Broomsticks Over Flaxborough

Chapter Eight

The following morning, Mrs Framlington drove her sedate, seven-year-old motor-car into the Market Place and parked it with three wheels in the roadway and the fourth half-way across the pavement. This untidiness did not matter much, for it was Sunday and the streets were deserted except for an occasional blear-eyed wanderer in quest of cigarettes or milk or the News of the World. Mrs Framlington wanted none of these things. Nor did she join the thin straggle of citizens making their way to the south door of St Lawrence’s in response to the great waves of bell-music that had been assaulting the town since before eight o’clock. She took the perimeter path round the Church Close and halted before the door of a tall, narrow, Georgian house that looked as if it would have one or, at the most, two rooms on each of its three floors. Mrs Framlington remarked expansively to the woman who opened the door—a woman slightly younger, perhaps, than herself but of gracious manner and a pleasing mildness of countenance—that she had never heard the parish bells in better voice.

“What a lovely peal and how splendidly it seems to sing out right over one’s head,” she exclaimed, clasping her hands and gazing up at the vast honey-coloured cliff of the tower.

The other woman smiled and shook her head. She took Mrs Framlington’s arm and drew her inside the house, then closed the door.

“Now, dear,” she said sweetly, “what was it you said? I could not hear a word for those bloody bells.”

“I said,” replied Mrs Framlington after the smallest of pauses, “that I would give anything for a nice cup of coffee.”

“You shall have one. Immediately.” And Miss Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime waved her guest to ascend the twist of narrow, white-painted stairs.

Miss Teatime’s sitting-room on the first floor had a much more spacious air than might have been deduced from looking at the outside of the house. It was light, with big areas of polished wooden floor, a few heavy rugs and a minimum of slender-legged furniture that seemed to stand about in attitudes of well-bred deference. The two armchairs, that now were facing the window and its view of the church and the laburnum trees by the west porch, were small but dumpily hospitable in their petticoats of flowered chintz. Mrs Framlington sat in one of them and began sorting out in her mind the reasons for her visit while Miss Teatime busied herself with the preparation of coffee in the tiny adjoining kitchen.

Just as the laden tray was arriving through the doorway, the pealing of the bells abruptly ceased.

“Thank God for that,” said Miss Teatime. She glanced at her guest. “If you’ll pardon the allusion.”

She put the tray down on a low table and settled herself into the other armchair.

There was a whisky bottle beside the coffee jug. Miss Teatime indicated it as she took up Mrs Framlington’s cup.

“Hemlock?” she inquired waggishly.

Mrs Framlington shook her head. Her earlier ebullience seemed to have evaporated.

Miss Teatime poured straight coffee for her, then dispensed her own fifty-fifty formula.

It was several minutes before Mrs Framlington gave a little shudder, blinked away her dreamy expression and put down her cup.

“There are times,” she said carefully, “when I find myself just the teeniest bit out of sympathy with...you know.”

“Really?” Miss Teatime’s tone implied nothing but a desire to help.

“Well, some of them do go on rather. I am a keen Pagan person myself, but I feel that one cannot be always flying in the face of so-called civilization. There must be give and take in all things, don’t you think?”

“You are so right,” assented Miss Teatime solemnly. “Although it does seem at times that the take tends to predominate somewhat grossly.”

“The trouble with our little group,” went on Mrs Framlington, “is what begins to look like a division of attitudes. I had hoped that a common consciousness of the Universal Spirit—the Earth Force, as I like to call it—would unite us in purpose. But I’m afraid it hasn’t. There is no use in denying that there are factions. And some of us fear that serious trouble will result.”

Miss Teatime thoughtfully uncapped the whisky bottle.

“I did warn you, my dear, did I not, that unwelcome attention would be attracted to your organization if some of the members persisted in their more malodorous practices.”

“Yes, but how can I stop them? They are very much under the influence of Mrs Pentatuke. As you know, she is a strong Brockenist. I remember on one occasion I had to advise some friends of mine privately against accepting her offer of help as a baby-sitter. It was most embarrassing, but one has to draw the line somewhere.”

“An intimidating woman.”

“Oh, yes. And terribly carnal. I think she must have something wrong with her glands.”

Miss Teatime poured more coffee.

“Am I to understand, then, that your being Coven chairman gives you no real authority over these more wayward spirits?”

“Oh, I do not delude myself in that respect, Lucy. I know why I have been favoured with the chairmanship. I happen to have a large, pleasant and secluded house where our meetings can conveniently be held. That I don’t mind so long as there are no rites. Mrs Gloss is welcome to accommodate them. She has more domestic help to clear up the mess.”

“Forgive me, but I cannot quite free myself from the impression that witchcraft is not strictly your thing, as I believe they say nowadays. Cannot you send Mrs Pentatuke and her cronies packing if you see danger in continued association?”

Mrs Framlington stared into her cup.

“When one is a Justice of the Peace, a marriage guidance counsellor and a member of the boards of governors of two schools,” she said quietly, “one has to be careful with whom one associates—but a good deal more careful from whom one then dissociates.”

There was a pause.

“Yes, I do see what you mean.” With a pair of embroidery scissors, Miss Teatime probed the end of a cheroot before lighting it. “Yours is not the happiest of positions.”

“Oh, but you must not misunderstand me,” said Mrs Framlington more brightly. “I would not for the world be anything other than a witch. ‘A witch am I in blood and bone, a steadfast daughter of the moon.’ ”

“I take it, though,” remarked Miss Teatime, drily, “that your enthusiasm would not extend to riding into the magistrates’ court on your broomstick.”

“Well, precisely. Even witches must be discreet. I wish Pentatuke and Parkin and old Mrs Gooding could see that.”

“And Miss Edna Hillyard?” Miss Teatime regarded her guest as blandly as if she had just asked her the time.

“You know about that?”

“I certainly have heard that the girl is considered by the police to be a missing person. I know, of course, as well as you do, that she is a member of the Flaxborough Folklore Society, in the midst of one of whose little revels she is supposed to have disappeared.”

“That is quite true,” acknowledged Mrs Framlington. She sounded tired.

“Is there anything you think I can do?”

“I really don’t know. In any case, I don’t see why you should be plagued with our worries.”

“My dear Hetty, that is nonsense. I owe you and your band of helpers a great deal. We work professionally to considerable mutual advantage, as you know well.”

“The Coven doesn’t know, though,” said Mrs Framlington, uncomfortably.

“It is better,” replied Miss Teatime, “that we should remain unaware of our own virtues; otherwise, we might be tempted to set a price upon them.”

“What do you suppose you can do? It is the possible publicity that I dread, of course. That we all dread. All but”—Mrs Framlington smiled mirthlessly—“the baby blood brigade.”

Miss Teatime watched an expelled stream of cheroot smoke decelerate and form a sun-creamed vortex above a bowl of wallflowers in the window recess.

“Has it occurred to you,” she asked, “that publicity is exactly what some person or other seems determined to attract? I am thinking, in particular, of the not very savoury exhibition in the church over there.”

“Poor little things,” said Mrs Framlington absently. She gave a start. “But how did you know about that? I only heard myself yesterday.”

“Have you not read a newspaper this morning?”

“The Sunday Times. But not all of it, of course.”

Miss Teatime put down her cup and rose to cross the room.

“An elevated taste in reading matter can be a disadvantage sometimes.”

She handed Mrs Framlington a copy of the Sunday Pictorial that had been folded back to display the headlines: “PETS EXECUTED IN CHURCH OF BLACK MASS TOWN: ‘END NUDE RITES’ DEMAND MUMS.”

“Good God!” exclaimed Mrs Framlington. She fumbled for glasses to read the smaller print.

A quarter of a mile away in the police headquarters in Fen Street, Inspector Purbright was sampling and comparing a number of newspaper stories, of which the account in the Pictorial was one. They were highly diversified in terms of reported fact, but a reader as attentive as the inspector could scarcely avoid the conclusion that all had originated in the one town of Flaxborough and purported to describe similar events.

Common to every report was the use of the words witchcraft, black, magic, mass, sacrifice and cult. In three cases, nude and orgy had been incorporated as well. Satanism was offered by the Dispatch, while the Express daringly added necromancy (“say it neck-romancee”.)

Purbright decided that the piece in the Empire News promised to be, if not the most enlightening, at any rate the most imaginative and morally pop-eyed of that morning’s contributions to what he once had heard aphoristically defined as the Anals of Journalism.

Flaxborough, Saturday.

These were the questions on everyone’s lips today in this sleepy little market town...

Does the Devil ride out to claim dupes and victims amongst their neighbours?

Who, or what, offers sacrifices of animals in their ancient parish church at dead of night and in hideous parody of Christian ritual?

Are the flitting figures that have been glimpsed in near-by woodland those of members of a witch cult taking part in the bestialities of their “Sabbath”?

And what has happened to pretty, fun-loving typist, Edna Hillyard, who has not been seen since she said goodnight to friends at a folk-dance festival on Wednesday?

Seeking answers to these questions, I have discovered that facts even more disturbing—facts that might be connected with a Voo-doo type kidnapping—have been reported to the police.

The informants have not dared give their names.

For fear stalks this quiet country town, where apple-cheeked farmers—usually ready with a friendly word or a rural quip—now turn away at the sight of a stranger and touch the silver coins in their pockets to ward off evil.

One man not afraid to talk, however, is bluff river-boatman “Yormer” Heath. Mr Heath it was whose gruesome discovery of a devil mask in the river set off police inquiries into the disappearance of attractive, vivacious folk-dancer Edna.

“Yormer” told me: “We have been stalked by fear for some time in this quiet old town. I cannot rightly put a name to what troubles us, but it is evil, evil—like that unspeakable object which I hauled out of the water.”

I asked “Yormer” Heath if he had heard any reports of the notorious Black Mass being celebrated in Flaxborough. “Definitely,” he replied.

Did he personally know of any witches in the locality?

Certainly, he did, and so did many of his friends.

Yes, there had been sacrificial rites in the parish church and other places, and he would definitely describe those responsible as fiends in human form.

And the missing girl?

“Everybody in this town loved Edna Hillyard,” declared “Yormer” Heath as he went into the dusk after answering my questions in the quaint old Three Crowns inn, “and we shall not rest until we find her.”

Purbright, pleasantly intrigued thus far, was sorry to find that the story deteriorated in the next few paragraphs to a repetitious chronicle of assertions by “a local shopkeeper”, “a clergyman”, “housewives shopping in the old Market Place” and other traditional fictions of the thwarted or bar-bound journalist. But then his interest quickened anew.

In charge of the hunt for Edna Hillyard is Detective-Superintendent R. Parbright, golden-haired seven-footer known by the criminal fraternity of this remote area of rural England as “Apollo”.

Superintendent Parbright talked to me in the Operations Room of Flaxborough Police H.Q. He said he was unaware of the townspeople’s reluctance to go out after dark because of black magic rites.

“I’m an agnostic,” the superintendent declared. He added that he did not know what was meant by the word “permissive” and said he would like to take the opportunity to deny allegations that his men went round the town breaking up adulterous associations with their truncheons.

I asked him what progress had been made in the search for Edna Hillyard.

“We are still looking for the evidence that this thirty-four-year-old good-time girl has been used as a human sacrifice,” replied Superintendent Parbright.

As he spoke, I heard somewhere in the distance the screech of an owl.

In this town of fear, even the night-birds are edgy.

The chief constable made a diversion on his way home from church in order to call at the police station. He found Purbright sitting with Sergeant Love in the general office on the ground floor. They were drinking coffee. A small avalanche of newspapers covered a desk.

Mr Chubb slowly drew off his gloves. His expression was that of a surgeon at the end of an unsuccessful operation on a particularly rich patient.

“You know, Mr Purbright, I seriously doubted at the time your wisdom in entertaining those newspaper people.”

The gloves were deposited in Mr Chubb’s bowler hat, which, with his walking stick, he placed carefully on the top of a filing cabinet. He motioned Purbright and Love to resume their seats.

“I didn’t entertain them half as lavishly as they have entertained me, sir.” Purbright nodded towards the pile of newspapers. He wondered how far down the social scale was the journal that Mr Chubb would confess to having read.

“Do not let us play with words,” admonished the chief constable. “What I mean is that all this inflammatory nonsense would never have got into print if you had refused to be interviewed. Whatever possessed you to bring up the subject of human sacrifices? My paper actually quoted you as saying something about my men going round the town with truncheons and stopping adultery. Really, Mr Purbright!”

The inspector looked shocked. “But surely, sir, The Observer hasn’t...”

Mr Chubb hastily made correction.

“No, I’m wrong. It was a paper the vicar showed me. But that doesn’t make the matter less serious.”

Purbright debated the likelihood of the chief constable’s appreciating an explanation of the tactics of the newspaper interview but decided against.

“I’m sorry about this, of course, sir, but I think you’ll find that where information is refused altogether the press can be very vindictive—as one might argue it has a right to be.”

For a moment, Mr Chubb turned upon the inspector that gaze of sad and perplexed reproof with which he habitually reacted to outlandish opinion. Then he examined the buttons on the cuff of his coat.

“Mrs Chubb tells me,” he said, almost casually, “that she was taking some of the boys for a walk yesterday” (the “boys” were a swarm of Scotch terriers bred and fostered by the Chubbs)—“when one of them was attacked by a beast belonging to a woman named Gooding...” He raised his eyes. “Do you know of a Mrs Gooding?”

Purbright shook his head and glanced questioningly at Love, who said at once: “Could be Mrs Margaret Gooding, sir. Beatrice Avenue. Husband, George. We’ve had complaints about him shooting arrows in the garden. I believe he writes to the Queen a lot.”

The inspector looked proudly at Mr Chubb, as if to solicit reward there and then for omniscient Love, but the chief constable merely nodded.

“That’s her. The dog is black and very vicious. Mrs Chubb naturally remonstrated with the woman. Now here’s the significant thing—at least, it could be significant. This Gooding person was rather offensive and she ended up by saying (now just let me get this right) yes, by saying: ‘You’ll be getting a call from my Meffie later and he’ll wind your bowels round and round the bed post.’ ”

“Good lord,” said Purbright. He tried to look more surprised then he felt at this fairly ordinary example of dog owners’ rhetoric. “Who’s Meffie, though—the husband? I thought he was called George.”

“She was referring,” the chief constable said very deliberately, “to her dog.”

“Her dog?”

“Certainly. Mrs Chubb had no doubt whatever about that. The woman indicated the beast while she was talking. My Meffie, she called it. Several times.”

The inspector, at a loss to see the relevance of this incident to the earlier subject of Mr Chubb’s complaint, waited for a hint.

“No smoke without fire, Mr Purbright.”

“I suppose not, sir.”

There was another silence.

“No, I didn’t understand either,” conceded the chief constable at last. “It was Mrs Chubb who opened my eyes, so to speak. The dog, you see—Meffie. Well, Meffie’s not a dog’s name. I mean, no one would call a decent self-respecting animal Meffie, would he?”

“Certainly not,” agreed Purbright, anxious not to protract what seemed to him an idiotic excursion into Fetology.

“But Mrs Chubb realized straight away that the name was short for something else. Now are you with me?”

