Campion appeared impressed. ‘Your business is done entirely through agents, I suppose?’ he said. ‘I can understand carrying it on, but I don’t see how you started it. You are the financier of the show? You buy the brains on one side and the executive power on the other?’
‘That is so.’ Mr Barber nodded. ‘It is a great pity, my friend,’ he remarked, ‘that I should have to kill you. I find you quite intelligent. The question you raise is a simple one. My father was the original Simister.’
Campion stared at him, and for a moment he seemed about to laugh.
‘Good Lord!’ he said, ‘you inherited it?’
‘Why not?’ The Oriental spread out his hands. ‘There seems to me to be nothing ridiculous in the idea that a man should leave his son a business of this kind any more than any other concern. I neve
