Chapter One
Friday was market day in Flaxborough. It was a somewhat tenuous survival, perhaps, but not yet an anachronism. Long departed, certainly, were the little wheeled huts—not unlike Victorian bathing machines—in which corn and seed chandlers shook samples from small canvas bags into the palms of farmers, each the size of a malt shovel, and invited them to “give it a nose”, whereupon the farmer would inaugurate the long and infinitely casual process of making a deal by observing unrancorously that he’d seen better wheat dug out of middens. Nor were animals any longer part of the market-day scene. The iron-railed pens and corridors; the weighbridge; the show ring, pooled with the pungent staling of bullocks and stained here and there with dried-off urine that looked like lemonade powder; the raised, half-round, open pavilion with a clock tower on top, where the auctioneers impassively interpreted twitches, nods and glances from the stone-faced butchers and dealers: all these had disappeared from the Market Place. So, too, had the drovers, those wondrously misshapen but agile men, who hopped, loped and darted among the sweating beasts and intimidated them with wrathful cries and stick-waving. In the long, black coats, roped around the middle, that they wore in all conditions of weather, the drovers of Flaxborough had looked like demented medieval clerics, bent on Benedictine and buggery.
The market-day crowds now were indistinguishable from those on any other day—or in any other town, for that matter. Not for many years had there existed the sharp contrast between townsmen and countrymen, expressed chiefly in the visitors’ dogged affectation of blue serge, brown boots, and a hank of sun-bleached hair, spittle-slicked over a brow the colour of new brick. These—the “country johnnies”, as they had been termed contemptuously by the girls of Flaxborough High School—had long since adopted the conformity of casualness in both dress and grooming, and were safely anonymous.
Yet Flaxborough Market flourished in its modified form and continued by virtue of a four-centuries-old charter to defy the rationalizing zeal of county and national government.
One Friday in early August, Police Constable Basil Cowdrey was strolling slowly past a row of stalls where home-cured bacon and hams, sausages and other vestiges of a cottage food industry were still to be bought. It was a good part of the market in which to encourage, by slow and diligent passage and re-passage, kindly thoughts concerning a policeman’s lot (to say nothing of respect for his powers of discernment in matters relevant to the Food and Drugs Acts) and Constable Cowdrey was prepared to be pleasantly surprised sooner or later by the deliverance into his custody of a pound of sausage, plump, meaty and well saged and peppered in the style of Moldham and Gosby Vale.
His first tour was unproductive. This did not disturb him. He went on past the vegetable sellers and stood for a while staring at a man who sheared lengths of dress material with an expression of pained reluctance upon his sweaty pugilist’s face.
The man grew aware of Constable Cowdrey’s presence. His shears were stilled and he moved his gaze just far enough to meet the policeman’s eye.
“Want something, son?”
The nostrils of Constable Cowdrey paled and twitched. Unhurriedly, he moved to the side of the stall, ducked his helmet to avoid the canvas awning, and loomed beside the sad-eyed proprietor like an army of occupation.
From this vantage-point, he contemplated the four or five women who were waiting to be served. He spoke quietly but with grave deliberation.
“Do there exist upon these premises suitable means for the washing of hands as required under the terms of the Borough bylaws relating to market trading and the control of slaughter-houses?”
The women looked at one another, then at the bolts of cloth, the stallholder, and the policeman once more. Two of them shook their heads vaguely.
The trader sighed. The shears resumed their partition of dress lengths. “Van,” he said.
“Van?” The quite superfluous mention of slaughterhouses in his own question recurred to Mr Cowdrey’s mind and confused him. He had been thinking too hard about sausages perhaps. Was this fellow going to try and make him look silly? “Van?” he repeated.
“That’s what I said, son.” The head of the cloth salesman gave an impatient, indicative jerk. PC Cowdrey looked behind him. At five or six yards’ distance, parked close to the West Row corner, was an elderly green Bedford. One rear door was open, trailing half a yard of pink material.
“That’s not premises,” the policeman said.
The salesman began parcelling a folded cloth length in a sheet of newspaper. “Not a slaughterhouse, neither,” he remarked to the woman nearest him. The woman glanced at PC Cowdrey and tittered.
Emboldened by this show of disrespect, two of the customers embarked on a spirited debate—ostensibly between themselves, but accompanied by so many meaningful glances at everyone within hearing that public oratory seemed their real purpose. Under discussion was the foolishness of authority in general and that of PC Cowdrey in particular.
“Washing hands is for food. Stands to sense. Comestibles. That’s food. Comestibles. Them [a wave at some rolls of tweed] isn’t bloody food, duck. He [a contemptuous finger pointed at Mr Cowdrey] doesn’t eat that uniform when he goes home to dinner. He’s got mixed up. He’s bloody smock-raffled. Don’t you [direct and stern regard upon the salesman] let yourself get pushed around, duck. He’s on about comestibles. Food. [To the world at large.] That’s right, isn’t it?”
PC Cowdrey knew that nothing weakens the force of law more surely and rapidly than irresponsible attempts to involve its representatives in what his sergeant termed “argy-bargy”. He turned upon his heel and stepped out at once towards the van, which, “premises” or no, he was confident would contain no more suitable means for the washing of hands than a wet flannel stuffed into an old biscuit tin.
It was an unfortunate moment for such decisiveness.
Into the narrow strip of the Market Place between stalls and pavement, from which wheeled traffic was excluded on a Friday, there had entered a vehicle of such imposing proportions that no one thought to challenge its progress through a prohibited area. This strengthened the delusion of the driver that he had chanced luckily upon some sort of clearway or by-pass, so he accelerated in order to take full advantage of it.
For a fraction of a second, PC Cowdrey’s brain marvelled at the message it was receiving from the far extremity of his optic nerve. Seemingly so close that he might lean upon it and mist with admiring breath its fawn-coloured coachwork, great crystal lamp glasses, and a radiator like a silver temple, was a Rolls Royce motor car.
Then admiration was transmuted into athletics. In one coordinated movement, PC Cowdrey made a ninety-degree reverse spin, simultaneously toppling back in the manner of a felled tree until his body was at the correct elevation and pointing in the right direction for his ready-primed leg muscles to propel him to safety. He leaped from the path of the Rolls like an ibis and, to the great wonder and approbation of the ladies who so recently had derided him, landed square in the middle of the wares of the cloth salesman, whose stall (or premises) collapsed and forthwith immured the policeman in a welter of canvas, spars and unfurling rolls of cloth.
The car did not stop, but in the quiet isolation of its interior the incident was remarked upon by the three men and a woman who occupied it.
The driver said: “Stupid sod!”
His companion in the front passenger seat, who had a pale, no longer young, yet healthy face, with a touch of saintliness in its good looks which might have proclaimed a successful faith healer, said: “I don’t think it was very clever of you, Robert, to flush that particular bird. It had a helmet on, old boy.”
“Only to begin with,” observed the man behind them after making a rearward review. “He seems to be wearing a very loose turban at the moment.”
The girl also had been looking through the back window. She leaned forward and grabbed the shoulder of the saintly one. Her face was urgent, ecstatic. “Christ, Clive! He was! He bloody was! Ye village bobby, no less. Bob’s slain the bobby, darling!”
“Nobody’s slain anyone,” the man she had called Clive said sharply. “Stop being a silly cow.”
The girl looked more delighted than ever. “It’ll be shittikins for Robert in the village lockup tonight. Hey, Bob—you know what they do to their felons in these parts? I mean, for Christ’s sake, they geld them just for nicking turnips!”
So stark was her make-up that even while she grinned, her eyes continued to look like two big bullet holes.
Clive half-turned. “Birdie, my dear, your high humour is a great tonic at the right time, but just at the moment it bores my tits off. OK? This, old girl, is not a village. It is a town and doubtless possesses more than one policeman. We are not yet out of it—and from the way dear Robert is driving at the moment I’d be surprised if we ever do get out of it. So keep the funnies until he gets his nerve back.”
Birdie’s companion on the back seat made for her a grimace of wry commiseration. She shrugged and began to suck her little finger.
The Rolls was travelling more slowly now. It reached the eastern end of the Market Place and continued in a direct line into Corn Exchange. At the end was a T-junction. “Left,” said Clive.
The driver obeyed, swinging the car into the narrow culvert of Pipeclay Lane that led to East Street and escape.
Or it would have done, had not Sergeant William Malley, coroner’s officer, stalled the engine of his ancient and much abused car a few minutes previously. It lay now, a stranded black grampus, athwart Pipeclay Lane, with Bill Malley standing alongside and staring with calm compassion at its flanks.
Clive stiffened and grasped the driver’s arm. “Christ! Road blocks already. They’ve actually set up bloody road blocks. I don’t believe it.”
Birdie giggled nervously. “Oh, shittikins,” she murmured.
The driver felt for reverse gear. Clive shook his head. “Just stay put, old boy. Act thick. Me London idiot, no compree. OK? Let me do the talking.”
Sergeant Malley looked up. His eyes widened and he removed his cap in order to run plump fingers through the cropped scrub of his hair, but nothing extreme in the way of surprise overtook him. Had it been Nelson’s flagship that had just rounded the corner, he would have shown but the mildest curiosity.
Birdie was still bent upon harrowing her companions. “He doesn’t need a bloody car, that one,” she said. “He’s a road block all on his own. Look out, Bob, he’s coming to squeeze you to death.”
The sergeant was indeed approaching and his girth was undeniably impressive. The driver groped uncertainly for a button and the window beside him glided soundlessly out of sight. There appeared in the space a couple of Mr Malley’s chins, then, as he stooped, the rest of his large, regretful, amiable countenance.
“Sorry about this, sir. I’ve sent for a bit of help. I shouldn’t think it would be worth your while to try and back out.” He glanced back towards the Corn Exchange junction and shook his head before inserting it within the car and blandly examining the furnishings.
Clive had been craning forward in his seat in order to intercept whatever stern questions the policeman might address to Robert. He now decided to take command before his increasingly apprehensive companion did something else in the button-touching line and committed fenestral decapitation.
Clive smiled so that when he spoke some of the smile seeped into the words. “Oh, come now, officer—there was hardly call for you to summon reinforcements. We have no intention of becoming fugitives, I assure you—my colleague here least of all.” He bent the smile a fraction to indicate Robert.
Malley, long accustomed to the obtuse humour of coroners and lawyers, offered no comment. He simply nodded and snorted gently once or twice like a somnolent bull. Only the girl was perceptive enough to recognize that he had no idea what Clive was talking about. She gleefully kept the knowledge to herself.
“We couldn’t stop before, actually,” remarked Clive. “Not without causing an obstruction. So my colleague here“ (a soft “Jesus wept!” in the back compartment) “decided to drive into a side street and wait.”
“Oh, aye?” said Malley. He had not been listening. There was a lot of Birdie’s leg displayed in the tasteful setting of the blue-grey upholstery of the rear seat. Clive interpreted the vagueness of his acknowledgment as cynicism. He did not feel happy.
Suddenly the bray of a siren reached them.
Malley withdrew his head and straightened. He peered towards his own car, then turned and looked in the opposite direction.
He gave a shrug of disgust. “The twats!”
Much puzzled, the car’s occupants looked first at one another, then back through the rear window. A patrol car, its roof lantern flashing, it seemed to them, with unwontedly furious intensity, was drawing to a halt close behind.
The sergeant made a God-help-us face and said to the patrol car driver as he emerged: “Trust you to come to the wrong end of the lane. Now all you’ve done is block this gentleman in. My car’s...”
“Never mind your car, Bill,” interjected the other patrolman. “This is the lot we’re after.” He jutted his chin nastily in the direction of the Rolls.
“Why? What are they supposed to have done?”
“You’ll have to ask Baz Cowdrey about that. It was him radioed in, just as we were leaving to move your heap.”
There was a gentle clunk, like the closing of a bullion vault. Clive stood by the door of the Rolls and asked if he might be of any assistance, gentlemen.
Patrolman Brevitt, the one with the expressive chin, whose air of pugnacious energy was emphasized by a cap pulled very low over his eyes, replied: “All in good time, sir.” The innocent phrase sounded like a threat. Brevitt’s special misfortune—or talent, perhaps—was a manner of address that in his mouth would have transformed even Tiny Tim’s “God bless us, every one” into a demand with menaces.
“Here’s Baz now,” said the patrol-car driver, a much more benevolent character named Fairclough, who treated his colleague as a delinquent younger brother in need of good influence.
Constable Basil Cowdrey paused at the lane end and surveyed the scene of ambush with grim satisfaction. He said something brief to his left shoulder, from which an antenna had lately sprouted, then set forth. Clive noted with some alarm that the radio aerial was not the only fresh feature of PC Cowdrey; he had also acquired an heroic limp.
Fairclough felt he ought to say something to ease the tension. “That officer,” he explained to Clive, “is the complainant, we understand. That means he’s going to accuse you of something. Or your driver, rather. But he’ll ask questions first, of course. We were just sort of asked to make you available, if you see what I mean.”
Brevitt, who had been listening, drew back his upper lip to expose big yellow teeth. Clive was put in mind of an angry horse.
Cowdrey arrived. His antenna had been retracted, but not his limp. Canting heavily upon what appeared to be a permanently shortened leg, he unbuttoned a pocket and drew out a notebook, then—rather pointlessly, everyone else thought—laboriously buttoned the pocket up again.
He freed the notebook from its lashing of black elastic and produced a short pencil which he examined for some moments before deciding which end to put to use.
At last, he looked at Clive. “You the driver of this vehicle, sir?”
Clive blessed him with a smile of forgiveness. “No, no, officer, not I...but perhaps I should make introductions. My name is Clive Grail, as you may or may not know. The lady in the rear seat is Miss Birdie Clemenceaux, my research assistant.” He indicated the driver. “My photographer, Mr Robert Becket. Anyone else?... Ah, yes, Mr Kenneth Lanching, there in the back. Colleague, you know. Same stable.”
Strictly a non-metaphor man, the constable looked sharply and with new suspicion at the travellers. “Oh, it’s horse-racing you’re connected with, is it?”
“Oh, Christikins!” trilled Miss Clemenceaux, her head thrown back. Lanching turned aside and grinned. Only Robert Becket showed no amusement but continued to stare blankly at the knob of the gear lever.
“Journalism,” explained Mr Grail, “actually.” He again smiled kindly, as upon a penitent who was still a bit confused about the distinction between worldly and spiritual. “Investigative journalism. Sunday Herald. Need I say more? Grail is my name.”
“Yes. You said.” The constable limped to the opposite side of the car and stooped. He also winced very obviously. Clive hastened after him and addressed Becket.
“Come on, Bob: the officer’s having to bend down to talk to you.”
Becket gave a start, then clambered from his seat and stood beside Cowdrey.
“May I see your driving licence, sir?” The question was put with that classic casualness which implies that failure to comply with so reasonable a request there and then will be construed by any judge and jury in the realm as admission of intent to deceive.
“I’m afraid it’s at home,” said Becket.
Deep in the interior of the Rolls, Miss Clemenceaux murmured something to Lanching and both laughed. Grail glanced in at them crossly.
“Your certificate of insurance, then, please, sir?”
“Home,” Becket said.
For a long moment, Cowdrey studied the author of this defiance. He saw a stocky figure in a suit with rather a lot of pinstripe in it. One hand, square and thick-fingered, was held loosely at waist level in an attitude suggestive of habitual coin-tossing. The head, disproportionately large, had close-cropped patchily greying hair. Becket’s moustache, too, was closely trimmed—an exact rectangle of stubble across the width of his upper lip. Ears were small and chubby, as was the nose. The restless, slightly inflamed eyes were deeply set above plump cheeks, which they irrigated from time to time with a tear.
None of which features registered upon the consciousness of Constable Cowdrey. His scrutiny was intended not to gather impressions but to make one. When he judged that enough time had elapsed for this purpose, he directed his attention to the open notebook, flexed his pencil hand, and prepared to conduct the catechism proper.