The chief constable’s face was as nearly expressive of excitement as either of his officers had ever seen it. Love said “Ah!” loudly, out of sheer nervousness.

“The sergeant’s got it,” said Chubb, almost jocularly, to Purbright. “What about you?”

“I’m afraid I’m rather dense this morning, sir.”

“I’m afraid you are, Mr Purbright. Perhaps the shock of”—he glanced at the pile of newspapers—“so much notoriety has not yet worn off. When it does, you might reflect that Meffie is an abbreviated form of Mephistopheles.”

There was a pause.

“You think, then, do you, sir, that Mrs Gooding may be associated with the kind of activities described—or hinted at, rather—in these newspaper stories?”

“I leave you to draw what inference you care to.”

Purbright consulted his own Familiar. “Has Mrs Gooding ever been in trouble of any kind, sergeant?”

Love answered without hesitation.

“Only for not having a dog licence. I think that was two years ago. And we were called once to a bit of disturbance with neighbours. They reckoned she’d got into their garden during the night and sprinkled everything with battery acid, but there was never anything proved.”

“Beatrice Avenue,” observed Mr Chubb, “went down badly after that dreadful business a few years ago at number fourteen.³ There were some very nice people living there at one time.”

³ Reported in Hopjoy Was Here

Purbright reflected, not for the first time, that the chief constable was inclined to regard vice and violence as systemic infections, mysterious as dry rot, that might be checked but never completely eradicated from the neighbourhood corpus in which they once had manifested themselves. Their spores, it seemed, were secreted in local property values which thereafter steadily and irrevocably shrank, the process being known by Mr Chubb as “going down”.

“Would you like me to have Mrs Gooding questioned?” Purbright asked. “What she said to Mrs Chubb might well be construed as a threat. And then there is the possibility of her dog coming within the definition of a dangerous animal, not under proper control.”

The chief constable vetoed this suggestion at once. Mrs Chubb did not bear a grudge and would not, in any case, care to be involved.

Purbright began to tidy up the newspapers.

“I expect you will have noticed that there is no mention of Mr Persimmon’s disappearance in any of these stories, sir.”

Mr Chubb’s tone was still chilly.

“Let us be thankful for small mercies.”

“His wife, I think, is less worried than she would like us to believe. His spending a night away from home and without warning is no novelty, apparently. She may or may not suspect that he has gone off with another woman—my impression after talking to her is that her husband’s fidelity is not the most important thing in life for Mrs Persimmon.”

“She is very interested in flower arrangement,” volunteered Mr Chubb. “The Club committee room is beautifully done out sometimes. Tell me, though, Mr Purbright—why are you so sure that Bert Persimmon is carrying on with this Hillyard girl? There’s been no whisper at the Club.”

“Coincidence, mainly, sir. I agree there has been an absence of gossip, but that in itself would tend to confirm that Miss Hillyard’s lover is a person of some local consequence. Both would be careful to keep the affair quiet.”

“You’re guessing, you know.”

“Yes, sir. I am.”

“But the girl’s clothes that were found in her car—how do you explain those?”

“She had been attending this folk dancing thing and I should think the arrangement was for him to pick her up there when it finished, or when she could slip away. She was probably hot and sweaty, so she changed into a fresh outfit there by the car. She wouldn’t want to go back to her lodgings so late in the evening and possibly draw her landlady’s attention to the man she was going off with.

“There was absolutely no sign,” the inspector added, “of a disturbance in or near the girl’s car. The clothing was not damaged in any way and it had been left in a neatly folded pile, except for a slip that looked as if it had been dropped on the ground and picked up again.”

Mr Chubb pouted thoughtfully. “All terribly speculative,” he complained. “It seems to me that there is nothing whatever to connect these two people.”

“Other than their simultaneous disappearance, sir.”

“Well, yes; that’s a pretty negative argument, after all.”

Purbright hesitated. The chief constable’s disputatious mood was out of character. Either he was spinning out the interview in order to absent himself from some kind of domestic unpleasantness, or he was genuinely apprehensive lest the Edna Hillyard affair provide the press with even more dastardly material.

“There is,” the inspector said, “one link that I haven’t mentioned yet. It may come under your heading of speculation, but I’ll tell you what it is, if you like.”

“Please do.”

“According to Mrs Persimmon—and I have not yet confirmed what she said—her husband works in some welfare capacity in partnership with three other well-known people. One, as we might expect, is the vicar. Sir Harry Bird is another. And the third is the Medical Officer, Dr Cropper, in whose office Miss Hillyard is employed.”

Mr Chubb wrinkled his nose. “A bit thin, Mr Purbright, isn’t it?”

An incoming call set off the buzzer of the unattended switchboard. Constable Braine clattered into the office and stared vaguely about him. Purbright waited until Braine had picked up the receiver before he spoke again.

“Tenuous perhaps at first sight, yes, sir. But an introduction might easily have resulted. I don’t know yet the nature of what Persimmon’s wife called his ‘samaritan’ activities, but they could be something to do with moral guidance.”

“You mean that is what the girl was in need of?”

“I mean nothing of the kind, sir. But women of generous and uninhibited temperament do have the misfortune to attract the attention of well-meaning people. That could...”

“Excuse me a moment, sir.”

Constable Braine had appeared at Purbright’s elbow.

A dignified nod from Mr Chubb conferred permission to speak. Braine straightened his shoulders.

“That was Henry Cutlock on the phone, sir. The fisherman. He was ringing from the staging at Five Mile Bar to say they’d picked up a body, sir. He thinks they’ll be berthing in just over an hour.”

Purbright looked up at the clock.

“Tell the ambulance station to have someone at the harbour by a quarter to one. You’d better warn them that the body’s been in the sea. Then get on to the hospital. Where’s Bill Malley?”

The Coroner’s Officer was likely, according to Braine, to be either at choir practice or playing darts in the Railway Hotel.

“Leave a message with his wife, then, will you? And I’d be obliged if you’d raise Harper in case we need pictures.”

Mr Chubb witnessed all this ordering of affairs with grave approval. It was not until Constable Braine had completed the commissions so far entrusted to him, however, that Purbright put the question which the chief constable had been waiting to hear answered.

“Did Henry say whether it was a man or a woman?”

“Man, sir.”

“Any hope of its being identifiable, did he think?”

“Oh, but he knows who it is, sir. It’s the manager of that supermarket at the corner of Bride Street. Mr Persimmon.”

Chapter Nine

The mortuary at Flaxborough General Hospital was set distinctly apart from the main group of buildings, as though the relationship was an embarrassment. It probably was, for whereas the hospital presented in 1912 brick baroque the florid and self-confident face of a doer of Good Works, the mean-visaged concrete and asbestos mortuary lurked like some necessary but resented menial, bearing mute witness to the philanthropist’s fallibility.

It was not the failure of hospital treatment, charitable or otherwise, that accounted for the latest occupancy of the mortuary, however. Bertram Persimmon had died either by drowning or—and the police surgeon inclined to this opinion after a preliminary examination of the body—from a deep wound in his neck.

“How long would you say he’d been in the water?”

Purbright was looking down at the white, boneless-seeming body of what the pathologist’s report was to describe as a “well-nourished male, aged 45-50, with some excess of adipose tissue but otherwise generally healthy apart from a degree of arterial deterioration consistent with age and sedentary occupation...” To the flaccid flesh of arms and legs, black hairs, still wet, clung like draggles of weed. The thick patch in the middle of the chest was less dark. Around the head, damp strands of grey were tangled. They, more than anything else about the corpse, suggested defeat and helplessness. Purbright discovered that he had the foolish desire to comb them into order.

“Difficult to tell. Two days. Three days. Ay-ay-ay-ay...”

This last sound was a favourite comment of Doctor Fergusson; it was a kind of brisk keening for human frailty.

Purbright watched the sun-burned poll of the little Scotsman as he short-sightedly peered and probed, turning over folds of skin, exploring bone structure and tracing with delicate fingers the lip of the great wound in the side of the neck.

Fergusson shook his head and tut-tutted.

“And what, my lad, were you doing to get this great hole dug in you?”

He straightened and said, this time to Purbright: “It’s one hell of a jab, is that.”

“Could it have happened while he was in the river? A chop from a propeller—something of that sort?”

“Not in a hundred years, laddie. Dearie me, no.” Fergusson bent again. “I’m not making any bets but I’ll be surprised if we don’t find that this was what put paid to him.”

“Have you any idea how a wound like that might have been caused?”

“I have not.”

“A knife?”

“No, no—not a knife. I’d say not a blade of any kind.”

“A spike, then?”

Fergusson did not refute this suggestion quite so promptly, but on reflection he thought a spike, in the sense of a spiked railing, say, was not the most likely weapon.

“What about a sharpened stake?”

“Ah...” The doctor raised a finger to the side of his nose and considered. He took a close look at the wound.

“Could be. Aye. Something at least two inches in diameter at the thick end. A stake—you might be right.”

He looked suddenly over his shoulder at the inspector. “Why? Have you found one?”

“Heavens, no.”

The doctor sighed and busied himself with his bag. The catch snapped shut. He walked to a sink and began washing his hands.

“As a matter of fact,” he called, “I once saw a wound very similar to that one. The fellow hadn’t been in a river, though. They’d pulled him out of a stockyard.”

He turned off the tap and glanced around. “Hell, isn’t there even a towel in this place?”

Purbright pointed to a paper towel-dispenser farther along the white-tiled wall. “Stockyard?” he repeated.

“Aye, he’d been gored,” said Fergusson. “By an Aberdeen Angus.”

The inspector stared ruminatively at the corpse. He bent down and examined an area of the throat a few inches to the left of the main wound. The flesh was bruised and close scrutiny revealed a number of small, irregular gashes. “What do you make of that, doctor?”

Fergusson thrust his head into partnership with Purbright’s. He pouted, unimpressed.

“Superficial cuts and abrasions. Bodies do get knocked about on their travels, you know.” He straightened, reached for his bag.

“No, wait a minute.”

The inspector took a pencil from his pocket and indicated with its point what appeared to be a bright red incision at the edge of the damaged area.

“I took that to be blood, but of course, it can’t be—not after a longish immersion in water. Try tweezers.”

“Hey, this isn’t the PM yet, laddie. You’ll get me shot.” But Fergusson, intrigued himself, produced a small pair of forceps and investigated.

The scarlet line proved to be the edge of a hard object embedded in the flesh. The forceps gripped and began to withdraw it.

Fergusson dropped the find into a small porcelain dish. It was a curved fragment, about half an inch long, of very thin ruby-coloured glass.

The bells of St Lawrence’s had just begun to make their second major assault of the day upon the ears and vestigial consciences of Flaxborough when six policemen, accompanied by a policewoman, sat down to consider plans for the investigation of the death of Bertram Persimmon. It was six o’clock.

A big rectangular table had been pulled into the middle of the CID room. At its head sat the chief constable, wearing half-moon spectacles that gave him an air of school-masterly sapience. Purbright was at the opposite end of the table. The two longer sides were occupied by Detective-Sergeant Love, Detective-Constables Harper and Pook, and Sergeant William Malley, the Coroner’s Officer.

The policewoman was Sadie Bellweather, and she sat a little apart from the others, with a shorthand notebook on her knee.

On the farther side of the room a tea chest had been up-ended to serve as a display plinth. It bore the bull’s-head mask which Purbright had retrieved for the occasion from a locked compartment in the lost property cupboard.

The chief constable spoke first.

“There are just a couple of points I think we should be clear about before we go any further, gentlemen. Firstly, there is no doubt, I take it, that the body is that of Mr Persimmon?”

“That’s so, sir,” confirmed Malley, a very large man indeed, whose matching store of amiability had not been noticeably diminished even by the disruption of his Sunday evening. “Mrs Persimmon has been down to the hospital already and identified him.”

“And the inquest?”

“Formal opening and adjournment in the morning, sir.”

Mr Chubb looked straight down the table to Purbright.

“You’ve seen the body, of course—as I have—and your opinion is that Persimmon could not possibly have received that injury by accident. Am I right?”

“Let me put it this way, sir. I find it quite impossible to visualize an accident that would have had precisely the results that we’ve seen here. The wound is consistent with the man having been gored. But it would be asking a lot from coincidence to suppose that he had happened to be on the brink of the river at the time. There are other factors which I shall mention shortly, and they do fit in with a picture of deliberate violence on somebody’s part.”

“In short,” said Mr Chubb, “we are faced with a case of murder.”

“Murder or manslaughter, sir. The distinction need not trouble us at this stage, as you rightly point out.”

The chief constable was still pondering this mysterious compliment when Purbright got up and walked over to the tea chest.

All looked towards the bull’s head, Mr Chubb with cold appraisal, Malley stolidly, Love and Harper craning like tourists anxious to get their money’s worth, Pook indifferently, and Policewoman Bellweather with that rigidity of mien with which she had trained herself to confront all things unusual or distasteful, from a motor accident to a rashly proffered penis.

Purbright stationed himself by the mask like a lecturer.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to tell you what I can about this thing without your coming any nearer. Forensic are sending someone over, and there will be hard words if we are caught handing it around.

“The curator of the Fish Street Museum, from which you’ll remember it was stolen a couple of years ago, says that it was used—or rather that others, of which this is an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century copy, were used—in religious celebrations of a kind that the press likes to call fertility rites. You could say it had associations with paganism—magic—witchcraft, if you prefer—but my main concern at the moment is with its physical properties.

“You can take it from me that this is an extremely durable article. Webster, the curator, thinks it is oak under all the varnish. The horns are actual bull’s horns, but they have been set in the wood at an upward rather than a forward angle. The carpentry is excellent: neither horn has worked loose even after God knows how many years. Both horns are sharp.

“This harness”—Purbright pointed to the broad leather straps—“would cross round the chest and keep the thing on pretty firmly.

“The mask would float with the help of a little trapped air. Which is why it is here now and not at the bottom of the river where I suspect someone either excessively optimistic or simply in a hurry thought it would end up.”

Sergeant Malley took from his mouth the empty pipe he had been sucking and signalled with it his desire to ask a question.

“You feel confident, do you, inspector, that Persimmon was killed with that thing?”

“Absolutely.”

Malley nodded and blew, like a gentle whale, while he formulated his next question.

“Do you have that opinion because both the body and the mask were found in the river within a fairly short time of each other?”

“No, not just because of that. Doctor Fergusson will be assisting at the PM a little later this evening, but I might as well mention one of the more interesting discoveries that he’s made already.

“Now, here”—the inspector pointed delicately with a pencil—“there has been fixed fairly recently to the top of the mask, exactly halfway between the horns, a small electric bulb holder. The bulb is smashed, but its base is still screwed into the holder and there is enough glass left to be compared with fragments of the same bulb that might turn up elsewhere.”

“As they have, presumably,” said Mr Chubb.

“In the neck of the corpse, actually. And the glass is rather distinctive. One would call it ruby, I think. The bulb is of the kind that is hung on Christmas trees. Forensic will be able to say for certain if the glass matches, but I have no reason to doubt that it does—nor that we have here the weapon that killed Persimmon.”

“I quite agree with you,” said the chief constable.

The inspector gave a small bow.

