Broomsticks Over Flaxborough

Chapter One

Naked as on the day she was born, save for a double-looped string of amber beads and a pair of harlequin-framed spectacles, Mrs Flora Pentatuke, of 33 Partney Avenue, Flaxborough, leaped nimbly over the embers of the fire.

As she danced into the deep darkness beyond, there arose small yellow flames, stimulated by the not inconsiderable draught of her passing. Briefly they were reflected from Mrs Pentatuke’s well developed but still handsome buttocks. They illumined too the backs of weighty thighs and calf muscles. The thighs were dimpled and lacked the tautness of the calves, which looked as if they had been hardened by much exercise. As, indeed, they had; for Mrs Pentatuke was a zestful member of Flaxborough Ladies’ Golf Club.

She pranced towards the edge of the clearing, swerved and came back for another fire vault. Her hands moved in gestures of sinuous supplication. Now and again they would stretch to become rigid extensions of the strong, white, plump arms. Then Mrs Pentatuke would halt on tiptoe, shut tight her eyes behind the bejewelled glasses, and cry in a rich tenor: “O mighty spirit! We are thine! Amen evil from us deliver but!”

Other figures appeared in turn at the fire. Several jumped over it with something of the expertise of Mrs Pentatuke. Some skipped up to it resolutely enough but then seemed to find themselves wrongly footed for take-off. They went into a quick shuffle and leaped with such determination that they were winded on landing. One or two shirked the ordeal altogether by making a last-minute switch of direction and hop-skipping round the perimeter of cold ash. Among these were a portly middle-aged man with a small beard and two women who held hands and occasionally glanced at each other’s feet as if to seek reassurance that they had not lost step.

The bearded man wore a mask over the upper part of his face. The mask was made of a soft velvety material neatly hemmed around the contours of nose and cheeks. A bag of the same material was slung under his belly, with the purpose, presumably, of preserving modesty rather than anonymity.

A watcher would not have found it easy to make a tally of the number of people taking part in the ritual. Somewhere in the sky was a third-quarter moon, but rifts in the heavy, slow-moving cloud were thin and infrequent. The street lamps on Orchard Road were at least a hundred yards distant, on the other side of a double row of black poplars and a thorn hedge more than eight feet high. The glow and fitful flaming of what was left of the wood fire showed sometimes three or four, sometimes as many as eight figures at once. The total number of dancers was greater than a dozen but probably fewer than twenty.

Women outnumbered men and seemed less inhibited in their choice of costume. Even so, the example of Mrs Pentatuke’s virtually complete nudity was emulated by only two others. Most had retained one or more articles of underclothing. One somewhat diffident-looking participant wore a black one-piece bathing costume, the skirt of which she kept tugging down over errant segments of her bottom.

“O master! Give us the power of thine unlight!” The cry came from a tall, scraggy man in khaki shorts. He had halted so suddenly to make this supplication that those behind bunched up like holiday makers thwarted by the closing of an ice-cream kiosk.

Somewhere in the outer darkness there sounded off the response of Mrs Pentatuke.

“Seven times and seven times and Yah-loo-hally!”

The jam resolved itself and the round went on. Perhaps the tempo had slackened a little. Some feet dragged for a step or two; but then the stubbing of a naked toe against a stone or a root would restore vigour.

Between the dancers and a bank of foliaged shrubbery—possibly laurel or rhododendron—that screened them from the gardens of the nearest houses stood a woman who gently beat a drum with one hand while in the other she held a treble recorder. The tune was a somewhat stilted version of Percy Grainger’s “Handkerchief Dance”. The woman’s lack of height—she was not much more than four feet tall—was emphasized by her wearing a broad, square-cut cape of thick tweed and, at the end of sturdy, unstockinged legs, a pair of rock climber’s shoes. Her hair was mannishly cropped. She was, as nearly as might be judged in the near-darkness, of a stern and chunky countenance, well weathered and inclined to whiskeriness. If ecstasy possessed her, she did not show it. She was quite grotesquely cross-eyed.

Mrs Pentatuke completed two more circuits, then skipped off towards a point where three small, steady lights gleamed. She halted and drew several deep breaths, her head thrown back, her neck taut and throbbing still from the exertion of the dance. Her spectacles had slid a little down her sweat-dewed nose. She pushed them back with two fingers.

The lights were the flames of three candles, each set within a large glass jar to shield it from the night breeze. The wax of the candles appeared to be black. The jars were suspended from a branch overhanging a pair of card tables that had been set up together and spread with a sheet of black polythene.

“Behold that which is and is not and is again!” declared Mrs Pentatuke when she had got her wind back. “Yah-loo-hally!”

“Nema!” gasped a fat, grey-permed woman in woollen drawers and heavily-armoured brassiere who had just arrived at the tables.

“It is almost time,” cried Mrs Pentatuke. “I feel Him near!”

The fat woman grasped her bosom in both hands, as if to help contain any explosion that its violent heaving might portend, and nodded eagerly. Her face was much flushed.

Mrs Pentatuke selected one of a number of assorted drinking vessels that littered the tables. It was a china mug fashioned in the likeness of a can-can dancer’s be-frilled rump and over-printed: Ooo, la-la! Bottoms Up! She dipped the mug into a green plastic bucket that was more than half full of a pale amber-coloured fluid—the aggregate, presumably, of the contents of a number of bottles that had been heaped on the ground near by—and drank with a sort of dedicatory ferocity.

“Take me, Abaddon!” called Mrs Pentatuke into the upper air. “Ashtoreth, strike off my seals!”

She searched among the glasses, cups and mugs until she found a squat jar, the lid of which she unscrewed. With some of the contents of the jar—something oleaginous that smelled not unlike sage and onion stuffing—she anointed her hips and thighs. Then she replaced the lid on the jar and stood it back where it could be seen readily in the light of the candle.

The woman in the woollen drawers was drinking quickly, and with eyes tightly shut, from a goblet that she had filled at the plastic bucket. Her breathing had subsided a little but her face was still dark with blood pressure and pricked with little beads of sweat. Having drained the last of the liquor, she held the goblet a few inches in front of her face, squinted at it critically, and broke wind. “Baboon blood,” she remarked to Mrs Pentatuke, then dropped the goblet into the bucket, where it sank.

“You ladies enjoying yourselves?”

The inquirer, who had silently manifested himself beside them, was a bald-headed man with inquisitive, restless eyes, an expression of bland solicitude and a church porch voice. He wore scouting stockings rolled down to the tops of a pair of brogues. Round his waist was a string of pennons of the kind collected and displayed on windscreens by motorists anxious to be deemed hardy travellers.

Mrs Pentatuke ignored him. She was listening intently as if to some far distant but immensely significant sound. The other woman made one of her hands into a claw and cackled a little self-consciously.

The man moved nearer to Mrs Pentatuke. She remained preoccupied, her head half-turned away, absolutely still. He leaned forward and sniffed carefully once, twice, three times, then looked at the woman in the woollen drawers and nodded over his shoulder to indicate Mrs Pentatuke.

“Flying tonight, is she?”

The fat woman scowled. “Don’t be sarcastic,” she said. She waddled away towards the fire.

The man shrugged and helped himself to a drink. Mrs Pentatuke remained in an attitude of entranced abstraction. The man raised the family-sized coffee cup in which he had ladled up his liquor.

“Hell fetch the Synod,” he murmured with the rapidity of established habit, then, more feelingly: “And boil the Unreverend William Harness in cat vomit and give Bertha Pollock the whistling piles!”

“Hush!” whispered Mrs Pentatuke, snatching off her glasses to hear better.

There reached them, above the panting of the fire-leaping celebrants and the flat, monotonous accompaniment of the “Handkerchief Dance”, a strange lowing noise. It was rather like the plaint of a great bull, far off but full of menace.

The sound ceased for several seconds, then came again. This time, seemingly, from a slightly nearer point. It was hot quite a bellow, yet more urgent than a moan.

Mrs Pentatuke replaced her spectacles and pressed her hands together.

“The Master!”

Adjudging her now almost cataleptic with expectancy, the man beside her reached out with his free hand and, without interrupting the steady downing of his drink, amiably patted and lifted those parts of her person that seemed to him most deserving of commendation. Mrs Pentatuke offered no objection; but nor did she in the slightest degree respond. After a while, he turned his back on her and took another cupful of liquor. This he drank in large, hurried swallows as if in anticipation of imminent drought. He did not appear to enjoy it much.

Three or four others staggered up to the improvised bar. They leaned hands on knees long enough to regain their breath and then, chattering and giggling in admiration of the novelties among the cups, jugs and goblets, snatched their own choices and filled them at the bucket.

One was a Toby jug in the likeness of a winking clergyman with an enormous strawberry nose. Another represented a huge frog; a third, a lady with one breast too many and a head too few. At the bottom of a fourth there lurked to astound the unaware toper a beautifully executed glazed earthenware dog’s turd, very lifelike.

“A hundred and sixty-nine!” Mrs Pentatuke suddenly called out.

“Thirteen and thirteen and thirteen!” cried a man with a pernickety, high-pitched voice. He wore a deep helmet of dark felt, rather like a woman’s cloche hat, to which small horns had been stitched. The helmet was pulled down to mask the upper part of his face and was pierced with eye holes.

“And ten thirteens again!” added a bouncy, chinless woman with pince-nez and a habit of good-humouredly emphasizing everything she said by hugging whoever happened to be nearest to hand. Her sole garment, a short fur coat, undulated glossily over several gallons of friendly bosom.

“A coven of covens!”

This neatly expressed summary of their arithmetic was contributed by the woman who had sorted out the pot frog. Whilst not underdressed so radically as her companions, she presented an appearance that in its own special way was much more alarming. Buttoned boots protruded from beneath a black skirt that draped the narrow, bony-looking figure from waist to ankles. The upper part of her body was encased in an archaic black corset, from which the thin, very white shoulders and arms emerged like potato shoots. A black straw toque hat of the kind considered de rigueur by Victorian widows, was perched upon her head. Of her face, nothing could be seen, for drawn down all round the toque and knotted beneath the woman’s chin was a black veil of so close and opaque a weave that only where it was stretched tightly against the skin could an underlying pallor be discerned. The most curious, and disconcerting, thing about this veil was the woman’s election to drink directly through it, rather than raise it above her mouth. There resulted the impression of a frog trying to nuzzle its way into a black tent.

Some more dancers arrived for refreshment. There now was a decidedly festive air about the assembly.

A woman with a big, loose straw hat tipped over one eye and a pullover tied about her middle seized the bearded and masked man and charged him round and round in a private, frantic waltz.

Mrs Pentatuke’s earlier companion, the woman who had taken amiss the remark about flying, was back again; she and the recorder player, now partly undressed and presumably enjoying an intermission, had the pot of savoury-smelling ointment between them and were rubbing each other vigorously and with squeals of gratification.

A series of painfully ruptured harmonics, repeated persistently, proclaimed that the recorder had fallen into less instructed hands. The drum, too, was being much abused somewhere.

Mrs Pentatuke helped herself to more drink. The level in the bucket had fallen by several inches. She drained the mug in two eager gulps and pushed away the scraggy man in shorts who had blundered into her and was short-sightedly scrutinizing her beads, which he fed through his fingers like ticker-tape.

From much nearer than before and at greater volume came repetition of the bellowing sound.

Mrs Pentatuke stared into the dark and thrust out her arms.

“Master! Apollyon!”

Those near her fell silent. All looked towards the source of the noise, which, a few seconds later, was repeated. It sounded very like a foghorn.

One of the other women called tipsily: “Coo-ee!”

The bearded man frowned at her and made a quick gesture of prohibition with his hand. Then he got down on his knees.

So did the woman with the squint. She swayed slightly and steadied herself by squatting back on the heels of her thick shoes.

The horn boomed again. Somewhere a woman was weeping and laughing in turns. The dancing had stopped altogether. Every now and then the glow of the fire embers was blotted out as somebody moved cautiously past. Men and women seemed to be feeling their way to form a crescent-shaped assembly with the invisible horn blower at its focal point.

“Asmodeus!” A man’s voice, loud but plummily genteel like that of a bank manager playing a robber in amateur dramatics.

“Asmodeus!” “Asmodeus!” Some of the chorus sounded uncomfortably self-conscious, but others—mostly women—vied in the expression of fervour.

Once more the deep bull-cry welled up from the dark centre of the arc of watchers. It was palpable, a sound that actually had body; they could feel it pushing against their flesh. It repelled, yet summoned. From some of the women escaped whimpers of fright.

Mrs Pentatuke was the first to descry the point of dusky red, no bigger than a firework fuse, that had winked into being in the patch of darkness at which they all had been staring.

She breathed a long, hoarse, ecstatic “Ahhh!”

Very slowly, the spark grew in size until it looked like the end of a strongly-drawn cigar. It became bigger still and started to elongate. The shape the light assumed was that of a flame, but it was a strangely steady, very red flame, as if it burned in a closed and vitiated room instead of the open air. It was three or four feet above the ground.

As the power of the flame increased, it become more and more angrily crimson. Now there could be seen on each side of it something erect and curved and tapering. And below, limned in red, the lumpish outline of a vast cranium.

What the assembly saw was a beast, or a man masked in the semblance of one, with that sullenly burning candle set between its horns.

The spectacle set off a medley of cries, groans and liturgical recitals, with Mrs Pentatuke’s constantly reiterated “Take me, Master!” beating the others by several decibels.

The name Asmodeus was called out most often, but Apollyon could be heard occasionally, while one discriminating diabolist—a spindly, meek-looking young man who affected the curious sartorial conceit of a brassiere worn as buttock-sling—piped “Angra Mainyu!” whenever he got a chance.

The ex-recorder player sturdily rooted, vide St John the Divine, for “Abaddon Six Six Six!” It sounded as if she were trying to acquaint the horned figure with her telephone number.

Whoever had taken possession of the drum began now to beat it with steady, businesslike rhythm and the dance was resumed. This time the circle was tighter, with the impassive and sinister bulk of the Master at its centre.

After a round or two, some of the celebrants became afflicted with giddiness and either fell over or staggered out of orbit.

Near the abandoned scene of the fire, someone gave a long, raking cough. Then another coughed, and another. A stench of burning sulphur drifted about the circle. Mrs Pentatuke’s eyes were watering. She took no notice. She contrived to pass nearer and nearer the horned man with every circuit.

The ignition of the sulphur had induced a heap of half-charred branches and dry twigs to burst into flame. For several seconds the object of tribute could be clearly seen.

His head, surmounted by the great horns with the red flame between them, was black but gleamed wetly, as if it had just been dredged from ancient and noisome pickle. The face was a fairly even compromise between bovine and human, save that the teeth were characteristic of neither; they were small, needle-like, and bright green. The huge eyes were suggestive of a pair of hard-boiled eggs that had been jammed into raw wounds.

The Master’s body seemed small at first, a mere appendage to the great head, but it was actually that of a plump, heavily built man of average or a little over average height. The skin was of light cinnamon colour and greasy as if it had been rubbed with a cosmetic tanning oil. A pelt, possibly of a goat or a dog, was tied round the lower part of his paunch. His chest hair was black, thick and curly. He was sitting with legs apart in a folding canvas chair of the kind favoured by film directors. There lay on the ground close by his right foot a conical object, presumably the instrument that had produced the bellowing noise.

Before the renewed blaze spent itself, three of the women broke, one after another, from the ring of dancers and rushed up to the Master.

The wearer of the black bathing costume was one; her demeanour was a good deal bolder than it had been earlier, the costume had a long split in one side and a shoulder strap had parted. Kneeling, she shut her eyes and held out her arms unsteadily.

With a swirl of black cloth, there landed like a raven at her side the woman in boots and widow’s veil.

The third arrival was the best preserved-looking member of the nude extremists. She made a few sensuous pirouettes, then curled herself neatly into the Asmodean lap and entwined determined fingers in the goatskin.

There were cries of encouragement. Whoever had captured the recorder forced from it a succession of strangled shrieks. The pace of the drumming increased. Those who were still dancing tried at first to keep step, then either switched into spasmodic individual leaps and jigs or surrendered to exhaustion and dropped to the ground.

The veiled woman and the one in the bathing costume moved off in attitudes of mutual commiseration towards what remained of the liquor supply.

The fire flickered and died.

For a while the satanic candle continued to glow. Its rays falling on the limbs of the woman contentedly grappled to the torso of the Master rendered them the colour of pottery. Then, startlingly, the light was snuffed out.

It seemed that a great door of darkness had closed upon the focal drama of the rites. No one moved. The only sound was the intoning, deep in the throat of Mrs Pentatuke, of the Lord’s Prayer in reverse.

The orison was correct in form, but her heart was not in it. By the time she got to “...bread daily our day...” the words were being delivered hastily and without thought. She had not yet reached the beginning when her voice was drowned by another.

“I HAVE CHOSEN!”

The words boomed out with a more than human amplitude.

There were murmurs of excitement, accompanied by some thwacks on the drum. A woman in a nightdress looked about her nervously and then after some hesitation, called out: “O mighty Pan!” She pronounced it “Pen”.

Some way off, a car engine started. Headlamp beams swung among trees and disappeared round the end of a driveway. The doors of another car slammed. Small shrieks and giggles were squeezed here and there out of the dark. A bottle splintered musically against stone. In the glimmer of the sole surviving candle, the woman in the bathing costume was dancing dolefully with the empty liquor bucket up-ended over her head.

It was clear that the ceremony, although not yet at an end, had entered the phase of independent interpretation.

Mrs Pentatuke stood alone, statuesque, indifferent to the slight chill borne now in the breeze from the east. She stared at the point in the distance where she knew to be a small grove of ash trees, the trees of the Old Religion whose magic was still respected by those otherwise hard-headed farmers who left them undisturbed even in the middle of ploughland. She waited.

