By then he was sitting on the side of the bed, in front of a large dressing-table mirror, which showed his hair standing on end after the scramble to answer the call. “Richard Rollison here,” he said. There was no answer. “Hallo, there. This is Richard Rollison.” There was no answer, but there were sounds, a kind of hissing noise, one that he associated with someone out of breath. It seemed close to the mouthpiece, and came very clearly. “Hallo,” he said, very distinctly and sharply. Then, a woman’s voice came. “Is—is that—is that the Toff?” The voice was very faint, but unmistakably a woman’s. There was nothing special about it, except a trace of Cockney in the last word, making ‘Toff’ sound almost ‘Torf’. Yet the manner of her speaking told him much more than the words, for it spoke of fear.