“What I cannot understand,” went on Mr Chubb, “is why the fellow, whoever he is, went to all that trouble. It’s a terrible enough thing to kill somebody, God knows, but to dress up as a cow with all that electric paraphernalia in order to do it... We’re obviously dealing here with a diseased mind, gentlemen.”

The others observed silence of a duration suitable to the profundity of the chief constable’s conclusion. Love was the first to let curiosity off the leash again.

“Where’s the battery?” he inquired, pertly.

“Inside,” said Purbright. He pointed again with his pencil. “Under some padding. The wiring is quite neat. It comes out at the side—just here—and connects with this rheostat switch.”

“Rheostat?”

To the aid of perplexed Malley came Harper. “It’s a dimmer. You know. Like a car’s dashboard light.”

“Ah,” Malley’s own elderly vehicle all but lacked a dashboard, let alone a rheostat, but he thought he understood.

Constable Pook, who was frowning a good deal, asked what the inspector supposed the idea of the switch and so on had been.

Purbright shrugged. “Your guess would be as good as mine. According to Webster, this kind of mask sometimes had a candle set between the horns. It was lighted during the ceremony to add to the general impressiveness of the occasion.”

“But whoever wore that thing,” Love said, “wouldn’t get much dancing done. Not with a lighted candle on his bonce. It would blow out.”

“As I understand it, he wasn’t expected to dance, sergeant. All he had to do was to sit and be worshipped.”

Harper spoke. “I think I get the idea of the rheostat, sir. If there’s been any worshipping or that sort of thing going on, that is. The fellow inside that mask would want the thing to be artistic, wouldn’t he? A gradual fading in and out. I mean, it would look stupid if it just went on and off like a traffic light.”

Mr Chubb, looking a little exasperated by the disquisition on electric circuits, suggested that it was time to consider other lines of investigation and how best they might be followed.

Purbright returned to his place at the table. He straightened two sheets of notes that lay before him.

“Because Persimmon appears to have been killed in so bizarre a fashion,” the inspector began after a pause, “the temptation is to concentrate on that aspect of the crime. To try and trace, for instance, the person who originally stole or later came into possession of that mask. Inquiries will need to be made, certainly, but we shall be lucky if they are productive; it’s amazing how invisible things become once they have been pinched from a museum or an art gallery.

“We also shall need to treat seriously, though not with credulity, the stories of witchcraft that have been going the rounds in the last few days. It would be foolish to ignore the ritual associations of the mask. Again, though, I’m sure the chief constable will wish me to stress the importance of sifting concrete and relevant evidence from all the portentous rumour which so readily froths up during investigations of this kind.

“More in the nature of conventional inquiries will be the effort needed to find out what sort of person the dead man was and how he spent his time—particularly, of course, during Wednesday, when he was last seen alive. Persimmon was well known and there should be no lack of information concerning his open activities...”

“Open?” Mr Chubb had raised one eyebrow.

“Yes, sir. There could have been others, of which direct evidence is unlikely to be forthcoming.”

The chief constable glanced apprehensively in the direction of Policewoman Bellweather.

“Be that as it may,” he murmured.

“Which brings me,” resumed the inspector, relentlessly, “to the matter of Edna Hillyard’s disappearance. When it was first known that Persimmon, too, had vanished, Mr Chubb rightly described as guesswork my connecting the two events. It was, at that time, conjecture—though not, I think, wild conjecture. Less than half an hour ago, however, I received a telephone call from the manager of the Neptune Hotel at Brocklestone. He confirmed, with dates, what he had told me when I rang him earlier in the afternoon. Persimmon and Miss Hillyard stayed together at the hotel on three occasions during March and twice in April.”

“The manager told you that?”

Mr Chubb’s involuntary emphasis on “Manager” suggested that even in murder investigations there existed areas of confidential dealing that were not lightly to be exploited.

“Yes, sir. Barraclough. He’s reasonably co-operative provided he can be convinced that we are not spying on his guests simply for the sake of being officious.”

“I was not thinking in terms of Mr Barraclough’s willingness or unwillingness to impart information,” said the chief constable. “What I find surprising is his ability to furnish you with the correct names. I had always understood that people who stay at hotels for immoral purposes are inclined to use pseudonyms.”

“Is that so, sir? Ah, well, Mr Barraclough has a very wide local acquaintance and a good memory. I suspect he would not need to rely too heavily upon his hotel register for identification.”

Sergeant Malley testified that the manager of the Neptune had not only a memory like a filing system but a particular talent for recognizing averted faces and even, some said, fugitive backsides.

“Does the inspector mean that Miss Hillyard could be at Brocklestone aow?” asked Pook.

“She could be anywhere,” Purbright replied. “But Brocklestone is one of the less likely places. She certainly is not at the Neptune, and has not been there since last month. No, in view of what has happened to her lover, the possibility that most worries me is that she finished up in the same place as he did.”

Mr Chubb stared, frowning, at the inspector. Purbright realized that the man was genuinely grieved by the suggestion. What he had not expected, though, was Mr Chubb’s patent surprise. Purbright felt sorry for him.

“After all, sir, no one has had word of this woman for four days. Persimmon’s death must change radically whatever theories we might have formed previously. I admit my own view was decidedly over-complacent.”

Sergeant Love spoke. “We don’t know for certain that she was still his girl friend. She’d knocked around a good deal before and the people who talked to me about her didn’t strike me as thinking that she was likely to settle for anybody in particular.” Love leaned round Harper to address the chief constable directly. “She’s not what you might call a home-loving girl, sir.”

Mr Chubb pouted dubiously. “That may be so, sergeant, but I’m afraid the only hypothesis we can afford to accept is that both these unfortunate people were involved in the same event. We must hope it did not have the same outcome for both of them.”

“One of my proposals,” Purbright said, “is that apart from trying to find out what happened on Wednesday night, and where, we should assume that Miss Hillyard is still alive and make a special effort to trace her. With your agreement, sir, I should not rule out door-to-door inquiries. The county people might help with men.”

Mr Chubb made a note on the pad before him. “I’ll have a word with Hessledine,” he said.

Harper asked Love something under his breath, then spoke aloud. “Does anybody know if Mr Persimmon had a car?”

“Yes, Malley said, a big Ford, he thought a Zodiac, was almost certain a Zodiac.”

“Do we know where it is now?”

Purbright acknowledged the point to be a good one. He added—but inwardly—that there was no excuse for his having failed to think of it himself, then sent Love into the next office with instructions to telephone Mrs Persimmon and ask if her husband had been using the car on the day of his disappearance.

“Surely,” said Mr Chubb to the inspector when Love had departed, “she would have mentioned the car to you when you called on her yesterday if her husband had taken it with him?”

“She was somewhat distraught, sir.”

“Yes, I can understand that. Even so, cars are pretty expensive items, you know.”

“His probably had been provided by the firm.”

“You think so?”

“It’s customary.”

“Ah.”

Love returned with the information that Persimmon’s car, the registration number of which he had obtained from the widow, had not been seen by her since the previous Wednesday morning. Nor had she thought about it. Was it, perhaps, in the parking bay behind the supermarket? She had no other suggestions to offer.

Chapter Ten

With the air of a generous sportsman leading his second best golf clubs to a friend who has never played before, the County Chief Constable acceded to Mr Chubb’s request for help in the hunt for Edna Hillyard.

Six uniformed men and two detective-constables were relieved of their duties in Chalmsbury, Brocklestone and some of the smaller county divisions and told to report at Flaxborough, where, if the search should prove protracted, they would be found lodgings.

Purbright awaited the result of his call to Ayrshire, where lived Edna’s only traceable relatives. If door-to-door inquiries were to be made, recognizable duplicates of a photograph of the woman would have to be run off. Neither her landlady nor any of her friends interviewed so far possessed a picture.

The day before the county men were due to be briefed, a carefully wrapped, framed portrait arrived at Fen Street. It was of a five-year-old child with whimsically gappy teeth and dressed in a gauze fairy costume and ballet shoes.

The inspector showed it to Love.

“Her auntie in Scotland produced it. It’s all they’ve been able to turn up. You’ve seen the girl. Is this going to be any good?”

“No,” said the sergeant.

“No hint of features? Nothing that might just connect in people’s minds?”

Love shook his head firmly.

Purbright put the photograph aside. “Could we get a drawing made, do you think? We’ve got to have something for people to be shown.”

“Have you tried the Citizen office?”

It was, the inspector reflected, just as well that Love had a kind of built-in guilelessness that prevented his exploiting or even gloating over the gaffes and shortcomings of his superior officers. So gross a lapse as failure to go straight to the local newspaper file as the most likely source of a picture hardly bore thinking about.

“My dear Sid, you mean you haven’t been round there yet?”

“I can’t remember that you asked me to.”

Purbright regarded with fond admonishment the pink face of Love, helpful, unsurprised.

“Never mind,” he said at last. “You’ve had a lot to think about. It’s often the most obvious things that get overlooked.”

The sergeant nodded, forgiving himself.

Ten minutes later, he was searching through the efficiently maintained photographic index of the Flaxborough Citizen in Market Street.

As Purbright, upon reflection, had surmised, Miss Hillyard was by temperament the sort of woman who might be expected to have had a history of entering beauty competitions. The most recent, apparently, had been only five years ago when she was twenty-nine. Love withdrew and gazed with admiration upon the print entitled “Miss Arcadia Ballroom, 1966”. It showed a large but well-proportioned brunette, whose sexual attractions—without question considerable even in straight presentation, so to speak—had been lent breath-catching emphasis by a choice of costume that not only was flagrantly translucent but seemed to have been shrunk on like the wrapping of a vacuum-packed ham.

“She looks fairly capable of looking after herself,” Purbright said, trying to feel confident.

He handed the print back to Love. “Get Harper to run off two or three dozen copies.”

With twelve of the duplicated photographs in his pocket, the inspector called at the Roebuck Hotel and asked if he might see one of the gentlemen associated with the detergent advertising campaign currently mounted in the town.

He was ushered into a small, brown room, papered in simulation of panelling and hung with as many sporting prints as could be accommodated in single file around the walls. The room smelled of gin, with an underlying tang of horseradish sauce.

Three men and two women sat round a mahogany dining table on which lay a jostle of pamphlets, correspondence and what Purbright took to be accounts or statistical extracts. Several bottles and two siphons were grouped in the centre of the table. On a sideboard were more bottles and a portable film projector.

The girl who had acted as the inspector’s guide retreated and shut the door behind her without attempting introductions.

Purbright found himself being eyed sourly by the room’s five occupants.

“I am an inspector of police and my name is Purbright.”

At first no one moved. The inspector had a momentary impression that the three expensively dressed, gloomy-looking men and their languid companions supposed his appearance to be connected with some puritanical local application of the liquor laws. Then he realized that their depression was rooted in some earlier and more serious cause.

“Which of you gentlemen is the Lucillite representative?”

The man called Gordon gave a start and leaped nimbly to his feet.

“Terribly sorry, inspector. We were rather preoccupied conference-wise. I’m Dixon-Frome, DD Division. This is Richard, our consultancy colleague”—a nod and a purr from the adman—“and Hughie, of course, who is our Assistant Environmental Research and Liaison Executive.”

“And anyone who can say that gets a free packet of Lucillite right here and now!”

The man with the aubergine nose was suddenly erect and grinning. He pumped Purbright’s hand, then stood back and upped and downed him in an appraising gaze of enormous geniality.

“Fabulous! Absolutely fabulous!”

To Purbright’s astonishment, he found an arm round his shoulder and Hugh’s grin bobbing about a couple of inches from his face.

“Let us,” said Gordon, elbowing Hugh aside like an over-exuberant dog, “not forget the most important members of the team. Sheila darling...”

He reached toward but did not touch the hand of a girl whose most immediately noticeable features were lemon-blonde hair, tight wash-leather shorts and a butt-end of cigar on which her mouth worked as tirelessly as a boxing promoter’s.

“Sheila’s our Personnel and Welfare Executive,” Gordon said.

“Detergents Division, Domestic,” squeezed wetly past Sheila’s cigar butt.

Purbright thought he detected a note of irony and held her glance a little longer, but the girl’s eyes remained solemn.

He looked away to a plump, sallow-complexioned young woman who had been examining a sheaf of photographic stills and making rings upon them with a white crayon

“Hendy,” Gordon announced, extending his hand towards her. “Assistant Co-ordinator, Visual Kinetics.”

Hendy examined two more stills, marked them, then looked up at the inspector. She gave him a smile like the movement of a camera shutter and resumed her task.

“Fabulous,” murmured Hugh, for no reason that Purbright could determine.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you in conference,” the inspector began, “but I do think that there are one or two ways in which you can be especially helpful to us.”

“To the police, you mean?”

“I don’t wish to put it quite as narrowly as that, sir. To the police, yes; but in the main to the community. There has been a murder in the town and a woman has disappeared. We are very anxious to trace her quickly. If she is not already dead, that is.”

Hugh’s face registered disbelief, then horrified surprise, and set after a few more modifications into the lineaments of grave determination to see justice done.

“But that’s terrible, inspector. Really terrible.” He turned to Richard. “Isn’t that terrible, Richard?” And to Gordon. “Gordon—did you hear what the inspector said? Isn’t that terrible? Hendy darling...”

Purbright waited for the equitable distribution of Hugh’s dismay to be completed.

“You’d heard nothing of this business, then, sir?” he asked Gordon.

“Not a word. But we aren’t exposed, really, to the neighbourhood thing. Not in any viable sense, are we, Richard?”

“I wouldn’t say we were, Gordon, no. I mean, we haven’t personalized communications outside the wash-psychology thing. There just isn’t...”

“Who’s dead?”

Sheila was looking up at the inspector. The cigar butt, perilously short now, seemed about to be ingested within her puckered lips.

“He’s a shopkeeper,” Purbright said. “Or rather, a store manager.” He saw interest flare suddenly in his audience.

“Not a supermarket manager?” prompted Gordon, hesitantly.

“That’s right, sir. A man called Bertram Persimmon.”

“Christ!” Richard said.

Purbright looked from one to another. “Did any of you know this man, then?”

“Well, I don’t know that we’d actually met him, had we, Richard? Not in a social situation.”

“He was a great person,” Hugh interposed fervently.

“I have an idea,” Richard said to Gordon, “that we did see him once—person-to-personwise, I mean. Wasn’t he at the prepromotion thing at the Dorchester? Right?”

“Right. Well, probably, anyway.”

“Right.” Richard turned to Purbright. “Persimmon rated with Dixon-Frome. I know you’d like to know that. You mustn’t think of Flickborough as right off the map. I’m with Thornton-Edwards—on the Lucillite account, right?—and I don’t think I’m breaking our client’s confidence when I tell you this is a potential zoom-zone. I can tell the inspector that, can’t I, Gordon?”

“Sure. Anything.”

Hugh, in reverie, shook his head. “A very, very sincere person. No, I mean really sincere.”

Purbright had been wondering for some time about the talk’s curious quality of disjointedness. He indicated Hugh with a nod and asked Gordon very softly: “He knew Persimmon, then, did he?”

Gordon looked surprised.

“No, no—none of us knew him. Why should we? He was supposed to have got things laid on, that’s all. And he let us down. Of course, what you say does explain why. But we’ve been bleeding blood over the past couple of days, we really have.”