Ten minutes had passed when a pinhead of dusky red appeared exactly in the line of Mrs Pentatuke’s steady gaze. Quickly it bloomed to incandescence. Stems and branches of trees stood out in scarlet tracery against the blackness beyond. Up and down and about, the devil’s candle moved. A squeal, as of shocked discovery, rose from the grove. Soon another followed, but this second cry was succeeded by a series of short whoops not at all indicative of distress.

The hour bell in the tower of Flaxborough Parish Church began to strike twelve. It was no longer the eve of Saint Walburga, but the morning of May Day.

The red flame in the ash grove waved erratically once or twice, then went out.

Mrs Pentatuke slowly unclenched her hands. Only later did she discover that the strong, carefully manicured nails had engraved in each palm four little blood-filled crescents.

Chapter Two

The following account appeared half-way down the third column of page five of the Flaxborough Citizen dated Friday, 2 May.

FOLK AND FUN: OLD CEREMONIES RECALLED

The quarterly “Revel” of the Flaxborough, Chalmsbury and Brocklestone Folklore Society attracted a good attendance when it was held on Wednesday in the grounds of Aleister Lodge, by kind permission of Mrs G. Gloss, OBE.

Study subject for the evening was “The Survival of Roodmas”, Roodmas being the ancient festival associated with the last day of April. A number of members brought masks and decorative articles, made by themselves, modelled on traditional examples.

The very successful dance session was led by Mr and Mrs H. Pearce, Mr and Mrs H. Hall, and Mesdames G. Gooding and F. Pentatuke. The caller was Mrs Pentatuke, who also agreed to take charge of the Devotional Half-Hour, in the absence through indisposition of Mrs H. K. Framlington, JP.

Mr G. Gooding was responsible for the erection of a tastefully decorated “quaffing bench”. Faggot-master was Mr J. Cowdrey.

The music was provided by Miss A. Parkin, who rendered selections on recorder and tabor.

Refreshment organizers: Mrs Pearce and Mr J. Bottomley.

Winner of the President’s Maypole Trophy for best living custom demonstration: Miss Edna Hillyard.

The Flaxborough Citizen was a weekly newspaper and it went to press on Thursday afternoon. Anything that happened later than lunch time but before tea on a Thursday might, if it were sensational enough, be accommodated by special dispensation of the editor and at the price of great gloom and recrimination in the machine room. Five o’clock, though, was the absolute limit. At five, the last page of metal would be locked with its fellow in their forme and trundled off to the mangle for the matrix to be pressed.

Thus it was that the paper containing the report of Miss Hillyard’s success in the Revel competition made no mention of her subsequent disappearance. For although it would not be true to say that no one missed Edna throughout Thursday, she was known to be unpredictable and quite liable to take a trip on impulse or to present herself at the home of a friend, with an off-hand yet perfectly confident request for hospitality. In the offices of her employers, Flaxborough Corporation, her periodic absences were noted with irritation but not alarm. Her landlady in Cheviot Road was used to knocking at Edna’s bedroom door without response on two or three mornings a month.

On Thursday evening, however, shortly after six, a discovery was made that could be disregarded only by the most phlegmatic among Miss Hillyard’s acquaintances.

Two boys who had climbed through a break in the hedge enclosing private woods and meadowland on the north side of Orchard Road were intrigued to see that a small, bright red car had somehow come to be parked beneath some trees. They approached it cautiously, encouraged by the remoteness of its resting place to hope for glimpsed indiscretions. But the car proved to be empty.

The older boy tried the door on the driver’s side. It opened. Something white and flimsy slipped off the seat and fell to the ground among wet dead leaves. The other pounced, trying to save what had fallen from getting dirty. He brushed it clumsily, leaving brown streaks.

“Look out, clot. You’ll have it absolutely filthy.”

The older boy snatched. He looked at what he held, then at the neat pile on the seat.

“Christ, they’re a bird’s.”

Flushing, he draped the muddied slip on the seat back. It flowed down into a heap beside the other things. He tried to make it look neat, undisturbed, by giving it a few nervous tweaks and pats, but had no success. His companion looked on impassively.

“Come on. Let’s scarpa.”

The older boy stepped back, ready to shut the car door.

The other put out a restraining hand; he was staring now at the clothing with keener interest.

“Hey, do you know what? She’s taken the flippin’ lot off. Jersey, skirt... Look, that’s her what-d’you-call it. Stockings, an’ all.” A small hesitation. “And them.” He pointed, awed.

“So what?” The older boy pushed him aside and closed the door as quietly as he could. “Come on.”

Neither, in his need to seem worldly, wanted to admit to the other the feeling of unease that the incident had roused in him. But as they walked back to the road, the younger perplexed, the older pretending nonchalance, there grew between them the unvoiced acceptance that somebody else would have to be told.

There was a telephone box near the junction of Orchard Road and Marshside Road. The older boy regarded it doubtfully, then swung the door open.

“I suppose we ought, really,” he said. “I mean, we don’t have to say who we are.”

He wiped his hands down the seams of his trousers, picked up the receiver and with great deliberation dialled nine-nine-nine.

Three minutes later, he rejoined his companion.

“Right thick one, that,” he complained. “Kept asking my name and address.”

“You didn’t tell him?”

“Course not.”

“What’s he going to do about the car and that?”

“How would I know? Expect they’ll come over and take a look round. We’d better not be hanging about.”

The boys hurried round the corner and slipped into the shelter of an alley a few yards along Marshside Road. For nearly half an hour they kept watch and listened for the two-note bray of a police car. Then, hungry and disillusioned, they went their separate ways home.

They were not to know that a patrol car had happened to be at the far end of Orchard Road, beyond the crematorium, at the time of their call to police headquarters in Fen Street, and that a radio message had long since sent its crew to investigate.

The driver of the car was Constable Palethorp, a reticent, phlegmatic officer whose eyes were as expressive as holes in a blanket.

He was accompanied by a lean, restless man. Constable Brevitt always rode as passenger in the patrol car. This was a precaution ordained by his superiors. Fully aware of Flaxborough’s distinction in having on its Force an officer who would have managed splendidly and perhaps even single-handed the suppression of the Indian Mutiny, they had no wish to test the compatibility of his panache with the requirements of the Road Traffic Acts.

“Go on, Fred—clip the stupid bugger into the ditch!” urged Constable Brevitt. He glared at Palethorp, who had braked and was watching patiently an old man who had dismounted from his cycle opposite the crematorium gates and now waited, directly in their path, for an oncoming car to pass.

“His road as much as ours,” Palethorp murmured.

Brevitt smote his own forehead with the flat of his hand and turned up his eyes. He suddenly reached over and held down the horn button. The old man jumped so violently that the bicycle slewed from his grip and fell over. It rocked once or twice and the handlebars quivered. Palethorp was put in mind of a horned animal, fatally shot but trying to get up again.

Brevitt grinned.

Palethorp said nothing. When the other car had gone, he pulled out to give the old man plenty of room and drove on. In his mirror he saw the old man heaving the cycle upright—wearily, yet with a sort of solicitude as if it were indeed a creature and not a machine.

Brevitt leaned forward against his safety belt and scrutinized the road ahead. In time with some tune within his own head, his right fist hammered gently into his left palm.

“Hang on.” He pointed. “There’s a break there, just before the bend.”

The car stopped. In the high thorn hedge a gap had been torn near the ground.

Palethorp spared it no more than a glance, but Brevitt jumped out and squatted to peer through. Experimentally, he squeezed head and some chest into the hole.

“No point,” Palethorp called. “It’s perfectly easy to get in the proper way. Past the house.”

“House?” Brevitt looked disappointed but he got back into his seat.

“Mrs Gloss. This is all part of her place. It’s open ground past those trees. And if there is a car there, either somebody sneaked it up the drive during the night or it belongs to a friend of hers. Simply enough settled by asking.”

The house was a 1928 Tudor mansion, with half-timber facings over roughened white concrete. The steel-framed casement windows had criss-crossed lead strip appliqué with here and there a bottle-glass inset. A complete set of shutters had been grafted in 1937. There was a round dovecot on a pole in the centre of the broad gravel forecourt. The drive from Orchard Road was flanked, where it opened into the forecourt, by two old-style street lamps. One carried the sign “Drury Lane”, the other, “Ye Strande“.

The patrol car crunched to a halt beside the porch, a creosoted half-barn that gave deep shelter to the big white-painted front door. Beside the door, and matching its heavy, ornamental hinges was a wrought-iron bell pull. Palethorp took firm hold of its handle and drew it down. Inside the house there sounded the unctuous double-boyng of an electric chime.

Almost at once they heard footsteps approach across a hard surface. They were brisk and spiky. Palethorp diagnosed a plump woman, short in the leg, busy. Mrs Gloss herself. Not one of the days for hired help. She was not going to relish silly inquiries by policemen.

“Yes?” The door stood open. Mrs Gertrude Gloss, OBE, had the slightly drawn look over one eye that betokened a struggle with hangover that was not yet quite won. Otherwise, she appeared alert, well groomed and not unobliging.

“We are police officers, ma’am.” The superfluous introduction was Brevitt’s. “We’ve had reports concerning an abandoned vehicle.” He looked accusingly at Mrs Gloss’s bosom, as if prompted by association of ideas.

“I don’t think I understand, officer. But perhaps you both had better come in.”

Palethorp noted the return play of the word “officer”. He recognized a gentle warning. Only those whose social or official status allowed them to strew other people’s paths of duty with the flints of criticism employed that form of address in quite so confident yet off-hand a manner.

The entrance hall was tiled in bright terra-cotta. In one corner stood a big stone jar from which splayed tropical grasses. A Tudor arch led to a white staircase laid with new-looking, flower patterned carpet. Each of four doorways, all similarly arched, had a little coloured plaster shield at its apex. Through one half-open door Brevitt glimpsed white porcelain. Downstairs lav, he ruminated, sensing need to be respectful.

Mrs Gloss led them to the lounge. They saw a wide bow-fronted china cabinet packed densely with pieces of porcelain, glasses, miniature jugs and warming pans in varnished copper, little ivory monkeys and elephants, a pair of cigarette cases decorated with designs contrived out of butterfly wings, and a set of model cowbells in six sizes, souvenirs of Chamonix.

Against the opposite wall stood a mahogany-cased grandfather clock with a brass face and a moon phase indicator. The clock was not working. Four oil paintings, all seascapes in heavy gilt frames, had been hung in line and exactly equidistantly from one another across a third wall. The room also contained a large oval rosewood table, a combined radiogram and television set camouflaged as a Jacobean sideboard, and a coterie of armchairs, obese and befrilled.

Across the back of one of the armchairs had been tossed a short fur coat.

Mrs Gloss did not sit down. Nor did she invite the policemen to do so.

“According to this message”—Palethorp made their errand sound an altogether unreasonable affair that he personally much regretted—“the so-called abandoned car is on your property, Mrs Gloss.”

She turned with a faint smile from Palethorp to Brevitt as if inviting him to supply the second half of the joke.

“Red sports car,” Brevitt said. “Under some trees.”

“According to the message,” insisted Palethorp.

“Abandoned?”

“Well—parked. As I say, under some trees. And there was some clothing in it.”

“Female apparel.” Brevitt sniffed, looked away, and probed one ear-hole with a piece of match which he had taken from an inner pocket of his tunic.

“How do you know the car isn’t mine, constable?”

“A sports car, madam?” Palethorp’s tone conveyed reproof.

“No, it isn’t, as a matter of fact. But I’ve a fair idea who the owner might be.”

“You do, madam?” Palethorp, looking suddenly pleased, glanced at Brevitt. Brevitt thriftily put away his match end and from another pocket produced a notebook.

“If we could just have his name, then, madam...”

“Her name,” Mrs Gloss corrected. She frowned. “Look, how did this nonsense start, anyway? Who sent you people here?”

Brevitt’s instinct was to tell her that questions were for policemen to ask and that what he wanted from her was answers and look sharp about it or else, but he managed to keep silent and let Palethorp mumble something about a nine-nine-nine call from someone who had looked inside the car.

“A trespasser, you mean,” said Mrs Gloss.

“It would seem so,” Palethorp agreed uncomfortably.

Mrs Gloss shook her head over the sad ineptitude of authority and said well, they’d better all go together and have a look and get the matter settled.

They followed a path round the side of the house and crossed a lawn that lay within an irregular embankment set with rocks and covered by masses of tiny white and yellow and purple flowers. Beyond the bank, a smaller lawn flanked an open-fronted summer-house made of boarding covered with bark strips. Hanging within from its roof on three fine chains was a round metal bowl, decoratively pierced. Brevitt supposed it to be some kind of colander for growing bulbs. Palethorp had once inadvertently attended Benediction at St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Southgate while trailing an indecent exposure suspect; he recognised a censer.

“It’s quicker this way,” Mrs Gloss explained, as they rounded the summer house and filed through a small wicket gate into a field. “The drive goes on past the house on the other side. They can get a tractor in when the grass needs mowing.” She pointed. “There you are—there’s the car you’re making all the fuss about.”

Scarlet glinted against the darkness of closely set trees about a hundred yards away on their right. They walked towards it, Mrs Gloss watching the ground as she stepped carefully in her high-heeled shoes.

Once or twice she tripped and would have fallen but for the ready and strong arm of Constable Brevitt. No corsets, he reflected after the most nearly democratic of these encounters had impressed him not unpleasurably with the warmth, scent and volume of her person. That evening and on several subsequent occasions before the memory faded, he was vicariously to award himself that privileged relationship with Mrs Gloss which he called “having a tit in each ear”.

Palethorp noticed, but did not remark upon, a circular patch of calcined earth, a couple of yards in diameter, where evidently there had been a wood fire within the last day or two. The evening breeze stirred pale, flocculent ash and blackened twig fragments.

The field was of perhaps six acres. It showed no signs of recent cultivation. Palethorp guessed it would be poor growing land. There was a shallow declivity near the centre where stood a group of tall ash trees; drainage probably was not too good. And the ranks of trees that enclosed the field on three sides would deprive crops of much light and nutriment.

Palethorp peered again at the grove in the middle of the field; it was now directly on their left and about thirty yards distant.

“What’s that thing in between the trees?” he asked.

“I’ve really no idea,” Mrs Gloss replied cheerily. “It seems to be some kind of old monument but I don’t think there’s an inscription or anything.”

“Looks a bit like a vault from here,” Palethorp said. “You know—like in churchyards.”

Brevitt, too, was staring now towards the table-like structure of greenish stone standing crookedly among the trees. He looked quickly back at Mrs Gloss when he heard her laugh.

Were churchyards comical, then? Brevitt wouldn’t thought so.

“As a matter of fact,” said the amused Mrs Gloss, “we’ve always called it the altar.”

Palethorp smiled politely and they walked the rest of the way to the red sports car in silence.

The two policemen padded round the car, giving it a preliminary scrutiny. They looked judiciously at each wheel in turn, examined the licence holder, eyed both number plates and gently kicked a front tyre that seemed softer than the others.

“Whose did you say it was, madam?” Brevitt had his notebook out again.

“I didn’t say,” Mrs Gloss corrected, “but I think it belongs to a lady called Miss Hillyard.” She watched Brevitt’s labouring pencil for a moment and added: “Miss Edna Hillyard.” He crossed out what he had written and began again.

Palethorp put a hand on the driver’s door. “Address?” he prompted, very quietly, then shook his head. “No, never mind. We can soon check if it’s really necessary. If she’s the Miss Hillyard I’m thinking of, she works in the Corporation Offices.”

“That’s right: she does.”

Brevitt wrote down some more. Then he asked: “Did Miss Hillyard have your permission to leave her car here?”

Mrs Gloss raised her brows, pouted. “Yes, in a general way. All my friends know they can park round here if they wish. There’s not a lot of room in front of the house.”

“I suppose you had company yesterday, did you, Mrs Gloss? I was wondering about all these wheel marks, as a matter of fact.” Palethorp indicated a complex of tyre tracks across the grass. “Ah...” His face brightened with sudden comprehension. “Of course. It will have been those folk song people. Right?”

Mrs Gloss challenged neither the appellation nor the plain hint in Palethorp’s tone that the sort of citizens who went hey-ding-a-ding-ing round a wet field when they could be watching television like everybody else were more to be pitied than harassed by the law. She simply confirmed that there had been a little social function the previous evening and suggested that Miss Hillyard might have had trouble in starting her motor afterwards and had been given a lift home by one of the others.

Palethorp opened the door on which he had been lightly leaning.

He looked around the inside of the car, then stretched across and gathered in his capacious hand the clothing on the passenger seat.

“The party who phoned said something about these,” he said.

Mrs Gloss looked annoyed for the first time in the interview.

“Well, I think they had a nerve. Not content with trespassing and breaking into somebody else’s car...”

“No sign of breaking,” Palethorp interrupted.

“All right. Opening it without permission, then. Anyway, after all that, they have the impertinence to interfere with personal property and then, if you please, to bring you people over on a...” Mrs Gloss nearly said “fool’s errand”, but diplomatically substituted “wasted journey”.

Brevitt watched the other policeman sort through the clothing and lay it, one article at a time, on the car bonnet. It consisted of a bright orange sweater, a short skirt in dark green corded velvet, white nylon slip, tights, a pair of black lace briefs and a matching brassière.

“And what do you make of those, madam?” asked Brevitt. He sounded rather pleased with himself.

“What do you mean, make of them? I suppose they’re the girl’s laundry. She’ll not thank you for getting them dirty again on there.”

Obediently, Palethorp gathered up the clothes. But instead of putting them back in the car, he looked them over again with a dubious expression.

“Funny that they should be an exact set,” he said. “If they’re laundry, that is. I’d have thought there’d be more than just the one each of some of them.”

“What my colleague means,” Brevitt explained, “is that it looks more as if the lady in question had stripped off.” As used by Brevitt, the word “stripped” was so evocative that Palethorp had to thrust his head inside the car and pretend further search in order to conceal his embarrassment.