“Your name and your home address, if you please, sir?”
Sergeant Malley, by now bored almost to the point of exasperation, made a low-voiced representation of his own. “You’ll not be wanting the lads any more, will you, Baz? I mean, I’m still stuck there outside Haywards and his fish van can’t get out.”
Without interrupting his chronicle of Mr Becket’s habitat, function and itinerary—a process so slow that Birdie said it was like being in bloody Egypt and waiting for an inscription on your bloody tomb—the constable nodded solemnly and Malley shooed the patrolmen into their car with instructions to back round and get busy with a tow rope.
The small crowd of market-day bystanders, who had congregated in hopes of there having been a bank robbery, gradually dispersed, but only after making the disappointing discovery that a backing police car does not sound its siren with notes in the reverse order.
Clive Grail made one or two further attempts to interpose sweet reasonableness between the coldly persistent policeman and an increasingly resentful Becket, but they seemed only to be making matters worse. He retreated into the Rolls and sat, looking very thoughtful, between his colleagues on the back seat.
“I’ve got a growing feeling,” he said softly, “that this little town is more than commonly afflicted with bloody-mindedness. Take a look in Willing’s, there’s a good girl, and get the address of the local paper.”
Miss Clemenceaux opened a compartment in the bulkhead before her. It proved to be a small reference library and stationery store. She picked out a book and thumbed through pages.
“Ah, very sturdy-sounding, darling,” she said. “The Flaxborough Citizen, no less. In Market Street. It probably organizes lynch mobs.” She giggled. “Poor bloody Robert!”
“Never mind Robert. Who’s the editor?”
The girl again found her place in the guide. Her frown of concentration suddenly gave place to a delighted grin.
“Goddikins! Better and better. Josiah Kebble, would you believe? Josiah!”
Chapter Two
Mr Harcourt Chubb, chief constable of Flaxborough, was as nearly an agitated man as he ever allowed himself to be in any situation other than one concerning his greenhouse or his home-bred Yorkshire terriers.
“What on earth, Mr Purbright,” he exclaimed, “was the wretched man thinking of? Actually to arrest the fellow.”
Detective Inspector Purbright regarded Mr Chubb with an expression of tender concern.
“I really don’t know, sir. I’m only sorry that it isn’t a matter that comes within the province of the CID.”
The chief constable was only too well aware that this was true. It added to his annoyance at having chosen so lamentably ill-timed a moment to “pop in”, as he expressed it to Mrs Chubb, “and see how things are” at the Fen Street police headquarters. Market days were generally safe. But now the impossible Cowdrey had ruined the record.
“Of course, you realize that there isn’t a magistrate to be found in the town,” said Mr Chubb gloomily.
Purbright knew that he was going to be asked a favour. He recognized the off-hand, tendentious way in which the chief constable tried to disguise a sense of dependence upon the good offices of an inferior.
“Yes, sir, I do see what you mean. The special market-day licensing hours. Pubs open all day.”
“That is not what I meant, Mr Purbright. Really, you make the members of the bench sound like a lot of dipsomaniacs.”
“Have you...” Purbright paused and appeared to be thinking very hard. “Have you tried Mrs Popplewell?”
“She’s on holiday.”
“Ah.” Another pause, then, “What about old Austin Kelsey, sir? He doesn’t need to stay in that shop of his all the time now that he’s re-married, and he can manage to keep sensible just about long enough for a quick remand job.”
Mr Chubb’s ill-ease deepened. He had an abiding dislike for irreverent phraseology. A “quick remand job” indeed. It was not the inspector’s style to be flippant—not in his, the chief constable’s hearing—and this present lapse could only mean that Purbright was enjoying the situation and intended to exacerbate it if he could.
“No, no.” The chief constable shook his head and prepared to accept a petitioner’s role with as much dignity as he could preserve. “Kelsey’s hopeless, poor old chap, as we all know. And this business could prove delicate. There are journalists involved—London journalists of some standing, I understand—and they can be very tricky fellows.”
“They can, indeed, sir,” confirmed Purbright.
“The trouble is, Mr Purbright, that the affair got rather out of hand. Cowdrey was upset—understandably— and formed the view that it was a case not of careless—nor even of dangerous-driving, but of deliberately attacking an officer in uniform. He arrested the man and told him before witnesses that he would be charged. Very serious, you know.”
“Very.”
Mr Chubb reflected unhappily that his inspector was never more anxious to echo his opinion than at those moments when he ardently desired the reassurance of a rebuttal.
“Naturally, I had no choice but to back up my own officer. I don’t like it, but there you are.”
Purbright shrugged and smiled a melancholy, fatalistic smile. Mr Chubb looked away.
“There will have to be a special court, so we shall have to find a magistrate,” he went on. “I don’t mind looking after things, of course, but your preliminary assistance...you know—actually locating a JP...I mean, that really would be appreciated.”
Involuntarily, Purbright gave a little half-gape of surprise. The chief constable had never, in the many years of their association, made so abject a plea.
“Well, I can’t promise anything, sir, but I’ll certainly have a word with my sergeant and see what we can do.” At the door, Purbright glanced back. “The gentleman in question—Mr Cowdrey’s alleged assailant—he’s in the cells, I suppose?”
By this final provocation, Mr Chubb’s sorely-tried composure was very nearly broken. “No, he is not,” he said sharply. “As a matter of fact, he struck me as being a fairly personable sort of chap. I’m having him wait in that little room at the end that Policewoman Bellweather uses sometimes.”
“Ah,” said the inspector, in the extravagantly understanding manner wherewith collusion in crime is acknowledged by one hopeful of a cut of the proceeds.
As the door closed, Mr Chubb drew slow breaths and tried to think of the world as a great Cruft’s. It was a long time before even this image began to yield its customary comfort.
By mid-afternoon, evidence of the exciting events in the Market Place had disappeared. The cloth salesman’s stall had been re-erected, his scattered wares collected, brushed down, and put back more or less tidily on display. The constable had not, however, returned. The woman at the home produce stall whose turn it had been to render tribute unto Cowdrey glanced from time to time at the small parcel she had prepared and wondered if she should accept one of the more optimistic rumours (which ranged from the policeman’s suspension from the Force to his actual demise) and let the contents go to some money-paying customer.
Four o’clock sounded from the great tower of St Lawrence’s church. The stream of shoppers had thinned and now flowed more sluggishly between the rows of stalls.
A short, shiny-cheeked man in rimless spectacles strolled across the south-eastern corner of the square and entered a shop in whose window was a group of choice antique furniture pieces, some cut crystal and a cased pair of eighteenth-century dress swords.
He was Barrington Hoole, optician, of Chalmsbury town, and he clearly was expected by the proprietor, who announced, without preamble: “They’re here.”
Mr Hoole pressed his lips together and made a high humming noise at the back of his nose, at the same time nodding like a spring-loaded Buddha. It was his way, apparently, of expressing gratification.
The shopkeeper, a stooped, sandy-haired man, with deep facial furrows and scraggy neck, went to a cabinet at the rear of the shop. He selected a key from the fob pocket of his aged but still elegant grey suit and opened the cabinet, the doors of which were glazed with tiny panes discreetly reinforced with steel latticework. There was something ceremonial about the performance, not unlike the reverence with which the senior partner in a wine-shipping firm might draw from sanctuary a very rare brandy.
It was not a bottle that was lifted into the waiting hands of Mr Hoole, though, but a rectangular, leather-covered case, about a foot long and three inches deep.
Mr Hoole carried it to a glass-topped table nearer the light. Carefully, he set it down and unhasped the lid. He drew a clean handkerchief from his breast pocket and rubbed upon it his plump but delicately tapered fingers.
The antiquarian (for thus Mr Enoch Cartwright described his latter-day metamorphosis from junk dealer) watched in silence as the lid of the case rose. Then he glanced at Mr Hoole’s face and smiled at what he saw there.
.”Oh, yes,” said Mr Hoole. “Ah. Yes, indeed. Mmm. Yes.” He wrinkled his small, beaky nose, and sniffed happily.
“Rather nice?” prompted Mr Cartwright.
The optician hummed and raised an eyebrow. He shrugged and hummed again, this time in a speculative kind of way; enthusiasm did not do when price-naming was imminent.
“You notice the crest, of course.” From Mr Cartwright.
“The loony earl. Ye...es...” Mr Hoole was smiling gently, as at some fading but still fragrant memory.
He eased from its bed of scarlet velvet one of the pair of pistols that the case contained. “A trifle on the heavy side,” he said, snuffing the smile lest it warm any expectations.
“Lovely balance,” countered Mr Cartwright at once.
“Funny how many of these old horse pistols are still around,” mused Mr Hoole. He peered dubiously at the weapon’s stock, as if a fissure had suddenly been disclosed. “And some of them in very fair condition.” “Like those, for instance.” There was nothing wrong with Mr Cartwright’s reflexes.
Mr Hoole puffed his cheeks, said nothing. He picked up the second pistol and cradled it in both hands. With its bell-shaped muzzle, it looked more like an antiquated motor horn than a firearm.
There came the sound of the shop door opening. Both men looked round.
They saw what appeared to be a youth of about twenty, eager-faced yet diffident in manner. He was dressed in sports jacket and trousers. His first concern, it seemed, was a medieval Japanese war helmet hanging just inside the doorway, but on hearing the proprietor’s approach he abruptly and a little guiltily switched his attention from that fascinating article to Enoch Cartwright.
“Good afternoon, sergeant,” said Mr Cartwright.
Detective Sergeant Sidney Love, who was a good deal older than twenty and sometimes wished that he looked it, nodded cheerfully.
“Inspector Purbright’s compliments, and could you spare him half an hour,” he said, then added reassuringly: “Just a remand. You know. In and out. No bother.”
“What-now?”
The sergeant shrugged good-naturedly. “Well, you know... when it suits you...within the next ten minutes or so.”
Mr Cartwright, who did not look very pleased (but knew, unlike Mr Chubb, that the delicacy of his dual role of magistrate and dealer in sometimes dubious properties placed him under certain special obligations) said that he would be ready as soon as he had dealt with his present customer.
“Good-o,” said Love.
He strolled across to see what the little bloke in rimless specs was looking at.
“Nice duelling pistols,” he remarked, after some moments’ silent admiration.
Mr Cartwright gave a short, mirthless laugh. “Duelling pistols,” he echoed. “Hardly suitable for duels, sergeant. Not bell-mouths. Ha ha. Oh, no.” There had crept into his way of speaking an academic drawl that friends of the former occupant of a Broad Street scrap yard would have found decidedly odd. It was what Purbright called “Enoch’s JP voice”.
Love glanced at Mr Hoole, as if seeking reprieve from disappointment.
The optician seemed to have been using the time he had been on his own to cultivate a downright contempt for the goods on offer. He responded to Love’s appeal with a disparaging pout and “No, he’s right, of course. Just a couple of common horse pistols. Provenance unknown.”
Mr Cartwright glared at this imputation of illegitimacy. “They’re Purdy’s!” he declared. “Not a doubt of it. Hand-chased for the seventh Earl of Flaxborough. Superb examples.”
Mr Hoole bestowed upon the sergeant a sad, knowing smile. “Purdy’s!” With one fastidious finger, he flipped shut the lid of the case. “Dear me!”
There were further exchanges of a similar kind. Love told himself that these two nuts might be at it all afternoon and evening if he didn’t do something about it. He looked at his watch very ostentatiously, as might a boy at a new birthday present.
Mr Hoole eventually thrust the case under his arm. “I shall come back,” he said to Mr Cartwright, “when you are in less demand by the constabulary.” Halfway to the door, he turned. “Don’t worry about these; I’ll look after them.” A pause, then, “Such as they are.”
“Quite a character, your friend,” remarked Love, as the shop door closed again.
Mr Cartwright, JP, glowered. “And tight as arseholes,” he replied. This time his voice sounded perfectly natural.
The occasional court was held in one of the ground floor rooms at Fen Street police headquarters. A certain informality was conferred upon the proceedings by the sparsity of the furniture—two folding chairs and a card table—and the presence, in various corners, of a stolen spare wheel, a stack of back numbers of Horse and Hound, and a tea urn awaiting repair.
The chairs were occupied by Mr Cartwright and the young woman on loan from a nearby solicitors’ office who acted as deputy clerk of the court. Between them was the small table.
Standing close by—so close, indeed, that he seemed to have been placed to umpire some projected hand of cards—was the prisoner, Robert Becket, 38, photographer, of Ardrossan Court, Paddington, London.
Even the chief constable, gamely occupying the role of prosecutor, was obliged by lack of floor area to share in the general intimacy. He stood, papers in hand, almost shoulder to shoulder with Mr Becket, to whom, on one occasion, he actually offered apology for knocking his elbow.
As for the prisoner’s colleagues, only one—Clive Grail—had managed to squeeze into the room at all. He was wedged between the pile of magazines and PC Cowdrey, who gave evidence of arrest. Birdie Clemenceaux and Lanching had to be content to stand outside in the corridor.
Fortunately for all concerned, the chief constable took less than five minutes to catalogue Becket’s alleged misdeeds, request an adjournment until the following Thursday, and observe that the police offered no objection to bail, which he suggested might suitably be set at five hundred pounds.
“You will be remanded,” said Mr Cartwright, with enormous solemnity, “for six days, and granted bail in your own recognizances. Do you understand what that means?”
“Do you?” countered the defendant.
The chief constable intervened. He made to the magistrate a slight bow, more dismissive than respectful, informed Mr Becket that that would be all, then ushered him, in a bustling but quite amiable manner, from the court.
Chapter Three
Friday being publication day and a natural breathing space between one week’s news-gathering and the next, there was no need for Mr Josiah Kebble to be present at all in the tall, ramshackle building in Market Street that housed the editorial offices of the Flaxborough Citizen. His appointment as editor, however, was a recent one, having followed upon certain unfortunate events in the family of George Lintz, the previous incumbent, and he had not yet assessed how sharp an eye was being kept upon him by his distant but voracious employers in London. So he had come in. The better to display his diligence, Mr Kebble had moved a desk from the office used by Lintz—a remote and private room on the upper floor—down to the open area behind the counter. There he sat, in view of the double glass doors leading from the street, a sort of benevolent monarch, ready (and, indeed, eager) to grant audience to any member of the public, with the exceptions of a Miss Cadbury, doggy charity organizer, Bernadette Croll, the Mumblesby nymphomaniac, and a very sinister-looking barber called Tozer, who was more than likely to upset the two office girls, Sylvie and Carole, by ogling them fiercely and asking them if they had ever considered entering the lucrative and interesting profession of housekeeper.
On this late Friday afternoon, the editor was entertaining a visitor from the neighbouring town, whose newspaper, the Chalmsbury Chronicle, had been Mr Kebble’s charge until recently.
The two men were giving Cartwright’s pistols close scrutiny, Mr Kebble with the aid of a jeweller’s glass that he had taken from one of the multitudinous pockets in his gingery tweed waistcoat.
He looked up, plucked out the glass, stretched his face once or twice, then pushed a pair of heavy-framed spectacles to the bridge of his button nose. “Aye,” he said, “they look all right, Barry. Who knocked them off for him, I wonder?”
Hoole was sitting side-saddle on the edge of the desk. “No knowing,” he said. “Someone blessedly ignorant, I’m relieved to say. Enoch did not try very hard to contradict my naïve assertion that the things were just common saddle pistols, so obviously he doesn’t really know one way or the other.”
“Has he never heard about the loony earl?” Mr Kebble wore his most benign grin. It divided his exactly spherical face like a split across a ripe pumpkin.
The optician emitted one of his hums, which then turned into speech. “Mm...Mr Cartwright is scarcely one of our local luminaries in the matter of history. He’s picked up some guff from somewhere about Purdy’s the gunsmiths and the seventh earl of Flaxborough...”
“James Scarbeck?” Mr Kebble interrupted.