“Would you like to tell me more about this letting down, as you term it. Persimmon was supposed to have made certain arrangements, was he?”

“You could say that. Sure. Richard here will tell you his consultancy had Persimmon lined up for product co-operation. Right, Richard?”

“Right.”

“You mean he was going to sell your washing powder in his shop?”

There was a brief silence. Richard and Gordon looked at each other.

“Oh, dear,” said Gordon, quietly.

Richard stroked his smooth chin, spicily fragrant with “Gunroom” after-shave.

“Mr Persimmon,” Richard explained to the inspector, “is—or was—the manager of a supermarket which is the local unit of the merchandizing division of Northern Nutritionals, a subsidiary of Dixon-Frome, which as you know is controlled by the Wyoming Cement Corporation.”

“The boot and shoe complex?” offered Purbright, unable to help himself.

Richard’s expression of patient patronage parted to allow a glint of surprise and admiration.

“Exactly,” he said. “So you will see that Persimmon was but a cog, a very small cog, in our product promotion machinery. But one specific task he did undertake—he was to issue private invitations to forty or fifty local washwives to take part in some film work for television commercials.”

“I’m sorry—local what?”

“Washwives,” Gordon said. “Women whose life-style depends for an enhancement element upon the know-how of the detergent industry. We don’t apologize for a word like that, inspector. It’s a tell-word, and tell-words are what we like to use. Right, Richard?”

“Right.”

“Do I understand,” asked Purbright, “that the forty or fifty invitations were not in fact issued by Persimmon?”

“They were not,” said Gordon. “We had to use our own home-call operatives to recruit the ladies at the last minute. The day was not entirely successful.”

“Have you any idea at all of what prevented Mr Persimmon from doing as you had expected?”

“We were told by his staff on Friday morning that nothing had been seen of him for two days. Two whole days, for God’s sake. Richard here practically orgasmed and I can’t blame him. The location and everything had been set up. Even a marvellous boatman character. Then, pfft—no washwives. Nary a bloody one.”

A disgracefully wayward but attractive notion had blown through the casement of Purbright’s imagination.

“This man’s disappearance,” he said slowly. “Could it have been of critical importance to the campaign you’d all come here to launch?”

The Deputy Chief Brand Visualizer of Thornton-Edwards, Arnold and Konstatin nodded with grave emphasis. It seemed to Purbright that the adman saw nothing outrageous in the situation at which he had hinted; perhaps his world really was one that admitted the nobbling of supermarket managers in the cause of The Product.

“Oh, but surely,” began Purbright, drawing back from the brink.

Hendy was on her feet. She stepped in front of the inspector and thrust at Gordon the photographs she had been marking.

Gordon sorted through them quickly and handed two or three to Purbright. On each he saw, ringed in white, the malevolently cross-eyed visage of Miss Amy Parkin.

Hugh’s arm was clamped round Purbright’s shoulder before he could step clear.

“Can you understand, inspector, what makes people do those terrible things? I think they must be sick, don’t you? Don’t you think people who do these things must be sick?”

“All that film,” lamented Richard. “Every last shot.”

“Spoiled?” ventured Purbright.

“My God! Image-wise, anything like that slays, but slays. Listen, all these are bad-ad—jokes, sarcasm, knocking animals, politics, death. Right? But worst, worst, worst is deformity. Limps, squints, leg-irons. They’re bad-ad in profundis.”

“This was fixed,” asserted Gordon, tapping the pile of prints.

Purbright turned. “By?”

“No names.”

“G and P, darling, for a ducat.”

Sheila had stretched herself almost horizontally in her chair and was holding to her eye, telescope fashion, an empty gin bottle.

“No names,” repeated Gordon.

Sheila grinned, as at the discovery of an amusing new planet.

“All right, then. E and S. Bet you.”

“No names,” Richard said testily.

Yawning, Sheila scratched long, honey-coloured thighs with her free hand. Hendy gave her a glance of disapproval, then crossed to the door.

“I’m going down to the bar for some cigarettes.”

“Just a moment...”

Purbright was drawing from his pocket the envelope of copies of the photograph of Edna Hillyard.

He handed one to each of them and put the rest on the table.

“This young woman is in her mid-thirties now, but probably not much different in looks from when this picture was taken. She was friendly with the man we have been talking about. First of all, I want to know if any of you recognize this girl or remember having seen her at any time.”

All gazed dutifully at the picture, then signified that Miss Hillyard was absolutely unknown to them. Only Hugh offered a comment.

“Oh, but fabulous. Absolutely fabulous!”

Extravagant concern flooded his face. “And do you mean to say, inspector, that this poor girl has been done to death?”

“That I do not say. But, as I mentioned before, she is missing. In view of what has happened to Persimmon, we have very good cause to be anxious. The help I am asking from you people is this. You are running a promotion campaign involving door-to-door calls. Your canv...”—Purbright caught the look of pain in the Dixon-Frome man’s eye—“Your home-call operatives will be covering ground that might well yield useful information. Could they not slip in a question on the side, so to speak? You know—Have you seen this girl lately?—that sort of thing. It might be most valuable.”

Gordon pondered.

“The HCOs aren’t really depth-orientated, are they Richard? I mean, in what sort of depth do you want this, inspector? We’ve no M-R people on this one, actually. Not at the moment.”

“M-R?”

“Motivational Research.”

“I don’t really think that would be necessary. Just the straight question and the picture. We should do all the following up, naturally.”

After a little more thought, Gordon nodded.

“Sure. Sure. Will do. Sheila—extra special briefing for the Lucies in the morning, love. Right? OK Richard?”

“OK Gordon. Just one point, Sheila.”

“Point awaited, darl.”

The gin bottle, gripped now in the crutch of the Personnel and Welfare Executive, was being rocked from side to side by means of a sort of sedentary belly-dancer’s technique.

“Those girls are not of the brightest. They are practically on top quiz-load already. Give them the one extra question only. Absolutely simple. ‘Have you seen?’ And the picture. Roger?”

“Roger and out.”

For a few moments more, Sheila watched with a self-centred smile the oscillations of her bottle. Then she reached a fresh cigar from a box on the floor beside her and bit nearly an inch off its end.

Purbright returned to the subject of Persimmon, but with no real hope of progress. The manager’s part in the Lucillite campaign had been settled beforehand by correspondence and a couple of subsidiary telephone calls from the London office. None of the team now in Flaxborough had met him personally or even spoken to him by phone. Apart from the hinted but quite unsubstantiated involvement of some other powerful protagonist in the detergent war, no one had been able to suggest a reason for the man’s violent end.

“We get ourselves op-based on Thursday night. Persimmon is to rendezvous with us the following morning. He doesn’t. We contact the store and his home. Negatively. Finalization of the campaign visuals is deadlined for May 7. Right. So we out-phase P and proceed. What else can we do, inspector? No one is so vital he cannot be redundantized.”

Having listened attentively to this summary by Gordon, Hugh directed upon the inspector a smile infinitely regretful and shrugged.

Purbright indicated the film stills. “Are you going to have to do all that again?”

“Tomorrow,” said Richard. He looked as nearly worried as Purbright had yet seen him.

“Come hell and high water,” added Hugh, jocularly. He darted approval-seeking glances at everyone else in the room. Hendy curled her lip at him.

Twenty minutes after Purbright’s departure, another visitor tapped at the door of the Dixon-Frome op-base and opened it immediately.

“Anybody home?”

Gordon, sifting disconsolately through the pages of a sales analysis, looked up to see the benign but alert features of a woman perhaps twenty years his senior. She was dressed in the kind of clothes—of excellent cut and quality but with a challenging touch of frumpishness—that proclaim the well-born who has managed to hang on to her money.

Gordon rose. He was alone in the room except for Sheila, who was asleep in her chair and faintly snoring. Hendy and Richard had gone down to the bar. Hugh, a compulsive body-cleanser, was locked in a bathroom somewhere for the third time that day.

The woman advanced into the room and subjected Gordon to close and friendly scrutiny.

“You are Dixon-Frome, of course,” she said, having nodded approvingly at the lemon hue of his drip-dry Executon shirt.

Gordon half-opened his mouth, remained motionless for a second, then snapped his fingers. “You’re TEAK...” He waited, smiling uncertainly.

“Teak?”

“Thornton-Edwards. One of their M-R execs. Right?”

She pursed her lips teasingly, then looked round for somewhere to put down her old-fashioned but very costly-looking blue sealskin handbag. Gordon took the bag and placed it on the table. She selected a chair for herself and sat down. Her legs were surprisingly shapely.

“No,” she said at last, “I am not from Thornton-Edwards, although I do know of them, of course. I was on the board of an agency for a number of years. Nowadays my interests lie in a direction different from advertising.”

“Oh, yes?”

“My name is Lucilla Teatime—incidentally, I should much prefer you to use it without the feudal handle, which may look well enough on company notepaper but does tend to be painfully embarrasing in conversation—and I am Operational Director of ECPRF.”

There was a tiny pause.

“Small world,” said Gordon.

“Indeed it is,” agreed Miss Teatime. She gazed past his shoulder as if the Antipodes had just swum into view above the sideboard. Then she said, slowly and deliberately: “Your promotion film has run into serious difficulties.”

Gordon started. “How do you know about that?”

“Should we say, perhaps, that our lines crossed? What a pity that Dixon-Frome did not consult us in advance. The site you chose for filming is quite notorious in PR circles, you know.”

“Our consultancy was quite happy with it, PR-wise.”

Miss Teatime gave a tinkling, tea-with-the-vicar laugh.

“Public Relations...oh dear, a small misunderstanding I fear. I was speaking of something rather less mundane. PR stands also for Psychical Research.”

“I see.” Gordon fingered his tie dubiously.

“Ah, you are embarrassed, are you not. Your idea association mechanism is in good order. It has given you the print-out. Psychic—spiritualism—table-turning and cheesecloth-mad old ladies in dark Peckham parlours...”

He sent a hesitant little smile to meet hers. “Well, actually...”

“Perfectly natural,” declared Miss Teatime. “You can have no idea of how that image still interferes with the work of purely scientific agencies. What I dare say you would term respect potential is something we have worked hard to achieve in the Edith Cavell Psychical Research Foundation.”

“Edith Cavell?”

Miss Teatime blushed. “My middle names, actually. Rather shame-making but the Trust insisted. They meant it kindly, I suppose, but people do not realize how unworthy of them is this persistent deference to money and aristocratic connection. However, and be that as it may, you will be wanting to know, will you not, in what practical manner the Foundation proposes to assist you and your excellent consultancy.”

“I’m not sure that I see how you...”

“Would you mind?” A little cheroot had appeared between two of Miss Teatime’s elegantly poised fingers. Gordon looked about him. He spotted a box of matches that rose and fell on the stomach of the sleeping Sheila.

Miss Teatime accepted a light with careful concentration, as if she valued it highly, then indicated the prints on the table.

“Those are some of the stills, are they?”

Gordon obediently handed them to her.

Miss Teatime donned a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles and scrutinized the first print. It showed a group of washwives, with Hugh in their midst. Each of the women was displaying a garment incredibly besmirched with foodstuff or effluent of some kind. The scene was saved from looking like an incipient lynching by Hugh’s expression of calm, almost saintly, reassurance.

Over every inch of the print ranged Miss Teatime’s keen eye. Gordon heard her sudden intake of breath when she came to the section ringed in Hendy’s white crayon.

“Amazing!”

He looked over her shoulder, but she was already busy upon the second photograph.

“Absolutely fascinating!”

“You see why all this work has negative use-value,” Gordon said. “The spoilage rate is terrific.”

She seemed not to hear.

Another print was of the washwives gazing at the river in which boatman Heath was pretending to fill his medieval bucket. The floating bull’s-head mask was clearly visible.

“Minoan ectoplasm!” breathed Miss Teatime.

A shot of the line-up of washwives at the display of their clothing after it supposedly had been immersed in Lucillite suds bore three of Hendy’s censorship rings.

One framed a woman gazing furiously at a pair of drawers marred by an enormous black hand-print. Within another, low on the left of the picture, two dogs were unconcernedly copulating. The third contained the inevitable camera-ogling visage of the dwarfish woman with the thirty-degree squint.

Miss Teatime sat back, removed her glasses and tapped them pensively against her knee. “I would never have believed it,” she said, half to herself.

“Well,” said Gordon, “you’ve heard about industrial sabotage. Right?” He pointed at the prints, opened his mouth, shut it again, and began walking rapidly up and down. He stopped and pointed once more at the prints. “Right?”

“The lady with the very odd eyes,” Miss Teatime began.

“Agent,” snapped Gordon. “From P and Q probably. Or C and H. KGB even.”

Miss Teatime looked shocked. “The Russians?”

“Kleen-Gear Biological. Do I have to spell it out for you?”

Gordon was noticeably less crease-proof than he had seemed earlier. Miss Teatime patted his sleeve.

“I think you ought to sit down,” she said gently. “Come along. I have something to tell you which may come as a slight shock.”

He frowned, but followed her advice. There was something decidedly persuasive about this punctiliously mannered woman.

“That’s better,” she said. “Now, then; I do understand your reaction to these unfortunate setbacks, but I must tell you that you are quite wrong in your interpretation of them. You see, I happen to know the identity of the lady whose physical affliction has spoiled so much of your film. She is not an agent. And I am sure that her turning up here was an event quite uninfluenced by your business rivals.”

“Name. The name’s all I want. Injunction. Right?”

“The name,” said Miss Teatime, “is Mad Meg of Pennick. And there would be no point in applying for an injunction.”

Gordon stared at her. “You mean she’s a mental patient, or something?”

“She is dead. She committed suicide four years ago.”

“Good God!”

“Curiously enough,” added Miss Teatime, equably, “there was nothing wrong with poor Meg’s sight during life. That very unnerving squint which you may observe in these pictures was caused—according to medical evidence at the inquest—by the method she chose to kill herself.”

Miss Teatime leaned forward and spoke softly, after a glance at the still sleeping Sheila.

“Hanging.”

Her voice fell still further.

“In a chicken coop.”

Gordon began a fresh examination of the film stills, this time with horrified fascination.

Miss Teatime’s manner became suddenly brisker.

“You must not worry too much about your filming tomorrow,” she said. “This town has always been the focus for a good deal of paranormal phenomena. We know now how to cope with it.”

“You mean you can render this sort of thing non-repetitive?”

“I mean that I shall be happy to place our not inconsiderable field knowledge of the subject at the disposal of you and your colleagues. I propose to begin work on the site immediately. Tele-Radiation clearance should be complete by morning.”

“I’m not certain, Miss Teatime, that I can commit Dixon-Frome any further budgetwise.”

The finely delineated eyebrows arched a fraction.

“The Foundation, needless to say, does not solicit fees.”

“Oh, well, that’s fine. We’ll just play this one by ear, shall we?”

Miss Teatime rose and prepared to take her leave.

“Vibrations, as Sir Oliver Lodge used so often to remark to my father, are our only help and guide.”

She held out her hand.

“Of course, Sir Oliver did not live to see the benefits conferred upon scientific research by donations from industry.”