Mrs Gloss stared sternly at Brevitt. “That is the most preposterous suggestion, constable. You seem to have forgotten that I am the owner of this property. People who come here do so at my invitation and for perfectly respectable purposes. What on earth do you think goes on here? Nudist conventions?”

Flustered and contrite, Brevitt mumbled scraps of a formula about “routine inquiries”. He was relieved—and not a little surprised—when Mrs Gloss’s tightly-set lips twitched and then parted in mischievous amusement.

“Pulling your leg, laddie,” she confided gently, leaning very close and giving his thigh a playful tap with the backs of her fingers. At once she stepped away again to watch Palethorp’s exploration of the back seat of the car, but not before Brevitt had caught a whiff of liquor of one of the more boudoir-ish kinds. Sherry, he thought. Or maybe raisin wine.

“I think,” Palethorp said when he had emerged from the car, “that we had better leave everything as it is, Mrs Gloss. We’ll have to make a report, of course...” He paused. “The lady’s shoes, by the way—they don’t seem to be here.”

“Why should they be? People don’t take shoes to the laundry.”

“No, of course not.” He left it at that.

They walked back to the house, where the policemen declined Mrs Gloss’s offer of a cup of tea “or something”. She promised to telephone as soon as the car was collected by its owner, and stood between them at the porch to give the arm of each a parting squeeze.

“Funny,” ruminated Palethorp on their way back to the station, “how you can be wrong about somebody. I thought at first she was going to be very upstage. ‘Orficer’, he mimicked, remembering. “Yet she turned out quite nice, really.”

Brevitt loudly sucked air between his lip and a couple of teeth in an attempt to dislodge a remnant of breakfast bacon. “I know what she wants...” He explored the teeth with the tip of his tongue while he reached for the pocket in which his match end was kept. “...and I don’t reckon I’d mind giving it her, either.”

Palethorpe took his eyes off the road long enough to give Brevitt a look of wondering disapproval.

In the lounge of Aleister Lodge, Mrs Gloss poured herself a tumbler of wine, drank a quarter of it and carried the rest to where a plum-coloured telephone stood in a window embrasure. She dialled a Flaxborough number.

“Have you,” she asked someone she addressed as Amy, “any idea of where our prize-winner got to last night? After the presentation, I mean.”

Amy said she personally had been too busy searching for a lost recorder to notice the comings and goings of others, but why the concern?

“She has not collected her motor-car and some policemen have called about it.”

This evinced an awed echo of the word “policemen”. Mrs Gloss described the visit in greater detail.

“Of course I remember she was there at roll-call,” Amy said slowly after a pause, “and I did see her taking part in the last dance before my instrument was mislaid but... Oh, dear, I wish I could be more helpful. I suppose she could not have...”

“Yes?” prompted Mrs Gloss.

“Well, gone home with... You know—afterwards, I mean...”

“Now that is out of the question. Completely and utterly.”

Amy had to agree. She suggested two or three alternative escorts. Mrs Gloss said she would call them. She did not sound enthusiastic.

When she had rung off, she poured more wine and propped herself against a pile of cushions in the largest armchair. Soon there entered the room a cinnamon-coloured cat so plump that it appeared to be wearing an extra fur. It crossed the carpet with a condescending waddle and heaved itself up beside Mrs Gloss.

“Hello, Hecate,” said Mrs Gloss. She rubbed the cat’s chin and gazed at its all but closed eyes.

“And where the devil has Sister Edna flown off to, eh?”

For a second, Hecate opened topaz eyes wide and stopped purring. Then it settled again into somnolent contemplation of Mrs Gloss.

Chapter Three

“If Lucillite is in your home, I’ve brough good news from Dixon-Frome!”

Detective Inspector Purbright looked at the apparition on his doorstep and tried to relate it to the more familiar aspects of life in Tetford Drive at a quarter to nine on a Friday morning.

Standing before him was a young woman dressed in a costume of what appeared to be white plastic. Basically a doublet, tightly belted and flaring below the waist, the garment was stiffened at the shoulders into what Purbright could only compare to aeroplane engine cowlings. From these a short cape hung at the girl’s back. She wore white tights and white plastic boots and carried a white plastic satchel.

“You’re not Supergirl?” inquired the inspector, with what he judged to be the appropriate blend of humility and hopefulness.

For reply, the girl pointed to her chest. The name LUCILLITE in pale blue lettering was surrounded by a representation of golden rays.

“Have you got the three packets like the advert said on telly?” asked the girl. Her large, very earnest eyes made the question sound extremely important.

Purbright abashedly shook his head.

“You sure? I mean, you’ll not get the Gift, unless. Hadn’t you better ask the wife?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t think that would do any good. We don’t happen to have bought any”—he glanced again at her name-plate—“Lucillite”.

“What, not the Introductory Offer?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Don’t you want the Gift?”

“Perhaps the opportunity will come again one day.” Purbright smiled and edged back in preparation for shutting the door.

“But the Lucies are only here for today. We go on to some other roads tomorrow.”

“Lucies?”

“Yes—us.” The girl gestured towards the road. Purbright stepped out from the doorway and saw with something of a shock that his caller was but one unit of a whole cadre. Girls in exactly similar garments were standing at doors, opening and shutting gates, or staring up at windows from one end of Tetford Drive to the other. The scene had something about it comparable with the discovery of the overnight infestation of one’s garden by a colony of cabbage whites, creatures individually engaging but collectively intimidating.

“I tell you what,” said the girl. “Never mind about the packets—see if you can get the answer to one of the Simple Questions.”

Purbright looked at his watch. “I think I’d rather finish my breakfast, if it’s all the same to you.”

The girl treated this observation with the indifference it deserved. She glanced at a card she had taken from her tunic pocket and recited carefully:

“What is the secret of Lucillite’s power to give your wash the sort of lightness and brightness and whiteness that will set all your neighbours talking?”

Purbright adopted an expression of intense mental effort.

“Only...” prompted the girl, watching him.

“...Lucillite...” she added, a few moments later.

Purbright shook his head. “I’m being really very stupid.”

“..has...”

“No, it’s no use. I’m sorry.”

“...sa...saponi...saponif...” The girl mouthed the syllables with all the patience of a teacher of deaf Hottentots.

Purbright felt the burden of his obligation becoming too much to be borne much longer.

“It’s no good, really it isn’t,” he said firmly. “Why don’t you try the lady next door? She’s more intelligent, and she gets around more than I do.”

The girl sighed. She looked up and down the road, then came close.

“Only Lucillite has saponified granules.”

Purbright snapped his fingers. “Of course!” He knuckled his brow in self-reproach. “The things one can forget!”

For the first time in the interview the girl’s solemn expression thawed. She gave him a little chin-up smile that wrinkled her nose.

“You can have the Gift now.”

Opening the satchel at her side, she took out and handed to Purbright first a sample packet of Lucillite Family Wash Granules, then—reverently—a yellow plastic frame made in the form of a spoked wheel, the spaces between the spokes containing polythene windows of graded degrees of smokiness.

“The Gift?” Purbright asked softly.

She nodded. “It’s a Scintillometer. You see...” She took it from him. “You turn these little windows against your shirt or whatever you want to wash until you get one that matches, then it says here”—she indicated the rim of the wheel—“how much Lucillite you have to use to get it white.”

“And bright.”

“That’s right.” She handed him back the Scintillometer and began re-fastening the strap of her satchel. “Pity you didn’t have those packets, though. You could have gone in for the Paradise Island competition.”

“Gosh,” said Purbright.

“It’s a special promotion for Dixon-Frome and it’s because there’s been a lot of consumer-resistance in places like...” She broke off, looked up from her satchel-strapping. “What’s this place called again?”

“Flaxborough.”

“Yeah, Flaxborough. But I can’t give you the invite, not without the packet tops. I only wish I could.”

“Never mind,” said Purbright. “I’ve always got these, haven’t I?” He cheerily waved the packet of Lucillite and the Scintillometer and withdrew.

Half an hour later, in an office that would not even have made bottom reading on the Scintillometer, Inspector Purbright began to read a report in the laboured but legible handwriting of Constable Palethorp. He was less than half-way through when he heard the sound of scrap iron in epilepsy that signified that somebody was climbing the spiral staircase from the ground floor.

“I thought you might like some tea.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you, Sid.”

Purbright cleared a space on the desk top to accommodate the two large mugs borne by Detective Sergeant Love. He cautiously sipped at the steaming rim of one of them without taking his eyes from Palethorp’s report.

“What,” he asked, “is all this about an abandoned car and folk singers and laundry, for God’s sake?”

Love’s face, pink and patient like a boy martyr’s, held in addition something of the innocent pleasure of the preinformed.

“You mean the Edna Hillyard business?”

“If it’s her car that’s over at Orchard Road, yes. Although why we should assume that it’s been abandoned I really cannot see.”

“Funny place to leave a car,” Love said.

“It would have been at one time. What you call funny places are the only ones where you can leave a car nowadays.”

The inspector read to the end of the report. He shrugged. “Well, unless this girl has been reported missing...”

“She hasn’t,” Love assured him. “Not as per the present. But she’s not a girl. She’s thirty-four.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, you know who she is, don’t you?”

Purbright looked blank.

“Niece of old Rupert Hillyard,” Love supplied. “She came here from Glasgow with her mother in 1954 and went to the High School for a year. She was seventeen.” The sergeant smiled sadly, as if at some fragrant memory.

Purbright good-naturedly gave him a glance of inquiry.

“I remember the age, actually,” Love said, “because she came into the station to ask if one of us would sign her passport application. It was the year Flaxborough was knocked out of the Eastern League. She would have been, wait a minute...yes, twenty-four when Doctor Hillyard died in prison. Did I say twenty-four—no, twenty-five, it must have been. Good lord, nine years...”

“Sid. Please.” The inspector had raised his hand. “We’ve established the woman’s age. All we want to know now is whether or not she’s come to any harm. I’ve yet to be convinced that whoever made that nine-nine-nine call wasn’t trying to be funny.”

“Would you like somebody to ask around? She works for the Council. They might know something in her department.”

“Tomorrow, Sid. Wait until tomorrow. If she hasn’t turned up by then, we’ll take some action.”

Love nodded, then rubbed his chin. “Of course they do reckon,” he said, “that she’s a bit...” His lips pouted, seeking le mot injuste.

“Oh, naturally,” said the inspector. He measured with lacklustre eye what was left of his tea, then quickly drank it down.

The telephone rang just as Love was about to leave the room. The inspector motioned him to stay.

“All right. Bring him along.”

Purbright put back the phone. He straightened some papers, half rose to glance at the condition of the only other chair, sat back, sniffed.

“Guess who’s coming to see us.”

Love co-operatively took the empty mugs off the desk and put them on top of the filing cabinet.

“The vicar,” said Purbright. He joined fingertips and smiled tightly in parody of pastoral solicitude.

For an instant, Love looked alarmed. Then he frowned and made rapid survey of the office as if expecting that something particularly unseemly had been left about.

The door opened with the suddenness of a sprung trap. “Christ!” said Love, spinning to face it.

He found himself regarded fixedly by the small, angry eyes of a man not much more than five feet tall but of considerable shoulder breadth. The man, whose complexion was like an open stove, wore a suit of the peculiarly apposite colour of coke.

“Do you habitually blaspheme, young man, or was that a genuine case of mistaken identity?”

The Reverend Clement James Grewyear, MA, D D, Vicar of Flaxborough, continued to stare at the speechless Love until the sergeant took refuge in urgent exploration of one of the drawers of the filing cabinet. He then turned to the inspector, but did not abate the gravity of his scowl.

“Do take a seat, vicar.” Purbright had stood up behind his desk and was indicating the visitor’s chair.

Mr Grewyear hitched up his coke-coloured trouser legs and lowered himself into the chair without taking his eyes off the inspector. Purbright reflected that the vicar seemed to take literally the definition of his calling as that of a fisher of men: his gaze had all the tenacity of a two-hundred-pound line.

“You must come with me immediately to the church, Purbright.”

The inspector waited for amplification, but Mr Grewyear added nothing. He clearly expected Purbright to respond forthwith. Several seconds went by.

“Something has happened at the church, has it, sir?”

“That,” snapped Mr Grewyear, “is putting it very mildly indeed. Come along, man.” He stood up.

“I’m sorry, vicar, but you really must be more explicit. Are you referring to an accident? A crime? I have to know the kind of assistance you want me to give.”

Mr Grewyear said coldly and quietly: “You are not one of my communicants, I believe, Purbright.”

Purbright shrugged in apology for recusance.

The vicar nodded. “No, well, you will probably be none the wiser when I tell you that somebody—or something—has been perpetrating abominations.”

“That certainly sounds serious.”

“It is serious. You do not suppose I should be here otherwise, do you?” There was a smokiness in the vicar’s eye that warned Purbright not to dispute the point: even though he was not a churchgoer, the Chief Constable was, and Mr Grewyear was obviously sufficiently stoked up to carry his complaints a good deal further than Fen Street.

“Sergeant.”

“Sir?” Love disinterred himself from the filing cabinet.

“The vicar believes that there has been a case of sacrilege at the Parish Church. Will you accompany him there and let him show you what has been going on. You’d better pick up Harper on the way. Tell him to take his bag and a camera.”

Mr Grewyear looked at Love as a wealthy hospital patient might have regarded an apprentice plumber co-opted to remove his prostate.

“The sergeant will make a note of the details,” Purbright explained, “and if he thinks it necessary I shall come over myself a little later. But I am sure you will find him a most experienced and capable officer.”

Saying nothing more, but dark with doubt, the vicar rose and walked to the door. Love scurried to open it and followed him out.

The vicar’s car was at the police station entrance. It was an American-built Ford of about the same floor area as the Lady Chapel in the parish church.

Love and Harper sat in the back and wondered how the five-foot vicar was going to pilot the machine from a driving position that obliged him actually to reach upward in order to grasp the wheel. He showed no hesitation, however, and soon the vast car was sweeping along East Street towards the Market Place.

From the rear, Mr Grewyear’s upstretched arms gave him the appearance of administering extreme unction to those pedestrians who had stepped or been jostled from the narrow pavement and were now leaping out of the way of the car’s elephantine fenders.

Love drew Harper’s attention to the tinted windows. “Like being under water,” he whispered.

Harper nudged him and whispered back, indicating their driver: “No wonder the little bugger needs a periscope, then.” He laughed noiselessly.

Love, a little shocked, quickly looked the other way.

The vicar drove across the Market Place, passed the wrong side of a traffic bollard into Spoongate and parked beneath a “Funerals Only” sign near a gateway in the church railings.

Without waiting to see the policemen evacuate the rear hall of his car, he strutted along a path and disappeared through the wicket in the south door.

Love and Harper found him standing by the font. They walked up to him. Speechlessly, he pointed.

The heavy, elaborately carved stone cover was in its usual raised position and a plain wooden lid, padlocked, lay on the font ready for removal at baptismal services. To the very centre of this lid something had been transfixed by a butcher’s metal skewer.

The policemen stepped up on the plinth for a closer view.

The skewered object was a dead frog. Between its out-stretched rear legs, there had been drawn a cross. A black felt-tipped pen seemed to have been used. Farther down were words, printed by the same means.

Ad te omnis caro veniet.

Harper wrinkled his nose in distaste, but Love leaned nearer and examined the frog with considerable interest. Then he peered at the inscription and turned towards the vicar.

“What’s the French all about, then, padre?”

“French?”

“This bit of writing.”

Mr Grewyear, who hated being called “padre” perhaps more than anything else in the world, wrestled for some time with his anger before he trusted himself to reply.

Very quietly, and with eyes closed, he said at last: “Those words, sergeant, are Latin. I construe: ‘Unto Thee shall all flesh come’.”

Love gazed at the frog with innocent amiability. “Quite neat, really,” he said, “when you come to think about it.”

Harper had opened his case and was busily assembling camera and tripod. He held a light-meter at arm’s length and regarded it gloomily. Then he stared in turn at the roof, the great West window and the rood screen, as if debating which one of those obstacles he would ask the vicar to have removed.

“You will record the scoundrel’s fingerprints, of course, officer,” said Mr Grewyear.

Harper shook his head and sucked breath through his teeth in noisy denial. “Never in this world, padre. What, from wood like that?” He rummaged in his case, drew out a flash bulb, and began screwing it into an attachment to the camera.

When the frog had been photographed from several angles the vicar set off towards the nave altar, imperiously beckoning the policemen to follow.

With outstretched arm, he indicated the lectern.

This was fashioned in brass in the likeness of a huge and fierce-visaged eagle. At first, neither noticed anything odd about it. Then Love spotted something suspended just beneath the bird’s neck.

It was a dead mouse and it had been hung from its tail with the aid of a piece of wire in such a way that the great brass bird appeared to be about to eat it.

“Well, I never,” Love said, hoping to please.

The vicar muttered something about satanic rites.

Harper took four more photographs after brushing the eagle’s neck with some fine grey powder and saying “Nix” to himself.

By now, several visitors to the church had begun to show interest in the proceedings.

An elderly couple, having discovered the sacrificial frog, were casting indignant glances in the direction of the vicar and his companions, whom they apparently assumed to be vivisectionists.

A woman holding two small girls by the hand pretended to read a ledger stone while awaiting her opportunity to see what had been done to the lectern.

The boldest approach was made by an American, who cordially invited Harper to advise what shutter speed and aperture would do justice to that wonderful old church. He was pretty old himself—a lean, brown, sinewy vine of a man, hung with cameras like a crop of leather-podded fruit.

Mr Grewyear coldly but courteously told him that he had—unintentionally, no doubt—interrupted a canonical investigation of the most serious kind. Was that so, exclaimed the onlooker, much gratified. Well, if the Reverend said so—and he withdrew to the North aisle.

The vicar proceeded to the revelation of the third and most startling piece of iniquity.

This was nothing less than a lifelike image in modelling clay of Mr Grewyear himself, dressed in miniature vestments and suspended in a string noose from the pulpit canopy.

Into the model had been pushed half a dozen long pins.