“Scarbeck, yes. They were all crackers from him on, of course, but Jamie had the style that the rest of the barmy oafs lacked completely. And if Cartwright really knew the story about these pistols, he couldn’t have resisted telling it.”
Mr Kebble sniffed the barrel of one. “Never been fired, they say.”
“So the account goes.” Mr Hoole peered into the percussion cap recess. “Ah—except for the one famous occasion.”
“But he’s supposed never to have lost a duel.”
“Only because no one was ever crazy enough to accept a challenge from the fellow.” Mr Hoole clucked and hummed. “Well, would you? Blunderbusses at ten paces? These things would mow half a cricket pitch on one charge.”
He regarded the weapons a little longer, then lovingly replaced them in their case. He tapped the engraved silver lozenge representing the Scarbeck family crest.
“The only bell-mouthed duelling pistols ever made, my dear Joss. Apart from their value as collectors’ items, which is enormous, utterly vulgar, and a great deal more than poor Cartwright is going to ask for them, I think I shall cherish them mainly on account of the dear old Duke of Wellington.”
Mr Kebble beamed in pleasurable anticipation and rubbed a pencil between his palms so that it produced a rhythmic clicking noise against the two heavy gold rings that he wore. “He was the one exception, was he?”
“He was. As one might expect. Our lunatic seventh earl got round to him in time and sent him one of his cartels...”
“His what, old chap?”
“Cartels. Challenges. Carried personally by one’s second, who was supposed to be able to help negotiate an honourable settlement. Except that Scarbeck always sent a most fearsome drunken illiterate with a great black beard, who insulted everyone in sight but couldn’t be called out himself because he wasn’t a gentleman. And invariably he took along the earl’s bell-muzzles. The mere sight of that great case was enough to get an apology—even from some wretched fellow whom the loon had picked at random.”
At this point of the narrative, Sylvie approached bearing two cups of tea with slow and painful concentration. The offering pleased Mr Hoole so much that for a long time he lapsed into a mere intermittent hum while he stirred the tea and gazed vaguely through its steam.
The editor waited patiently, having pushed his own cup aside to cool. At last, “And the Duke of Wellington?” he prompted.
Hoole stared at him for several seconds, then seemed suddenly to recall what he had been talking about. “Ah, Old Nosey. That gentleman was not going to take any nonsense from some seedy, half-crazed aristocrat out of the sticks just because he carried a brace of cannon about with him. He accepted Scarbeck’s challenge and came over from Stamford, where he’d been staying the weekend. You know where they’re supposed to have met, don’t you?”
Mr Kebble shook his head and made a few more clicks with his pencil-rolling.
“In that low meadow-land on the other side of the river from the harbour. Quarrel Green, my dear fellow. The name tells all.” And Mr Hoole hummed in celebration of this piece of logic.
“But they didn’t fight a duel, surely?”
“Not in the accepted sense, no. It was a notably effective encounter, though. The Iron Duke made two vital stipulations that seemed, at first sight, to be very favourable to our James. He insisted that the seconds put a really generous charge of powder into each pistol. And also that the loony earl accept the privilege of first fire. Well, you see where that put Wellington.”
“In the shit,” suggested Mr Kebble.
Mr Hoole grinned. “All the rules of honourable behaviour,” he said, “plus the fact that not even an earl, crazy or not, could get away with blowing the head off the country’s top national hero with a concessionary shot, obliged our James to delope.”
“De-what?”
“Delope. The duelling term for fire in the air.”
“And that’s what he did?” Mr Kebble looked less than impressed.
“That’s what he did, Joss. And the seventh earl of Flaxborough never sent out another challenge.”
“Too shamed?”
Mr Hoole’s face grew even shinier. He was nodding with good humour. “Lord, no. He made such a nice gesture of firing into the air with a dead straight arm that the recoil from that thundering great charge of powder smashed his wrist, fractured his elbow, and permanently dislocated his shoulder.”
There was a tinkle of laughter somewhere behind them. The editor swung his chair through a quarter-circle and peered over the tops of his glasses towards part of the area beyond the counter that was in the shadow of a tall display board. A young woman was standing there.
Mr Kebble stood at once, the plump and courteous uncle, friend of all “totties”, as he termed the whole of womankind from fourteen to fifty. He grinned a good morning and ran his fingers back through silky, daisy-white hair. “Can I help you?”
“What a lovely story,” gurgled Miss Clemenceaux. “Absolute blissikins. This the way in?” She had raised a flap in the counter and was side-stepping through the gap into the editorial enclosure.
Mr Kebble found a chair for her. She spiralled into it as if sitting down was a notable sensual accomplishment.
The optician regarded Birdie fixedly for some moments, his hands cradling his belly like a priest’s.
“Mmm...are you a collector of Wellingtonia?” he asked.
“Boots, you mean?” Her bullet-hole eyes had expanded a little.
“Mmmm...anecdotes relating to Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, the Iron one, so-called—Old Nosey. Mostly apocryphal, one suspects, but quite a character.”
“Especially with the artillery,” remarked Birdie, having picked up one of the pistols and grimaced prettily at its weight.
Mr Kebble tried to think of some homely observation to offset the discouraging effect he feared Hoole’s academic chat might have upon the visiting tottie. He indicated the antique. “Stick it up on end and you could put flowers in it, I suppose.”
“As the lady said to the gamekeeper,” Miss Clemenceaux observed, almost automatically. Mr Hoole said it was nice—and something of a novelty—to hear a well-turned literary allusion in Flaxborough. Was Miss Mmm...just passing through? On her way to the D. H. Lawrence country perhaps?
She smiled faintly and turned to the editor. “Are you Mr Kebble?”
“I am.”
“Mr Josiah Kebble.” It was not a question. She framed the words commendingly, as a palaeontologist might read off the name of an unexpectedly well preserved fossil.
Mr Kebble chuckled. “They tell me that when I was born it was the usual thing for parents to pick names by sticking pins in the Bible. I’ve a cousin who got Belial that way.”
Hoole looked delighted at the news. He turned to Birdie. “Do you happen to be of a religious cast of mind, Miss Mmmm...?”
“I am a journalist.”
“That’s nice,” exclaimed Mr Kebble, who did not think it nice at all but was anxious not to alienate someone who might prove to be an envoy—a spy, even—from the hateful head office in London. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
She declined, but accepted one of the editor’s battered cigarettes, which he offered her from a flat tobacco tin. “My name’s Birdie Clemenceaux. Sunday Herald. I’m a research assistant, actually. For Clive Grail.” She leaned back her head and sent slow curls of smoke from her nostrils, as if offering incense to that divinity.
Mr Kebble looked suitably impressed. The optician, though, smirked knowingly. “Should I be in error, Miss, ah, Clemenceaux, in identifying the stock in trade of your periodical as a carefully balanced mixture of moral indignation and libidinous self-indulgence?”
If the little, round editor, who now stared at Birdie with an expression half amused and half alarmed, expected her to show resentment at this slur on her employers, he was disappointed. She simply confirmed, very soberly, that Mr Hoole’s assessment was correct and that she could not have described the situation better herself.
“Unfortunately.” she went on, “I am in hock, as it were, to these Machiavellian muck-spreaders and must serve their purposes or starve.”
Mr Kebble, who could not by the most extreme effort picture an emaciated Miss Clemenceaux, nodded sympathetically nevertheless.
“Which brings me,” she added, “to the purpose of my calling on you, Mr Josiah Kebble.”
And suddenly the eyes were not holes any more but warm and lively lights in the midst of a smile. She’s quite a nice little tottie, after all, reflected the editor. Had he not been a man with a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, he would have been much tempted to put his hand upon her knee. As it was, he just said, “Yes, my dear?” in a tone of kindly encouragement, and hoped that Mr Hoole would soon desist from trying to hog the conversation.
“The fact is,” said Birdie, “that my Mr Grail has been put into a very embarrassing position. Professionally, you understand. Not that I personally could lose much sleep over that—I mean, the man’s an absolute tick—but we do happen to be a team, and we do sort of have to look after the bastard.”
“Of course, duckie.” Mr Kebble, who in his time had employed mutants of journalism ranging from a shop-lifter to a pyromaniac, knew how difficult loyalty could be sometimes.
“You see, we were coming through this village or whatever in the snob-wagon, minding our own business, when this lunatic copper tries to leap over the bonnet. Didn’t touch him, actually, but Bob—he’s our photographer—Bob was driving, and he’s going to get done in court, and the publicity’s going to be absolutely fiendish because of his association with the Clive Grail expose-type column. I mean, Caesar’s wife. All that. You do see.”
“Which Caesar?” hummed Mr Hoole, interested. “There were lots of them, you know.”
The editor frowned. “Are you sure you’re not making too much of this?” he asked Birdie. “I should have thought careless driving was the worst they could throw at your friend.”
“Actually...” The girl looked uncomfortable. “Actually, the charge this copper’s making isn’t just that. It’s something about driving at him. With intent, as they say. Of course, it’s crazy.”
“What’s the policeman’s name? Did you notice?”
“Car... Cow...”
“Cowdrey?”
“That’s it. Yes.”
“Barmy,” said Mr Kebble, very decidedly. “His uncle was once the public hangman, they tell me. You mustn’t worry about Baz, duckie. By the time your friend’s in court again it’ll be for failing to observe a traffic sign, or something.”
Mr Hoole, whose early expectations of academic responsiveness on the part of their visitor had been disappointed, was now wandering aimlessly around the office. The girl took the opportunity to lean closer to the editor and adopt a more serious and confidential tone.
“You’re right, of course, but what we want to avoid is any mention of names at all—even in a local paper and in connection with a trivial traffic offence. There are people in Fleet Street who are keeping a bloody keen eye open for opportunities to make the Sunday Herald look foolish. They’d even use this.”
Mr Kebble’s eyes widened at this intimation of professional skulduggery. After brief consideration, he said: “You know better, of course, than to ask me to keep the case out of the paper.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” averred Miss Clemenceaux, huskily. “Surest way of getting it in.”
The editor nodded cheerfully. “On the other hand, as a newspaperwoman you’ll know that pressure of space does sometimes mean that some trivial item gets dished—always provided, mind you, that nobody’s actually asked for it to be suppressed.”
“Ah, yes. That would be a horse of a different colour.” With which dashing equestrian metaphor, Birdie resumed her former attitude and expression just as Mr Hoole got back from his tour of the office.
Mr Kebble picked up his phone and called across to Carole to put him “upstairs to Mr Prile”, whereupon she pressed two or three switches sprouting from a box-like contraption beside her shopping-bag and then turned a little handle with every appearance of doubt and despondency.
There was a long, silent interval. Then Carole rose from her chair. “I’ll have to go up.” She disappeared through a door.
Mr Kebble, still nursing his phone, glanced at the ceiling.
“Supposed to have contracted sleeping sickness in Somalia,” he murmured in kindly explanation.
After another minute, the phone made noises suggestive of an imprisoned and much alarmed midget. Kebble spoke into it. “It’s all right, Kelvin; I just wanted to know if you’d picked up anything about a special court this afternoon... No?... No, don’t bother, old chap, it was just a remand and I’ve got the details myself.”
He returned his attention to Birdie. “There’ll probably be another adjournment,” he said, “but it will come into ordinary open court eventually. You realize that, of course, duckie.” His smile bespoke sad resignation.
Somewhat to Mr Kebble’s surprise, the girl looked eminently satisfied. “Grandikins!” she exclaimed. “It’s just this next fortnight that’s a bit sensitive, actually. You’ve been a precious lamb, Mr Josiah Kebble.” And she swooped forward to nuzzle a cheek against the centre of Mr Kebble’s pink, shiny forehead.
When she had pranced away, having blown a valedictory kiss to Mr Hoole, Mr Kebble remarked chucklesomely what a nice little tottie she was.
The optician regarded him with wry amusement for a few seconds, then turned his attention to one of the pistols. “Mmm... yes...” He squinted into the bell of its barrel. “You really must try, some time, Joss, to view people through the eye of the entomologist.”
“Oh, aye?” Mr Kebble’s expression of extreme geniality was unchanged. “And what should I have seen in that particular little ladybird?”
Mr Hoole pouted, sniffed, said nothing.
Chapter Four
A conversation was being held at the same time, and about the same person and her friends, in the office of Inspector Purbright at Fen Street police headquarters.
Sergeant Love sounded quite excited. “You know who he is, don’t you? Not the bloke Baz arrested—his pal, the big, smarmy-looking one.”
“Apart from his bearing the rather unlikely name of Grail, I’m afraid I don’t, Sid. Why, is he a pop singer or something?”
The inspector’s other-worldliness earned a grimace of exasperation from the sergeant. “No, it’s Grail of the Sunday Herald. He’s a right stirrer, that one.” A sudden gleam in Love’s youthful eye made him look more than ever like a schoolboy autograph-hunter. “Didn’t you see that piece last Sunday?”
Purbright confessed that he had not. Bill Malley, though, made good his deprivation at once. “God, aye—the bit about the nude dollies at the tax inspectors’ conference at Swansea.”
“They reckon that lad can topple governments,” added Love, with sober conviction.
“Look out, Flaxborough chamber of trade,” murmured Purbright.
A hopeful grin lifted a couple of the coroner’s officer’s chins. “This little brush with Baz Cowdrey isn’t going to make Mr Grail very friendly. Perhaps he’ll put something in the paper about the sauna at the Klub Kissinger.”
“Or the probation officer’s dirty postcard trade,” added Love, warming to the spirit of the thing.
“Ah, that’s only among his own clients,” pointed out the inspector. “Be fair, Sid.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Malley, “is what this bunch was doing in the town in the first place. They’re still here, you know. Or just outside. Herbert Stamper’s rented them that place of his on the Chalmsbury Road.”
Purbright allowed a short break in his maintenance of an air of being unimpressed. “God, there’s a gentleman who’d be a natural for the Sunday Herald.”
“A bit of a lad, old Stamper,” commented Sergeant Love.
“They say one of his housekeepers is looking after that London party,” Malley informed them.
“One of his housekeepers? How many does Mr Stamper run to?”
It was Love’s turn to grin. “On the Fen, they reckon he uses a sort of rotation principle. Like fields. The one he’s lent out has probably been lying fallow.”
The inspector looked at him reprovingly. “You’ve been spending too much time with your fiancée’s disgusting agricultural relatives, Sid. Anyway,” he glanced at the clock, “I think we might call it a day.”
Sergeant Malley, who never disengaged from a conversation with anything like dispatch, was rubbing his right ear thoughtfully. “I’d still like to know what this Grail character and his friends are hoping to dig up in Flax. They don’t move a couple of hundred miles out of London just for a change of air.”
Purbright gave him a tight smile, a pat on the shoulder, and was gone. Love hesitated a moment, then shrugged and followed the inspector.
Farmer Herbert Stamper sat at the wheel of his big Mercedes motor car and gazed aside with great satisfaction at the straggles of yellowing sugar beet on the land of a rival who had neglected to apply a preventative spray at the appropriate time. He was driving slowly—at no more than twenty miles an hour—in the middle of the highway that led eventually to Chalmsbury and the coast. Following traffic was obliged to form a procession whose leisurely pace was woefully inconsistent with the patience of the participants. The drivers of approaching cars had no choice but to veer off into the sanctuary of the grass verge, where they wound down windows, shook fists, and shouted imprecations of a violent and obscene kind. Hearing these as a mere murmur through the heavy tinted glass of his mobile pavilion, Farmer Stamper smiled. He liked people to swear at him. It proved that he was still doing well in life.
A couple of miles out of town, Farmer Stamper made a right-angle turn into a lane very suddenly and without giving a signal, and was agreeably cursed by his retinue.
The lane led between two colonnades of elms to a big square house of bright red brick. This house had been recently built at Stamper’s behest but with care that his name should appear on none of the documents connected with its construction and purchase. Its intended function, as such circumspect measures might suggest, was that of doxy-box, or, in other words, accommodation for whichever housekeeper of the moment might be receiving Mr Stamper’s special favours. Unfortunately, his chronically ailing but vigilant wife had got wind of the enterprise and now made spot checks from time to time to ensure that whoever was enjoying the facilities of Mr Stamper’s investment, it was not its proprietor. She had set the seal of her supervision upon the building by insisting upon its being named, after her, “MIRIAM LODGE”.