Chapter Eleven

Inspector Purbright inverviewed members of the staff of the Bride Street supermarket in the white-painted closet, furnished with chair, table and camp bed, that served to accommodate in their separate seasons travelling salesmen, ladies taken queer, and shoplifters. On the wall was a first-aid cabinet. He had peeped inside it and discovered a part roll of adhesive tape and the heel of a woman’s shoe.

The under-manager, whom the inspector decided to question first in deference to his seniority, turned out to be a pale but wiry youth of nineteen or twenty. He looked a pretty good box heaver. Henry Baxter was his name.

“When was it,” Purbright asked him, “that Mr Persimmon was last in the store? Take your time and try to be accurate.”

“Half-past eight on Wednesday,” Henry replied without hesitation.

“What, in the evening, you mean?”

“That’s right.”

“But isn’t it half-day closing on a Wednesday?”

“Most places it is. Not here, though. We get our time off staggered. If,” Henry added, “there’s any going.”

“I see. So you were here with Mr Persimmon on Wednesday, were you? Until eight-thirty.”

“That’s right. Well, we had all the Lucillite packets to overstick, didn’t we?”

“Overstick?”,

“With those little labels. ‘New—Improved’.”

“Ah, you’d had new stock come in.”

“No. But the price had gone up again, hadn’t it?”

Purbright backed out of this conversational cul-de-sac and asked: “Did you notice anything about Mr Persimmon’s manner that evening? Anything unusual—strained, excited?”

“Not really. He was a bit mad at having to stay late, especially at such short notice, but it wasn’t the first time it had happened and in this trade you get used to being buggered about a bit by head office.”

“When you say short notice, do you mean he was only asked that day to stay behind?”

“Yeah. They rang up about three. Of course, there’s a special push on this week and next. They’ve got girls in space suits and God knows what all. Proper circus.”

“Did you leave together at half-past eight?”

“More or less. Except that I walked and he got in his car.”

“Did you suppose he would drive straight home?”

“No.”

“You didn’t—why?”

“Well, there was that phone call he made, wasn’t there?”

Henry Baxter’s mode of answering questions was curiously suggestive of a supposition on his part that the inspector had been a hidden observer of all his past life.

“Phone call?” repeated Purbright, patiently.

“When he knew about having to do the oversticks. He rang up this party and said he’d come straight over when he could.”

“Might it not have been his wife he was talking to?”

“Oh no, he never rang her. Not the boss. Not his wife, he wouldn’t.”

“Who was it, then? Do you know?”

“Me? No, I never heard him. It was Julie who was getting stuff out of the stockroom to refill one of the special offer bins. The phone’s in there.”

“You say Mr Persimmon was not in the habit of telephoning his wife. Do I take it that they weren’t on very good terms?”

The under-manager shrugged. “Well, just sort of average. I don’t suppose he thought much of her, but they’d been married ages, hadn’t they?”

“You’d call the relationship unenthusiastic rather than hostile, then.”

“Yeah, I suppose you could say that.”

“Was anyone—anyone at all—inclined to be hostile to Mr Persimmon?”

Mr Baxter considered carefully this wider question..

“What, customers, you mean?”

“Not necessarily.”

There was a pause. Then the under-manager shook his head.

“I can’t think of anybody in particular,” he said, “but I don’t reckon he was liked much. Not by men. You know.”

“I’m not sure that I do know, Mr Baxter. Effeminate, was he?”

“Far from it. I’d say he was a randy old sod, if he hadn’t been my boss.”

“I think we can take it that his death absolves you from professional loyalty, Mr Baxter.”

“Right. Then that’s what he was.”

Julie Bollinger, bin-filler and shelf-recharger, entered Purbright’s presence with a draggle-tailed awe that argued years of parental warning of the policeman who would fetch her away if she didn’t eat her dinner. She was sixteen years old, sallow and straight-haired, and looked as if the threats had failed in their purpose.

Purbright got up and gave her his chair. She perched on the edge of it and covered bony knees with large red hands.

The inspector squatted on the farther end of the camp bed and waited until she glanced his way, when he gazed admiringly at a huge buckle of chrome and coloured glass on her belt.

She saw him looking and was pleased and just a little reassured.

“Julie, you know that Mr Persimmon is dead and that we think somebody killed him. Obviously all this has nothing to do with you, and I’m not going to bother you with a whole lot of silly questions. But there’s one thing you might have remembered from last Wednesday which could be important. Now listen. When you were working in the stockroom and therefore happened to hear Mr Persimmon talking on the phone, did anything of what he said come over clearly to you?”

Julie, whose mother would have prefaced such a catechism with the observation that “little pigs have big ears” and a blow on each just to prove it, thought how nice and understanding this big, yellow-haired policeman was. She closed her eyes and rummaged conscientiously through the little rag-bag of her memory.

“He said,” she announced at last, nodding slightly at each word in warranty of its truth, “that he couldn’t make it that night and that whoever it was he was talking to should be sure to let Dilly know. I think he said that bit twice. And then there was another bit where he laughed and said well it was a bit of luck for whoever was at the other end of the phone because she’d get an extra turn.”

“She?” queried Purbright. “Do you think it was a woman he was talking to, Julie?”

She frowned, confused by the complication.

“I don’t know, really. He never called whoever it was by name. I just...” Her thin shoulders rose and subsided.

Purbright hastened to say, never mind, she’d got a jolly good memory and the odds were that her first impression was probably the right one.

“Did you like Mr Persimmon?” he asked casually.

“He was all right. I’m sorry about what’s happened to him.” Julie’s mouth trembled. Purbright thought she was chiefly upset by the looming so near of the fearsomeness of death, but there was some pity there too, some regret.

Of the four other girls who worked at the supermarket, only one was able, or inclined, to say about her late employer anything that might be a clue to the circumstances of his death. She was an eighteen-year-old cashier, Doris Periam, and she told the inspector of having seen Mr Persimmon’s car being driven along Priorgate fairly late on the previous Wednesday night.

“How late?”

“It had gone twelve. A friend was taking me home. I live in Moss Road and it was half-past when I got in.”

“You know Mr Persimmon’s car, do you?”

“Oh, yes. It’s a big powder-blue thing.”

“Why did you notice it especially that night?”

“Well, there wasn’t much about. And then, this car went by. It was going ever so fast. I thought it would turn over at that bend into Marshside Road. It just scraped round, though. And my friend said look at that something fool. And I said it can’t be, yes it is, it’s my boss. Because I could see the car and the colour and everything in the light of that lamp outside Morrison’s. And my friend said he must be drunk, but I said no, not Mr Persimmon, he never touches it. I thought it was ever so funny, though, him driving like that.”

During the few minutes it took him to walk back to the police station in Fen Street, Purbright pondered the behaviour and the route of Persimmon. Haste was uncommon enough in Flaxborough to be noticed at once, even by a courting cashier, and Persimmon must have been in an uncharacteristically rash frame of mind that night to use Priorgate as a speedway. He certainly was not drunk at the time, if, as seemed likely, he had met his death within the next few hours. No trace of alcohol had been revealed at autopsy. So why the erratic driving?

There was no doubt of where he had been going. Marshside Road, the continuation of Priorgate, led only to Orchard Road, And there, presumably by arrangement, waited his mistress, Edna Hillyard, in the privacy of her little tree-screened car.

But even at that time there must have been people about. The folk-dancing affair had gone on “pretty late” according to Mrs Gloss. Both Persimmon and Edna had always taken good care—unusual care, in her case—to keep their meetings secret. Why, then, choose for an assignation the grounds of a house where characters had been prancing around at large all evening? Persimmon’s car, it seemed, was readily identifiable. And as a local store manager, he himself would be familiar to the sort of middle-aged, middle-class women likely to join a folklore society.

Then—and Purbright reproached himself for having accepted at first an explanation more convenient than convincing—there was the point about the girl’s neatly stacked clothes. Had she really had the forethought to set out that evening equipped with a duplicate set of clothing to put on after the revels? And if so, what had she carried it in? There was no suitcase in the car—not even a box or wrapping.

Julie’s evidence concerning the phone call, examined beside what little was certain about Persimmon’s movements on that Wednesday, should have suggested some line of inquiry. It must, after all, have had relevance—perhaps vital relevance—to whatever course and commitments were to lead Persimmon to his death. And yet those overheard fragments of conversation remained, however diligently Purbright sorted and examined them in his mind, as unilluminating as they must have been to the girl who had recorded them.

“ ‘Dilly’,” the inspector said to Love the moment he encountered him emerging from the side entrance of the police station.

Love halted and looked politely attentive.

“Supposing,” Purbright said, “you had heard somebody referred to as ‘Dilly’, who would you think was meant?”

The sergeant pondered.

“I think I’ve heard young women called dillies. It’s supposed to mean that they’re a bit of all right.”

“No, I don’t want the generic application, Sid. What about nicknames? Is it an abbreviation for something?”

“Ducks are dillies,” announced Love after further consideration. “Somebody short in the leg, maybe?”

Purbright looked unimpressed. “Never mind.”

Love, brightening as at the recollection of an agreeable piece of tidings temporarily eclipsed by duller matters, said: “Harry Bird’s had a spell put on him.”

Purbright closed his eyes for an instant.

“He’s what?”

“It sounds like that parish church business over again. One of the newspaper people came in looking for you. He said somebody’s cut a black cockerel in two and nailed both bits to Bird’s front door. I was just going to drive over and have a dekko.”

“Which reporter told you this?”

“The one with fangs. I think he said he was from the Daily Sketch.”

“And how did he know what had been nailed to Bird’s front door?”

“He said they’d had a tip-off.”

Purbright was silent for some moments. Then he motioned Love to follow him into the yard where his car was parked.

“I think I’ll have a dekko myself while we’re about it. Incidentally, Sid, have you noticed what a lot of tipping-off there’s been lately? Anxiety to oblige is something I don’t much care to see in this town. It’s usually a sign of conspiracy.”

Sir Henry Bird was the head of a firm of agricultural machinery manufacturers. His knighthood had been conferred only the previous autumn. He thereupon had moved out of 14 Birtley Avenue and into a big double-fronted house with pink stucco walls and false turrets behind one of the high hedges bordering Oakland, a cul-de-sac that ran parallel to The Riding, off Partney Drive.

Purbright and Love got out of the police car just in time to see a kneeling woman in a flowered overall wring out a cloth and vigorously rub the central panel of the front door. The water in the bucket beside her was slightly stained. A few black waterlogged feathers revolved slowly.

The woman glanced over her shoulder and got up, laboriously.

“Not more of you, surely.”

“Is Sir Henry in?”

“He’s not seeing anybody else.”

Purbright said that they were policemen and that he was sure Sir Henry would have no objection to their going in to see him.

“I thought you was from the papers,” the woman said, grudgingly converted. She picked up the bucket and trailed off round the side of the house.

A little puff of pride distended the cheek of mistaken-for-a-journalist Love. He stroked the case of the portable tape recorder that hung from his shoulder.

Purbright bent and examined the step. The woman had missed two or three spots of blood, now dry and glistening like black varnish.

The door opened.

“Mr Bird says you can come in. He’s in the front room.”

The chairman of Autocult (Flaxborough) Limited amplified this instruction by calling out: “In here, Purbright. In the lounge.” He made the word sound long and squeezy and expensive. Purbright was prepared for red plush and Renoir reproductions.

In fact, the atmosphere they entered was cool and at first seemed restfully dim. But soon the eyes tired of the kind of light diffused by the long yellow muslin curtains that were draped and looped and re-looped with fussy precision over the entire window area, light that after a while made everything in the room look to be made of butter.

“To what,” asked Sir Henry, “do we owe the pleasure of a visit from the constabulary?”

The voice, affable and with a pronounced smoker’s rasp, was in keeping with the florid well-fleshed face. What Purbright found unfailingly fascinating about the man, though, was his ears. They were very small—no bigger than dried apricots and of similar colour—and set so snugly within corresponding recesses that only at close quarters could they be discerned at all.

Purbright explained that a report of damage to Sir Henry’s property had reached him. “Or defacement,” he qualified.

“Aren’t there more serious matters to keep you people busy just now?”

Sir Henry’s eyebrows, whose conspicuousness more than made up for his curious auricular deficiency, hunched like combatant caterpillars, challenging each other across the bridge of his nose.

“Serious, yes, sir. But not necessarily unrelated.”

Bird watched without comment the adjustments that Love was making to the tape recorder, which now was switched on.

“This defacement, as you call it. You know what happened, do you?”

“According to what little information I have, a mutilated chicken was left hanging on your front door.”

“A cockerel, Purbright. The distinction does matter, you know. A black cockerel.”

“Exactly, sir.”

“You sound as if you know something about black cockerels.”

“By repute, yes.”

“Ah, by repute, Purbright. Tell me, now, what is your understanding of this matter of black cockerels?”

The caterpillar-brows of Sir Henry reared to denote a sort of fierce interrogatory amusement. The inspector saw that “Knocker” Bird, as he once had been known in the town, and still was by some of his contemporaries, was in a mood to make him feel small. The press, no doubt, had been troublesome. Purbright resolved to make allowances.

“It isn’t a subject I know much about, sir,” he replied, “apart from stories of black magic and that sort of thing.”

“Voodoo,” prompted Love, with a surreptitious nudge.

“You don’t seem all that impressed, inspector. I did wonder when I read some of the Sunday newspapers. They depicted you as tolerant to the point of indifference.”

“Indeed, sir?”

“What are you proposing to do about this bit of foolery at my front door?”

“In the first place—and with your help, I hope, sir—to establish whether it was just foolery or something more serious.”

“You didn’t have to come traipsing over here, you know, Purbright. I didn’t send for you. Now why don’t you be a good fellow and run along. The mess is cleaned up. If the papers want to make a silly song and dance about it, that’s their business. So far as I’m concerned, the incident is over.”

“That is what you told the press, is it, sir?”

Sir Henry laughed. “Yes, but in much more forthright terms, believe me.”

It was the laugh—a controlled, fruity chuckle which suddenly skidded into falsetto—that confirmed Purbright’s suspicion. Bird had been frightened, and quite badly. Was it by the sudden prospect of publicity? As deputy chairman of the Bench, he had suffered, or enjoyed more likely, enough newspaper quotes to have broken his coyness in that respect. In any case, his reputation both in business and more recently in public life was that of an extrovert, a pusher.

“Well, we’ll leave that for the moment, Sir Henry. It wasn’t the only reason for my coming to see you. I’ve been wanting to ask you about a certain charity organization.”

Bird stared. He half rose from his chair.

“Now, look, Purbright, I realize you’re not a chap who rushes round with a harassed expression all the time, but aren’t you supposed to be in charge of this Persimmon business?”

“That is so, sir.”

“Yet you have time to trot over here to investigate a mutilated chicken—no, your words, Purbright—mutilated chicken—and when I laugh off that one, as you should have done in the first place, you start chatting about charities.”

“Perhaps I chose an inapt phrase,” Purbright conceded patiently. “It was what I judged to have been meant by Mrs Persimmon when she spoke of her late husband’s ‘samaritan nights’. She named you, Sir Henry, as one of his associates on these occasions.”