Chapter Four

The area promotion director of Dixon-Frome (Domestic Detergents Division) stared at the Deputy Chief Brand Visualizer of Thornton-Edwards, Arnold and Konstatin, Dixon-Frome’s consultancy in charge of the Lucillite account, and inquired: “Now what the bloody hell do we do?”

Both men were between thirty and thirty-five years old. Their suits looked soft yet impossible to crease. So did their faces. Black shoes, carefully cleaned to a degree just short of shine, encased restless yet always precisely poised feet. About the persons of these men hung, faint but unmistakable, the odour of deodorant.

The name of D-F’s APD (DDD) was Gordon. TEAK’s DCBV was called Richard. None of the friends and colleagues of either man ever used his second name or abbreviated his first.

“If he hasn’t turned up by this afternoon, Gordon, we shall have to go ahead without him.”

“Yes, but Richard, look at it this way. Persimmon has the how-pull when it comes to maximan venue participation.

“Right?”

“Right.”

“So he’s absolutely integral—but integral—so far as local product acceptance is concerned.”

“In an above-the-line situation, Gordon.”

“Above the line. Sure. I’m with you on that. But what is it we’re really aiming for, Richard? D-F is short on Folk-fond—and I mean short. So...”

“Folk-fond we can get, for God’s sake, Gordon. You are talking image now. Folk-fond—that’s an image situation. But first things first. Before product acceptance, product presentation, right?”

“If you want to co-ordinate visuals, Richard, by all means coordinate visuals, and we’re with you a hundred per cent, but this is Friday, May the second, and Persimmon has bloody well disappeared.”

“Hang on. We’ll just kick that one around a bit, shall we? One—have we really lost him, disappearancewise? Or is he just temporarily snarled up in a bottle situation?”

“No, no. Drinkwise, he’s absolutely neg. Eastern Super rate him clear on that.”

“Fine. O.K. So Persimmon might not be back in time for the campaign film. We need to reckon with that—but seriously. Right?”

“But seriously, Richard. Right. Now you’re in mesh.”

“Right. Now, we just kick this around a bit more, do we? Point number two. Reserve customer participation—that we have not got. No, I admit we should have thought about RCP.”

“Oh, but timewise...”

“Timewise nothing, Gordon. Forgetting to provide RCP was plain ad-bad. I beat my breast, I really do. However—next case. Persimmon had forty, fifty washwives handpicked and primed. But we don’t have his list. Therefore selected wash-wives are strictly non-viable material. Remedy?”

“D-F would probably sanction reasonable loading with pro-extras.”

“Flown in? Time’s short, Gordon. It would cost.”

“No more than to cancel filming.”

“Another thing, Gordon. Exposure factor. Washwife pro-extras are certified resistant to detergent dermatitis. You know as well as I do that’s why there aren’t many of them. So their faces are familiar screenwise. You’d be absolutely right to tell me D-F don’t want shadow image coming through in Lucillite promotion.”

The Deputy Chief Brand Visualizer of Thornton-Edwards, Arnold and Konstatin rose from the padded swing-and-spin think-chair in front of the great rear window of the forty-foot campaign cruiser and helped himself to another vodka and celery juice at the hospitality locker. He enlivened the drink with a short burst of soda from a receptacle labelled: ZING-POD by Dixon-Frome (Northern Nutritionals Division) and resumed his seat.

The Area Promotion Director of Dixon-Frome (Domestic Detergents Division) made two slow revolutions in his own think-chair while he tapped one knee with a pair of spectacles that had enormously thick, square, black frames. The first time round, he said: “I don’t want to angle this question to get an over-responseful reaction, Richard...” and the second time round, he said: “...so I’ll put it this way, right?

“Right. Now, Richard, you are the Product. Put yourself right there. The Product. I say this to you. Fifty consuming washwives recruited at the local supermarket want to use you, but they can’t because the supermarket manager is their identity key and no one knows where he is. O.K. Hold on to that. Now, then—fifty pro-extras could be slotted in, but film of them would look like a re-issue and very non-fresh, so they do not get slotted in. Hold on to that, too. Right. So who do you want to use you? A Product in a Dilemma is how I see this, Richard. Just by asking these questions, just by personalizing the Product, something starts to jel. No, wait a minute. Don’t say anything yet. There’s a sort of sex thing here. I’m almost certain there is. Now, what? Rejection fantasy? No, no—too linear. I know-call it Use-Wish. Use-Wish, Richard—how does that roll you as a bit of motivational structurizing?”

“Use-Wish...”

“Remember you’re Lucillite. Identify. That’s all I want you to do. Identify. Now—get rolled up. Like a spring. Fine. Tight with Use-Wish. I really think we’ve got something here, Richard. O.K. Now let it come.”

“Sex-thing, it is, by God...”

“Great. Great.”

“No, you’re dead right, Gordon. I’m really with you on this. Christ, but Use-Wish—it’s brilliant. But brilliant. A sort of Product-soul—that’s how you read?”

“That’s how I read. Right. So be Lucillite. Come on, give OUT, Lucillite.”

“I’m granules. I’m a lonely lover made of granules...”

“Great. Come on, come on, come on...”

“I’m in a box. Imprisoned in a box.”

“Yes.”

“But there are women all round me. And they say, what is this? What does this do?”

“Women?”

“Washwives.”

“Great.”

“And I tell them: I don’t do anything. I want to be used is used up—turned into foam and sluiced away.”

“Guilt eradication.”

“And I shout out: Darlings, feel my granules. They are for you...”

“Spermatozoa image! Marvellous.”

“Open my box...”

“Pandora complex!”

“Fly fixation, actually.”

“Oh, this is four-star, Richard. Bloody four-star. Christ, wait until I tell them at D-F.”

“Wait a minute, though. I’m still Lucillite. Still the Product. And I know what I want these women to do. I want to be delved into. Grabbed. Emasculated. De-granuled. The final orgasm of being de-organed!”

The climactic six words were delivered by a man suddenly wide-eyed and holding aloft a fan of tensed fingers.

D-F’s Area Promotion Director released pent-up breath. “My God,” he said softly. “Mantis motivation!”

The other watched him, alert but silent.

“You see what this means, Richard!”

TEAK’s DCBV nodded. He blew gently upon the nail of his left thumb.

“An ad-clens revolution. A turn round of the whole concept. Everything up to now has been slanted on women wanting to please men. But do they?”

“Exactly. Do they? We’ve been hammering away for years on this whiteness thing. And why? Because Motivational Research said whiteness represented lost virginity.”

“Every washday the woman got her hymen back so she could offer it again to her mate. Sure, sure. You remember the Vurj campaign, Richard? Always a shot of washwife handing the Vurj pack to man in white hubbyshirt.”

“God! How off-beam can one get? Listen, this is how I see it, Gordon. Copulation equals children equals drudgegrudge.

Right?”

“Right.”

“What colour drudgegrudge? White. Because of millions spent on washimage, right? Now, then. White equals the Product. Lucillite equals white equals copulation, equals drudgegrudge.”

“A multidirectional equation...”

“Sure. Now you see where everybody’s been going wrong, Gordon. They’ve tried to make the Product a love-object.”

“Instead of...”

“Exactly. A hate-focus. Or castration substitute, if you like.”

“The implications are pretty terrific, Richard.”

“Policywise, my God, yes! Dynamite.”

“Maybe we should have had Antony in on this.”

“He’s getting cameras set up. In any case, we’ll have to stick to format until D-F and TEAK can conferencize.”

“I suppose so.”

“Pity.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Gordon...”

“Yes?”

“You realize we haven’t any consumer-participation laid on yet?”

“God, I’d forgotten. No use waiting for Persimmon. Look, what about getting Hughie to organize this. He’s done CP organizing before.”

The adman went into the interior of the campaign cruiser. He called back: “Which mobile is Hughie on?”

“Number two.”

“Roger.”

The prodman heard a murmur of conversation in the talkout stall.

When he returned, the adman said that Hughie would brief his Lucy-team and issue them with extra giftbait.

The first women recruited by the Lucies arrived shortly after twelve o’clock. They were from the Council estate off Burton Lane. A party of three from Windsor Close had linked with the Simpson Road and Abdication Avenue contingents. They were closely followed by a straggling dozen from Edward Crescent. Some had brought sandwiches and flasks of tea. Almost all wore their best clothes and more than their usual amount of make-up. Several of the younger ones had packed swimsuits in their shopping bags, but none admitted having done so.

The campaign cruiser was easily enough identified. It carried the word LUCILLITE in letters two feet high along each side. There rose from the roof on supporting brackets the representation of an attractive female clutching a packet of Lucillite and gazing up, like a saint contemplating her own halo, at a thinks-balloon inscribed “For Stains that Defy—Saponify!”

The cruiser was parked on a half-acre of uncultivated land that lay between the river and the northern end of Jubilee Park Crescent. The area was low lying and its liability to be flooded each spring gave it a grey and streaky appearance; what grass grew there was short, sparse and wirelike.

On this impoverished terrain had been set a broad, white-painted platform surmounted by an arch of trellis over which two drumfuls of “Bowermaster” plastic vine had been unwound. At each side of the platform was an imitation medieval fair booth. That on the left bore a notice in Gothic type: Ye Towns-people’s fouled cloutes taken here. The notice on the right-hand booth read: Collect ye fayre and sweete cloutes here.

An outsize washing-machine occupied the centre of the platform.

By one o’clock, more than thirty women had collected around the great caravan. Two Lucies emerged from their rest-room amidships and began to check names and describe in simple terms what was going to happen. More detailed directions, they said, would be given by the gentlemen from The Company and The Film People.

The crowd grew to fifty or more. Instinctive segregation was beginning to be noticeable. The more animated elements, those from the Burton Lane estate, kept close to the cruiser, ready to profit from neighbourhood solidarity should anything be offered from its doors on a first-come-first-served principle.

Less voluble, but no less vigilant ladies, whose homes lay in the avenues and closes south of Pawson’s Lane, moved slowly in small groups around the platform. This not only enabled them to avoid a social admixture which, they were considerate enough to realize, would have embarrassed their less fortunately placed fellow townswomen, but it was calculated to give them a head start if the platform and not the caravan should prove to be the focus of the afternoon’s activities.

A third group, the smallest, loitered on the river bank in graceful contemplation of the upper air. Every now and then they peeked at tiny gold watches, glistening amidst the fur of coatsleeves like the eyes of little animals. These women were residents of Stanstead Gardens and its tributaries, Brompton, Mather and Darlington Gardens, and they were on hand partly out of curiosity and partly on account of the rumour that a ten-guinea fee was to be paid everyone selected for actual screen appearance.

Precisely at one-thirty, the Assistant Environmental Research and Liaison Executive in charge of the number two mobile and called Hugh by his peers, leaped briskly up the three steps to the platform and held up his arms.

“Ladies...”

The factions began to draw together to form a single audience. Even the Gardens-dwellers ventured within listening distance. They turned to one another, trying out smiles.

“Ladies,” cried the AERALE, “as you know, this is a big day for”—he frowned for a second, snapped his fingers—“for Flaxborough. With your kind assistance and”—he glanced at the sky—“that of the beautiful weather you seem to enjoy in this part of the country”—good-humoured groans—“we intend to put this town on a million television screens. Right, everyone? Right. Now you know what that means, don’t you? It means that some of you lovely ladies—no, don’t laugh, I can safely say that seldom have I seen so high a proportion of attractive women in all the crowds that have come to testify to the power of our Product—it means, I say, that some of you luscious ladies will have the chance you have been waiting for—and which, believe me, you so richly deserve—the chance of being a real film star! What do you think of that, eh? Fabulous? Fabulous, right. So we’ll get right along with all the wonderful things that are in store for Flaxborough while this fabulous weather holds and while all you lovely ladies are still smiling. Smile, smile, smile, that’s the style, right? First of all, there’s a fabulous young man I want you all to meet. He’s our Location Visual Kinetics Executive—and anyone who can say that gets a free packet of Lucillite here and now, I promise you, ladies—can you say that, madam?—no, never mind, we’ll just call him Antony, shall we? Antony, come up here and meet all these lovely ladies...”

And soon they were all friends: the ladies both of humble station and high degree; Hugh, with his chubby chops, a nose like an aubergine, and eyes restless as riot police, darting always here and there in the crowd to see that the quips and sallies were being properly acknowledged; black-bearded Antony, who wore heavy gold ear-rings and manipulated his camera like a harpooneer; and the four Lucies on herd control and powder-room whisper duty.

Neither the Area Promotion Director of Dixon-Frome nor their consultancy’s Deputy Chief Brand Visualizer had yet put in an appearance. They were taking a working lunch at the Roebuck in order to discuss in depth the new concept of Mantis Motivation in the domestic detergent field.

No such advanced theory lay behind the programme of filming and interviews from which a two-minute commercial would eventually be sculpted by the Tele-kinetics Division of TEAK. The idea to be promoted was simply that Lucillite was of such remarkable cleansing potential that it would enable clothes to be washed even in the polluted water of a modern river.

The treatment of the finished film was to be in a style combining historico-fantastical and chemo-whimsical elements.

Some shots had been taken the previous day. Polystyrene rocks had been set in the mud at the water’s edge, and Lucies in seventeenth-century gowns filmed while they dunked seventeenth-century shifts in the river, slapped them on to the polystyrene rocks and belaboured them with plastic paddles. This performance would be condensed into the few seconds’ screen time sufficient for viewers to be told that in Good King Charles’s days rivers ran pure—pure enough for washing the family’s clothes. There would follow the interpolation of some stock library shots of industrial effluent to point the question, “But would you put your husband’s shirt into this?”

Hugh, held all the time at close range by Antony’s lenses, moved among the women like a faith-healer with a full head of steam. He halted before a benign-looking woman on whose coat was pinned the tiny “L” monogram that showed she had been interviewed by a Lucy, found reasonably articulate and co-operative, and coached in the art of giving prescribed answers with apparent conviction.

“Would you like to try doing your weekly wash in that river, madam, as they did in Good King Charles’s golden days?”

“Ha, ha,” said the woman with great care and solemnity. “You must be joking of course.”

Hugh shook his head, put one arm round the woman’s shoulders and smiled into the middle distance. “My dear, you won’t think I’m joking when I tell you what I’m going to do. You’ve brought your weekly wash along here today?”

“Yes I have. I don’t know what my hubby will say I’m sure.” The woman stared steadfastly at the microphone and waited.

“Fabulous. Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell one of those young ladies to take your things and—no, wait for it—and WASH them in that dirty old river water. Now what do you say to that?” He gave her shoulders a squeeze and grinned round at the assembly.

“Well all I can say is good luck to Lucillite and its sapo-ni-fied gra-nules but I must say you are taking something on this time.”

Hugh released the woman from his evangelical embrace and without sparing her another glance he began to wind up a few yards of slack in the microphone cable.

“Lovely,” said Antony. “Marvellous.” He made cabbalistic motions with a light-meter. “I want the river shots now. That lovely boatman. Before the light goes.”

“We’ll have some more of these little personal chats later, shall we, ladies?” Hugh was addressing the women in general. “That will be fabulous, and I’m looking forward to it, I truly am. But for the moment I want you all to gather over there by the river and stand—yes, that’s right, just stand there—and look out over the water at the boat. Like you were waiting for Bonnie Prince Charlie. You all know who Bonnie Prince Charlie was? Of course you do. That’s marvellous. Just stay like that a minute. Fabulous...”

Into Antony’s ear he inquired: “Where’s that prick who’s supposed to be taking the bloody boat out?”

The boatman was eventually discovered asleep in his craft, moored a hundred yards up river. He was a Flaxborough man (“a genuine local”, in Antony’s enthusiastic phrase) and the admen had recruited him the previous evening on the strength of his assurance, given with a wealth of circumstantial detail in the bar parlour of the Three Crowns, that he was a ferryman of long experience and wide renown. His name was Heath.

“Aye, aye, cap’n!” he responded with great presence of mind, on being jolted from sleep by an angry shout from Hugh. He scrambled to the stern of the rowboat, unknowingly loaned by a drinking acquaintance, and cut the rope that secured it to a baulk of timber. The boat began to drift offshore, slowly revolving.

Heath searched for whatever means of locomotion the boat possessed. There were no oars. He managed to pull out a seat-board. Using this as a paddle, he got the craft near enough to the bank to make himself heard by his patrons.

“Ahoy, there...I’ll belay her down wind a point and get her to where you said. You go and hoist your film gear and she’ll be there before you can spit.”

Heath had been punctilious in one respect: he had donned the costume devised by the TEAK Tele-kinetics Division for his role—indeed it had so taken his fancy that he had been wearing it continuously since the previous evening. It consisted of a scarlet and gold waterman’s doublet, Nelsonian breeches and a highwayman’s hat left over from a stillborn campaign on behalf of Dick Turpin Y-fronts (The B-I-G Holdup).

The plan was for this picturesque figure to row out to mid-stream, mime a baling action to make it seem he was filling the antique brass-bound plastic tub in the prow, and return to the shore. A series of brief clips would convey an impression of the operation and of its sequels: the transfer of the supposed river water into the washing machine ashore and the supposed addition of the miraculously saponifying Product, in order, that a collection of the town’s most gruesomely stained articles of apparel might supposedly be cleansed to the astonishment, edification and high delight of the beholders.

Heath’s intended course was marked by three poles that had been driven at low tide into the river bed at twenty-yard intervals. These rose some ten feet above the present water level and served the primary purpose of supporting a banner that read: BRIGHT, BRIGHT—NEW LUCILLITE.

Having with difficulty brought his boat to the bank close by the first pole, and exchanged his extemporized paddle for the oars that Hugh had commandeered from a beached dinghy near by, Heath spat on his hands and struck a nautical attitude.

“Everything shipshape, cap’n?” he inquired of Antony, already clamped to his viewfinder.