He parked the Mercedes at a clumsy angle across the front of Grail’s Rolls and emerged heavily, as from the cab of a tractor. The door he swung shut behind him with his boot as he stared up at the house. A survey of the windows, first of the bedrooms then those on the ground floor, took him only a few seconds. He trudged across the gravel to the front door and gave it a hearty thump with its lion’s head knocker.
The door was opened by a woman of about the same height as Stamper. Under black, untidy hair, was a lean, well-weathered face; the mouth wide, not ungenerous, but tightened by a sort of grim amusement that could have betokened a long and mainly successful struggle for independence. The chin and cheekbones were sharply angular, the nose narrow, straight and red-ridged by exposure to the winter winds of the fen country. Her eyes were half closed for the same reason; they were steady, though, and almost impertinently speculative.
The name of this lady was Lily Patmore.
She addressed the owner of the house. “Now, then, y’old bugger.”
Farmer Stamper was not a man to give vocal expression to his emotions, but as he pushed past Mrs Patmore into the hallway he cupped one of his great hands about her bottom and honked it good-naturedly.
“I see Mawksley’s beet’s doing bloody badly. If there’s one acre with the yellows, there must be bloody forty.”
The housekeeper observed that sugar beet wouldn’t be the only thing to suffer if he didn’t give up making free with her arse, whereupon Mr Stamper offered to wemble her: a proposition that moved Mrs Patmore to remark that his persistence in pawming her when there was company in the house was simply begging for a kick in the lesk.
At which point in their amatory exchange, a door opened so suddenly behind them that both jumped as guiltily as poachers.
Turning, they saw the newspaperman, Ken Lanching. He was holding a twelve-bore shotgun.
Stamper stumped towards him, waving his hand down. “Never you hold a bloody gun like that, son. You’ll have some bugger’s head off.”
Lanching lowered the barrels until they nearly touched the floor. He kept hold of the stock with obvious reluctance. “It was over the fireplace,” he said. “I don’t suppose it’s loaded.”
“Of course it’s bloody loaded,” Stamper retorted. “What good’s a bloody gun wi’out?” He took the weapon, broke it to check that both cartridges were in place, and strode into the dining-room. Effortlessly with one hand he lifted the gun back on its hooks.
“Where’s your mates?”
Lanching looked slightly bewildered by the question. “Oh, around,” he said.
“Everything all right? Lil’s seeing to you, is she?” Mr Stamper seemed not to require answers. He winked. “Mind you don’t try and see to her, though.” A nod towards the housekeeper. “Eh, Lil?”
Mrs Patmore glanced aloft with mock patience and left the room.
“Where’s your Mr Grail?” inquired Stamper, suddenly businesslike. Lanching said he had gone out for a walk but would soon be back.
The farmer gave an appraising stare around the room while he asked casually: “You’re managing all right, then, are you? Finding what you wanted to know?”
“Well, more or less...”
“I must say,” said Stamper, approvingly feeling the texture of the wallpaper with fingers as big as dinner rolls, “that I can’t think of anything in bloody Flax as’d interest a newspaper in London.”
Lanching shrugged uncertainly. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. It depends.”
The farmer gave him a long stare. “You know,” he said at last, “I reckon you’re the recklin of this bloody litter.”
“The what?”
“Recklin. The weakest. The one as won’t make bacon.” He pronounced it “bayacon” with a diphthong that sounded as if it were being dragged through heavy loam.
“I can’t say I have any ambitions in that line.” Stamper grunted.
“That lass of yourn’s not as green as she’s cabbage-looking, though. I’ll bet she keeps you lot snaped.”
“Keeps us...?”
“Snayaped.” (Again the laboured diphthong.) “Under control. Ready to jump when she tells you.”
Lanching clearly found translation difficulties too substantial to permit of argument.
The farmer plunged into even more outrageous speculation. “Whose tottie is she, anyway?” he demanded. “I’d not like to cause trouble by getting it wrong. Which one’s serving her—the boss?”
“Boss?” echoed Lanching, praying for rescue from this importunate hayseed.
“Gaffer,” explained Stamper. “Top man. Grail. The one who writes the pieces in the paper. She’s his little bed-tommy, is she?”
“I know nothing of Miss Clemenceaux’s relationships, and I can’t say I’m wildly interested.”
Stamper regarded him as if he were beginning to show signs of incipient stem wilt. “Not wildly interested. Ah.” He turned his attention to a sideboard on which several bottles of spirits were set out. “Cost three hundred and eighty five quid, did that. Four years back.” One of the great fingers explored the surface. “You want to put some bloody newspaper on it before something gets spilt and snerps the polish.”
Lanching started towards the door. “If there’s anything else you want, Mr Stamper...”
The farmer did not look round. He said to the bottle of gin he had picked up: “What’s your friend Grail want with Alf Blossom, then?”
“Blossom?”
“South Circuit Garage. Asked me where it was. Among other things. Why should he want to know that?”
“No idea.”
“Thought it was the tottie who turned your top soil.”
“Miss Clemenceaux is the research assistant, if that’s what you mean.”
“Aye, well, now I’ve put a spade in, mister. P’raps I’ll get my name in the paper.” Stamper put down the gin bottle and picked up one of whisky. As he squinted through it against the light from the window, he threw out another of his blunt, apparently aimless questions. “What do you reckon to the boss asking me if I know who’s the secretary of the Flaxborough bloody Camera Club?”
“Why shouldn’t he ask you, if that was what he wanted to know?”
“Well your mate’s the snapshot man, isn’t he? Not Grail. Struck me he’s got a harse-forrard way of doing things.”
Someone was crossing the hall. Stamper went to the door and looked out. He stepped back a moment later to admit Clive Grail, who was closely followed by Mrs Patmore.
“There’s some dinner ready if you’d like to come through,” she said, carefully angling the invitation to by-pass Stamper. The farmer tap-tippied one of her breasts with the backs of his fingers in the manner of a vet, and started to leave.
From the other side of the doorway he called back: “That club secretary. Draper Pearce. Harry.” Footsteps receded heavily, as if over furrows.
“You mustn’t mind him,” Mrs Patmore said to Grail. “His dad’s worse. And he’s pushing ninety. The warden’s wife will never go on her own into that old folk’s bungalow of his.”
Grail, who did not appear much heartened by this information, gave Lanching a perplexed look. “What was he talking about? Who is Pearce?”
“You asked him the name of the secretary of some local photography club, didn’t you? They make films, or try to.”
Grail’s hand rose immediately to riffle through his silky, silvery-grey hair. “God, yes! I’d forgotten.” He turned to the housekeeper. “Do you know this gentleman Harry Pearce, Mrs Patmore?”
“Not ever so well. He used to keep a shop but it’s been taken over by Brown and Derehams. His wife’s one of the Harrison girls, but you’d not think it to look at her now. Of course, it was Harry who got mixed up with some rather nasty goings on in that Folklore Society or whatever they called themselves. 1 I always thought he was a bit of an old woman, myself. Still, I don’t suppose you...”
1 Reported in Broomsticks Over Flaxborough
“No, not really,” Grail interjected mildly.
Unoffended, Mrs Patmore completed Mr Pearce’s biography, as she understood it, and added as bonus the news that he once had discovered a body.
Grail was by then sorting some pages of typescript that he had taken from a slim leather case. He favoured the housekeeper with a bright, if brief glance and an encouraging “Oh, yes?”
“Well, not to say body, exactly,” she amended. “She did die soon afterwards, though. That was photography. Poor Edie. Well, I expect you remember it. It was all in the papers.”
“So it was,” murmured Grail automatically. This time he did not look up.
Lanching appeared much puzzled by the ascribing of the mysterious Edie’s death to “photography”. Some time later, he again brought up the subject. Birdie Clemenceaux and Becket had returned and all four had eaten Mrs Patmore’s substantial offering of a game casserole and an apple and elderberry pudding, of which even the normally abstemious Grail had accepted a second helping. Lanching, happily somnolent, eyed his coffee. “A bit odd, the old girl’s story about that woman,” he said.
“What woman?” Birdie asked. She looked at the others. “What old girl, for that matter?”
“Oh, of course. You weren’t here. Mrs Whatsername—the housekeeper—she was burbling on about photography and a woman getting poisoned.”
“Edith Bush, you mean.” Birdie gave a slight shrug. “So?”
Grail said: “It was in the London evenings. Didn’t you notice it, Ken?” His tone was casual, but the interjection had come very promptly. Lanching looked at him uncertainly.
“Yes, but the story we’re on up here...” He turned to Birdie. “You knew her name. When I mentioned poisoning just now, you came straight out with it. Edith Bush. As if it was familiar.”
“Well, of course it was. Heavens, the story ran for several days.” Birdie scooped a fourth spoonful of sugar into her coffee. The look she gave Lanching was lazy, amused.
“Names—some stick, some don’t. It doesn’t signify,” said Grail, smoothly.
Lanching glanced down the room at Becket, as if in appeal, but Becket appeared to be taking no interest in anything beyond his own knees, which he had hitched up against the edge of the table and was regarding fixedly with an expression of absent-minded gloom.
“Very well, then,” Lanching said at last. “Don’t bloody tell me if you don’t want to.”
Grail sighed. “It’s not a question of not telling you anything, Ken. The stuff I’m doing up here...”
“The stuff we’re doing.” Lanching’s somnolence had evaporated.
“All right. We. Sure. The stuff we are doing is what I told you—a straight expose feature...”
“The wicked burgers of Little England,” Birdie explained. “Quailing before Grail’s flail.”
From Grail, a nod of gracious indulgence. “Miss Tit-brain expresses the matter precisely,” he said to Lanching. “My column—oh, with your help, dear colleagues, with your most valuable help—my column, I say, is devoted exclusively to the one and only object that justifies the existence of the cant-ridden, meretricious old harlot that we call the Press. That object being? Right, dearly beloved. Muck-raking.”
All of which was said in a gentle, beautifully modulated voice and accompanied by the delicate gesturing of long, alabastine fingers.
“Mr Stamper,” said Lanching, “asked me if you two were lovers.”
“Oh, blissikins!” trilled Miss Clemenceaux.
Bob Becket slowly slid his regard from his knees to Grail’s face.
Grail looked more beatific than usual. “Salt of the earth, is Mr Stamper. Have you noticed how he blows steam from his nostrils?” He paused, then said, half to himself: “I wonder if the art of the cinema is among his passions.”
In another room, a telephone began ringing. Grail turned his chair from the table, as if in expectation. And it was to him that Mrs Patmore soon afterwards imparted the message that he was required by a gentleman speaking from London.
Immediately Grail had left the room, Lanching leaned forward across the table and spoke hurriedly to Becket. “Hey, Bob, you’ve kept bloody quiet up to now. Just what exactly are we supposed to be getting into? One minute I’m being told to chat up some old birds in an amateur photographic society, and the next I get briefed on how to point a shotgun if anyone walks in without knocking.”
“Briefed? Who briefed you?”
Lanching jerked his head towards Grail’s empty chair. “The holy father.”
“He hasn’t got a shotgun,” said Birdie.
“Well, what do you think that is, hanging over the fireplace? A vacuum cleaner?”
“That’s an antique,” said Becket. “Like carriage lamps and that sort of crap.”
“It’s a double-barrelled twelve-bore,” said Lanching firmly. “And it’s got two shells ready to go off.”
Birdie regarded the weapon with a little wrinkle of distaste.
“It’s Stamper who keeps it loaded,” explained Lanching.
This information appeared to come as no surprise to Becket. “I tell you,” he said bitterly, “they have a homicidal streak round here. Police. Farmers. All of them. You talk about muggings in London. But at least London’s got bloody lights. You go outside this house and you might as well be in the Underground during a power cut.”
Mrs Patmore, entering to clear the dishes, expressed the hope that they had had enough belly-timber. She added—seemingly with reference to Birdie’s having left her potatoes untasted—that she’d never grow much of a kedge if she didn’t eat her orts—an assurance which Birdie decided to accept smilingly as a compliment. Whereupon Mrs Patmore roguishly observed to the company at large that young Mistress Grail wouldn’t be able to blame tates when the time came for her to be in calf, would she?
“Oh, Christ!” said Miss Clemenceaux, when the housekeeper had borne away her great piled tray. “She thinks I’m Mrs Pius XIII.”
“That impression,” Lanching said, “seems remarkably general in these parts. Perhaps there’s an amorous side to Clive’s nature that shows up only in the clear air of the country. Our vision is clouded by cynicism and gin.”
Becket, to whom these remarks seemed to have been particularly addressed and who looked very cross, was just opening his mouth to speak when Grail appeared in the doorway. He had just quiffed a hank of his soft hair attractively over one side of his brow with the little nursery brush he kept always in an inner side pocket for that purpose. He looked even more likely than usual to be on the point of calling for volunteers in his audience to come out for Jesus. In the event, however, he said merely: “That was Richardson. The prelim is set and it’s already gone into the early editions.” He pulled one of the chairs away from the table and sat, his long, thin legs crossed and his head on one side in an attitude of dreamy abstraction while he delicately plied a toothpick.
Birdie spoke to him. “Have they used all the stuff you sent? As you sent it?”
“Naturally. My copy stands as it goes. Always.” The toothpick moved to a further site.
“In that case...” Becket suddenly set his chair with a crash upon its full complement of legs and sat upright himself for the first time since finishing his meal. “In that case, let’s hope that we collect some better evidence than we’ve managed to root out so far. These bloody people are lynchers. I’m bloody sure of it.”
Grail turned up his calm, martyr’s smile. “Well, now; isn’t that a nice incentive for you all.” He paused, as if to enjoy their discomfiture, then said: “Don’t despair. I bring you good news. Richardson says that the Kuwait film has now reached the office. They are getting a print sent up here as soon as they can. Won’t that be a jolly job for us?” It was Birdie now who was receiving the full benefit of the smile.
“Christ!” Becket lit a cigarette with such furious haste that it immediately went out again. He drew on it twice, then threw it in his coffee. “I’d have thought we’d got a bit past that stage of getting a thrill.”
The outburst left Grail looking genuinely perplexed. He soon recovered, however.
“My dear Bob, I’m sorry. No one who knows you would suggest for a moment that you are in need of puerile stimulus of that order. My promise is not of vicarious sex, but of that very evidence the lack of which you were deploring just now.
“I have—no, we have—set up in tomorrow’s edition the skeleton from the, ah—what is it again?—ah yes, Flaxborough—the skeleton from the Flaxborough cupboard; but next week, if, as I am confident you will, you do your work well, those bones will be clothed in flesh—in identifiable flesh. And then let’s see who talks of lynching, eh?”
Chapter Five
The Mayor of Flaxborough enjoyed a number of privileges appropriate to his office, including a pair of ornamental lamp standards outside his red brick semi-villa in Birtley Avenue, but he received his Sunday newspapers with no more ceremony than other citizens; like them, he came downstairs in his pyjamas and collected his weekend reading in person from where it had been tossed disrespectfully and sometimes inaccurately in the vicinity of his front door.
Thus attired, and displaying that humpy, trundley disposition peculiar to Sunday awakenings, Alderman Charles Hockley looked more like a hippopotamus than ever as he stood at his porch and blinked the tiny eyes that seemed perpetually in peril of disappearing for good.
He bent and assembled the papers in some sort of order before scooping the pile under one arm. Only as he turned and re-entered the house did something he had seen register sharply on his consciousness. He dumped the load of newsprint on the hall table, rapidly sorted through it, and pulled one paper free.
It was the Sunday Herald. And heading the last two columns of the front page was a picture of an everyday street scene in an ordinary English town. Or so it would have appeared to an ordinary reader. But Alderman Hockley stood in special relationship to the town depicted. He was Mayor of it.