Bird said nothing for a while. He gazed unseeingly towards an alabaster nude preening herself on the big, white-painted overmantel. A sheet of cellophane, strapped round the figure to protect it from dust, glistened wetly in the room’s ochre twilight.

“Have you had words with the vicar?”

The quality of Bird’s voice had undergone a radical change. It was quiet and earnest and free of the half-mocking, half-accusing tone he had employed before.

“Not on this subject specifically, no, sir. He did call to see me on Friday, but about something else.”

“About what he’d found in the church, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“That,” Bird said gravely, “wasn’t ‘something else’, Purbright. All these events have a common cause, as I think you are beginning to realize. There are forces at work in this town—highly dangerous forces—which can’t simply be arrested and locked up. They have been operating under the surface for a long time.”

Bird got up and crossed to the window. He stood staring out through the muslin folds. In profile, the chin was virtually non-existent. His head at that moment seemed to Purbright to be a round, yellow globe, featureless as a turnip.

“You say you’ve not mentioned the watchnights to the vicar.”

Bird turned and the turnip had a mouth again, and a nose, and eyes caved beneath those anxiously contracted bundles of hair.

“Watchnights? I’m sorry, I don’t think I know what you mean, sir.”

Bird made an abrupt, dismissive gesture. “No, never mind. I’ll explain. You’ll have to know, obviously. But not until I’ve spoken to Grewyear. That would be quite wrong.”

He left the room at once, closing the door behind him. The policemen heard the sharp ting that signalled the lifting of a phone.

On his return, Bird made no reference to his conversation with the Vicar but his manner suggested that Grewyear had sanctioned whatever he was about to say.

“About a year or eighteen months ago,” began Bird, “some rather queer reports started to come in to a little social welfare set-up that a couple of friends and I had been running in our spare time. It was a sort of moral advice thing—you know what I mean? Quite unofficial, but with connections. Cropper, for instance—he’s in the right job to know about problem families and so on. I’m on the Bench and a few committees. Grewyear—well, his value is obvious. And poor old Persimmon had his Boy Scout and Home Mission contacts.

“The first strange story that came to us was told by a woman who claimed that an animal of some kind kept clattering about on the roof at night and pawing at the tiles just above her bed. When she looked up from the street, there was nothing there. She was a widow and lived alone. One morning, she woke up parched with thirst and hardly able to breathe. The space in the bed beside her was hot, she said—not just warm but hot—and she saw hairs on the sheet, rough and wiry, like a goat’s hairs. Know what I mean?

“Then a young girl brought us something she said she kept finding on the floor in various rooms at home, no matter how often she threw it away outside or even burned it on the kitchen fire. It was a rough figure made out of straw. We knew what it was, but we didn’t tell her. It was a Hugger-doll. The tale goes that if this thing isn’t discovered during daylight, its maker will be able to take its place after dark and do what he wants—you know what I’m getting at, don’t you?—to anyone in that house—kill them, even—without fear of discovery.

“I could go on, but those two first cases were fairly typical. Some of the people who came to us were absolutely frantic. They thought they’d seen the devil, or were dying of some illness their doctors couldn’t discover, or had been possessed—and I mean physically possessed, you understand, in the sense of being ravished, coupled with, inseminated—you know what I mean?—by creatures not human. There were others who complained of mysterious infestation of their houses or their bodies— particularly their secret parts—you know what I mean?—by hordes of strange insects that disappeared when doctors or health inspectors were called.”

Bird had been leaning further and further forward in his chair as his story progressed. Now he paused and sat back.

“You see what we were up against, don’t you? Oh, we didn’t believe it at first, any more than you would have done. Or a doctor. Or a lawyer. Of course, Grewyear had to pretend to. Not that he actually did any interviewing of these people himself. It was understood from the beginning that the rest of us would constitute a sort of auxiliary—you know what I mean?—to leave him free to get on with his regular parish duties. We passed on the details, though, so that he could advise. And in the end, none of us had any doubts at all any more.

“Do you know what we were doing? We were fighting a battle, Purbright, a battle with evil. Right here in this town. Make no mistake about that.

“Forces had gained hold in Flaxborough that would have corrupted and then devoured it. You think that’s a melodramatic way for an experienced business man and a magistrate to talk, don’t you? All right. But I tell you this. If there’s such a thing as the mark of the devil, I’ve certainly seen it in Flaxborough. And not just once or twice.”

Chapter Twelve

Lucy-probationer Barbara “Bubbles” Westmacott was feeling inspired and ambitious. She had been permitted, together with four other junior members of the team, to watch some of the re-making of the Lucillite campaign film and so splendidly had the occasion gone off—with lots of absolutely spontaneous Ooo’s from the washwives, quips and grins galore from Hughie, and a spell-binding imitation by boatman Heath of Long John Silver—that she had set herself to convert eleven households (eleven was her lucky number) to whiter, and therefore more joyous, living that very day.

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

Miss Westmacott, spruce and plump and engaging in her fractionally too tight uniform, smiled confidently at the old lady who had opened the door of the pretty little bungalow.

“Eh?”

Miss Westmacott repeated her incantation.

Nutcracker jaws champed four or five times while the white plastic tunic was submitted to slow and dubious scrutiny by eyes like mildewed bilberries.

“You from the chiroppy?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Come to do me feet, ’ave yer?”

“Oh, no, I’m not a chiropodist. I am here to show you how to get a whiter wash.”

With speed almost incredible in one so frail, the old lady snaked back behind the shelter of the door and slammed it shut.

“There’s a Gift!” cried Miss Westmacott, as mellifluously as she could manage in the discouraging circumstances.

From behind the door came an angry and very brusque retort. It sounded, curiously enough, like Russian. Then, in English, the girl heard that she was to tell them dratted council lot to bloody well get a bath themselves and stop bloody pesterin’.

Barbara sighed and conscientiously put a cross on her progress analysis chart in one of the squares marked “consumer resistance”.

She went up the path between the lawns of bright green not-to-be-walked-on turf, and rang the bell of the next bungalow.

After some delay, it was opened generously and suddenly by a woman five feet tall and two feet thick all the way down. The hat of her butcher-blue uniform looked like a chopping block with a brim. Sticking out at one side of the hat was a big amber bead. Diametrically opposite there emerged an inch of steel point. Barbara tried with some bewilderment to decide whether the woman had an uncommonly flat head or a cranium insensitive to the passage of hat pins.

“Yes?”

“If Lucillite is...”

The girl faltered, having grasped belatedly that the woman was a visiting nurse and not the householder.

“It’s all right,” she said, turning away.

“Here, I hope you’re not selling things,” said the woman, sternly. “Not in Twilight Close.”

“No. Oh, no.”

Barbara gave the next bungalow a miss, just in case the nurse was still watching. She turned a corner past a row of symmetrical tame-looking almond trees, and walked up the path to a dwelling similar to all the others except that there came from its half open door waves of pop music from a turned high radio.

The girl felt encouraged. She let her shoulders and hips rock gently in time with the pop and drummed her fingers on the white plastic satchel while she awaited a response to her ring.

It was not long in coming.

The prolonged stare of astonishment melting into delight that the girl received from Mr Herbert Stamper, one-time farmer of Flaxborough Fen, would have warned a more worldly caller to make some quick excuse and depart.

But Miss Westmacott’s head was too tightly packed with her dream of the Dixon-Frome Golden Merit Medal to notice, let alone interpret, a look that in its time had made even goats bolt for cover.

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

“ ’Ave ye, be-Christ!” gruffled Mr Stamper, his regard ranging appreciatively from hock to haunch.

The Lucy accepted this as a token of understanding.

“Do you have the three packets, then?” she inquired. “They can be empty or full—it doesn’t matter.”

Mr Stamper scratched one ear (Barbara decided, on thinking about it later, that it was the only time she had actually heard anyone do this) and made a remark about “three bags full” at which he shuddered with merriment for more than half a minute.

Then, abruptly, he indicated with a jerk of his head the interior of his bungalow.

What vestige of self-preservative instinct had survived a Dixon-Frome Product Loyalty Course prompted the girl to hesitate.

“Your wife...shall I find her in the kitchen?”

Mr Stamper made a noise she took to signify assent.

She walked primly past him into a passage-way that smelled of paraffin and raspberry jam. He left the front door open long enough to admit daylight while he admired Miss Westmacott’s hind quarters and calculated the best approach for a serving throw.

Sir Henry Bird had suspended his narrative while he fetched whisky for Purbright and himself, and on the sergeant’s insistence that he would prefer it, a glass of orange cordial for Love.

“Am I right,” Purbright asked, “in thinking that this small group that had been formed eventually became concerned solely with—what shall I say?—with apparently supernatural occurrences?”

Bird stared into his glass and pouted. “I’d just like to qualify that a little,” he said. “You make it sound as if we were investigators. There was nothing detached about our attitude. To help these people—to rescue them, if we could—that was our object.

“Of course, we didn’t pretend to have any scientific training. But we discussed and we read and we kept our eyes open. And by the end of our first year’s working we had noticed something very peculiar. Do you know what it was? I’ll tell you. It was something to do with dates.

“We noticed that nearly all the most horrible incidents that people described to us had taken place about the same time—or at least during the same period. There would be a whole crop of these happenings, all within a few hours, all during darkness. Then nothing—nothing serious, anyway—for weeks. And then, off it would go again. Another night of poor creatures being tormented in the most dreadful, filthy ways. You know what I mean?”

“Not precisely, sir,” said the inspector.

“Beastliness, Purbright. Beastliness. Quite indescribable.”

“Yes, sir. And these dates?”

Bird looked him in the eye. “The second of February, the last day of April, August the first, and the thirty-first of October.”

Purbright considered. He shook his head.

“You don’t recognize them?”

“I can’t say that I grasp their special significance.” Purbright turned to Love. “Do you, sergeant?”

“One’s Mischief Night,” Love declared. “I know that.”

For the first time Bird’s face registered a flicker of amusement.

“That is what children call it. A much older name is the Eve of Hallowtide. Last day of October. Let me identify the others. February the second, Candlemas. The first of August, Lammas. And perhaps the most sinister of all—the thirtieth day of April. That’s May Day Eve.

“Now then, inspector, you see what I’m getting at, don’t you?”

“I think so, sir. You mean that these dates are all associated with a belief in magic.”

Bird regarded him for several seconds.

“No, Purbright, I mean a lot more than that. I mean that the times of the year when evil is let loose upon this town in a very special and terrifying way are the ancient festivals of witchcraft. They are the nights of the great Sabbaths.”

There was a long pause.

“Do you believe in withcraft, sir?”

Another silence, but shorter.

“Let me put it this way. I believe in the belief in witchcraft. And I believe in the effects it has had. Because”—Bird’s normally rich-toned voice rose, as it was apt to do either when he was nervous or when he asserted something with special emphasis, to a momentary treble—“I have seen them. We have all seen them, all three of us on this little vigilante committee of ours. Do you suppose me gullible? Or Dr Cropper? An important council official? Or a businessman like poor old Persimmon? I tell you we acted on evidence, Purbright, not on superstition.”

“I accept that, of course, sir. But I cannot yet quite see in what way you and your colleagues were able to help these people. I would have thought that exorcism or something in that line was indicated.”

“It is, sometimes. There is nothing wrong with incantation, Purbright, provided it works.

“Be that as it may, though, the first thing you have to do if you want to help people in trouble is to be available. You see what I mean? So this is what we did. Grewyear let us have a little room at the back of the church hall. We had the phone put in and we gave the number of that phone to everyone who knew about our work and might hear of cases. Cases—that’s what we called them, you see? In the Middle Ages, they would have been described simply as ‘bewitched’, of course, but that won’t do now.

“So...” Sir Henry shrugged, spread his hands, and directed a look of hospitable inquky at the policemen’s drinks. “There you have the truth about what Mary Persimmon called poor Bertram’s ‘samaritan’ nights. Watchnights are what they were, Purbright. Or vigils, if you like.”

The inspector declined a whisky refill, but remained sitting silent as if in expectation of the climax to the story.

Bird seemed to have nothing more to say.

Purbright prompted him.

“The dates of these watchnights...”

“I told you, inspector. Your man can produce them again on his machine, can’t he?”

“I know those dates,” said Purbright. “But I presume there were others.”

“Certainly. Those were the vital ones, though, the productive ones. We met on other occasions, of course, but not to remain on call throughout the night.”

“Is that what you did—all three of you—on what you called the Sabbath nights?”

“Invariably.”

“And if there was a call, sir?”

“We gave what reassurance or advice we could. It seemed sufficient in some cases. Not in all. Whenever we believed the caller to be in real and immediate danger, one of us went over at once.”

“Last Wednesday night, sir...”

Bird looked up, attentive. “Yes?”

“It was the thirtieth of April. What you called May Day Eve.”

“It was, yes.”

“Did you and the other gentlemen undertake your stand-by duties at the Church Hall that night?”

“Certainly we did. And I’m well aware of what you’re going to ask next, Purbright.”

Bird busied himself with the flat silver cigarette box on the little table by his chair. The lighter he used was yellow, presumably gold-plated. As an afterthought, he pushed the box towards the inspector, who shook his head.

“Sir Henry, surely, as a magistrate...”

Bird held up his hand. “All right. I know. Bert’s death. You think I should have got in touch with you earlier. I did consider having a word with Chubb, as a matter of fact, but the situation’s so delicate. Quite frankly, I didn’t think he’d understand.”

“Why, sir?”

“Well, good heavens—witchcraft! Can you imagine your chief constable’s reaction to that sort of suggestion?”

Love, who could, turned his face aside and smirked.

“Perhaps,” Purbright said coolly, “we’d better try now to make up for lost time, sir. First of all, how long did Mr Persimmon remain with you and Dr Cropper?”

“From about nine o’clock until, oh, shortly after midnight.”

“You were together in the room in the church hall.”

“That’s so.”

“Were there any telephone calls?”

Bird thought. “Three. And then this one just about midnight.”

“Would you care to tell me the names of the first three callers, sir?”

“I’m sorry, that’s quite impossible.”

“You don’t know them?”

“I cannot divulge them. They were people in distress who had been promised secrecy. You must see that I am in exactly the same position as a doctor or a priest.”

“Can you tell me what kind of trouble the calls referred to? Was Mr Persimmon involved in any way?”

“They had nothing to do with him. He didn’t even take one. Cropper and I dealt with all three. As I remember, they were similar. Mild cases of possession. A lot of sex mixed in, of course. You know what I mean?”

“People you knew, sir?”

“Cases I knew, Purbright.”

The inspector nodded, as if satisfied.

“Now maybe you’d be good enough to tell me about the call that Mr Persimmon did take, sir.”

“I can’t tell you anything about it. I don’t know anything.”

“Look, sir, I’m sorry, but this time I must insist.”

“Insist all you like. I just cannot help you. And this time it is not a case of respecting confidences. The phone rang—at about midnight, as I told you—and Persimmon answered it. He listened, not saying a word himself, and then slammed the phone down and rushed out straight away. We both heard his car start off and that was that. He didn’t come back.”

“Did he say nothing when he was leaving? Nothing at all?”

“Not a word.”

“Presumably he knew who the caller was?”

“I suppose so.”

“Was it a man or woman, sir?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“But it would be fairly quiet at that time. And one can generally catch the tone, at least, of somebody’s voice coming over a phone in the same room.”

