruit stall that had been struck by lightning.
‘Madam,’ I said, ‘it is a magnificent hat.’
‘I knew it.’ She turned her head this way and that. The cherries trembled. The bird looked at me with its one remaining glass eye. ‘I’ll take it.’
And there it was: the moment. For fifteen years I had lived for moments like that one. A customer who wanted to believe something, a gentleman with a good tie who was willing to let her believe it, and money changing hands at the end, warmly and with gratitude on both sides. I had sold tin mines that did not exist and galleons that had never sunk and a case of vintage port three times in one afternoon to the same wine merchant. Selling a woman from Surrey a hat that she loved was the easiest thing I had ever been asked to do.
‘It is a magnificent hat,’ I heard myself say, ‘on somebody else.’
The lady stopped turning her head.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It’s a hat for a tall, thin woman with a long neck, madam. A woman who wants to be noticed from the other side of Ascot. On you it looks as though it has landed there by mistake and is waiting to be rescued.’ I reached past her to the stand by the window. ‘Now, this one…’ It was a small navy straw with a white petersham band, and it cost a third of the price. I settled it on her head and stood back. ‘This one is you.’
She looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. Then she looked at me.
‘Young man,’ she said, ‘you’re quite right. I look ten years younger.’ She took out her purse. ‘I’ll take the navy one. And I’ll tell all my friends about this shop.’ She paid, and swept out to the Jaguar, and at the door she turned and gave me a look of such warmth that I was briefly ashamed of myself, which is not a feeling I am used to.
Behind me there was a small, dry cough.
‘That’s the third one this week,’ said Doris.
…