And yet... Could this be Flaxborough, this row of small shops on one side of a market place, these stalls, this familiar-seeming hotel? Mr Hockley read the astonishing legend, or manifesto, or whatever it was, beneath the photograph; stared at the incredible headlines; and once again scrutinized the picture.
Yes, it was Flax, all right. Not a doubt of it. There was Semple’s music shop. And the Farmers’ Union offices. And a dead clear likeness of old Peters crossing the road by the whelk and winkle stall.
But no mention of the name of the place.
“Margaret!” The cry that issued in a raucous Scots accent from the twenty-one stone frame of Alderman Hockley sounded like a summons to quit a burning building before the roof fell in, but in fact he had raised it without even the effort of taking his eyes from the paper.
From upstairs came a muffled and somewhat indifferent acknowledgment. The mayoress was used to her husband’s offstage alarms.
“The ratepayers’ll be up in arms when they read this!” declared the mayor at the same pitch. He moved on into the kitchen, still scanning Mr Grail’s tantalizing promises of “a full and frank exposure of this quiet little town’s Club of Shame”, and put the kettle on.
Mr Hockley, whose continued enjoyment of the defunct title of alderman was due, in his special case, to its having become a sort of good-humoured tribute to his bulk and pomposity, had emigrated to Flaxborough from his native Glasgow some forty years previously. He now was head of a timber firm that made his family so much money so easily that he was able to devote his full time and not inconsiderable energy to public benefaction.
This took several forms. He sat, for instance, on a whole clutch of committees that had been laid by the Town Council, the Conservative and Unionist Association, the Dogs at Sea Society and sundry other zealots in the canine interest. He was one of the Grammar School governors and the vice-chairman of the League of Friends of Flaxborough Hospital. He also was a leading member of one of those bands of emigre Scotsmen who gather once a year in every English town to mourn, in whisky, sheepgut and oatmeal, their sufferance of prosperity in exile.
Charlie Hockley, moreover, was an indefatigable champion of worthy causes in an individual capacity. He was a generous subscriber to charity and needed to be subjected to only the sketchiest of pleading to be convinced of some fraud, injustice of imposition, and thereupon to “speak out”, as he termed it, without further investigation. This quixotic impulsiveness had led, more than once, to embarrassment, such as that which resulted from his “speaking out” against the severity of a prison sentence recently imposed by the Flaxborough Bench, quite forgetting that he himself had presided on that occasion in his mayoral capacity as chief magistrate.
Mr Hockley’s imaginary allies in his forays were those very ratepayers whom he had invoked a few moments previously; worthy, if choleric citizens who spent their lives in a constant state of readiness to take up arms.
Such supposition was, of course, utterly delusory. There had been no instance of civil strife in Flaxborough since the 1893 election, when an attempt by the authorities to close the pubs and thus interfere with the traditional bribery of the voters with strong drink resulted in every policeman in sight being rounded up and locked for the rest of the day and night in one of the town’s bonded warehouses.
The truth was that Alderman Hockley was a general without an army, but people had grown so used to the spectacle of his indignant bravura on the redoubt of municipal politics that their question: “What’s the old bugger on about now?” was prompted by quite amiable regard and even a modicum of genuine interest.
“Whatever,” asked the mayoress on her arrival, dressing-gowned and yawning, at the kitchen door, “are you on about now, Charlie?”
He jabbed a fat forefinger at the Herald’s front page. “Just you wait,” he said. “The whole town—”
“—will be up in arms. Come on, mind out of the way and perhaps he can get a cup of tea.”
Fortunately for Mr Hockley, there were available in Flaxborough more tolerant listeners than his wife. After breakfast, he bore down upon the telephone like a fat old roue about to embrace a complaisant mistress.
Upon anyone of less volatile temperament than His Worship and of keener analytical sense, the Herald article might not have made its intended impression. It possessed all the elements of evangelical journalism: its tendentiousness, its coyness in the matter of actual places, dates and names, its reliance upon the propulsive power of moral indignation to carry the account safely over swamps of imprecision and chasms of missing fact. It was distinctly tainted, furthermore, with that curious odour—as of some kind of moral Athlete’s Foot—which any old Fleet Street man will recognize as a product of ethical acrobatics.
The mayor’s first victim was Mr Dampier-Small, deputy town clerk. The holder of the substantive office was, as always when telephoned by Alderman Hockley, “most unfortunately out of town—can I get him to ring you?” His deputy, as was only proper, did not run to a well trained, mendacious wife.
“Yes, sir. As a matter of fact, I do happen to have read it. A most offensive piece, I thought.”
“Offensive? I’m glad you think it’s offensive, laddie. I’ll tell you this, and no messing. The town is going to be up in arms about it.” And Mr Hockley’s scarlet dewlap napped up and down like a turkey’s wattles.
“It does seem a somewhat unfortunate outburst,” said Mr Dampier-Small. “Although, of course, the town is not identified—not in so many words. Legal response might be tricky, Mr Mayor. Quite tricky.”
“But there’s a picture of the place. Right here in the paper. I know my own town when I see it. You’re not going to tell me I don’t know my own town?”
Oh, God, thought Mr Dampier-Small, why does this lunatic have to be sicked on to me every time? “Ha ha,” he said, trying to sound fruitily humorous, “I would need to get up early in the morning to tell you that!”
“What’s getting up early to do with it?” inquired Mr Hockley, genuinely mystified.
There was an uncomfortable pause.
“Never mind that,” resumed the mayor, “what I want to know is what we’re going to do about this...this pack of lies in the paper.”
“With respect, Mr Mayor, there would not seem to be sufficient in the way of definite, ah, assertion—yes, definite assertion—in the article to constitute anything actionable.” Another pause, shorter. “If I make myself clear.”
Mr Hockley shuddered with righteous exasperation and pushed aside the mayoress, who was trying to give him a cup of tea. “Now listen, Mister Deputy Town Clerk, and I quote. Are you listening? Right. And I quote. ‘World Copyright Reserved...’—you know what that means? It means this stuff is going all over the globe, that’s what that means. ‘World Copyright...’ Wait a minute... Aye, listen to this—and I quote. ‘When I arrived in this pleasant, sleepy little market town, writes Clive Grail, the Sunday Herald’s special reporter on the state of the nation’s moral health’—and he’s the fellow you have to get after, Mr DTC, not a doubt of that—‘I thought to myself that here was likely to be found a community still conforming in pattern with the old yeoman stock that won England’s acres’—no, now wait a minute, that’s not the part I wanted to read out... Aye, here we are—and I quote...”
Twenty minutes of this mainly one-sided conversation left the deputy town clerk in a good deal more exhausted state than that in which he had gone to bed the night before. He had failed utterly either to understand what Mr Hockley supposed could be done about the scurrilous assertions of the man Grail, or—and this was more worrying—to fathom why he, a responsible and respected officer of municipal government, could allow himself to be hectored at Sunday breakfast time by an obese Scottish floorboard merchant scarcely capable of signing his own name.
As soon as he could escape from the mayor’s imprecations, which grew less articulate as they gained in ire, Mr Dampier-Small drank three cups of strong coffee and composed himself to re-read the Herald’s article more attentively. He was by now in a mood to hope that allegations which had so grievously offended Mr Hockley were true—indeed, that they might prove the mere tip of a monstrous iceberg of moral delinquency that would crush once and for all the vulgar self-righteousness of the mayor and burgesses of Flaxborough.
Meanwhile, the mayor’s rallying cry was speeding over the wire to Queen’s Road, where the chief constable had most grudgingly interrupted a curry-combing session with his pack of Yorkshire terriers in order to receive the intelligence that the town was up in arms.
“It seems to me,” Alderman Hockley was declaring to him, “that the main target for this fellow’s abuse—and it’s very offensive abuse, let me tell you, Mr Chubb, very offensive—his main target, I said, is the Flaxborough Photographic Society.”
“Really?” responded Mr Chubb, with an expression suggestive of his having been told that Mrs Chubb had just been arrested for soliciting. He in fact was not interested in anything that the mayor had said or was likely to say that morning, but knew from past experience that to admit indifference simply fed the furnace of Mr Hockley’s zeal.
“You,” stated Mr Hockley—and Mr Chubb could almost feel the man’s finger poking him in the chest—“you are a member of the Photographic Society, Mr Chief Constable. The vicar is a member. I don’t think I tell a lie when I say he’s on the committee. As I am. Yours truly. And it’s nothing short of disgraceful and disgusting that a Sunday newspaper is allowed to print this sort of thing.” A slight pause. “You’ve read this, of course?”
Mr Chubb had not. He said: “One of my officers is detailed to go through the items in the Press. He doubtless will give me a report a little later. I believe, however...” He paused to let pass, like the tiniest of sighs, a scruple, then: “I believe that Inspector Purbright takes this particular newspaper. Should you feel the matter to be of urgency, Mr, ah...”
“I’ll get on to him right away, Mr Chief Constable. It doesn’t do to let grass grow under our feet when this sort of thing happens. Listen, you may not believe this, but four people have stopped me in the street already this morning and asked what the police are doing about it.”
Two minutes later, Mr Chubb was squatting in carefree communion with his dogs while half a mile away a telephone rang at 15 Tetford Drive, the home, but not the refuge, of Detective Inspector Purbright.
“This is the mayor speaking, Mr Inspector. About this article in the Herald. You might find this hard to believe, but ten people—ten ratepayers—have called at my house already this morning and asked what’s being done about it.”
Purbright slipped three fingers over the mouthpiece and half whispered, half mimed to his wife: “It’s Rob Roy. The town’s up in arms again.” Ann Purbright resignedly went back to the kitchen and removed a pan of half-cooked rashers and kidneys from beneath the grill.
One man only in the entire town there was who could be said to be eagerly expectant of a call from Alderman Hockley. That was Josiah Kebble. And although it was almost noon, Mr Kebble’s brandy and water hour, before the spreading telephonic wave of mayoral indignation reached the editor’s house, he received the confidence that more than thirty ratepayers (many of them professional men) had called in person upon Mr Hockley to urge action, with an air of spontaneous surprise and sympathy that was altogether gratifying.
The truth was that Mr Kebble, like many another newspaper editor, fed his readers, whenever possible, upon such tasty or exciting sentiments as he could induce some public figure or other to express. He was, in a sense, a professional opener of other men’s mouths, yet would have modestly disclaimed any skill in the matter, holding that so many notable members of the community were permanently agape with their own opinions that a reporter had only to listen, select and record.
“This is a terrible slur on the town’s good name,” declared Mr Kebble, eyeing his drink against the light from the window. He appeared very happy despite the lamentable tidings.
“Aye, you’re right there, Jossie. And I don’t intend to let it rest; you can be sure of that.”
“Of course, as mayor...” Mr Kebble took a sip of his brandy and water, giving silence a chance to prime Hockley’s expectancy.
“Aye?”
“I’d have thought that, as mayor, you are in a very special position to put these London scandal-mongers in their place.”
“You think so?”
“The readers will certainly think so,” declared the editor of the Citizen, ex cathedra.
Mr Hockley stroked his dewlap reflectively. No doubt about it: Kebble was a good man, a first-rater. “A strong statement—an official statement. From the mayor.” The effort of composition deeply furrowed Hockley’s brow. “You know—refuting the, the what, the lies—no, the distortions, the outrageous...”
Mr Kebble took aim with the notion he had been fashioning ever since his eye had fallen delightedly upon Grail’s story in the Herald.
“May I,” he interrupted, “put forward something rather unconventional, Mr Mayor? Something, if I may say so, that is just your style?”
Mr Hockley, had he possessed any latitude in the matter of expansion, might be said at that moment to have swelled.
“That’s exactly what I like, Jossie,” he declared. “The unexpected. The one right in the belly. Heh?” The high Caledonian cackle of glee came oddly from his huge, swarthy face. Hearing it, even without the benefit of seeing the face, Mr Kebble winced and reinforced himself with another swig of brandy and water.
“I take it that the town isn’t wrong in looking on you as a sportsman,” he went on.
“No-o-o—oh, no, no. Not wrong at all. Not at all, Jossie. Make no mistake about that.”
Mr Kebble grunted approbation. “Mind you,” he added, with the air of a bookie offering ridicuously long odds on a certain winner, “this could land you with the hell of a lot of publicity—national publicity. You might not care for that, even if the town did benefit as a result.”
The mayor slipped immediately into his hand-on-heart manner. “All I want, Mr Editor—and you can take it from me that I’m not one for the bull and the flannel—you know that, don’t you?—aye, you know that fine. All I want, I say, is for this wicked pack of nonsense in the paper to be taken back. Denied. Refuted. An apology’s what I want. And it’s what I’m going to get, make no mistake about that. I dare this fellow—what’s his name again?...”
“Grail.”
“Aye, Grail—I dare him to show his face here while I’m mayor of this town. He needn’t think I’m too old to do a bit of horse-whipping.”
“What I had in mind,” said Mr Kebble, thoughtfully, “did happen to be something in the nature of a direct personal challenge. The public like that sort of thing. It gets through to them much better than official statements.”
“Fine, old friend! Fine! I’m game. I’ll challenge him, all right, make no mistake about that. Look, what do you say to coming round here so that we can work something up. Heh? You’re better at words than I am. And they’ll need to be good for this little job! Heh?”
It was not far from the editor’s house to the mayoral residence. He went by bicycle. Mr Kebble rode a cycle with as much panache as a squire might ride his hunter. Instead of field gear, though, he wore his unvarying costume of leather-elbowed tweed jacket, trousers like twin bags of oatmeal and the editorial waistcoat whose host of pockets accommodated useful equipment that ranged from a portable balance for weighing fish to a goldsmith’s touchstone. His hat, a carefully preserved relic of journalism in the zo’s, was a stiff, creamy-grey felt, high-crowned and broad of brim, which perched far back on his head to give full display to the round, pink, mischievously amiable face.
The mayor, still in his dressing gown, was waiting hospitably at his front door. He helped Mr Kebble dismount and propped his bicycle against one of the ceremonial lamp standards.
They went together to the somewhat overblown room with feathery furnishings in pale blue and gold that Mrs Hockley still called the lounge but which her husband, more readily adaptable to protocol, designated the Mayor’s Parlour.
Mr Kebble made himself comfortable at once, sinking into a divan like a quicksand trimmed with blue grass. Alderman Hockley, still too agitated to sit, spent some time fussing to and from a drinks cabinet with two empty glasses in his hands. His main difficulty, it seemed, lay in persuading himself that Kebble really had asked for brandy in preference to Scotch whisky. “Are you poorly, Jossie?” he kept asking.
The point at last was settled.
“Cheers,” said Mr Kebble. The ride had given him a thirst.
The mayor raised his glass with a flourish. “Here’s to our little town, aye, and may its good name soon be restored.”
The editor concealed behind a patient, round-faced grin his dislike, developed over a long career of reporting public dinners, of what he called “wind-and-piss sentiments”.
Then, after having given Mr Hockley a minute or two to recover from the emotional stimulus of his own toast, he set about his task.
Tell me, Mr Mayor,” said Mr Kebble, with the gravest expression of interest, “tell me—have you ever thought of fighting a duel?”
Chapter Six
The following morning, there arrived at the rented retreat of Clive Grail and his colleagues a Sunday Herald staff car. The driver, a Londoner in whose estimation anywhere as distant from the capital as Flaxborough was dangerously near the unfenced brink of the world, got out and made a rapid, nervous survey of the house and its setting before going up to the front door.
He told Mrs Patmore that he was from the office and had brought some gear and that Mr Grail or somebody had better lend a hand and show him where it had to be put.
“What gear?” asked Mrs Patmore, whose private view was strengthening daily that her obligation to Mr Stamper should not include ministering to the unpredictable and sometimes quite unreasonable demands of what she called “that newspaper lot”.
Just a film and projector and stuff, the driver said, but it was heavy and he wasn’t going to rupture himself on top of a morning of being misdirected by a bunch of idiots who couldn’t speak English.
