The Double Clue
'But above everything - no publicity,' said Mr Marcus Hardman for perhaps the fourteenth time.
The word publicity occurred throughout his conversation with the regularity of a leitmotif. Mr Hardman was a small man, delicately plump, with exquisitely manicured hands and a plaintive tenor voice. In his way, he was somewhat of a celebrity and the fashionable life was his profession. He was rich, but not remarkably so, and he spent his money zealously in the pursuit of social pleasure. His hobby was collecting. He had the collector's soul.
Old lace, old fans, antique jewellery - nothing crude or modem for Marcus Hardman.
Poirot and I, obeying an urgent summons, had arrived to find the little man writhing in an agony of indecision. Under the circumstances, to call in the pol
