Chapter 13
LEGAL ANGLEThe dingy office, pathetic with an outmoded elegance of brass rail and threadbare carpet, was exactly what Mr Campion had envisaged. He and Miss Jessica had approached it up two flights of dusty stairs, and the smell of newsprint from the small local newspaper office on the ground floor hung round them depressingly.
The elderly clerk who had greeted them was in character also. He was Dickensian in costume, doubtless by design, but could not help explaining the grudging deference with which he treated Miss Palinode by mentioning that he remembered her father.
As they followed him through a vast outer office, which now housed only himself and two fourteen-year-old girls instead of the eight or ten clerks for whom it had been designed, Campion prepared himself to dea