At which point, Grail appeared at the door and looked pleasantly surprised. “Hello, Tone!” he said.
“Heh, wossorl this abaht a dool, then?” inquired the driver, with reciprocally approving recognition.
“Dool?”
“Yeah, dool. Wiv some mayor geyser. Pistols at dorn’norl that. Sin the bladdy mile. Sun’norl.”
Tone illustrated the truth of this statement by producing from various pockets closely folded copies of the Daily Mail and the Sun. “And the bladdy garjun,” he added, with a sneer, but in this case without the evidence.
“Yes, I did see something in the Guardian,” Grail said. He glanced with expert speed through the stories which Tone had handed him. “I suppose,” he said, half to himself, “that we have the enterprising Josiah to thank for these. He must have made himself quite a bob or two.”
“ ‘Ere, you an’ this nutter’s not really goin’ ter blarst orf at each uvver?” The question was probably intended to be purely rhetorical and to imply loyal rejection of any such crazy possibility, but somehow—perhaps because he was tired after the journey—Tone allowed his inflection to suggest a delicious optimism rather than ridicule.
Grail looked at him coolly and handed back his papers. He gave a quick shake of the head. “Nutter is right,” he said. “They’re ten deep in these parts. Look, I’ll give you a lift in with that projector.”
When the heavier items had been shifted to the house, Tone delved suddenly, as if in response to an afterthought, into one of the door pockets and handed Grail three flat, circular cans. “Won’t be much of a film show withoht the bladdy film.” He indicated the labels on the cans. “ ’Ere—sorlinarabic.” To this observation he lent emphasis by doing some snake-like dance steps accompanied by a nasal wail.
“See yer in the kasbah!” was Tone’s parting sally as he climbed back into the car. The memory of it sustained his spirit all the way to Peterborough.
Birdie had slept late and bathed without haste. She was just coming downstairs when Becket and Lanching joined Grail in the hall, like explorers eager to see the latest batch of provisions from base.
Grail sought out Mrs Patmore and asked if there were a small room in the house which could be darkened for the showing of a film.
“What sort of film?” She looked from one to another with beetling suspicion.
“I don’t really see that that matters, so long as the lighting can be controlled,” Grail replied.
“Aye, but...I don’t think Mr Stamper would like it if...” She stared down at the largest package as if expectant of seeing it heave. “I mean, it won’t be something mucky, will it? Mr Stamper wouldn’t like that.”
Grail managed to look hurt and stern at the same time. “Mrs Patmore, really...” He turned to Birdie, as if seeking vindication from the most obviously virtuous person present.
Without hesitation, Birdie said goodness me, Mrs Patmore wasn’t to worry, the film was just a sort of travel documentary, terribly dull, actually, but all part of a journalist’s job, worse luck.
“A gentleman is coming up from London tomorrow or the day after,” added Grail. “We are just setting this up for him to see and do some translation for us. He is what we call a foreign correspondent.” A benevolent smile, then: “Just work, Mrs Patmore, just work. Alas.”
The protector of Farmer Stamper’s sensibilities finally agreed to their making use of a spare bedroom, at present unfurnished but curtained and with enough space for a small table and a few chairs.
When she had gone back to the kitchen, Becket examined the projector and pronounced it simple enough to use and probably in good order despite its having been, however temporarily, in the charge of Tone.
Grail was opening a large manilla envelope. “These will be the stills Richardson mentioned. They should make the job of identification a good deal easier.”
Birdie peered over Grail’s shoulder as he withdrew a sheaf of prints, enlarged to some ten inches wide. “Christikins! There’s glamour for you.”
The uppermost picture was a head and shoulders shot of a woman in her middle forties. Her eyes were half closed, her mouth, heavily lipsticked, half open. There was a faintly furry rotundity about her features, suggestive of a home life blameless save for over-indulgence in starch.
Grail slid her to the bottom of the pile and revealed a photograph of a much thinner lady, apparently in heated argument with a youngish man wearing a very false moustache. The background also was patently false: it included a pagoda-like structure and a distant battleship. The woman wore a dressing gown; the man a sports blazer and flannels.
“There’s a very sophisticated conception of pornography behind all this,” Grail remarked, thoughtfully.
He exposed the next print.
It represented a bedroom scene. There was no one actually on the bed but a woman and a man in police uniform lay beneath it. A second man, wearing dress shirt and dinner jacket but no trousers, was ogling the camera with a sort of lunatic jollity, while a girl attired in a cap and apron stood at his left and rear and made play with a feather duster.
“I must admit I’ve never gone a bundle on this transvestite thing,” remarked Birdie, after they had silently contemplated the print for some seconds.
Another still showed an encounter inside a hut or shelter between a man in shirt and riding breeches and a girl with a much soiled face and protruding eyes. She was half recumbent on the floor and held an arm protectively across her breasts. The sundry rents in her dress looked to have been rather neatly done. Their effect upon her companion were difficult to judge, as he wore a pith helmet several sizes too big for him. Handfuls of hay lay around and a cab-horse whip stood in one corner.
Lanching, who felt perhaps that it was his turn to provide comment, offered the opinion that it did not seem at first sight to be the kind of material to inflame the baser senses.
“No, no, no—they’re selected. I told you. Heavens, you surely don’t imagine that just because a film is pornographic there isn’t an innocuous shot in it.”
The unexpected sharpness of Grail’s retort produced an awkward silence. He broke it himself by sorting off-handedly through the rest of the prints and saying: “Well, we certainly seem to have a fair selection of participants here for the record. Notice how some of them keep cropping up in different roles, so to speak?”
Birdie had been looking at Grail thoughtfully. She glanced now at Becket. Their eyes held for an instant. Then he forced one of his quick, uncertain laughs.
“Hey, you haven’t heard yet, have you, girl?”
She waited, smiling, playing up to him.
Becket nodded his oversized head towards Grail. “We’re losing him.”
“Oh, yes?” Birdie stood, looking from one to another, like a party guest who has missed a joke through leaving the room.
“He is about to be done to death by an outraged mayor.”
“What a way to go!”
There was laughter, Grail’s included.
“Not a horse,” said Becket. “The Mayor of Flaxborough.”
“He’s challenged our Clive to a duel,” Lanching added. “With pistols...is that right, Clive?”
Grail shrugged. “So the more vulgar sections of the Press assert.”
Birdie pressed hands together and parodied girlish heroworship. “Oh, blissikins! Hey, may I staunch your wounds? Oh, please!” And she capered up to him and pushed the heel of her hand against his groin.
Suddenly, she was solemn again. She looked round at the others. “You’re not pulling my leg?”
Lanching handed her the Express. The story had made the front page, but more than half way down. Birdie wrinkled her nose, then gave Grail a pitying look. “You poor darling. Below the fold.”
The account began:
Burly Glaswegian Charlie Hockley—His Worship to the 14,482 inhabitants of this quiet little market town—today threw to the floor of his Mayor’s Parlour one of the ceremonial white kid gloves that go with his office. The Chief Citizen of Flaxborough was issuing a challenge to a duel—probably the first public “calling out” in this country for more than a century.
For Mayor Hockley believes that his township has been grossly libelled by a recent article in a Sunday newspaper (not the
Sunday Express
) and considers it his duty on behalf of his fellow citizens to challenge the journalist responsible and demand “satisfaction“.
Birdie looked up, wonderment on her face. “This clown must be certifiable. Must be.” She read on.
During the next few days, the man they are calling Honourbright Charlie here in Flaxborough (motto: In Boldness We Prosper) will await formal apology for statements made in the article of which he complains.
And if the apology is not forthcoming?
“I shall be there—make no mistake about that,” Mayor Hockley told me. “Of course, the time and place must be secret for the time being. That is tradition, I understand. But I can assure you that all arrangements are being made. I have chosen my second, and what I prefer to call ‘suitable equipment’ is being made available.”
The mayor is widely believed here to have been promised the loan of a pair of authentic duelling pistols together with lessons in their use.
The man named by Mayor Hockley in his challenge, London columnist Clive Grail, was last night not available for comment.
“Weren’t you, Clive?” asked Birdie, innocently.
“I shouldn’t have thought,” said Lanching, “that anybody stuck in this part of the world would be available for anything. I’m beginning to feel like a political detainee.”
Becket had been listening with a half smile to the reading and to the remarks of the others. He now looked intently at Grail and said: “The phone rang yesterday evening at about seven and you answered it. Why didn’t you tell us that it was a newspaper man? You knew then about this duel nonsense, didn’t you?”
“Of course not. How the hell could I?”
“How could you?” repeated Becket, mockingly. “Quite simply, old man. This local correspondent—the fellow who’s been working up the story—rang up and asked for a quote. And you gave him the old ‘not available’ crap—but not before he’d told you all about it. Oh, come, Clive—it’s bloody obvious. Don’t treat us like idiots.”
There was silence. The two men—one undersized, aggressive, confident; the other tall, defensive, contemptuous—faced each other across the bowl of scarlet and yellow dahlias that Mrs Patmore had brought in from the garden the day before. Then, as though obeying a cue, both smiled simultaneously and relaxed.
“You’re right, of course,” Grail said, lightly. “It’s just that the thing’s so ludicrous, so unimportant.”
“Not now, it isn’t,” Lanching said. He took the paper from Birdie. “This mayor bloke may be round the twist, but whoever put him up to this has hit on a pretty effective way of queering our pitch.”
“I don’t see that,” said Grail.
“At the least, it’s a diversion that he’s arranged. At worst, it could win public sympathy and make the Herald’s morality campaign look like priggish interference.”
Birdie looked pleased by this suggestion. She reached over and grasped Grail’s shoulder. “There’s only one thing for it, darling. You’ll have to accept. Tell you what. I’ll be your second.”
Grail’s impatience flooded back. “For Christ’s sake, stop being such a tit!” He strode to the sitting-room door and slammed it behind him.
The ensuing silence was broken by Becket. “My, my—we’re touchy today. Don’t tell me he’s publicity-shy.”
“Understandably,” said Birdie. “When you’ve shovelled as much shit as dear Clive, a head wind makes you nervous.”
“The office won’t like this,” suggested Lanching. “I wonder they haven’t been on to us yet.”
Birdie shook her head. “Don’t you worry—he’ll have got in first. Probably last night or first thing this morning. I bet he tried to take personal credit for it.”
“I shouldn’t feel very happy,” said Becket with a sort of gloomy relish, “if a mad mayor was laying for me with a gun. Not round here, I shouldn’t. These characters mean what they say.”
Lanching had opened one of the cans of film and was holding a strip up to the light. “Hot air,” he said, casually. “It’s got to be. If anybody really meant to fight a duel, they’d not advertise it in advance.” He let slip through his fingers another two or three feet of film, frowned dubiously, then wound it back on the reel. “You might as well,” he said, “tell the press you’re going to commit burglary. Duelling is just as illegal.”
“So is boiling in oil,” observed Becket, “but that wouldn’t deter anybody in Flaxborough, once they’d got into the habit.”
Grail reappeared after about twenty minutes. He looked calm and benevolent. “I’m going into town for an hour or so,” he announced. “I’ll want you with me, Birdie. Then if Ken and Bob will improvise an Odeon in the meantime, we’ll all have an improving movie show when we get back. Right?”
A light drizzle had begun to fall. Grail and the girl hurried across the gravel, the already wet stones slithering away beneath their feet. Grail climbed into the Rolls and leaned across to admit Birdie to the seat beside him. The affability had left his face but his expression was one of anxiety rather than annoyance.
She settled herself into a hunched, half-curled position, indifferent to the expanse of thigh revealed. For a few moments she stared through the rain-stippled windscreen at the stripped harvest field, of whose lines of brown stubble the height of the great car gave a view above the hedge.
Grail, too, was gazing blankly ahead. Becoming aware that he had made no move to switch on the ignition, she looked across at him.
He lowered his eyes and turned the key about in his fingers, as if wondering what it was for.
“Something wrong?”
He remained silent a little longer. Then he said: “Look, love, I know you’re not wildly enamoured of this story...”
“Christikins.” The snapped glass of her laugh cut him short. “Is anybody? Is Bob? Ken? Like hell. It gets worse all the time. Thinner and smellier. You’ve been conned, boy. And we have to push on because you won’t admit it.”
“No,” he said, softly. “No.” He shook his head. “You’re hopelessly over-simplifying.” The key went home and turned. As the car glided forward, he shook his head again.
The girl seemed to find the mildness of his response puzzling. She watched him carefully, as he guided the car between the green banks of the lane that led them to the main road.
“When you talk of ‘over-simplifying’,” she said, “I take it that you mean I haven’t thought up as many excuses as you have.”
“Excuses for what?”
“For going to town on a story you can’t authenticate.”
He gave a short laugh. “Authentication, dear girl, is in that film you’ll see later today. I’m not worried on that score.”
There was a slight pause.
“But you are worried,” she said.
“A little, yes. Not for the reasons you suppose.”
“Why, then?”
“I think there are dangers involved that we hadn’t reckoned on. Not libel. Nothing like that. More direct. Nastier. Do you see?”
Birdie gazed at him reflectively. The pale, ascetic face, as carefully groomed and cherished as a vain woman’s, had lost something of its customary patina of calm self-sufficiency. In particular, his eyes now were alert and nervous.
She spoke with deliberation, still watching him. “No, darling, I do not see. Tell me more.”
The probe irritated him at once. “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t let us get prosaic about this. It’s just a feeling I have.”
“Of danger? What kind of danger?”
“Of harm. Of physical harm. To us.”
“To you, you mean.”
“Primarily, dear girl, to me. Naturally. I’m glad you put first things first. But by a supreme effort of selflessness I brought everyone in. The team.” Grail stressed the word so that it sounded silly.
“If you’re being serious,” Birdie said, “I think you should tell me and the others at once exactly why you’re so bloody nervous. You get paid for risking martyrdom. We don’t.”
They had reached the town’s outskirts. In the veil of rain, the big, square, Victorian villas built for the founders of Flaxborough’s prosperity loomed amidst their bays and laurels like mourners.
“Where are we going, anyway?” Birdie asked.
“To see your little editor friend. The man who gives you a piece of candy with one hand while he stirs you a mug of hemlock with the other.”
Birdie uncurled and sat upright. “Oh, come off it, darling. Kebble was very accommodating. He didn’t have to be. He’s a nice old boy. You leave him alone.”
Grail slowed the car at a junction. “Where’s his beastly little office?”
“I shan’t tell you.”
“Look girl: don’t try pissing me about, or you’ll find yourself out on your little fanny pretty damn quick, and I am not joking, believe me.”
She was shocked not by the words, but by the transfiguration of his face. As he wrenched viciously at the wheel to bring the car into the town-bound traffic stream, the smooth, disdainful features were tightened and sharply lined into an expression of vulgar fury. It was as though a respected statesman had suddenly, in full public view, reverted to his beginnings as party tout and heckler.
Something much more serious, she decided, than Grail’s usual pre-revelation nerves was working on his mind this time. Quelling her instinct to counter the abuse, she sulkily gave him directions until the Rolls drew to a halt in the narrow side-street in which was the works entrance to the Citizen building.
Mr Kebble rose in a flurry of surprise and delight from his half-acre desk and welcomed Birdie as if she had been Florence Nightingale, making the Citizen her very first call on the way back from the Crimea.
Grail had had time to re-compose himself into the image of a distinguished London journalist on a goodwill tour of his lesser dominions. Mr Kebble seized Clive’s somewhat limp hand and held it in his own firm, warm grip long enough to impart his sense of the significance of the occasion.
“They tell me,” began the editor, in characteristic acknowledgment of those ubiquitous but anonymous informants who seemed to throng Kebble’s Flaxborough like the voices on Prospero’s island, “that you’ve turned up quite a nice little story here, old chap.”
“As an old newspaper man,” said Clive, graciously, “you will appreciate its flavour, I think.”