“Lovely. Lovely. Carry on. Marvellous. Now the rowing. Lovely. Pull. Try and keep both together. You’re Captain Bligh. Yes, lovely. You’re Bligh, duckie. Intrepid. Obsessed. Yes, yes—marvellous. Knot your neck muscles. Now a teeny bit of agony. You’re being lashed. Ooo...lash, lash, lash. Lovely...”

When he had been for some time out of range of these murmured exhortations, Heath judged the moment appropriate to stop rowing and to go through the baling routine. The third pole, he noticed, was only a yard or two away. He picked up the reproduction eighteenth century grog pannikin that had been supplied with his costume and dipped it in the river, then emptied its contents into the tub. He repeated the operation half a dozen times.

A shout came from the shore. Heath looked back to see Hugh waving and pointing meaningfully at the boat. Antony had stopped filming and seemed to be making gestures indicative of impending self-destruction. Heath, much puzzled, cupped his hand to one ear.

“Get the bloody thing off!” came over the water from Hugh. “It’s right in the bloody picture!”

Heath frowned, shrugged and inquiringly doffed his three-cornered hat.

“No!” bellowed Hugh. “Not that.”

Heath put his hat on again.

“In the water,” Hugh shouted. “There. Just by the stern.”

Heath peered over the prow.

“Stern! Stern!”

“The back!” screamed Antony. Heath gave a great quarter-deck salute of comprehension and clambered aft.

What he saw was enough to disconcert more seasoned mariners than Heath. Waterborne just below the gunwale and staring up at him with bulbous, bloodshot eyes was the head of some monstrous animal. Strips of hide floating from the severed neck had caught on the farthest banner-supporting pole.

Heath stared for nearly half a minute at the creature’s chaps, blackened as if by mummification, at its bull-like nostrils and partly submerged horns.

Then, quite suddenly, it dawned on him that the thing was too buoyant to be real. He poked it with an oar. It bobbed, sending an impression of wood, of hollowness, up the oar. He leaned out and tugged the leather strapping free from the pole. Heaving the head into the boat took scarcely any effort at all.

“Beg to report sea monster in the scuppers, cap’n!”

The homeward-bound Heath, delighted with the discovery so late in life that he could row, grinned over his shoulder at the assembly on the bank.

A few of the women smiled back. The others, who had heard some of the things which Hugh and Antony had been saying to each other about Heath’s odyssey, remained grave-faced.

As soon as the boat touched ground, Hugh yanked out the head and swung it on to the turf behind him. In a terribly audible whisper he ordered Heath to turn the boat round and go through his whole routine again but not like a piss-boiling twat this time or God help him he’d stitch his ears to his arsehole and please but please to remember this whole thing was more serious than the Holy Ghost so no more bloody jokes...

Heath embarked on his second voyage to the accompaniment of another stream of those delirous little cries of encouragement which seemed to issue from Antony quite automatically whenever he aimed a camera at anybody.

Hugh, his solicitous affability restored to full pressure, marshalled the washwives into new positions for interviews and amazement shots.

The Area Promotion Director of Dixon-Frome and the Deputy Chief Brand Visualizer of Thornton-Edwards, Arnold and Konstatin arrived back from their working lunch in the APD’s Sholto-Clore Mark III Retaliator. They watched the filming for a few minutes from the observation window of the campaign cruiser, then closed their eyes in order to internalize a few of the day’s ideas.

Only two people seemed disposed to take notice of the great mask that lay on the grass, the spring sunshine drawing from it faint wraiths of steam.

One was Mrs Flora Pentatuke, who had been watching from the opposite bank during Heath’s first excursion.

The other also was a woman. Her name was Miss Amy Parkin and although she was of exceptionally short stature, she somehow had contrived that afternoon to get her face on to more than half the footage of Antony’s film.

Chapter Five

Saturday morning in Flaxborough is normally an undemanding, leisurely interlude between five days of labour and the athletic, alcoholic or concupiscent demands of the week-end. There is an open street market at one end of the town and at the other an auction of such various objects as henhouses, bags of onions, fishing rods, rolls of wire, saplings, tortoises and second-hand hearing aids. The shops in between are packed with citizens exchanging news and opinions and occasionally buying something. Inns do a moderate trade, but the availability of their liquor is of secondary importance to the comfort and seclusion of their bar parlours. The drivers of the cars wedged irrevocably in narrow streets do not engage in the empurpling bouts of mutual recrimination that are the sole enlivening indulgence open to the city motorist; they sensibly go in search of talk and refreshment until such time as the situation be resolved by the Flaxborough equivalent of natural selection. Even policemen, from Chief Constable Harcourt Chubb to the rawest cadet in Fen Street, subscribe—in normal times—to the preservation of Saturday morning as a strictly social amenity which could be blighted by the slightest excess of zeal on their part. “Let it mulch until Monday”, is one of the favourite advisory metaphors of Mr Chubb, a keen gardener in his considerable spare time.

But the day that followed the opening of the Lucillite promotion campaign was not normal—or certainly not to a degree that would have permitted Inspector Purbright and his colleagues to remain inoperative.

For one thing, Edna Hillyard had not yet made a reappearance at her lodgings or her place of work or, as far as the police were aware, anywhere else in the town.

For another, the wife of Mr Bertram Persimmon, of 3 The Riding, Flaxborough, had reported her husband missing since Wednesday.

A third thoroughly disconcerting circumstance was the arrival at the police station of five journalists from London papers anxious to know about a Black Magic Cult which had turned Flaxborough into a Town of Fear.

Purbright sent word to the duty sergeant that if the five gentlemen would be good enough to await him in the station recreation room they would be rewarded with a press conference.

Sergeant Love expressed apprehension but Purbright brushed aside his doubts with the observation that the newspaperman of the present day was no longer all hip flask and trespass but a civilized practitioner who would respect confidences and reciprocate helpfulness. Thus whistling in the dark, so to speak, he led Love downstairs to the recreation room.

Purbright took stock of the waiting five and was a little surprised to find that they did, indeed, look different in type and temperament from national pressmen as he supposed Love would recall them. The dirty raincoats with epaulettes and leather buttons had gone; as had the scuffed brown brogue shoes, the underarm clutches of early editions, the blue ribbon of smoke ascending from the mouth-cornered cigarette past the permanently closed eye that gave the face its abiding expression of quizzical world-weariness. These men looked less abusive and less abused. Purbright guessed that they ate more expense-account lunches than their predecessors and fewer railway pies. For a moment, he wondered if the old habits of thought had been jettisoned with the shabby coats and the chain-smoking.

“Inspector, what are the police doing about all these black masses that are going on down here?”

Purbright sighed. Plus ça change... “Ah,” he said brightly, “I’m glad you asked me that...”

To the home of Mrs Gloss on Orchard Road went Detective Constable Pook, primed by Purbright to ask further questions about Edna Hillyard and to bring her car back to police headquarters.

Mrs Gloss did not look particularly pleased to see him but she invited him into the lounge. “Another cup, Edie,” Mrs Gloss called through the kitchen door as they passed.

A very short, plainly dressed woman was sitting beside the table on which coffee and a plate of biscuits were already set out. Pook recognised her as a teacher from the Dorley Road junior school.

“Morning, Miss Parkin,” he said.

Amy Parkin’s convergent eyes were trained at points in space a little beyond and to each side of his head. She wished him good morning.

“Mr Pook is a policeman,” explained Mrs Gloss, “and he has come to take Edna’s car away.”

She held out her hand for the cup and saucer which a sallow, straight-haired young girl wearing an apron had brought in.

“Help yourself to a biscuit, officer.”

He did so.

“I understand,” Pook said, regarding the KreemiKrunch Kookie that would release the real taste of the country at the first bite, “that Miss Hillyard was last seen on Wednesday night.”

“Well, that was when I personally last saw her. I cannot speak for other people, naturally.”

“You saw her then as well, did you, Miss Parkin?”

“I?” Miss Parkin sounded surprised. Then she noticed the folded copy of the Flaxboroagh Citizen which Pook had taken from his pocket and was smoothing, napkin-like, across his knee. “Oh, yes. Certainly I saw her. At our little function. But only very briefly.”

Pook nibbled the KreemiKrunch Kookie and allowed his taste buds to be beguiled by a country-style combination of dehydrated milk solids, soya rusk, sodium monostearate and saccharin.

“I see she won some sort of a prize,” he said.

“A title only,” Mrs Gloss said quickly. “Nothing tangible.”

“Not a cup, then? It says here ‘Maypole trophy’.”

“You shouldn’t take things in newspapers too literally,” Miss Parkin said.

“That’s true,” added Mrs Gloss. “ ‘Trophy’ in this case isn’t used in a material sense, you know. It’s a sort of honour, that’s all.”

“The members know what it means, and that’s what matters, isn’t it?”

Pook nodded at Miss Parkin’s sapience and looked again at the Citizen report while he drank some coffee and demolished the rest of the KreemiKrunch.

“What’s a faggot-master?” he inquired.

Mrs Gloss frowned. “If you must know, we generally have a little bonfire to brighten up our outdoor meetings, and Mr Cowdrey looks after it. He has had experience with the Scouts.”

“I know,” Pook said, without looking up from the paper. He somehow made the acknowledgement sound like a notice of impending prosecution. The two women glanced at each other.

“What time was it when you last noticed Miss Hillyard?” Pook asked Mrs Gloss.

“I really couldn’t tell you. It was towards the end of the meeting. Elevenish, perhaps.”

Pook looked at Miss Parkin.

She waved a hand vaguely. “About then, yes.”

“Dancing, was she?” asked Pook, having referred again to the newspaper report.

“I believe she was.”

Miss Parkin nodded agreement.

“It says here,” the policeman went on, “that there were refreshments. What sort of refreshments, Mrs Gloss?”

Mrs Gloss’s expression hardened. “Is that relevant, officer?”

“It could be, madam.”

“How?”

“Well, it’s not for me to speculate, but the lady did leave her car here. Perhaps she had reason to think that it was the wisest thing to do.”

Mrs Gloss was silent for a moment. She shrugged. “You could be right. But it is not for me to speculate, either. I only know that the bar...”

“The ‘quaffing bench’?”

“If you prefer to call it that.”

“It’s what the paper calls it.”

“I see. The point is, though, if I may return to it, that any notion of unregulated drinking on anybody’s part can be dismissed from your mind at once. The refreshment was the one customarily served at our meetings—a very wholesome drink made to an old country punch recipe.”

“Chiefly home-made wine,” averred Miss Parkin.

“Ah,” Pook said. (Purbright once had observed that one of what he called Pook’s “rancid monosyllables” was as intimidating as a search warrant.)

“About Miss Hillyard,” Pook said. “Has either of you ladies any idea at all where she might have gone after you last had sight of her?”

Miss Parkin replied first. “One would have expected her to return to her apartment.”

“Apartment?”

“She has rooms in Cheviot Road,” said Mrs Gloss.

“That’s rather a long way from here, isn’t it? If she walked, I mean. And late at night.”

“There were others here with cars. She probably got a lift home.”

“In that case, there might be somebody who could tell us what happened to her on the way. Because she certainly didn’t arrive at her lodgings.”

Pook brought out this piece of reasoning with the air of having forced some wily miscreant into a corner.

Mrs Gloss made no comment. She poured more coffee for Miss Parkin, refilled her own cup, and moved the remaining biscuits to the side of the table farthest from Detective-Constable Pook.

Miss Parkin took small but audible sips from her cup and gazed unsympathetically past the head of coffeeless Pook. Although the room was warm, she was dressed in the same thick, stiff cape which she had been wearing the previous Wednesday night. Her hat, in matching material, was round and hard-crowned and of broad brim, like a lifeboatman’s. When she put down her cup and wiped her lips with a handkerchief produced from beneath the cape, there was a faint scrubbing noise.

“Just one more question, I think, Mrs Gloss.” Pook consulted some notes he had made in the margin of his copy of the Citizen. “Could you tell me if Mr Persimmon, the supermarket manager, is a member of your society?”

“Persimmon?”

“That’s right. Mr Bertram Persimmon. Lives off Partney Drive.”

Mrs Gloss shook her head dubiously. “I very much doubt it. Do you know, Amy?”

“We do not have a Mr Persimmon. That is for sure.”

“There you are, then, officer. Your final question is answered.” Mrs Gloss made as if to rise.

“Was Miss Hillyard an acquaintance of Mr Persimmon, do you happen to know?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. And now, if you wouldn’t mind....”

“Can you answer that, Miss Parkin?”

“No.”

Pook stood up.

“I understand my colleague left the key of Miss Hillyard’s car in your safe keeping, madam.”

Mrs Gloss stepped to the Jacobean television sideboard and pulled open a drawer.

“Do be careful how you drive it round the side of the house, won’t you, officer. We don’t want to lose any of the bedding plants.”

For a moment she kept the keys in her hand, ignoring his outstretched palm.

“You do have a driving licence, I take it?”

When the policeman had gone, both women waited in silence until they heard the distant grind of a starter succeeded by the bursting into spasmodic life of the sports car’s engine.

“I don’t think I liked him very much. Did you, Amy?”

Miss Parkin grunted and thoughtfully tugged at a whiskered mole under her right ear.

“I wonder,” she said very quietly, “where he lives.”

• • •

The five pressmen, Purbright soon found, had been commendably busy since their arrival in Flaxborough the previous evening.

They had sought out the Vicar, pierced his hostile reticence, and flattered him into providing a colourful account of the discoveries in the Parish Church.

They had found several shopkeepers willing to testify to disturbing but unaccountable interference with trade by what they called “rum goings on”.

A Miss Lucilla Teatime, secretary and treasurer of the Edith Cavell Psychical Research Foundation, had been prevailed upon to describe the level of poltergeist activity in the area as “well above that which we investigators of paranormal phenomena would expect to find in the circumstances”.

And the unknown lady whose telephone call to a London newsagency had aroused Fleet Street’s interest in the first place had since asserted—again anonymously, but this time in a letter addressed to “The Gentlemen of the Press’ and left on the reception counter at the Roebuck Hotel—that she had personally attended more Black Masses in Flaxborough than she cared to remember.

“Even making allowance for exaggeration,” said the representative of the Sunday Dispatch, a young man with the beginnings of a Fu Manchu moustache, “I would have thought there was enough in this story to have worried the police. Are the police worried, inspector?”

Purbright smiled apologetically.

“If I say yes, it will mean that the constabulary doesn’t feel confident to deal with the powers of evil. If I say no, I’m inviting the criticism that we don’t believe in them. I would prefer to be allowed the middle course of benevolent agnosticism: tell me where a black mass is going on—or likely to take place—and I’ll see if there’s anything we can or ought to do about it.”

“What you’ve said,” quickly observed a girl with a pretty but worried face and a shaggy motoring coat, “strikes me as sort of...oh, I don’t know, sort of uninvolved. I mean, like you had a lot of permissiveness around out here in the country—you know, the Provinces—and sort of wanted to turn a blind eye. I mean, I’m not criticizing you, or anything, but...” All the time she was talking, the girl kept capping and uncapping a fountain pen and fixedly staring at it.

“Would you say you had a permissive society here, inspector?”

This question was issued on behalf of the readers of the Empire News, whose representative, a plump youth in Victorian style trousers, flowered shirt and velvet jacket, was clearly devout in desiring the answer to be yes.

The girl with the pen, a Sunday Pictorial feature writer, looked up and gave her colleague a grateful smile.

“I’m not sure that I know what you mean by permissive,” Purbright said. “The police certainly don’t go around harassing people in deference to the morally pretentious. We don’t believe that citizens can be sorted back into the right beds by rule of truncheon. We do, on the other hand, try to dissuade them from raping one another—galloping their maggots in public—that sort of thing. Or is it something else you have in mind? Something more sophisticated, perhaps?”

A constable, dispatched earlier to fetch coffee from the canteen, appeared with a tray. Cups were distributed. One of the two journalists who declined, the Daily Herald man, put another question.

“Is it true that people are afraid to go out after dark because of black magic rites?”

“Not as far as I’m aware.”

“But we have been told”—the Herald man glanced round at the others—“by four or five people in the town that they’ve either been bewitched themselves at some time or they know of others who have.”

There were murmurs of agreement, although a lanky grizzle-haired man from the News Chronicle, older than the rest, interposed the remark that free drinks would buy testimony to anything.

Purbright, who saw that direct confirmation of the truth of this opinion would not be popular, observed instead that strangers might be forgiven if they mistook for veracity that eagerness to please which was so notable a canon of Flaxborough hospitality.

“I’m very sorry,” he went on, “if it seems to you that I could be a little more eager to please in this matter, but I’m sure that such experienced journalists as yourselves would prefer me to be absolutely prosaic and factual. Policemen who make conjectures, however attractive they may be from a news editor’s standpoint, are really of no more use to you than those who sit on facts.”

The reporter from the Dispatch had begun to put a question about pin-stuck images when there came through the door a man of about sixty wearing a light grey overcoat and carrying a walking stick and yellow washleather gloves. His bearing was careful, his expression one of courteous inquisitiveness. Purbright greeted and introduced him as Mr Harcourt Chubb, the chief constable of Flaxborough.

“This lady and these gentlemen,” the inspector explained, “are journalists”—Mr Chubb raised one eyebrow—“and they are here to ask questions about witchcraft.” Mr Chubb’s second eyebrow went up and he gazed disbelievingly at the girl from the Sunday Pictorial.

Purbright turned to the pressmen. “Is there anything you’d care to put to the chief constable while he’s here?”

Mr Chubb instantly pursed his lips and shook his head. “My dear Mr Purbright, I wouldn’t dream of interfering with your prerogatives.” He took a step towards the door. “Just you carry...” Sudden comprehension of the enormity of what the inspector had said pulled him short. “Questions about what?”

“Witchcraft, sir. Black magic. Necromancy.”

“Good gracious me. Where?”

“Here, sir. In Flaxborough.”

There was silence. Then the chief constable said “I see.” He gave the pressmen a bleak, puzzled little smile of farewell and departed.