“Not when Bert was listening, poor devil,” Bird said. “He had an odd habit of holding a telephone tight against his ear.”

“A secretive man?”

“In some way, yes, decidedly.”

“But not, would you say, sir, a guilt-ridden one?”

Bird took some seconds to reply.

“I have,” he said hesitantly, “wondered sometimes about that. Only wondered, mind you.” He quickly finished his drink and set down the glass. “You know what I mean?”

The Lucy-probationer who, in her enthusiasm, had strayed off scheduled territory into the municipal bungalow settlement of Twilight Close, made two discoveries in quick succession.

The first was that if Mr Stamper had a wife he kept her neither in his kitchen nor anywhere else within calling distance. The second and much more welcome discovery was of the remarkable elusiveness of her plastic costume in the grip of a Senior Citizen.

Miss Westmacott backed into a recess between the sink and the refrigerator. Her hands were behind her, against the wall.

“Whoaa...come up, there!” cried Mr Stamper. He made a grab for her withers. She bobbed down and at the same time thrust herself away from the wall. Her head collided with Mr Stamper’s stomach.

When he had recovered breath, he clicked his teeth good-naturedly and followed her into the passage. She was trying to open the front door.

Mr Stamper copiously licked both hands, rubbed them on the seams of his trousers, and lumbered towards her.

She turned and swung her satchel at the same time.

Against the side of Mr Stamper’s head there landed the combined weight of 450 forms of entry to the Lucillite “Win-a-Paradise-Island” competition and three one-gross packs of Scintillometers.

For a moment he remained inert, one glazed eye only six inches from Miss Westmacott’s coveted forequarters. Then he began to slide down the wall—quite happily, as she judged from his smile—and subsided in folds upon the floor. She stepped over him carefully and hurried back to the kitchen.

The key was in the farther door. She turned it.

From the passage came a grunt, then a chuckle. She glanced back. Already Mr Stamper was hauling himself upright. He waved cheerily and made groom-like noises of enticement.

The girl pulled open the door and ran into the garden beyond.

“Whooaa there!” cried Mr Stamper. “Coom ’ere and git mounted, theer’s a good gel!”

Miss Westmacott looked about her. The garden was flanked on two sides by a high fence of woven osiers. At the bottom of the garden was a wall. The only way of reaching the road by which she had arrived was to go back through the house. “Whooaa-back, gel!”

She sprinted over the patch of lawn and across vegetable beds neatly staked and strung to keep birds off their rows of sprouting seeds, plunged through a tangle of spear-grass and dead thistle, and with a leap and a scramble reached the top of the wall.

The wall continued for some distance in each direction, forming part of the boundary to the Close. Below her lay concrete, cracked and ruptured by weeds growing though it. The concrete extended for fifty yards or more, as far as a second wall. There were two buildings within this silent and seemingly derelict area.

The girl gave a backward glance at her thwarted pursuer and jumped lightly down.

She walked towards the nearer building.

It was tall but of only one storey, made of cement-faced brick and quite plain in design. At one corner a plant with long leaves and little red flowers had sprouted from the edge of the flat roof. Most of the panes in the big steel-framed windows had been smashed.

Barbara raised herself on tip-toes and looked in. It was like peeping into a den filled with petrified mammoths. She glimpsed vast jaws and beaks of steel, dulling over with rust. The place was a store for snow-clearing machinery.

As the girl turned away, there registered on the very edge of her consciousness a slight movement. She looked at once towards where she could not help fancying that something odd, something out of place, had happened while her attention had been on the ploughs and bulldozer blades.

All she could see was the grey wall of the other building in the depot, blank save for green and brown streaks of moss and lichen and a small blind-looking window about twenty feet above the ground.

Towards this window she gave an occasional glance while she made her way to a gate in the depot wall that rounding the plough store had revealed.

The gate was padlocked. The wall on either side was a good foot taller than the one she had climbed to escape from Twilight Close. From the farther side came the sound of a passing car.

She tugged and rattled the padlock, then brushed her hands with her handkerchief and patiently turned away. There would, no doubt, be another way out.

The window, though. Something was hanging from it. That must be what she had glimpsed before. A white arm, listlessly swinging from the elbow. Just the arm—forearm, rather—hand and forearm—swinging limply.

But how extraordinarily white it was.

Impelled partly by a practical intention to ask advice in her predicament, but chiefly by curiosity tinged with unease, Barbara crossed the yard and stood beneath the window. She looked up.

“Excuse me,” she called, and waited.

There came no sign that she had been heard. The hand above her continued to hang motionless.

Half a minute went by.

“I say!”

The sound echoed from wall to wall. Watching—anxiously now—Barbara thought she saw the chalk-white fingers twitch.

She called again.

“I say—are you all right?”

This time the hand moved perceptibly. But its motion was aimless, weary.

Barbara shouted. She hurried round to the second side of the building.

Almost its entire width was filled by a set of corrugated shutters. They looked the kind that could be unlocked at the bottom and rolled up to disclose a garage. The girl stopped only to pound on them with her fists. Then she ran on, grasping the next corner to swing herself round.

Level with her head was a window, or at least the rusting steel latticework that once had held twenty or thirty panes of glass. Fragments of glass, thickly begrimed, lay amongst rubble on the ground. They crunched under her feet.

She looked through the lattice and saw that this end of the ground floor of the building was, as she had supposed, a garage. What she had not expected to see, though, was the big, blue, new-looking car that it contained.

The building’s only door was at the top of a flight of five concrete steps. It was a plain door, painted dark green, and it had no handle, just a keyhole.

The girl had only to look at it to know that it was locked and that nothing she was capable of doing would open it, but she pushed and kicked it nevertheless.

Then she ran as fast as she could towards a part of the border wall of Twilight Close that she judged to be well clear of Mr Stamper’s territory.

Inspector Purbright had only just returned to his office when a message was relayed to him from Constable Palethorp, the driver of the patrol car which had been sent in response to Miss Westamcott’s 999 call.

He left again at once.

Joining the sluggish tide of traffic along East Street, he drove into the Market Place, over the Town Bridge, and diagonally across Burton Place into Leicester Avenue, at the far end of which was the old Corporation depot.

The journey took him exactly eighteen minutes, which was not bad going. Patience had paid off, as usual. No Flaxborough policeman ever dreamed of using a siren: he knew it would simply dam up the road ahead with inquisitive citizenry.

The depot gate stood open, its padlock having been levered off by Constable Palethorp.

With the aid of an ambulance man, he had also breached the green door that had defeated Miss Westmacott.

Purbright climbed the straight wooden staircase that led from the room behind the garage—it appeared to have been a workshop at one time—to the upper floor.

Palethorp awaited him in a bare loft-like chamber, at the far end of which was a low doorway. Palethorp stooped and went through. The inspector followed.

There was barely room for the two men in the tiny enclosure. The air was hot and foetid despite the square unglazed opening in the wall about a foot above the floor. Paper sacks were strewn over the boards. Some were streaked with what Purbright surmised to be dried vomit. A thick glass tumbler had rolled away into a corner.

Purbright spoke very quietly, as if he was anxious not to be overheard.

“How do you think she’ll make out?”

Palethorp shrugged, saying nothing.

“What did she look like?”

“Bloody terrible, sir.”

“She hadn’t been attacked, though, had she?”

“No, I don’t think so. Not in any obvious way, that is.”

Purbright looked about the compartment, taking care to avoid disturbing what little it contained.

“I’ll get over to the hospital. You can leave as soon as Harper and the others arrive with their stuff.”

Down in the yard, Purbright glanced through the window at the garaged car before getting into his own.

“Thank you,” he said to Palethorp as he drove off.

Palethorp, watching his departure, looked faintly puzzled.

Against the white linen of the hospital pillow, Edna Hillyard’s face showed up as yellowish grey. The skin shone with a thin dew of sweat.

Dr Palmaj, house physician, caressed the girl’s wrist experimentally, one lean finger seeking the pulse.

“We are fortunate that this is a strong woman. It is her good fortune, too, of course.”

Purbright said, “She looks very ill.”

“Not fatally, I am sure, inspector. Unless a pneumonia develops, she should recover in a week or two.”

“Are you able yet to say what is wrong with her?”

Dr Palmaj gently released the girl’s hand and straightened the coverlet. The letters FGH were embroidered on its edge in red cotton.

“Exposure effects, mainly.” He looked up at Purbright. “She was quite naked, you know, when that policeman found her. Did you know that?”

“Yes. Although in fact there was a blanket there, I understand. A travelling rug, rather. He put it round her.”

There was a pause. Then Purbright asked: “What had she been given?”

“That is hard to say, inspector. Barbiturates, I should imagine. And in quite big quantities. Stupid quantities.”

“By mouth?”

“Oh, yes. There is no sign of injection.”

“There would have had to be persuasion, then. It is very difficult to force anyone to swallow things, isn’t it, doctor?”

“That is true. But a person who is confused or sleepy or very, very unhappy seldom offers much resistance.”

“Not even when the object is murder?”

The houseman looked startled.

“So that is what you believe? Oh, but surely, inspector...”

“You didn’t suppose she had been taking drugs herself, did you?”

“Taking them herself—well, perhaps. But not by herself. I spoke just now of stupid quantities, did I not. I was thinking in terms of drug taking for self-gratification. In seclusion naturally, but in company. The sexual element, you understand—always that. In my experience. But such people handle these things absolutely without a normal sense of caution. You will yourself know how common is the overdose in such cases.”

They had been moving slowly away from the bed in the small white room with its glass-panelled walls. At the door, Purbright asked:

“Has she said anything that made sense to you?”

“No, no. Words—half words—quite unintelligible.”

“A policewoman is coming over. You would have no objection to her sitting here?”

“Certainly not. But I think it rather unlikely that this woman will have much to tell. Her remembering may be much damaged.”

Dr Palmaj turned the handle of the door and stood aside in readiness for the inspector to leave in front of him. Then, suddenly, he took away his hand and patted his forehead in self-reproof.

“My remembering, too, is not what it ought to be, inspector. Come.”

He stepped back to the foot of the bed.

“Something very strange is here. I shall be most interested to know what you think about it.”

Purbright watched the doctor deftly untuck blankets and sheet and raise them just sufficiently to disclose the feet of the unconscious girl.

Tatooed in blueish-black on the sole of the left foot was a carefully-executed cross.

Chapter Thirteen

In an ideal world, it would have been enough for Purbright to set a couple of men in secret occupation of the building in which Edna Hillyard had been found, in order to intercept a return visit by her abductor, who, it seemed reasonable to suppose, was also the murderer of Bertram Persimmon, and thus to bring him to justice.

But the success of so simple a plan would have depended on the continued ignorance of the population at large, murderer included, of the fact that Miss Hillyard was safely tucked up in a bed of Flaxborough General Hospital.

And on that Purbright knew better than to place any reliance whatsoever.

Feeling a little like Macbeth, he called upon the secretary of the Edith Cavell Psychical Research Foundation.

Miss Teatime welcomed him warmly and said what a long time it seemed since their last meeting. The loss, Purbright assured her, had been his entirely.

With which pleasantries they ascended the little staircase in Church Close and entered Miss Teatime’s sitting room.

“I have come to seek your expert opinion,” said Purbright. He stretched back in the chair facing the window and gazed appreciatively at the view of St Lawrence’s.

“How very nice of you.” Miss Teatime dexterously transposed a bottle of whisky from the mantelpiece into a Victorian workbasket.

“What does it mean when somebody has a cross tattooed on the sole of his foot?”

Miss Teatime paused in the action of bringing forward a cushioned cane chair and glanced sharply at the inspector.

“Dear me...” She sat down. “You have been moving in peculiar circles, Mr Purbright.”

“So it seems.”

“Tell me, what kind of a cross do you have in mind? Can you describe its shape?”

“An ordinary, straight-forward cross, I suppose. Not the sort one votes with. Certainly not a swastika, either. Here...” He made a quick sketch on an envelope.

“That,” Miss Teatime informed him, “is what is known as a Latin cross. It is the ecclesiastical variety and if you have found it upon the sole of someone’s foot the probability is that he or she is a practitioner of black magic. Or, more likely, a would-be practitioner.”

“I take it that you are sceptical on the subject.”

“Witchcraft is terribly unscientific, inspector. And very messy. But simply to dismiss it as superstition is to evade an important question. What is the nature of the Force that some dabblers in the so-called black arts have undoubtedly encountered and afterwards—quite spuriously, let me say—claimed credit for unleashing?”

“Do you know, Miss Teatime?”

She gave a smile of quiet reserve. “You did not come here, I am sure, inspector, for a lecture on psycho-thermal kinetics.”

“This cross...”

“Ah, yes. The cross. Let me see if I can tell you more. This is part of what I term the messy side of witchcraft. The fart-in-the-font department, I regret my old anthropology professor used to call it. To walk constantly upon a religious symbol, you see, is supposed to be very daring and diabolical. Only really dedicated devil-worshippers have the operation done. Well, it must tickle unbearably.”

Purbright smiled. He was silent for a moment, then asked:

“Has your research led you to the discovery of any specific instances of this kind of thing in Flaxborough? I don’t need to tell you that the press has been almost embarrassingly successful in turning the town into another Salem.”

“Yes, I had noticed,” Miss Teatime said acidly.

Almost at once her helpful manner returned.

“As for investigation, it is like everything else—a matter of funds. Some research bodies are fortunate in being retained in an advisory capacity by public authorities.”

“Indeed?”

There was a slight pause.

“Others, of course, have been able to help on the understanding that the expense entailed would not need to be met out of their own funds.”

The inspector pursed his lips. “Not an unreasonable arrangement, I should have thought.”

Miss Teatime’s prim but friendly smile signalled him to speak his mind.

“My interest,” he began, “is centred upon what you have called the messy side of witchcraft and the people in this town who go in for it. I see no point in trying to conceal from your—what is the phrase?—extra-sensory perception?—the fact that there is a distinctly black magic smell about the death of this supermarket manager...”

“Ah, yes. Poor Mr Persimmon.”

Purbright raised his brow. “You knew him?”

“Not in any very personal sense. Our little organization was able to help him on one occasion when his store was being subjected to paranormal activity of quite high polterage. But please go on, inspector.”

“Another thing you might as well know, although I must ask you to keep it strictly to yourself at this stage, concerns the cross I questioned you about earlier. The person who wears it—if that’s the appropriate verb—is the young woman who disappeared last Wednesday and who has now been found.”

“Alive?” The question was urged, rather than asked.

“Oh, yes. Alive.”

Miss Teatime nodded. She looked relieved.

“Furthermore,” Purbright went on, “the story is now being told us, and not by hysterical or credulous people but by certain pretty solid citizens, that cases of diabolism were getting so serious a problem some time ago that a sort of body and soul rescue service was set up. Did you know that?”

“No, but I am not altogether surprised. Amateurism does tend to flourish in a place like this.”

“I should rather like to know, Miss Teatime, the names of some of our amateur satanists. In the strictest confidence, needless to say.”

Dreamily, Miss Teatime regarded the ancient stone of the parish church.