Mr Kebble was peering at both visitors in turn, with a mixture of friendliness and respect. “Of course,” he conceded, “we people on the spot are often sitting on a story without knowing it. That does happen, you know.”
Grail waved a spray of white fingers. “Often a matter of sheer luck, old man. And the nationals do have an unfair advantage in the matter of resources. Take this story, for instance. We were put on to it by our Baghdad office.”
“You don’t say, old chap?” Mr Kebble’s eyes widened as gratifyingly as if the agency of Haroun al Raschid himself had been claimed.
“Films,” said Grail, airily.
“Ah.” Mr Kebble nodded.
Suddenly, his expression changed to one of anxious solicitude. He leaned closer. “They tell me old Charlie Hockley has quite flown off the handle. He’s the mayor here, you know.”
Birdie gave an inward gasp of admiration for the little editor’s bland duplicity. He was, she knew, and Grail knew, the only possible candidate for the authorship of that morning’s account in the national press of Mayor Hockley’s foray into chivalric fantasy. It was even likely that Kebble it was who had telephoned Grail the previous day for a quote.
“Mind you, old chap,” Kebble went on, kindly, “you mustn’t let Charlie’s antics worry you too much. His bark is probably worse than his bite. We must hope so, anyway.”
“Quite a comedian, I gather,” said Clive, having caught something, perhaps, of Mr Kebble’s habitual accrediting of information to unnamed sources.
The editor gave a chuckle. It implied that Alderman Hockley’s eccentricities had a long and well known history. Birdie found herself searching Grail’s face for signs of renewed nervousness.
“I imagine the police are more than capable of dealing with your mayor if he persists in making a fool of himself,” said Grail. Birdie looked away, her guess confirmed. So unimaginative and pompous a retort was not Clive’s style. He clearly was rattled.
They heard the thump of one of the outer doors swinging shut. Mr Kebble looked across to the already opening inner door. “Talk of the devil,” he said softly.
“Hockley?” whispered Birdie, following his glance.
Kebble shook his head. “Man called Hoole,” he breathed. “He’s Charlie’s second.” And he rose to greet the new arrival with an ear-to-ear grin and an arm as eagerly extended as if he had not seen Mr Barrington Hoole in ten long years.
Chapter Seven
“What does he mean, ‘Second’?” Grail murmured to Birdie. The expansive Mr Kebble sheltered them at that instant from the view of the new arrival and Birdie just had time to pose furtively but very expressively in a representation of taking aim with a pistol before introductions were being made.
Grail’s smile for Mr Hoole was as affable as fly-spray. The girl, on the other hand, greeted the optician like a favourite uncle. She hugged his arm and turned to Clive with “I told you he was a duckikins, didn’t I?”
Grail acknowledged this felicitous remark with a slight rise of the lip.
“Mmm...ah,” hummed Hoole. “A fortunate call. For me, at all events. I was not at all sure where to find you, Mr Grail.”
“And why should you wish to find me?” Clive had sufficiently recovered himself to produce his expression of vacant sanctity.
Hoole rubbed his plump little hands and jutted his head forward. He nodded in the friendliest way at Grail and said: “I have the mmm...privilege, sir, of bearing the mayoral commission, as it were. His cartel, as we say in duelling circles. In vulgar speech, challenge. Mr Hockley wants to shoot you. Mmm...yes, he does.”
Mr Kebble heard this little address with every appearance of wishing to congratulate both parties. He glanced at each in turn, his face positively pulsating with good humour.
“There now, Clive,” said Birdie. “You could go further and meet with no nicer invitation.”
Very slowly and deliberately, Grail looked about him, selected a chair, and settled himself into it. He waited some seconds, then said quietly: “I am not going to spoil an elaborate joke by saying how silly I find all this. Nor shall I insult your intelligence, gentlemen, by pointing out the obvious—namely, that any attempt to carry the joke further would automatically bring those taking part to the notice of the police.”
He gave Hoole, then Kebble, a slow, sad smile, and went on: “I do not know who you are, Mr Hoole, but you look too old and respectable a tradesman to be mixed up with a...a jape of this kind. As for you, Joss—may I call you Joss?—I should like to call upon your journalistic services in a matter much more worthwhile in every sense than this dubious nonsense that somebody has prevailed upon you to promote. Come now—what do you say?”
Only twice during his quarter century of professional practice had Mr Hoole heard himself termed a tradesman. For the rest of that day and during much of the ensuing week he was in a rigor of ice-cold outrage—a condition of which the only detectable symptoms were a persistent small nervous laugh and a white patch in the centre of each of his rosy, tight-skinned cheeks.
Kebble hid his glee behind the frown of earnest interest with which he addressed Grail. “Anything I can do to help, old chap. Glad to. What exactly had you in mind?”
Grail hitched his chair a little nearer the editor. “Let me put you in the picture, Joss. I don’t think I am betraying any confidences (his glance flicked aside to the optician and back) if I tell you that some film has come into my possession—the Herald’s possession, that is. Portrayed in that film are certain people who are residents of this town. It is most important that these people be clearly and accurately identified.”
Grail paused. A drumming noise that had begun quietly with his opening words was now irritatingly obtrusive. Mr Hoole’s finger ends were beating upon a resonant desk panel. Grail glared at the offending hand.
“Mmmm...if I might just interpose an observation?” said Hoole. He smiled icily. “As I mmm...intimated before, I do have certain propositions to put to Mr Grail. If he accedes to them, as I hope he will, there will no longer be any need for him to pursue his researches in this area, in which case his requirement of your assistance, Joss, would cease to exist.”
Hoole looked at Birdie, as if in confidence that her common-sense grasp of realities would induce her there and then to declare her alliance with him.
“All right, what does His Worship want?” Birdie asked.
“We know that,” said Grail promptly. “He wants to shoot me. Right, Mr Hoole?”
“Mmm...regrettably, yes. But there exist what I believe are termed, in current cant, ‘options’. Perhaps you will permit me to outline them?”
Grail spread a hand in limitless invitation. “My dear fellow...”
“In the first place,” began Mr Hoole, “my principal—Alderman Hockley—feels that although mmm . . . much damage has been done to the good name of the town by what has already appeared in the mmm...the Sunday Herald—the Sunday Herald? (Yes, said Birdie, that was indeed the name of the paper in question.) Ah, yes ... he would be prepared to consider honour satisfied if the projected articles were cancelled and a brief apology printed.”
Grail did his best to simulate high amusement. “Oh, yes? And in the second place?”
“You would undertake to destroy or return to the proper, mmm...proper owners, such material in your possession as might be used to discredit the town or its citizens.”
“And do you really imagine,” retorted Grail, “that this quite unfunny concoction of your mad mayor, or whoever, is going to receive some sort of formal reply?”
Mr Hoole raised a disclaiming hand. “Ah, you must not regard me as capable of imagining anything, Mr Grail. A second is an absolutely disinterested person, a cypher, one might almost say—a mere carrier of messages.”
“In that case,” said Clive, “kindly carry this one to your Mr Hockley: Go shoot your own silly brains out and stop wasting other people’s time.”
Kebble beamed at Birdie, then, expectantly, at the optician. Hoole, when he chose, could lay tongue to abuse of such refined indecency that it sounded to the uninitiated like a lecture in medical jurisprudence. But on this occasion he merely chuckled and nodded his head four or five times, as if eminently satisfied. Then he left.
“May we now,” said Grail to Kebble, “get back to the business that brought me here in the first place? This film, Joss. I take it that you won’t mind giving us a little help—purely in the matter of identification. The Herald does pay rather well, incidentally.”
On the London train that was drawing into Flaxborough Station at that moment, there happened to be three passengers whose first-class tickets bore witness to the generosity of the proprietors of the Sunday Herald.
They were, in order of costliness, Sir Arthur Heckington, Queen’s Counsel, retained by Herald Newspapers to defend photographer Robert Becket on a charge of aggravated assault with a motor car upon a police officer; Robin Marr-Newton, Herald representative in Baghdad, now on leave; and Mr Ben Suffri, of Haringey, an expert upon Islamic languages.
Sir Arthur, who was six feet and four inches tall, wore the full morning rig of a barrister. “To impress the natives,” he had remarked light-heartedly to Lady Heckington that morning on leaving his Kensington home. The first native to be impressed was the driver of the taxi which he hailed imperiously on emerging from the station. He showed his respect by elaborating a two-hundred yard journey to the offices of Mr Justin Scorpe, solicitor, into a sight-seeing tour of some two and a half miles.
The other two arrivals on Herald business were less splendidly attired. They were directed on foot to their immediate destination, the Roebuck Hotel, which was very little further distant than Mr Scorpe’s premises. There they registered, and drank some bruise-grey coffee while awaiting transport to Miriam Lodge.
Mr Scorpe received Sir Arthur Heckington with outstretched hand and an “Ah, Sir Arthur!” so expressive of admiring familiarity that the barrister doubted for a moment his own reasonable conviction that he had never seen this curious looking fellow before in his life.
For Scorpe unquestionably was easily memorable. He was tall, with a big and knobbly skull, and stood poised in well-worn and slightly too large clothes of courtroom black as if he had been hung up, suit and all, from the nape of his scraggy neck. His eyes were dark and deeply set, his nose long, his wide, thin mouth set in a grim smile of forensic omniscience. He carried in his hand a pair of spectacles, plainly too massive to be worn except for very short periods, but without equal in three counties as an instrument of eloquence, when waved; or, when shaken or jabbed, as a weapon of scorn and discomfiture.
“Morning, er, Scorpe,” said Sir Arthur. He spared the wonderful spectacles no more than a brief and quite sour glance. Scorpe put them on and lowered his head so as to peer over their frames, but the barrister was already engaged in his own ritual of clicking open his briefcase and sorting through a thin sheaf of foolscap. Off the spectacles came again. Scorpe grasped them closed, nibbled one side frame, and awaited developments.
Sir Arthur said he would have a word with Scorpe’s client before the case came into court again but thought there would be no point in going for anything other than a straight rebuttal.
“Exactly,” said Mr Scorpe, weightily.
“You’ll prepare on those lines, then, will you?” said Sir Arthur. He glanced at his watch.
The solicitor looked as if he were about to make a speech, but he got no further than pursing his lips portentously.
“Odd charge,” said Sir Arthur. “Wouldn’t stand up in a thousand years. Police here pretty incompetent, are they?”
A rumble came from the throat of Mr Scorpe. He tapped the furled spectacles against the side of his nose. “Ah, well...as to that, I can but offer...”
“I have been given very clearly to understand,” interrupted Sir Arthur, speaking now with greater deliberation, “that our main object—apart, of course, from demolishing this quite preposterous charge—is to reduce to a minimum the chances of publicity. Don’t ask me why; I thought newspapers liked publicity, good bad or whatever.”
Mr Scorpe’s lower jaw made movements suggestive of deep cogitation. He spoke. “The situation as, ah, I understand it, does happen to have...”
“Become difficult? Of course. A melodramatic indictment like this was bound to make things difficult to play down. You must keep your witnesses grey, Scorpe, grey. Nothing gaudy, you understand.”
Mr Scorpe hauled a large, cinnamon-tinged handkerchief from an inside pocket, flourished it and began to polish the spectacles, holding them to the light occasionally like a host lifted before a reverent congregation.
“The, ah, chief constable of Flaxborough,” he intoned, “did, as it happens, communicate by telephone with my clerk no more than, let me see, twenty minutes ago.” He paused to peer at the barrister as if challenging him to interrupt yet again.
Sir Arthur grunted but remained attentive in his fashion, which was by staring sternly through the window at some pigeons circling above the pantiled roof of the opposite building.
“The substance of the chief constable’s message, as I am led to believe by what my clerk reported, was to the effect, ah, that the police have decided to offer no evidence upon the charge of assault by motor car. They will, however, or so I gather, proceed summarily with the lesser charge of driving the, ah, said motor car without due care and...”
“Attention,” snapped Sir Arthur, with the air of locking Mr Scorpe’s verbosity inside a deed box. He consulted his watch once more. “I do think you might have told me that in the first place, Scorpe. When are they proceeding?”
“It appears that the chief constable holds the view—in deference to my client’s professional obligations, of which it seems he has been apprised—that Mr Becket’s case might now conveniently be brought to the front of the list and, ah, disposed of...just a moment, if you don’t mind, Sir Arthur...” Scorpe assumed the great spectacles and consulted a sheet of paper on his desk. “Ah, yes—on Thursday morning at ten of the clock. Subject always”—a crocodile grin—“to the convenient availability of learned counsel, naturally.”
Sir Arthur nodded and flicked a dust mote from the brim of his bowler with one wash-leather glove. “Have your clerk fetch a taxi, will you, Scorpe? I’d better go and have a word with this Becket fellow. Then all should be plain sailing, mmm?” And for the very first time since his arrival, Counsel released a tiny, four-guinea smile.
Grail and Miss Clemenceaux had not yet returned when the man from Baghdad and his interpreter were admitted by Mrs Patmore. Convinced by now that “the newspaper lot” had turned the house into an assembly point for some kind of white slaving conference, the housekeeper stared at both new arrivals with what appeared to be sustained malevolence. In fact, she was trying to memorize their respective features in readiness for helping the Vice Squad with identikit details.
Mr Suffri smiled nervously and said what a pretty hovel and had the corns grown well that year? The housekeeper’s only response to this inquiry was to clutch her breast and squeeze past him, and he later confided sadly to Robin Marr-Newton that he feared it was on account of his colour. Mr Marr-Newton, impeccably pink-cheeked and golden-haired son of the titled Foreign Office official whose relationship by marriage to the chairman of Herald Newspapers was Robin’s chief, if not solitary, journalistic qualification, replied nonsense, there was no racial prejudice these days, he’d even seen wogs in Brook Street, Benny wasn’t to worry.
Lanching and Becket were upstairs, assembling the projector in one of the unused bedrooms. The screen had been hung across the only window, effectively blocking, out daylight. A collection of several chairs stood outside on the landing. Becket was weaving cable in and out of doorways and testing switches.
Marr-Newton introduced himself and his companion, and Lanching made a couple of jokes suitable to the occasion, such as had they brought any dancing girls with them? and would they mind emptying the sand out of their shoes because otherwise Mrs Patmore would have their balls for pincushions.
Some cans of beer were produced and within half an hour a convivial atmosphere prevailed in which stories of Fleet Street coups by Becket and Lanching found exotic counterpoint in Marr-Newton’s tales of a foreign correspondent’s tribulations in the embassies and ministries of the Middle East, most of which, it appeared, were concerned either with alcohol or venery.
“Have you seen the flick, by the way?” Robin asked eventually.
“Just a few stills,” said Lanching. “Odd, but tame, I thought.” He turned towards Becket. “Didn’t you think them pretty innocuous, Bob?”
“No,” said Becket. “Very suggestive.”
Lanching looked at him, uncertain of whether he was being facedous or not. He asked, as a test: “That one of men dressed as boy scouts, for instance?”
Becket shook his head. “Boy scouts, nothing. They were supposed to be Mounties. You know—Royal North West Canadian whatsits. Sinister, I thought.”
Robin Marr-Newton had one hand over his face. He was giggling. The others glanced at him.
“Christ! You should hear what the commentator says about that scene. According to him, they’re English gentlemen on their way to hunt foxes.”
“Commentator?” Becket was frowning.
Robin shrugged. “Sort of. In Arabic, of course. Benny here says its incredibly indecent. I thought it hilarious, actually.”
“Do you mean,” said Becket, “that the film’s only verbally obscene?” He sounded suddenly concerned, apprehensive almost.
Robin, inclined to answer simply with a guffaw, caught the note in his voice and paused. “Oh, no,” he said, flatly. “By no means, duckie.” And he twitched his long, straight, well-bred nose.
Lanching nodded slowly, not looking at him, then said: “Clive, as you will have gathered, has plunged pretty deeply with this one. I don’t want you to think I’m questioning his judgment, or yours—or anybody’s, for God’s sake—but did he go to town on this strictly on the strength of your say-so? I mean, you were a long way off.”