The man from the News Chronicle said it appeared that anxiety about the alleged instances of satanism had not spread to the upper ranks of the police force.

“It hasn’t, actually,” said Purbright.

“Not even when they know that a girl has disappeared and may have been used as a human sacrifice?”

Four journalists snapped attention to the fifth. He was the floridly attired Empire News reporter and he was blushing partly with triumph, partly with annoyance at the impetuous discard of his own advantage.

Purbright knew that nothing excites deeper suspicion and resentment in a newspaperman than the countering of an awkward question with the retort: Who told you that? He considered, then replied carefully:

“It is true that a young woman of thirty-four has been missing—in the sense of being absent from both her work and her lodgings—for the past two days. We have no reason to suppose that she has come to any harm, although, naturally enough, we shall feel easier when she reappears.

“The suggestion by your colleague that this woman has been the victim of, what, a ritual murder—is that your meaning, sir?”—the Empire News man nodded—“Yes, well, that suggestion is unsupported by any evidence known to me.”

There was a rattle of conversation, from which, after a few moments, intelligible questions separated.

“What’s the girl’s name, inspector?”

“Edna Hillyard.”

“Married?”

“We don’t think so.”

“Address?”

“Cheviot Road. Number eighteen. Incidentally, if you do wish to question her landlady, who is inoffensive and knows singularly little, I rely on you not to embarrass her.”

In reply to another question, Purbright added that the landlady was called Mrs Lanchester.

“Has the girl no family?”

“Not in this area. She moved here with her mother some years ago, but the mother is now dead. There are relations in Scotland, I believe, and we are trying to get in touch with them.”

The Sunday Pictorial girl spoke. “Look, if you don’t think anything’s happened to this Hillyard person—I mean, you don’t sound terribly concerned—not that one expects policemen to wax hysterical or anything...but after all she is missing, and one can’t help wondering why the sangfroid, as it were. You do see what I mean?”

“Oh, certainly. And there is a reason, as you’ve obviously guessed already. Miss Hillyard is an independent sort of young woman. She gets around. Her reputation is one of unpredictability.”

“You mean she’s disappeared before?” asked the Dispatch.

“I mean she gets around, as I said. Disappear is a rather Gothic way of putting it.”

“A good-time girl?” brightly suggested the Herald.

Purbright gave a worldly shrug.

“And you don’t think she takes part in this Voodoo Cult you’ve got here?”

“Miss Hillyard,” Purbright said patiently, “is employed in the department of the Medical Officer of Health. She is also, I understand, a member of the Presbyterian Church. Of those facts, gentlemen, you are at liberty to make what you will.”

After the press conference, Purbright made his way to the chief constable’s office, where Mr Chubb was in recuperative retreat in the interval between exercising six of his Yorkshire terriers and attending a Rotary lunch.

“What’s all this nonsense about witches, for heaven’s sake? I thought you were pulling those fellows’ legs just now, but they all looked very serious.”

Purbright explained. Mr Chubb looked more dubious than ever.

“You mean they’ve been going round the town listening to a lot of silly gossip. That’s what it boils down to.”

“To be fair, sir, it isn’t a subject they’re likely to learn anything about without listening to gossip. We don’t normally issue official bulletins or Wanted-for-Witchcraft posters.”

“Yes, but you don’t believe this ridiculous story about Miss Whatsername, do you?”

“Miss Hillyard. No, sir. Nor do they. But it’s not a question of belief. Newspapers are a branch of the entertainment industry, not a research foundation.”

“You say you are not worried about this woman, Mr Purbright.”

“Not unduly. As I told the press just now, she has something of a reputation for unconventional behaviour. But there’s another thing—and this I didn’t tell the press. We learned this morning that a man called Persimmon has also been missing since Wednesday. The possibility of their having gone off together is well worth considering.”

“Not Bert Persimmon, surely?”

“Bertram. Yes, sir. Middle-aged. Store manager.”

“But he’s...” Mr Chubb was about to say “vice-chairman of the Conservative Club” when he remembered his inspector’s perverse inclination to disregard the relevance of social lustre to a presumption of innocence. “But he’s married,” he said instead.

“He is indeed,” the inspector confirmed. Almost zestfully, he added: “Isn’t he vice-chairman of that club of yours, sir?”

“Possibly. I don’t know all the officials’ names.” Mr Chubb was examining his shirt cuff. “By the way...” He looked up.

“Yes, sir?”

“About this unpleasantness at St Lawrence’s. You’ll do what you can to get to the bottom of it, won’t you? Old Grewyear isn’t the easiest chap in the world to deal with, but he means well. It’s not nice to have a lot of dead animals left around in one’s church.”

“I think it was the effigy that annoyed him most. It was an exceedingly good likeness. I’ve asked Policewoman Bellweather to make a few very discreet inquiries among the Arts and Crafts people. There may be a lead there.”

“You say there were pins stuck into the thing?”

“Yes, sir.”

The chief constable shook his head. “Childish tricks some of these people get up to. One wonders sometimes how their minds work.”

The inspector decided that it would only add to Mr Chubb’s perplexity if he were to detail the disposition of the pins. He took his leave and prepared to drive out to The Riding and the home of Mr Bertram Persimmon.

He was going out of the building into the central yard where the cars were kept when the duty sergeant intercepted him.

“That thing, sir...”

The inspector halted and listened courteously.

“Roberts collected it after that woman rang up yesterday and I didn’t know whether you’d want it put among the lost property or what. Not,”, the sergeant added with ponderous drollery, “that I can imagine anybody wanting to get it back again.”

“Perhaps I’d better have a look.”

The sergeant crossed the office and opened one of the doors of the row of cupboards that extended along the opposite wall. There rolled forth, as if from the blade of a concealed guillotine, the great horned head that boatman Heath had retrieved from the river.

Purbright gave an involuntary start, then moved nearer.

The sergeant shifted the head with his boot so that it confronted his superior officer in full face if not with due respect.

“That’s not lost property,” Purbright declared almost at once.

“How do you mean, sir?”

“It was pinched.”

Kneeling, the inspector turned the head about and explored its texture.

“Two or three years ago. From the museum.”

“Oh.” The sergeant looked abashed. The burglarious entering of the Heritage Room of the Municipal Museum in Fish Street by some over-eager legatee had caused much local indignation at the time. It was most remiss of any police officer to have failed to recognise the stolen article.

“Never mind,” Purbright told him. “You can’t be expected to remember every fertility rite outfit that gets lifted from a museum.”

“Is that what it is, sir?”

“So they tell me.”

Purbright turned the head over and peered inside it, then righted it again.

“Good lord, the things people choose to turn into table lamps.”

The sergeant saw that Purbright was looking at an electric bulb holder, set between the two horns. The metal stem of a bulb, still screwed into its socket, held fragments of glass, ruby-coloured.

“I think,” the inspector said, “that we should have this locked up carefully until someone from the museum can come over and see what damage has been done. Can I leave you to arrange that?”

The sergeant grasped the chance of self-redemption. “Oh, yes, sir. Certainly you can.” He sprang for the telephone.

“Incidentally...”

“Sir?”

“Who was the woman who telephoned about that thing?”

“We don’t know that, sir. She wouldn’t give her name.”

Purbright frowned. “Odd. Why shouldn’t she, I wonder? There’s an awful lot of anonymity about just now—had you noticed?”

“I think it’s because of not wanting to get into the papers, sir,” suggested the now desperately helpful sergeant.

“That,” said Purbright, making for the door, “I can well understand.”

Chapter Six

“Oh, God, yes,” said Mrs Persimmon when Purbright spoke her name interrogatively at the front door. “Oh, God, yes,” she said again when he announced his own. Then, “Oh God, come in,” she said, and raised her eyes so that he could see their whites as he stepped past her into a hall perfumed with the lavender of Croon, the only furniture cream containing ionised beeswax. Purbright feared that the interview was going to be a harrowing experience.

On her silent invitation, he entered a room whose big bay window commanded a view of the front lawn and the tall hedge that hid it from the road. Mrs Persimmon closed the door by leaning her back against it. She remained in that position for several seconds, breathing deeply. She put one hand on her breast.

“Oh, God, you’ve found him.”

“No. No, we haven’t actually. But you really mustn’t distress yourself, Mrs Persimmon. There’s no certainty that your husband has come to any harm.”

Purbright’s words appeared to have gone unheard. She continued to stare into space. The hand edged slowly off her breast and under her arm. She abstractedly scratched herself.

“Of course, you don’t know what I’ve been through.”

She launched her body away from the door and walked across the room. Pausing by a semi-circular table set against the wall, she adjusted the position of two china figures that stood upon it. “Oh, God!” She impetuously passed a hand over her hair without disarranging it.

“Perhaps it would be better if you sat down, Mrs Persimmon.”

Purbright indicated a square-cut sofa covered in orange plastic. She hesitated, then lowered herself into diagonal occupation of the sofa, one thin white arm along its back (like toothpaste, Purbright reflected).

The inspector found a chair for himself and sat opposite her. He felt in his pockets and produced a ball-point pen and an old sales receipt, blank on one side.

“I understand you last saw your husband on Wednesday.”

She put a hand over her eyes. Purbright took the gesture to be affirmative.

“At what time, would you say? Approximately.”

The shield of ringers remained over the pale, back-tilted face. “When he left for business. About ten o’clock.”

“But the store opens at eight-thirty, surely?”

“My husband is not a counter hand, Mr, er...”

The correction, Purbright fancied, had been delivered with a trace more acerbity than he would have expected from a putative widow.

“Did he not return home that day for a meal?”

“No.”

“He usually has lunch in town, does he?”

“Always. He eats at the Roebuck. They reserve a special table for him.”

“In the evening, though—weren’t you surprised when he didn’t come home on Wednesday evening?”

“Oh, no. It was his ‘samaritan’ night.”

“I’m sorry—his...?” Purbright turned his head slightly, as if to present his keener ear.

“His ‘samaritan’ night. Mr Persimmon does social work. I thought you would have known that, Mr, er...”

“Purbright.”

“Mr Purbright. Yes, he received his OBE for that. He’s on lots of committees.” Mrs Persimmon had removed the hand from her face. She was looking a little stronger now.

“I’m not sure that I quite understand what you mean by ‘samaritan’ night, Mrs Persimmon. There is an organization called The Samaritans. Do I take it that your husband is a member?”

“Oh, no, not that organization but it’s just what I’ve always called, that’s all—his ‘samaritan’ night. It’s to help people. I expect one of the other gentlemen can tell you more about it if you really want to know.”

Purbright nodded with every appearance of having understood. “Of course. The other gentlemen.” He held his pen poised.

“Well, there’s Harry,” said Mrs Persimmon. “You know—Sir Henry Bird.”

“Ah, yes.”

“He’s a particular friend of my husband, and I should say they’ve done this social whatever-it-is, this ‘samaritan’ business, as I call it, oh, for a couple of years at least, ever since...oh, God”—she hoisted herself forward and opened her eyes—“but you won’t go and ask him a lot of questions, will you? You’ll not do that? I don’t think my husband would like Harry to be bothered unnecessarily.”

“We try not to bother anybody unnecessarily, Mrs Persimmon.”

There was a pause. Mrs Persimmon straightened her posture and sat facing forward.

“Perhaps,” she said quietly, “I’ve been rather hasty in sending for the police.”

Purbright watched her face. “Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. It seems silly, though. To panic. I mean, I would have heard if anything had happened to him. Don’t you think so?”

“Almost certainly you would have done, yes.” The inspector was wondering why dramatic expletives and gestures had given way first to social defensiveness, then to this unhappy deflation.

“Well, then,” she said at last, “we’d better just forget about it for the time being, shall we?”

She stood. Purbright motioned her to sit down again. He sighed gently.

“Look, Mrs Persimmon. Today is Saturday. You have told me that you last saw your husband on Wednesday. His absence during that night did not surprise you because you knew he was doing some kind of social welfare work. Very well. But he did not come home on Thursday night either. Nor last night. So you telephoned us this morning and reported him missing.”

“Yes, I’m sorry, I...”

“No, don’t apologise, Mrs Persimmon. I don’t at all consider your phone call to have been hasty, as you put it. What I do find difficult to understand is why you waited so long before making it.”

She considered.

“We don’t live in each other’s pockets, you know,” she said coldly. “Me and my husband, I mean.”

“I don’t suppose you do.”

“Well, then—what are you making all the fuss about?”

“I came because you asked for help.”

“All right. Well, now you can go because I don’t want any after all.”

The childishly crude retort Purbright recognized as a symptom of deep unease. He could not quite decide whether Mrs Persimmon was aware of the possibility of her husband’s having decamped with another woman. Was it scandal she feared? She clearly was the kind of person who rated neighbourhood opinion very highly. And yet he doubted if this was the only or even the main reason for her distress.

“Mrs Persimmon, you must forgive my asking this, but are you perhaps just a little afraid of your husband?”

A reflex frown of annoyance faded quickly. The tall, thin, angular, expensively-dressed woman seemed suddenly to suffer a kind of interior unstarching. Very softly, she said: “He’s not always the easiest man in the world to get along with.”

“Is this the first time he’s stayed away from home for more than the one night?”

“No, it’s happened two or three times before. But always over a week-end. He didn’t lose any time at the shop.”

“And did he tell you where he’d been?”

“No.”

“Didn’t you ask him?”

“Not directly. He doesn’t like being what he calls quizzed.”

“But did you find out? From somebody else, perhaps?”

She shook her head. “I think it was in Brocklestone he stayed during one of the weekends. A friend of mine mentioned afterwards that she’d seen him there. But he never said, and I didn’t ask.”

Purbright considered whether he should take further advantage of Mrs Persimmon’s meekness of mood by sounding out what knowledge or suspicions she might have concerning Edna Hillyard. He decided against. He asked instead if she could give the name of anyone else associated with her husband’s “samaritan” activities—just in case, he said, it proved necessary to widen inquiries into his whereabouts and movements on the night of his disappearance.

Mr Persimmon, she replied, had spoken from time to time of three colleagues in that particular branch of his social work. They were Sir Henry Bird, mentioned already, and also Dr Cropper, the Borough Medical Officer, and the Vicar, Mr Grewyear.

The inspector said he was sure that three such distinguished gentlemen would be not only reliable but discreet informants should the need for their co-operation arise. For the time being, though, he counselled patience and faith in the likelihood of Mr Persimmon’s having taken himself off somewhere simply to think out the perplexities of life. It did happen with people of his age, and, as Mrs Persimmon had herself acknowledged, her husband seemingly was not a man to share his problems.

Not the problem of Miss Hillyard, anyway, Purbright added in a personal aside to himself as he smiled encouragingly at Mrs Persimmon and rose to take his leave. At the door, he put his final question.

“Is your husband interested in folk singing or anything in that line?”

Mrs Persimmon’s immediate “Not that I know of—why?” was distinctly derogatory in tone.

“Oh, no reason,” said Purbright. “I just wondered.”

Sergeant Love was combining with business the pleasure that any healthy, youngish, innocently good-looking policeman is almost bound to feel in the company of totties, Flaxborough’s generic term for all presentable and responsive females. Totties were predominant among the employees in the Town Hall and in no department could there be a more pleasing selection, Love decided, than in the offices of Dr Halcyon Cropper, Medical Officer of Health.

The doctor was absent at a conference in Ipswich, but the chief clerk—whose function seemed to be mainly that of a sort of girl-herd—told the sergeant that he was welcome to interview whom he pleased. Love looked round the room with as nearly blank an expression as he could manage in face of such largesse and said he would “try that one”.

The clerk beckoned his choice, a girl called Sylvia Lintz, who had straight, short, straw-coloured hair, long but plump legs, and what Love’s mother would have called a fine, strong chest.

“The sergeant,” the clerk said to her, “wishes to ask some questions. About Miss Hillyard.”

Sylvia glanced quickly at Love, alarmed.

“Oh, no, nothing, er—well, not as far as we know,” the clerk soothed without conviction. His eye covertly ranged the other girls in the room. What’s he worried about, Love wondered.

“Perhaps,” the clerk said to Sylvia, “you’d better take him into the stock room.” He rubbed his chin dubiously. “Unless you can think of anywhere better.”

The stock room was about eight feet square, windowless and lined on three sides with shelves loaded with packets of forms, stationery, and other kinds of office equipment. It contained a small table and chair. Love fetched another chair. He left the door wide open. They sat, Love stiffly, the girl demurely, the table between them.

“You do know Miss Hillyard’s missing, don’t you?” said Love.

“Well, I know she hasn’t been to work. Not since Wednesday.”

“Has there been any talk about her being away?”

“Not really. Not at first, anyway. She often has a day off.”

“More often than other people?”

“I don’t know that I’d say that.”

“Has she ever told you why she had these days off?”

“I haven’t asked.” The reply was made with slight hesitation.

Love tried to look extra kind. The effort somehow resembled a wind-repressing discipline.

“What you say won’t get her into trouble, you know,” he said. “We just want to be given some idea of where she might have got to.”

The girl was silent a moment. She traced a spiral pattern with a finger tip on the table top. “I think Edna’s a bit...well, you know...”

“Promiscuous?” dared the sergeant, feeling the unfamiliar word bring something of the satisfaction of boldly squeezing Miss Lintz’s thigh.

She considered the question without sign of embarrassment then said simply, “Of course, she’s a lot older than most of us.”

“Yes, I can see that.”

The girl smiled. Ooo, but you’re scrumptious, the sergeant silently told her. Aloud, he asked if Miss Hillyard had ever confided to her the names of such admirers as had seduced her from service in the public health sector.

“Not to me, she didn’t. She was thicker with Mavis and Vi than anybody else. They might tell you. Shall I see if Mr House can spare them?”

“Mr House?”

“He’s the gentleman you’ve seen already. The head clerk.”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

“No trouble,” said Miss Lintz sweetly. She got up.

Love rose as well, partly out of politeness but mainly because he felt that otherwise the girl might be left with the regrettable impression that decrepitude rather than authority dictated his remaining seated.