Marr-Newton frowned. “I don’t quite see what you’re getting at, Ken. Long way? Sure, but there are phones, dear lad. One gets asked to chase something up, and one chases. Then all one needs do is produce some money and the job’s done. Simple as that. In Baghdad or Biggleswade. Distance no object.”
“You were asked to get this film, then?” Lanching sounded surprised.
“Sure. You don’t suppose I trog round all the blue picture shows in the Gulf looking for home movies from England, do you?”
Mr Suffri, who had remained silently attentive hitherto, apparently found this notion too funny to be allowed to pass. He grinned at the other three in strict rotation, as if handing round cake, and declared: “The old red and white and blue more sodding likely, gents!”
Robin gave the interpreter a pat of commendation and said: “Yes, rather,” to no one in particular. Then, to Lanching: “The London office was tipped off. Didn’t Grail tell you? Who unearthed the original story I don’t know, but both Grail and Ricky seemed to think it was someone absolutely reliable. Knew the town, according to Rick. Described details in the film. As I said, I just chased it through the old randy reeler circuit and snaffled a print. The things we do for bloody editors!”
There was a swish of tyres on gravel below the window. Becket moved the screen a little aside and peered down. “Grail’s back.” He stretched to extend his view. “Somebody else, as well. I think it’s a taxi.”
Marr-Newton joined him. They heard voices, one of them plummily imperious. Robin nudged Becket. “Here comes your own personal legal eagle, old son. My God, the Herald must love its children.”
Chapter Eight
“What do you know, Sid,” inquired Inspector Purbright of his sergeant, “about the Flaxborough Camera and Cinematograph Society?”
“I believe Mr Chubb belonged to it at one time,” said Love, putting first things first.
“Indeed? Apart from that, though, should we be aware of anything to its discredit?”
Love considered the question carefully, then shook his head.
Purbright resumed examination of the copy of the Sunday Herald which the chief constable, with an air of great gravity, but no comment, had placed on his desk an hour previously.
“It does seem odd,” he said, “that so blameless an institution seems to appear to this Mr Grail to be some sort of satanic pleasure palace. He promises pretty horrific revelations.”
“Yes, I read it,” declared Love.
Purbright regarded him narrowly. “Oh?”
“My landlady gets it for her horoscope,” the sergeant explained.
“I only hope,” said Purbright, “that the planets are more specific than Mr Grail.” He folded and put the paper aside.
Love waited patiently for whatever the inspector had been leading up to. Purbright, he knew very well, did not deliver random questions like a schoolmaster testing the awareness of his pupils.
Purbright rose from his desk and went over to the window. He stared down into the yard where a couple of patrol cars were being hosed.
“The only thing even remotely connected with the cine club that sticks in my mind is the death of that wretched girl who drank developer or something in a darkroom.”
“Edith Bush,” supplied the sergeant, promptly.
“That’s the one, yes. Probably absolutely irrelevant. The business just lingers in the memory, that’s all. A singularly silly death, as well as wasteful.”
“There, was no suggestion of foul play,” Love said. The stiff official phrase was laid before the inspector like a stick retrieved by a youthful, diligent Labrador.
Purbright affected airy scepticism. “No, there wouldn’t be, would there? Old Amblesby was coroner then, remember.”
Love raised his brows and was silent, awed by such worldliness.
“Never mind, Sid.” Purbright turned from the window. “Some rather more immediate problems have landed on our plate, thanks to these same enterprising guests from Fleet Street.”
“The court case, you mean?”
“Well, that shouldn’t give any trouble, now that the chief has trimmed it of Constable Cowdrey’s excesses. It goes on as a straight careless driving. Five or ten minutes and no blood spilt. No, I’m thinking of the Charlie Hockley business.”
“Just his fun,” suggested Love, hopefully.
“ ‘Fun’ in this context, Sid, is defined at law as either conduct likely to lead to a breach of the Queen’s peace, or issuing threats of grievous bodily harm, or conspiring to discharge firearms to the danger of life, or...oh, I don’t know, lots of laughable alternatives of a like kind. Mr Chubb has been reading his Blackstone and brooding on all of them.”
“I suppose he wants Alderman Hockley restrained?”
“You could say so, yes.”
Love looked thoughtful, then, quite suddenly, knowing.
“I reckon,” he said, “that he’s being put up to it.”
The inspector mutely invited him to expand his theme.
“Well,” said Love, “it does seem funny that there should be all this talk about duels just after a pair of duelling pistols was sold by old Knocker Cartwright.”
“You mean he sold them to Charlie?”
“No, to that pal of Mr Kebble’s. Little sarky bloke from Chalmsbury. Optician.”
A grin of fond recall spread over Purbright’s face. “Good Lord! Hoole. Barrington Hoole. Remember the Chalmsbury dynamitings, Sid? 2 Barry lost his eye.”
2 Reported in Bump in the Night
The sergeant frowned. “He had two when I saw him on Friday.”
“No, not his own eye. It was a bloody great glass model that once hung outside his shop and lit up at night. It used to give people quite a turn if they weren’t used to it.”
“I reckon one of those pistols would give someone a turn if it went off,” remarked Love.
Purbright considered. “I must say those newspaper interviews were suggestive of another hand in the affair,” he said. “Charlie sounded as if he was working to a script.”
“Kebble’s?”
“Could be. But in any case, I shall have to go and see him. No township can tolerate a chief citizen who invites every visitor with a complaint to stand up and be shot.”
Purbright found the mayor in the garden of his home. He was standing at the far end of the lawn, close by the post from which a line of washing was suspended. The mayoress, who had come to the door herself to admit the inspector, was now unpegging some of the clothes and loading them into a big wicker basket. Among them, Purbright noticed, were several heavy woollen vests and a number of pairs of drawers, singularly capacious and of the hue of pease pudding: Mrs Hockley, it seemed, was not of coquettish inclination in the matter of underwear.
His Worship acknowledged with a mere grunt his wife’s announcement of “the inspector of pollis”. He had assumed an awkward-looking sideways stance and was gazing for approval at Mr Hoole, whose plump but trim figure was discernible some twenty yards away against a clump of michaelmas daisies. Mr Hockley’s right arm was raised and he held in his hand a rolled-up newspaper, bent in crude representation of a firearm.
“Better, a little better,” Mr Hoole called out, distance lending his voice an even more nasal quality than usual. “You ought to be safe against a ball through the heart. Trouble is, your gut profile is a bit mm...obtrusive. If he fires low, you could lose the lot.” And Mr Hoole mimed with two hands in a most disconcerting manner the rupture and discharge of a laden abdomen.
Mrs Hockley was scowling at some socks she had just taken down from the line. “If you don’t soon cut your toenails, my lad, you can set about mending these yourself.”
“Och, piss off, woman!” retorted the mayor. She looked reassured and gave Purbright a smile of understanding before picking up the basket and returning to the house.
The inspector strolled slowly across to Hoole, who hummed and glowed and nodded several times, then averred that it was pleasant to renew acquaintance with a civilized policeman. “A very rare mm...phenomenon, inspector, as you will readily appreciate.”
Purbright said he hoped this good opinion would survive the knowledge of why he, the policeman in question, had called. “I don’t know what the custom is in Chalmsbury, Mr Hoole,” he went on, “but duels are much frowned upon in this borough. Indeed, they are accounted a most serious breach of the law.”
The optician had been watching his pupil with something less than approval. He now called to him: “I think we must consider the alternative position of your presenting your rear to the adversary and firing over your left shoulder. It is not without, ah, precedent and it has the advantage of its being difficult to penetrate the digestive organs from behind. Let us see how you manage.”
Mr Hockley began to lumber about in a circle. His body being far too thick to twist, all he managed in the way of taking aim with his bent newspaper was to stick it under his arm and blindly wave it about.
The optician turned to Purbright with a smile and placed the tips of his fingers together. He seemed pleased to have an excuse to abandon the practicalities of his job as the mayor’s second in favour of consideration of its academic aspect.
“You may be surprised to learn, inspector,” he said, “that statistically the chances of being hit are as low as one in six. It is calculated, moreover, that only one man in every fourteen who ‘go out’, as the duelling term is, actually receives the coup de cæur”.
Purbright had a fleeting mental picture of fourteen men with pistols trooping forth, rather like the men in the song who went to mow a meadow. “It is still against the law, Mr Hoole,” he murmured, “however small a proportion of casualties proves fatal.”
The spectacle of the suspended vests had caught Mr Hoole’s eye. He frowned and called out to the mayor: “Are those mm...garments on the line yours? Those which look like knitted shrouds.”
Mr Hockley abandoned his attempt to squint over his left shoulder and looked in the direction indicated by Hoole.
“Those are vests, laddie. Of course they’re mine. Why else do you think I’ve never ailed anything?”
His second made a face expressive of the utmost disapproval. “Never, never, my dear sir, fight a duel with wool next to the skin. The ball will carry half a yard of the wretched stuff into the wound.”
Purbright, while aware that his authority was being disgracefully flouted by the calm continuation of this illicit training session, was strongly tempted to satisfy his personal curiosity on certain points.
“Hence, I presume,” he said to Hoole, with reference to the optician’s assertion, “the loose silk shirts one sees in pictures of duels. They were not favoured simply on account of their romantic aspect?”
“Indeed, no,” declared the expert. “A severely practical precaution. And the looser the shirt, of course, the more difficult for one’s adversary accurately to delineate his target.”
“Ah,” said the inspector, pleasantly enough to encourage Mr Hoole to distil further wisdom.
“I personally tend,” Hoole continued, “to the view of the Bois de Boulogne school. It always favoured the tight, black, high-collared morning coat as presenting the narrowest target possible and the most difficult to sight against a dark background, such as a wood.”
The mayor was showing signs of finding these refinements tiresomely irrelevant to the task in hand. He came up and clapped his second and the inspector on the shoulder and said something about a wee dram.
“One hears,” said Purbright to Hoole, on the way back to the house, “references to ‘paces’ in duelling. At what distance do they...did they, rather...actually fire at each other?”
“Mmm...paces, yes. Ah, well, anything from ten to fourteen paces will answer. A pace being three feet. The poorer one’s marksmanship, the shorter a distance one should choose. Naturally.”
“Naturally,” echoed Purbright.
“That dratted scribbler,” put in Mr Hockley, with devastating contempt, “can choose half a mile, gentlemen. Half a mile. I’m telling you. And listen—I’ll still make him wish he’d never set foot in this little old bailiwick, believe me!” And he blew into the paper barrel of his proxy pistol as zestfully as a moss trooper.
In the mayor’s parlour, whisky and glasses had been placed in readiness—presumably by Mrs Hockley, for a thick woollen sock had been stretched sacrilegiously over the bottle. The mayor whipped it off, looked about him irresolutely for a moment, then stuffed the sock into a jar of candied fruits, lately presented to his lady by Gosby Vale Women’s Institute. The bottle he rubbed hastily with his sleeve before unscrewing the cap and sluicing a generous measure of Glenmochrie into the three tumblers.
Mr Hockley raised his own drink. “Powder and blood!”
Not even his abettor found himself able to respond to this ferocious toast. Mr Hoole murmured diffidently and took the tiniest of token sips at his liquor. For the inspector, it clearly was time to make an unequivocal statement of policy. Sadly, he moved his drink a little aside—into reserve, as it were—and addressed the mayor.
“I’m sorry, Mr Alderman, but this really must not go any further. You know perfectly well—as does Mr Hoole here—that what you propose, or pretend to be proposing, is against the law. Neither the chief constable nor I believe that you have any intention to harm Mr Grail. We appreciate that you are making a gesture—a dramatic gesture—in pursuance of genuinely held principles. But it must stop at that. Now, then, Mr Mayor, if you will give me your assurance to that effect, we can enjoy this friendly drink and go our ways. What do you say, sir?”
For some moments, the mayor appeared to be considering Purbright’s proposition with great solemnity. The inspector, who had been slightly taken aback by his own eloquence, awaited a sign that he might now drink his Glenmochrie with an easy conscience. Mr Hoole said nothing, but continued to smile at his fingers as if they were a class of favourite pupils who had just been subjected to a nonsensical disquisition by a visiting lecturer whom he would shortly discredit.
Mr Hockley, dark with resolution, champed portentously several times and then said: “Aye, I realize that you’re doing what you consider your duty, inspector, but there’s something that I don’t think you realize. The whole town’s up in arms over this Sunday Herald business. I tell you, I’ve not known anything like it in all my years on the council. Hey”—he jabbed the mayoress’s favourite coffee table so hard with his forefinger that whisky from Purbright’s glass jetted forth and began to dissolve its surface polish—“do you know that my telephone has scarcely stopped ringing since yesterday morning? It’s the truth that I’m telling you: the whole town...”
Purbright held up his hand. “Mr Mayor, I am not contesting that the article in the paper has caused resentment. You may well feel that your official position obliges you to lend a voice to that resentment. But this is not a frontier town in nineteenth-century America, Mr Mayor, and you are not a sheriff. If Flaxborough can be said to have such a person, I suppose it’s me. So now let us have no more talk of shooting people. Agreed?”
Mr Hockley shook his head so vehemently that Purbright fancied he could hear his jowls flapping.
“Never!” the mayor declared, and downed his whisky in one. “This has got to go forward to a finish. You can lock me up if you like, inspector” (the thought of so outlandish and embarrassing an expedient had never entered Purbright’s head) “but you cannot stop the ratepayers knowing the truth.” Suddenly he looked slyly pleased with himself. The television people, he confided, were coming along that very afternoon to interview him.
Oh, Christ, the inspector reflected, they bloody would be, wouldn’t they. There would be no holding this maniacal Rob Roy now. He glanced in despair at the optician. Mr Hoole’s pince-nez were reflecting light in such a way that it could not be determined whether his eyes were open or closed. But there was no mistaking his smile.
“Good day, gentlemen.” Purbright had risen and half turned away. He felt a little like the visitor to a closed ward in a psychiatric hospital who notices for the first time that none of the doors has a handle on the inside.
Mr Chubb received the inspector’s report in gloomy silence. Then, “I feared as much,” he said, which was not strictly true because he had not previously given the matter enough thought to feel anything more than mild curiosity.
“We could seek a court injunction, sir.”
“Against our own mayor, Mr Purbright? Oh, come now. There has been enough dreadful publicity already without our inviting more.”
Purbright pursed his lips and rubbed the side of his nose. “Judge in chambers?”
The chief constable shook his head. “The trouble with this chap Hockley is that he sees grievances everywhere. Very Scottish, you know. They haven’t our capacity to reach reasonable settlements.”
“Do I take it, then, sir, that we are to remain officially neutral? The position might be difficult to justify subsequently if somebody does actually get hurt.”
Mr Chubb gestured impatiently. He, too, had been finding the presence of the London journalists an abrasive impurity in the stream of Flaxborough life. But almost immediately he mustered a things-could-be-worse smile for his inspector’s benefit.
“Look at it this way, Mr Purbright,” he said. “We all are well aware that a duel is illegal. But what about half a duel? The law says nothing about that. And as long as this London newspaper fellow treats poor old Hockley’s challenge as a bit of nonsense and doesn’t do anything mad, such as turning up with a pistol or a sword himself, I really cannot see that there is any call for us to get involved.”
“Just as you say, sir.” Purbright turned to leave.
For several minutes, Mr Chubb remained standing by the fire-place in his office, that vantage point from which he customarily listened to the representations of his officers, rather in the manner of a Roman patrician, poised against a pillar. On this occasion, though, he was less than happy with the interview’s outcome, despite understandable pride in his spontaneous production of the “half a duel” concept. For if there was one thing calculated to disturb the chief constable more than another, it was prompt and unqualified agreement with one of his opinions by Inspector Purbright. Something, Mr Chubb felt, was going to happen. Something against sharing responsibility for which he had failed adequately to insure himself. Something pretty awful.