There were times when the sergeant wondered whether his long and loyal courtship of the person still optimistically described by his mother as “your young lady” had not been attenuated by mutual passivity; a probationary period of fourteen years did seem adequate to forestall any charge of fool-hardiness.

As he watched the departure of Miss Lintz’s splendidly untrammelled legs and lively bottom, oscillating within its brief tourniquet of skirt, he recalled with a sense almost of awe that this nineteen-year-old daughter of the one-time editor of the Flaxborough Citizen was a child of six when he, Love, had worked on his first murder case, the slaying of old Marcus Gwill in Heston Lane.¹ He would buy his Agnes a dinky nylon nightie that very afternoon. If he could get away, of course. And if the store wasn’t too crowded, as it well might be on a Saturday...

¹ Reported in Coffin Scarcely Used

Mavis O’Conlon and Violet Beach arrived together.

Violet was tall, with thin arms and shoulders but paradoxically heavy legs. She looked as if she would be difficult to knock over. Her cool, pale-lashed eyes were steady but mistrustful. She had a habit of caressing her left shoulder with her right hand, the forearm resting protectively across her small bosom. Love thought her pretty in a rather delicate way which he attributed vaguely to her having been sired by the manager of the Field Street branch of the Provinces and Maritime Bank, a notably pussy-footed gentleman.

Miss O’Conlon presented a contrast as startling in its way as the disparity between the profession of her companion’s father and that of Mr O’Conlon, bookmaker. Mavis had a mouth wide enough to be kissed with moderate satisfaction by two men at a time, and, if Love was any judge, which at that moment he thought he was, hers was the disposition to let them. Generosity was implicit in brown, questing but not calculating eyes, a slightly side-tilted head and a throat, plump and uncreased by habitual affectation of modesty, that channelled regard at once to its confluence with breasts of astonishing amplitude. There, after some seconds, the sergeant discerned a little gold cross, suspended upon a fine chain.

“Got it for my first communion,” confided Miss O’Conlon in a deliciously husky voice, tinged with brogue.

Love gave a start and turned a brighter than usual pink. He went in search of an extra chair.

“Did the other young lady,” he asked when the two new arrivals were settled, “tell you what I wanted you for?”

They looked at each other doubtfully, then back at. the sergeant.

“Well, it’s about Edna, isn’t it?” said Mavis O’Conlon.

“Miss Hillyard,” her companion amplified.

“That’s right.” Love tried to keep his gaze away from the environment of Mavis’s crucifix (her “Christ of the Andes’, as Dr Cropper once had dubbed it). “You’re both friends of hers, I understand.”

“Sort of.” Violet did not sound eager to commit herself.

“Oh, but sure we’re friends,” said Mavis quickly and with emphasis, taking no notice of Violet’s nervous side glance.

Love went straight to the point. “Does either of you know where she is? Today, I mean. Right now at this moment.”

“No idea,” said Violet. Mavis, suddenly solemn, shook her head.

“This really could be important. I don’t want you to cover up for her because of her job. You’re not doing that, are you?”

This time it was Violet who shook her head. Mavis said Jesus no, she’d not dream of doing any such thing but what did the pollis think had happened to the poor woman for God’s sake?

Love hastily assured her that there was no reason so far to suspect that Miss Hillyard had come to harm. The fact remained that no one seemed to know where she was, so it was only right and sensible to make a few inquiries.

Yes, the girls agreed. So it was.

“That little car of hers, now. Does she normally use it a good deal?”

Every day, they said. Edna was very fond of driving around in her car.

“So you wouldn’t expect her to go off anywhere without it?”

They certainly wouldn’t. Not unless something had gone wrong with the works, of course.

“Laundry,” said Love. “Does either of you know what she does about laundry? Dresses, undies—that sort of thing.”

Mavis gave a good-natured shrug in acknowledgment of the sergeant’s innocence. “Washes them, darlin’—what else.” She was, Love noticed again as she made herself more comfortable in the chair, a well-nourished girl and she undulated very pleasingly within her own undies and that sort of thing.

“Washes them herself, you mean? At home?”

“That’s right,” said Violet. “She always does her ironing on Tuesday night. That I do know.”

“So you wouldn’t expect her to take a pile of clothes to a laundry in the town.”

“I’ve certainly never known her to do that. Have you, Mavis?”

“Not on our sort of money,” said Mavis.

Violet glanced at her with prim reproof. “It’s not a question of affording. One likes the fabric to be treated properly.”

“Has Miss Hillyard a lot of friends?”

Violet turned in consultation to Mavis. “Would you say that she’s a lot of friends? In numbers, perhaps. But not that many really staunch friends. Would you say she has many staunch friends?”

“She gets sniffed around after plenty.” Miss O’Conlon sounded amiably matter-of-fact.

“That’s not a nice thing to say,” exclaimed Miss Beach. “Not a bit nice.”

“It’s true. And it’s truth the pollis’ll be wanting, surely?”

Love confirmed this supposition. “You mean she has men friends—several men friends?”

“Jesus, she’s every right to have made a bit of a collection at her age. I mean, you get the liking. Y’know? You’d not be blaming her?”

“Not in the least,” declared Toleration Love. He pondered a moment. “It would help, though, if you could tell me if she has any particular preferences at the moment.”

“Particular’s not the word I’d have used meself, but maybe it’s special you mean. In the sense of extra keen, like. Hungry. Y’know? Now wait a bit. Do you know, Vi?”

Miss Beach, whose face clearly indicated that she found all such speculation offensive, gave a tight little headshake.

“Hey, that fellow from the garage—whatsisname—Blossom. Has she finished with that one?”

Miss Beach remained silent.

Miss O’Conlon snapped her fingers—an accomplishment that Love found endearingly raffish in so feminine a witness.

“Len Palgrove... Now she was having it with that one. That I do know. Definitely.”

“Don’t be horrible, Mavis. I don’t know how you could say that about Mr Palgrove so soon after his bereavement.”

“Bereaved, was it?” Miss O’Conlon’s eyes enlarged mightily for the benefit of the sergeant. “Listen, he wasn’t so eaten up with grief that he couldn’t lay twenty quid in cross doubles with my old man on the morning of the funeral. Da nearly refused it out of respect for the dead but he knew the bets wouldn’t have a snowflake in hell chance. Anyway...”

“The point is,” Love broke in, “that we’d like to know where Miss Hillyard is likely to be now. It’s at least two years since Mrs Palgrove was...since she died.² Are you saying for certain that the friendship between Mr Palgrove and Miss Hillyard is something that’s going on at the moment?”

² Reported in Charity Ends At Home

“You know very well it isn’t,” Miss Beach said reprovingly to Miss O’Conlon, who pursed her lips, reflected a little while, and then admitted that perhaps her information was out of date, but not by many weeks.

Further questions were put by Love, simply because the longer the interview went on, the longer he would be able to gaze with official justification at two good-looking girls. Their answers gave no lead at all to the person in whose company Edna Hillyard had been content—or obliged—to abandon her job, her lodgings and her car.

Neither girl could say that she had actually seen Edna with a man during her spare time since before Christmas. She had made oblique references to a “friend”, certainly, but he had not been produced and she had not mentioned anyone specifically by name.

Love thanked his informants and followed them back into the main office in order to tell the head clerk that he would not require the co-operation of any more members of staff that morning.

Mr House cast an eye quickly over Miss Beach and Miss O’Conlon, as if to satisfy himself that no parts of them had been damaged or abstracted as souvenirs, and said that it was just as well because the department closed at noon on Saturdays and it was then 11.53.

Purbright seemed to find Love’s account of his interviews less disappointing than the sergeant thought it sounded.

“At least we know two things now that we didn’t know before. One is that although Edna Hillyard is over thirty and unmarried she’s considered by people who know her fairly intimately to be far from frigid. The other is that she’s taken some trouble—uncharacteristically—to keep her current affair secret.”

That, Love said, had been his impression.

“And why should she do that?”

“Reputation, I suppose.”

“Yes, but whose? What you were told by Miss O’Conlon doesn’t suggest much reticence on Edna’s part in the past.”

“She’d have had her work cut out to be reticent about Pally Palgrove. They reckon he leaves footprints on his girl friends.”

“And Alf Blossom?”

“He runs the South Circuit Garage.”

“Yes, I know that,” said Purbright, a little tetchily. “I mean he’s no great conquest, is he? Not socially. I’m leading up to something. You’ll see in a minute.”

Love resolved to make no more irrelevant observations. “Stud-wise,” he said with dignity, “Alf Blossom isn’t even in the book.”

The inspector nodded. “So we can assume that Edna’s present consort is someone she values more than she would value Palgrove, say, or Blossom, or any of those she told her office friends about. The probability is that he is married—which would explain their care not to be seen together—also respectable, and reasonably well-heeled. I’d put his age at a bit above fifty.”

“Job?”

“Profession,” Purbright corrected. He pretended to consider. “Store manager, I should say. A fairly big store.”

Love, suspecting a leg pull, looked cheerily sceptical. “You wouldn’t know his address, I suppose?”

“My guess would be somewhere in Debtors’ Retreat or up by Jubilee Park. How likely does The Riding strike you?”

Love frowned and remained silent. Then, suddenly, “Oh, Christ! Of course...”

“Mr Persimmon, of the Bridge Street supermarket.”

“You really think they’ve skipped off together?”

“Their simultaneous disappearance does rather suggest it.”

“It could be coincidence.” Love’s slowness to catch the inspector’s drift of thought had left him feeling less than generous.

“In London or New York, perhaps,” said Purbright. “But there’s not much random duplication in a town of fifteen thousand inhabitants.”

“What about her car, though?” Love protested.

“Well, they don’t need two. It isn’t usual to elope in a convoy.”

“Then there’s her job. His, too, for that matter.”

“I gather his head office is giving the books a good looking over.”

Again the sergeant was visited with a sense of having missed a significant possibility. “Oh,” he said, gloomily.

Purbright relented. “Of course, there’s no evidence at the moment of anything crooked having gone on. We’ll have to wait for the audit.”

“Perhaps,” said Love, “it was just a case of irresistible passion.”

“You could be right, Sid. How nice it would be if you were.”

Chapter Seven

On the evening of Saturday, 3 May, there was held an emergency meeting of the Flaxborough Branch of the Sabbath Conservation Society at the elegant home in Mather Gardens of Mrs H. L. Framlington, JP. There was a good attendance, despite the brevity of notice that circumstances had dictated, and the tastefully decorated drawing room contained not one empty chair.

Mrs Framlington presided. She sat behind a dark mahogany table on whose polished surface lay a thick, black-bound book, a black candle in a squat holder of polished brass designed like a bishop’s mitre, a small enamelled incense bowl on a trivet, and a tumbler of water.

By her side was the secretary, Mrs Pentatuke. Her alert, slightly bronzed face wore a grim half-smile as she peered through her harlequin-framed glasses round the room and ticked names on a list she had taken from between the leaves of the book. Pausing in this task, she leaned forward to light an ochre-coloured cigarette at the candle flame. The smoke she blew forth aggressively over the hat feathers of the nearest members smelled of sulphur.

Mrs Pentatuke was fully dressed. She wore an outfit in bottle-green woollen fabric. On the floor by her sturdy, nylon encased calves lay a large handbag, a stumpy, furled umbrella and a pair of gloves of the same shade of violet as her shoes.

When she had finished putting ticks on her list, Mrs Pentatuke nudged Mrs Framlington, who had been contemplating dreamily the cornices of her elegant drawing room, and indicated with a nod the incense bowl.

Mrs Framlington smiled vaguely, patted her grey, wispy, untidy hair, and accepted the box of matches that Mrs Pentatuke handed to her. She managed with the third match to ignite the tip of the small heap of material in the bowl. There rose a grey fume, thin at first but then broadening and becoming laden with sooty motes. There was a smell of singed poultry. Mrs Framlington glanced apprehensively at her ivory-faced wallpaper.

“Amen, evil from us deliver but temptation into not...” Mrs Pentatuke’s ringing tones brought to a sudden end the murmur of witchly small-talk. The Coven was in session.

Mrs Framlington half rose from her chair and bobbed a welcome to the assembly. Then she sat again, leaning slightly forward and resting a hand against the right side of her neck in readiness for its being cupped as a hearing aid.

“Ladies...ah, sisters, sisters and warlocks... It’s most gratifying to see such a good turn-out this evening. This, of course, is not the regular meeting, as you all know. Our next little get-together was not due until the end of this month, but we did feel—that is, the ladies, the sisters, rather—the sisters and Warlock Gooding of the Sabbath sub-committee, did feel that in the circumstances...”

“Point of order, madam chairman!”

The interruption came from the bald-headed man who had taken part in the Walpurgis-night Revel in rolled-down stockings and motoring pennons. His costume now was considerably more formal but there was still noticeable in his eye a certain wildness that contrasted with a countenance which one might have thought expressly designed to hover over hymn-books.

“Yes, Warlock Parkin?” Mrs Framlington’s hand rose behind her ear.

“Shouldn’t Maiden Pentatuke have read the minutes first?”

Maiden Pentatuke did not wait for Mrs Framlington to consult her.

“Certainly not,” she called. “This is an emergency meeting and there hasn’t been time for minutes to be copied into the book. They’ll be read next time.”

“Emergency meeting,” Mrs Framlington echoed, nodding her head very decisively at Mr Paracelsus Parkin. “No time to be copied.” She was a little afraid of Mr Parkin, brother of evil-eyed Amy. He was a former Baptist lay preacher who had been drummed out of the Church on account of his too liberal interpretation of the word “lay”. He was reputedly addicted to muscle culture and stamp collecting, and more than one member of the Coven suspected that his adherence to wizardry was less for love of the black art for its own sake than in the selfish hope that he might become sufficiently skilled in its practice to wreak personal vengeance upon his late accusers, in particular the Rev. William Harness and Miss Bertha Pollock of the Flaxborough Borough Welfare Department.

“I was saying,” resumed Mrs Framlington, “that the Sabbath Sub-committee thinks that certain events of the last few days could be of great importance to...to our little gathering, and that they ought to be discussed.”

She looked inquiringly at Mrs Pentatuke, who thereupon barked “Without delay“.

“Without delay,” said Mrs Framlington. She assumed a straighter posture and took a few sips of water.

“Unfortunately, as some of you may be aware, I was prevented by sickness from attending the Sabbath in person at Roodmas, so I hope that you, Madam Maiden”—she turned to Mrs Pentatuke—“will correct me if I betray ignorance on any particular point.”

Mrs Pentatuke drummed her long fingers on the black minutes book and stared stonily out of the window.

“Of course,” Mrs Framlington went on with a fond, reflective smile, “I was really amongst you all in a sense that night.” She looked up. “Through my Familiar, you know. Did any of you see my little Billy Boy—no, Belial—my little Belial flying about? I did let him out of his cage, you know, and he flew around for quite a while looking for the keyhole in the bedroom door, bless him, and when I woke in the morning there he was, back on his perch again, and I knew—I knew—well, because I’d dreamed, you see, and anyway he was chattering away thirteen to the dozen—‘Looo-cifer, Looo-cifer, Bicky for Billy, Looo-cifer...’ ”

“Point of order, Sister chairman!”

A plump hand was held aloft by a man with a neatly trimmed beard. His conventional shopkeeper’s suit of dark serge hid and constrained the pale belly that had bounced and flopped above a velvet loincloth three nights before.

He was Henry Pearce: draper, toxophilite and husband of Mrs Tossie Pearce, whose choice of widow’s weeds as her orgy costume had been prompted solely by sensual eccentricity and in no degree by wishful thinking. Indeed, Henry himself had provided the outfit from his discovery in a corner of the stockroom of a cache of apparel hidden away by some long dead, thrifty predecessor in the corsetry trade.

Mrs Framlington did not at once see the raised hand. She peered nervously round the room. Mrs Pentatuke leaned across and tapped her shoulder, then pointed out the interrupter.

“Just half a minute, Sister chairman,” said Warlock Pearce, in the tone of a long-suffering shop steward. “With all due respect, I think I can say that we did not come here today to hear about the doings of your little Belial.”

He paused and smiled thinly at a mutter of approval that came from some half-dozen members of the Coven.

“I think I can fairly say that. I mean to say, the Familiars do get a fair crack of the whip. There’s the annual tricks competition for one thing. But I don’t think I need go on about that. Time and place for everything. What we do want to know, and what my good friend Warlock George Gooding and the sub-committee want to know, is this...”

Mrs Framlington, goaded by digs from Mrs Pentatuke into asserting her authority, quaveringly demanded: “Isn’t that rather a lengthy point of order, Warlock Pearce?”

“Never you mind about length, Sister chairman,” retorted Mr Pearce. “I’ve got the floor and I’m going to put my question. It’s about the police...”

“Black blisters and the scalding weeps be on ’em!” shouted a stout, red-faced woman from her seat at the back of the room.

She was Mrs Margaret Gooding, the Sabbath participant who had worn woollen drawers and claimed to be a drinker of baboon blood.

“...the police, I said,” repeated Warlock Pearce, “and if Sister Gooding wants to move a curse as an amendment, that’s up to her, but what I’m asking is in regard to a point of order, Sister chairman, which is, and I put it to you fair and square—Who called them in when Sister Hillyard took off, as is her right as a witch, I don’t think anyone will quarrel with that.”

Mrs Framlington looked perplexed. Not sharing with Mr Pearce the privilege of membership of Pennick Rural District Council, she was unaccustomed to the somewhat dislocated language in which the affairs of that and similar authorities habitually are conducted. She turned to make mute appeal of Mrs Pentatuke.

“All Warlock Pearce means,” ruled Mrs Pentatuke brusquely, “is that you should get straight to the point about police inquiries into whatever’s happened to Edna Hillyard. He suggests, if I understand him aright, that there was a tip-off of some kind.”

“Who says that anything has happened to Sister Edna?” called out Warlock Parkin.

One or two others made noises of support.

“The police want to take their long noses out of what doesn’t concern them or they might find the same thing happening to those said noses as I had the pleasure of seeing happen last Lammas to the nose of a certain party in the Post Office who steamed open a certain letter.”

The reference seemed a familiar one—at least to Mrs Pentatuke, who raised her eyes and sighed “Lucifer all-bloody-mighty! Not again!”

Mrs Framlington tapped the table with a pencil.

“If we can just have a little order, I will ask our Sister who has actually been visited by the police to tell you what she thinks it is all about.”

Mrs Gloss stood up and gave a brief account of her questioning by Detective-Constables Palethorp, Brevitt and Pook. She said it was her opinion that the interrogation had been of an unnecessarily importunate kind. Why, one might ask, had no fewer than three policemen been sent to her house? None had offered any good reason to suppose that Sister Edna had come to harm. She believed her so-called disappearance was being used as an excuse for police persecution. Small wonder that ratepayers resented having to find huge sums of money for the maintenance of law and order. Was this what they were to understand by law and order? She for one could think of other names for it.

Immediate warm applause was punctuated by cries of “Witch-hunt!”

Mrs Gloss, who appeared no less surprised by her own oratory than gratified by her audience’s reception of it, sat down in a glow and pretended to have lost her gloves among the cushions of her arm-chair.

“That,” said Henry Pearce as soon as he could make himself heard, “is all very well, but the question with me, Sister chairman, and with respect, is this. There wouldn’t be hordes of these policemen pushing into all our homes now if somebody hadn’t carried information. I think that the...”

Among several conflicting shouts of protest was one from Miss Amy Parkin.

“They found her car, didn’t they? And her clothes. It was only to be expected that they’d go round asking questions. I very much resent the insinuation of...of subversion that’s been made by Probationary Warlock Pearce.”

There were calls of “Hear, hear!” and “Withdraw!”

The object of the derogatory reference to rank, purple with fury, began to recite a curse, but his wife pulled him to his seat.

Mrs Framlington, finding appeals by pencil-tapping ineffective, opened a small metal box that stood beside the incense bowl and tried to tip a little of the greenish powder it contained upon the almost dead embers. In her agitation she cascaded a good ounce of powder into the bowl.

The resultant upsurge of thick, greasy smoke would have done credit to a burning tyre dump.

“Suppurating Satan!” muttered tall, scraggy Warlock Gooding as he shambled past the chairman’s table to fling open the french windows. None was so ungrateful as to rebuke him for blasphemy.

The debate was adjourned so that members might take advantage of Mrs Framlington’s invitation to stroll in the garden for a few minutes “in order”, as she phrased it, “to renew our store of Life Force from the great Pan“.

It was remarks of this kind which had done much to render invidious Mrs Framlington’s position as Coven chairman. The less tolerant members called her an old folksie, a white witch, and other uncomplimentary names. She was not what Thornton-Edwards, Arnold and Konstatin would have termed “orgy-orientated” and although she never voiced criticism of those channels in which self-expression tended to flow at the quarterly Sabbath, her early retirement from the ceremony or, on occasion, failure to attend at all, left no one in doubt of her lukewarm attitude.

The truth was that Bertha Framlington had drifted into witchcraft for no better reason than that it lay in much the same latitude as other and earlier interests of hers. This lofty, raw-boned, untidy-looking woman, with her round, steel-rimmed glasses; thick stockings, always rumpled; woollen garments that gave the impression of having been tossed upon her as upon a chair-back, by their true owners; her expression of troubled but kindly anticipation as she listened to others, which she did with mouth a little open, for she was inclined to deafness; this woman who walked with long, uncertain strides as if bolts had worked loose in her leg joints, was the widow of the one-time proprietor of a small wines and spirits business which now had been merged into the Bride Street supermarket. She was a vegetarian whenever she remembered to be. She had once stood for the Borough Council as an anti-fluoride candidate and polled fifty-eight votes. A dedicated reversionist, she considered Arthur to have been the last British monarch worthy of the crown. She would have re-instituted the maypole and the setting out of bowls of cream for goblins—despite lack of response to a saucer of Carnation Milk she three times thrice had left on the elegant porch of 3 Mather Gardens. Witchcraft, to Mrs Framlington, was a Robin Goodfellow affair, a branch of home arts and crafts. She found it more sociable than Primitive Methodism, her late husband’s hobby; less bloodthirsty than whist drives; and not so damp as Spiritualism, which she had tried also, but briefly.

On its re-assembly, the Coven was served with refreshments. There were cups of tea brewed with what Sister Pearce, who had brought it, asserted to be font water. The tea certainly tasted odd (“like mildewed vestments”, Warlock Parkin appreciatively pronounced it, to the benefit of his reputation as a cognoscente) and Mrs Framlington swallowed only enough to carry down one of the biscuits contributed by Sister Gooding. These were grey and gritty with pink flecks and were handed round by their creator with the gloomy but insistent generosity of a distributor of the means of fulfilling a suicide pact. Sister Gooding had never divulged the recipe for her confection, which Mrs Gloss flippantly called her Crypt Crumble, and the curious had to make what they could of her husband’s enigmatic “She’s got a cousin who works at the hospital, you know.”

The discussion was resumed. Sister Henrietta Hall, the wife of the manager of a car-hire firm in St Anne’s Place, said that her husband had spoken of newspapermen arriving in the town from London. They had been asking questions about the Craft, and there was talk of photographs.

“Photographs? What photographs?” Warlock Parkin had swung round in some alarm.

“In the church, he says.”

“Photographs of what?” asked Amy Parkin.

“Things,” darkly replied Sister Hall, at the end of her seam of information.

“That’s quite true, actually,” confirmed Sister Gloss. “One of my cleaning women has a son in the police, and she came in this morning with a tale about the vicar having been found hanged in his own pulpit...”

“No!” exclaimed Warlock Parkin, eyes a-glitter.

“...not that he had, of course. It was an effigy of old Grewyear and he called the police in to see it. That and a couple of other little arrangements, as a matter of fact.”

Mrs Framlington peeked anxiously at Maiden Pentatuke. “That was never authorized, was it? Doing Mr Grewyear!”

The black minutes book was consulted. “Not in this month’s programme, certainly,” said Mrs Pentatuke. “Could Sister Gertrude be more specific about the other things the police are supposed to have been shown?”

“ ‘A mouse that was hanged and a toad impaled.’ ”

Significant glances were exchanged around the room. Mrs Gloss had spoken quietly but with a rhythmic intonation that she had not used in speaking of the effigy.

Silence was broken by Tossie Pearce.

“ ‘With this spell be your coffin nailed’,” she recited eflectively.

Some of the others nodded. The mouse and toad combination seemed to be an old favourite.

Mrs Framlington, though, looked anxious. “Those little creatures hadn’t suffered, had they?” she inquired of Sister Gloss.

“Well, how would I know? I didn’t put them there.”

“Has anyone seen the vicar today?” Mrs Framlington asked, with rather less concern.

“He looked all right at four o’clock, wolfing cakes in Brown and Derehams.” This information came from Sister Parkin.

“Ah,” observed the more sanguine Mrs Pearce, “but we mustn’t forget that cramps don’t usually come on until the third day and it’s not before the seventh that they vomit nails.” She turned to Mrs Gloss. “Did you say one toad or two?”

“According to my cleaning wo...”

The slamming of the minutes book on the table signalled Mrs Pentatuke’s wrathful rise to her feet.

She glanced down contemptuously at Mrs Framlington, then addressed the meeting.

“This is all absolutely out of order. I do not think that anybody fully realizes the seriousness of what has been going on. The secrets of our society are threatened. One of our sisterhood has been taken and none knows where. Meddlers and inquisitors will use her vanishing as an excuse to harass us and seek the source of our power and chain our spirits. Thus I tell. Thus I warn. We are all in great peril. There is but one course to take, and that without delay.”

Slowly and with every muscle and tendon from wrists to shoulders tensed, Mrs Pentatuke raised her arms until both long, outstretched forefingers pointed horizontally ahead.

“We must raise the Grand Master!”

For nearly a minute, they all stared in shocked silence at the statuesque figure.

Then an almost incoherent whisper came from Mrs Framlington. “Yes, but...”

She cleared her throat very delicately, and tried again.

“But we don’t...we don’t know who he is.”

Silence descended again.

So, gradually, did Mrs Pentatuke’s arms.

“He is the Grand Master,” she stated hollowly, as if from sleep. “If we call, He will come.”

“Do you really think we ought to?” asked Mrs Hall, looking round at her neighbours.

None offered an opinion.

Then a smooth-faced, chinless man with thin hair and protuberant eyes, who had said nothing up to then, shuffled to the edge of his chair and spoke. He was Jack Bottomley, landlord of the Freemasons’ Arms, and leading singer in perpetuity of the Flaxborough Amateur Operatic Society.

“This lady who’s missing,” rasped Mr Bottomley, in a voice whose original fruitiness had long since been dehydrated by perennial performance of The Desert Song. “I wonder if I could make a suggestion.”

“By all means,” said Mrs Framlington, eager for an excuse to put off the mess and trouble of a conjuration.

“Well, it might not work, of course, but I was reading just the other day in ‘B and C’ that if you can get hold of some hair of anybody you want to find and burn it in front of a mirror, that person will appear. I thought I’d better, you know, sort of mention it.”

Mr Bottomley cast down his glance. Off-stage and away from his pub counter, he was a shy and nervous man; necromancy was for him a refuge from fears of inadequacy—or so Mrs Gloss had said more than once.

“What edition?” Mrs Pentatuke snappily inquired. She had left the table and was standing before a tall, glass-fronted bookcase.

“Well, er, that one, actually.”

“Seventeen forty-three,” Mrs Pentatuke spoke with a brusqueness that reproached Mr Bottomley’s lack of precision. She opened the case and pulled out a book whose leather binding looked dry and powdery, as if it had been stored in cocoa. It was one of the most frequently consulted volumes in the Coven library, and known simply as ‘B and C’ in abbreviation of its full title: With Broom and Cauldron, Being The True Confessions of Goody Nixon.

Mrs Pentatuke licked a finger and sought first a place in the index and then a specified page. They watched the alert, oscillating eye behind the spectacle lens quickly devour print. She slammed the book shut.

“Exactly as I thought. It’s one of the virgin things. Out.”

She squeezed Goody Nixon back between A Chronicle of Demonology in the Eastern Counties, 1587-1694, by Albert and Theresa Home, and Partick’s Dictionary of Herbs and Tinctures.

“How do you mean?” asked Amy Parkin. She sounded not very friendly.

“I mean,” said Mrs Pentatuke, walking back to her seat, “that it only works with virgins. Anyway, we’d have to find the woman first to cut some of her bloody hair off, wouldn’t we?”

With the ill-advised persistence of a self-doubter, Mr Bottomley coughed and said: “But I don’t quite see how our lady secretary can be so sure that this won’t work, madame chairman. I mean, Miss Hillyard isn’t married, is she?”

Before Mrs Pentatuke could raise steam for a fitting retort, Mrs Framlington said kindly: “No, of course not, Mr Bottomley; but that is rather a good point about our not having any of her hair for the experiment. Don’t you think?”

Mr Bottomley shrugged and lapsed into despondency.

An impatient tapping was heard. It was being made by Mrs Pentatuke’s shoe against the leg of the table.

“We’re wasting time, you know,” she said, without looking at anyone in particular. “The sooner we have the protection of the Master’s power, the sooner we can be sure that our terrestial existence will not be harassed by policemen and newspaper spies. I have warned once, I have warned twice. Split the mandrake with grattle and grice!”

“Stew their balls in badger bile,” yelled Mrs Gooding, with alliterative fervour.

Mrs Pentatuke turned up her eyes.

“O Master, come soon among us!”

Mrs Gooding nodded violently.

“He is like a ramrod of fire! Go-orrrh!”

She let out her breath with a noise like a winded horse and gave an ecstatic shuffle with her posteriors. Mr Gooding bestowed on her a sidelong glance of mild proprietary curiosity.

Amy Parkin and Mrs Pearce were having an argument about pentagrams, which the latter insisted on calling pentagons.

Mrs Gloss had discovered a hand casually laid upon her shoulder from behind. It was that of Paracelsus Parkin and, as Mr Parkin leaned forward to pay closer attention to something the chairman was murmuring, the hand slid through the neck of her dress. Mrs Gloss kept very still and dignified.

So, too, did Mrs Hall, who now regretted having spoken about the happenings in the church—partly because her sparsity of information had made her look ineffectual in relation to Mrs Gloss, proud claimant to not merely one cleaning woman but a plurality; and partly because she feared that the conjuring of the Master, so forcefully advocated by Sister Pentatuke, would almost certainly entail a general casting off of garments, which she, Mrs Hall, did not much fancy in broad daylight.

“Sisters and warlocks,” cried Mrs Framlington, aware at last that no one had been taking any notice of her for the past five minutes, “I really must ask you to preserve a little order in this discussion...”

Mr Parkin’s hand contracted playfully within Mrs Gloss’s brassiere. “Honk, honk!” he whispered into her ear.

“...which, after all, is concerned with a most serious matter. It would be most unfortunate if our little group were to find itself involved in a police investigation—particularly at a time when, as you have heard, some representatives of the national Press are in the town. We do not want any misunderstandings, do we? They could, if publicized, do some of us great harm.”

Mrs Gloss, OBE, Chairman of the Standing Conference of Conservative Ladies, looked grave. So did Mrs Pearce, Honorary Secretary of the Flaxborough Society of Mead Makers; Mrs Hall, vice-president of the Ladies’ Branch of the British Legion; and Mr Gooding, who for years had been trying to get into the Masons by sending gifts of his fretwork to members of the Royal Family.

“What I do think is regrettable,” continued Mrs Framlington, “is this quite unauthorized piece of spell-casting in the parish church. Sister Pentatuke is right to warn us of the possible consequences of, er, tactlessness in the exercise of our arts...”

“That,” Mrs Pentatuke broke in, “is not what I said. I warned and warned thrice of harm intended by spies and strangers. I have never sought to stay the hand of sister or brother in mal or moil, in dark or light.”

“I beg your pardon, Maiden Pentatuke.”

“Granted, Sister chairman.”

There was a long pause. Mrs Framlington looked expectantly at several members in turn. Mrs Gooding spoke.

“Couldn’t Warlock Bottomley get all these newspaper people or whatever they are into his pub? It would be easy enough then for him to...” She began to laugh wheezily—“to put a few drops of...of...”

This was as much of the suggestion that Mrs Gooding was able to offer before the palsy of her amusement rendered her altogether inarticulate.

“No, he jolly well couldn’t,” declared the horrified licensee of the Freemasons’ Arms.

“Let us be practical,” Mrs Framlington urged. She noticed that Henry Pearce had stood up and was looking at a piece of paper on which he had been writing a few notes. “Yes, Warlock Pearce?”

“To test the feelings of the meeting,” Pearce said slowly, “I am going to propose the following motion from the floor in regard to matters arising from what was said by madam secretary. That this assembly hereby authorizes the officers of the organization, known for security reasons as the Flaxborough Branch of the Sabbath Day Conservation Society, to conjure or otherwise obtain the presence—no, the attendance—the attendance for advice purposes of the Being we call for security reasons the President of the said Branch. And that we agree”—Mr Pearce glanced about him, then looked down at the paper again—“to co-operate in any ceremony or other activity deemed necessary by the said officers in order to raise the said President.”

Mr Pearce folded the paper twice, put it into his pocket and sat down.

“I second that proposition,” called Mr Parkin, withdrawing and raising his right, warmer, hand.

“Me, too!” Mrs Gooding was fumbling with a button at the side of her skirt.

Mrs Framlington searched with hopeful eye for evidence of contrary counsel. She looked for a moment at the unenthusiastic face of Mrs Hall but it remained averted. No one else seemed to wish to say anything.

“Carried unanimously,” announced Mrs Pentatuke, before Mrs Framlington could call for a vote. “I think,” she added, rising energetically to her feet, “that the curtains had better be drawn just in case anyone wanders by.”

Mr Parkin hastened to respond.

From within the tent of her tortuously uprising inside-out skirt Mrs Gooding was making little growling noises of pleasurable anticipation.

Her husband moved to the other side of the room and began slowly to unknot his tie in front of a gilt-framed wall mirror in which he could watch the reflected disrobing of Mrs Gloss. It looked, he thought, very artistic in the greenish gloaming produced by the closing of the curtains.

“Potions, everybody!”

This rallying cry came from Mrs Tossie Pearce on her return from a brief excursion to the kitchen. She shut the door behind her with her foot. On the tray she carried were five big black bottles.

“Do you mind using your cups?” she inquired cheerily.

To Mrs Pentatuke, ecstatically unbuttoning her dress, the question seemed to be a reminder. She came out of her trance.

“Gosh, I must just ring home,” she said to Mrs Framlington, and hurried to the door. “I left Lionel some liver in the oven. Mind if I use the phone?”

She disappeared before the owner of the house and telephone could reply. Mrs Framlington reflected that Mrs Pentatuke’s forcefulness of character could be a little trying on occasion.

She looked about her. Everyone seemed preoccupied and rather excited. Tossie Pearce’s home-made wine—this particular crue, she believed, was Sage and Blood Orange—had no rival in the county as an aphrodisiac. Would they take offence if she were to put newspapers over the furniture? Perhaps. Feeling apprehensive but quite impotent, she edged unobtrusively to the door, slipped through, and closed it behind her. She had decided to spend an hour weeding the herb garden.

On her way to the kitchen and the back door, she heard the voice of Mrs Pentatuke telephoning in the hall. She did not consciously listen to what Mrs Pentatuke was saying. Later, though, it was to occur to her that there had been something odd about the call—about the tone of voice which Mrs Pentatuke had used.

Why, Mrs Framlington was to ask herself, should a homely conversation about braised liver have sounded so threatening?