“You would be well advised, I think, inspector,” she said, “to observe the distinction that was so properly drawn in The Wizard of Oz. ‘Are you a good witch or a bad witch?’ Remember the line? In other words, you will save a good deal of time if you leave the merely folksy out of your calculations and concentrate on those whom that nice sergeant of yours would call the nutters.”

“Are there many of them?”

“Oh, no—remarkably few, considering how fascinating pagan licentiousness must appear to ladies whose idea of ultimate degradation is being trapped in their hostess’s lavatory with an unsinkable turd.”

The inspector looked a little startled, but at once recovered composure.

“By ‘merely folksy’, would you be referring to the membership of the Flaxborough Folklore Society?” he asked.

“In general, yes.”

He took from his pocket a folded sheet of paper.

“I’ve a list here of the people who belong to it. All those who turned up at the meeting last Wednesday night—the one from which Edna Hillyard disappeared—have been questioned. I haven’t seen reports of all the interviews yet, but I do know that they tally in most particulars and that they contain no suggestion of what might have happened to Miss Hillyard.”

“Do you believe them, inspector?”

“No.”

Miss Teatime leaned forward. “May I?” She took the list from the inspector’s hand.

After a brief scrutiny, she said: “All very respectable people, Mr Purbright.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“But you suspect, do you not, that a trained psychical investigator, with proper equipment, might detect a sepulchre or two beneath all this whiteness.”

“I have an open mind on the subject, Miss Teatime.”

“How refreshing to encounter an unprejudiced policeman. You have no idea what a rara avis you are, Mr Purbright.”

She rose.

“If you will make yourself comfortable for a few moments, I shall see what comes of submitting this list to a few preliminary psychometrical tests.”

Half-way to the door, she stopped and came back to pick up the workbasket.

“What is that for?” Purbright asked.

“It contains my resonating orgonoscope,” explained Miss Teatime.

In her bedroom, she relaxed against stacked-up pillows after pouring half a tumbler of whisky and lighting one of her little chocolate-coloured cigars. She read again through Purbright’s list and underlined in pencil the names of Mrs Gloss, Mrs Pentatuke, Mrs Gooding and Paracelsus Parkin.

Rejoining Purbright a quarter of an hour later, she handed him the list.

“Your consort of viles,” she announced.

“You have been quick.”

“Ah, we do not depend upon things like the old Ouija board nowadays, inspector. With a modern orgonoscope, it is possible to pre-set the vibrations. Then all one has to do is read off the radionic dials. Would you care for a cup of tea?”

“That is kind of you, but I think not.” He put the sheet of paper back in his pocket.

“To be quite fair,” said Miss Teatime, “there are other names there which produced some reaction on the multi-oscillator unit. However, I thought you would wish me to keep the field as narrow as possible. Those I have indicated are the real off-the-scale ding-dongers.”

Purbright thanked her and prepared to leave.

“Oh, by the way...” She pointed to the pocket in which he had slipped the list of folklorists. “Had you noticed something rather interesting about the holders of office in that organization?”

He frowned. “No, I don’t think so.”

“It seemingly has no president.”

“But there is a chairman. Mrs whatsername—Framlington. Not all these societies have presidents.”

“If you will look in the current issue of the local paper,” said Miss Teatime, patiently, “you will find in the report of the quarterly Revel, as they call it, a reference to Miss Hillyard’s having been the winner of a prize. The name of the prize was the President’s Maypole Trophy.”

Purbright gazed at her admiringly.

“You are being very perceptive today, Miss Teatime.”

She laid a finger delicately against the side of her small and nicely shaped nose.

“Exceptive, Mr Purbright,” she corrected. “It is the spirits that should be given credit, not ourselves.”

“KILLER CURSE PUT ON HEALTH CHIEF

IN VOODOO TOWN.”

Purbright looked with disbelief at the identity of the paper Love had just handed him. It was none of the national news organs, but the usually prosaic Eastern Evening Advertiser from the next county, an early edition of which reached Flaxborough in mid-afternoon.

“Not more poultry, surely,” murmured the inspector, beginning to tackle the main text of the story.

“No,” Love said. “Sage.”

Purbright scowled at the page before him. “Jokes, Sid, we can do without just now.”

“It’s not a joke. Read on a bit. You’ll see.”

According to the Evening Advertiser report, a cleaner in the department of the Flaxborough Medical Officer of Health had come across what appeared to be a sort of wreath propped against the door of Dr Cropper’s private office. Attached to the wreath was a white card with his name on it. Supposing it to be something agricultural that had been left for analysis, she laid it on a sheet of paper on the doctor’s desk.

Only then did the cleaner notice an object twisted amongst the twigs and leaves that made up the wreath. It was a snake. She ran screaming out of the office and locked it behind her.

When the department staff arrived, two of the men—a clerk and a health inspector—went into the office prepared to deal with the snake. They found it was a grass snake or “slow-worm” as people in the locality would have called it. It was dead.

There were interviews with the cleaner and the clerk, a man called Hodgson. Hodgson it was who had identified the snake. He thought he knew what the wreath had been made from, too, although it was half rotten and looked as if it had been buried for some time. Sage, diagnosed Mr Hodgson.

“I beg your pardon, Sid,” said Purbright, and read on.

The paper recapitulated some of the allegedly occult goings-on which had given Flaxborough recent notoriety; then spread itself on an interview by telephone with Denise Cornelius, demonologist and author.

“Common or garden sage,” Miss Cornelius had revealed to the Advertiser, “was once considered a very powerful harm-dealing magic when it had been kept in the ground for a certain period and dug up with prescribed ceremony. English witches valued its malignant properties highly. The most terrible use of ‘sage-rot’ was in conjunction with a reptile-type charm. The purpose of that combination invariably was to kill. And I have no doubt that it worked.”

The Russians, added Miss Cornelius, were known to have organized the re-establishment of witch covens in England and America. Their recruitment of evil powers was far advanced.

“It might well be that Flaxborough’s present ordeal is but a rehearsal for an unimaginably more horrible onslaught upon the Christian world in the not far distant future,” Miss Cornelius declared.

In a small final paragraph, the paper noted that the Medical Officer had not been available for comment.

“I wonder if he’s available now,” remarked Purbright. “Come on, Sid.”

Sergeant Love’s second appearance at the Municipal Offices was acknowledged by excited whispering amongst the totties, surreptitious stares, and even—to his almost unbearable gratification—a slow and sultry wink from Miss O’Conlon. Patriarch Purbright, naturally, was ignored.

House, the chief clerk, hastily put himself between the policemen and his girls. He was a fussy, dusty, ink-stained man, with creases of chronic suspiciousness about his eyes.

Purbright asked if it would be convenient to see Dr Cropper.

House pouted dubiously and crept to a big oak panelled door marked Private. He touched it delicately with one knuckle, listened for ten whole seconds, and went in.

Like opening a safe, Love reflected.

When House re-emerged, his chief could be seen immediately behind him, one open hand already thrust forward.

“Lovely to see you, inspector!”

There was a vigorous handshake for each of them, an extended chair, a wave towards a box of cigarettes, a nod of genial professional approval when they declined. Then the big man with the pink, handsome face strode back behind his desk and sat, straight as a company director on audit day.

“And what can I do for you, gentlemen?”

The tiny click of the switch of Love’s recording gear brought Cropper’s eyes round at once.

“Aha!” he said, roguishly, on seeing the sergeant unwind the microphone flex. “Bugged, eh?”

“I hope you’ve no objection, sir,” the inspector said. “The more conventional kind of note-taking does tend to hold things up rather.”

For a few moments more, Cropper continued to watch the recorder with amused interest. Then he returned his attention to the inspector.

“I’m sure you will be aware, doctor,” Purbright began, “that an investigation is in progress into the death of the Bridge Street supermarket manager, Mr Bertram Persimmon...”

“Aware?” interrupted Cropper, suddenly grave-faced. “I am very deeply aware, inspector. He was a friend. In a sense, a colleague. But you must know this, surely? Sir Henry...” He waited, his head slightly forward, inviting Purbright to adopt a franker approach.

“Sir Henry has been in touch with you, has he, sir?”

“But of course. He is as concerned as I am to learn the truth of this terrible affair. I trust I have not broken a confidence of some kind?”

“Certainly not, sir. I am glad to think that you’ll be better prepared to answer some of the questions I shall be putting to you. For the moment, though, I’m rather interested in the incident which the Evening Advertiser describes so graphically.”

Purbright began to unfold the newspaper that he had taken from his pocket.

Dr Cropper waved it aside.

“Don’t bother. I’ve seen it. And really, inspector, of all the nonsensical fuss...”

“Is the account not accurate?”

“As far as it goes, yes. But, good God, ‘killer curse’—‘voodoo town’—I ask you! Are you aware, my dear inspector, of the amount of offensive rubbish dumped by crack-brained members of the public at this office during the year? We get rotting fish, underweight sausages, beer with tadpoles in it... Listen, somebody once actually managed to get in and tether a sheep to the door handle. Don’t ask me why. One gets used to it.”

“I appreciate that, doctor. But it seems to me that what was left here this morning was intended to convey a threat—a threat to you personally.”

Cropper grinned beamishly. “Oh, I fancy I’m able to look after myself, inspector.”

“Mr Persimmon wasn’t, though, was he?”

The grin was switched off.

“I don’t think I quite understand.”

“Look sir, four of you gentlemen have been associated in what I gather is a kind of vigilante committee. Sir Henry Bird has explained its purpose. And if this reading of the situation is correct, you all have been running certain risks.”

“But very willingly, inspector. Remember that.”

“I don’t doubt it. At the same time, I have to remind you that it is the job of the police to run risks, not the ordinary citizen’s, however public-spirited.”

Cropper leaned forward and spoke very quietly.

“You cannot put handcuffs on Satan, my friend.”

“Perhaps not, sir. But do you contend that it was Satan who murdered Persimmon?”

“Indirectly. Yes, I do.”

“And then made threats of what I can only call a particularly vicious and dangerous kind to each in turn of Persimmon’s collaborators?”

“Through some human agency. Again, yes.”

“You don’t dispute that they were threats, then, doctor including the so-called spell addressed to you?”

Cropper shrugged. “No, of course I don’t. Perhaps I should not have tried to impress you with my indifference, but for anyone in a job like mine publicity is an extremely unwelcome thing. You must see that.”

“Oh, I do. But I am not a journalist, Dr Cropper. What goes into that little box the sergeant is holding does not come out again for public consumption.”

“The press arrived here remarkably promptly this morning. I find that rather puzzling.”

“Reporters are around in some strength at the moment, sir. I expect they’ve established their own intelligence system. Would there, though, be anyone you can think of who might have let them know?”

“No one in the department, certainly.”

“Talking of the department, doctor, do you happen to have any idea of Miss Edna Hillyard’s choice of friends?”

There was a pause.

“Inspector...”

Cropper was regarding Purbright with an expression that was at once respectful, wily and reproving.

“Sir?”

“You are trying to trap me into pretending that I occupy far too elevated a position here to be aware of what mere clerks get up to.”

“And what do they get up to, sir?”

Cropper smiled and shook his head.

“I know perfectly well, Mr Purbright, that Miss Hillyard associated—that is the word, I believe—with Bertie Persimmon.”

The inspector put another question at once. “Do you know who made the call last Wednesday night that resulted in Persimmon going out?”

“I have no idea.”

“What is your recollection of that call, doctor?”

“None, naturally. I didn’t take it.”

“Persimmon did?”

“Yes. We’d had one or two earlier, but they were—well, relatively trivial. Then this one came through about midnight.”

“Did he not say anything that might suggest who the caller was?”

“Not a single word. He scarcely looked at me. Just slammed the receiver down and went straight out. Then I heard his car start up.”

“That was the last you ever saw of him, in fact?”

Dr Cropper spread the fingers of his right hand on the desk before him and scrutinized them sadly.

“As things turned out—yes, I’m afraid it was.”

Chapter Fourteen

The boot, or trunk, of the late Mr Persimmon’s car had been crafted with special care to solve for the family man all those holiday luggage problems; to provide the modern business executive with space equivalent to a second office; and to give the sportsman the big, BIG, B-I-G-G-E-S-T rod, gun or clubs locker he had ever dreamed of.

It was now known to have served a fourth, unscheduled, purpose—the posthumous transportation of its owner.

The fact had been established quite simply and quickly in a Nottingham police laboratory by analysis of blood samples and by comparing fibres recovered from the boot with others taken from clothing on the corpse.

Of the significance of fragments of hard varnish and aged, brittle, animal hair, also found in the boot, the forensic scientists had offered no opinion.

Purbright treated Love to his own confident interpretation.

“They must have chucked that bull’s head mask in with the body and then dumped them both in the river.”

The sergeant thought about this for a moment. Then, “Who’s ‘they’?” he asked.

“One, the man who killed Persimmon, whoever he is. Two—and I’m afraid there seems to be no doubt about this—the Hillyard girl.”

“You mean she helped him?”

“There are her prints all over the car. Those inside and round about the boot are bloody. And their position indicates that she must have been helping to lift. That’s what the report says, anyway.”

“Perhaps he forced her to.”

“Perhaps.”

“And abducted her afterwards.”

Purbright sighed. “You have a chivalrous disposition Sid.”

He looked at his watch.

“In twenty minutes from now, our colleagues will be paying simultaneous calls upon three of the folklore enthusiasts we discussed earlier. I want you at the same time to take four county men and give Mrs Gloss’s grounds a thorough going over. What story-fixing there’s been up to now between these people can’t be helped, but at least we can deny them a chance to tip one another off today.”

Leaving Love to marshal his squad from the men lent by County Chief Constable Hessledine, Purbright entered the office of his own superior, Mr Harcourt Chubb.

“This warrant, Mr Purbright—I’m not altogether happy about it, you know. Mrs Gloss is not a poor woman. She has the means to make things awkward for us if it turns out that you’ve acted hastily.”

“On the contrary, sir. Persimmon was murdered last Wednesday. I think you can claim to have acted with great restraint in waiting so long before ordering a search of the grounds where he almost certainly met his death.”

“But is it your contention that Mrs Gloss was involved in the crime? I mean, this is just what people are going to think when they see policemen on the place. You’re using some of the county fellows, I understand,” added Mr Chubb, with the slightest wrinkle of distaste.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to...”

“Sit down, my dear chap, do.”

Mr Chubb made no move towards a chair himself but remained standing by the mantelpiece, on which he supported one elegantly-extended arm.

“I would not go so far,” repeated the inspector, “as to accuse Mrs Gloss of actually having a hand in what happened to Persimmon. But I certainly do believe that she and some of her friends were aware of it soon afterwards and came to an agreement among themselves to keep quiet.”

“And why should they do that?”

“Because they did not wish the police, or anyone else for that matter, to find out what they had been up to that night.”

“You are talking about this folk-singing carry-on, are you?”

The chief constable sounded disparaging yet intrigued.

“It was something rather more sinister than that, sir.”

Mr Chubb slightly widened his regard of the inspector, but said nothing. Purbright explained.

“The ground behind Mrs Gloss’s home was being used for black magic rites of some kind. Possibly fairly harmless. Possibly not. It rather depends on one’s point of view. But erotic—that, I fancy, we can safely bet on.

“We don’t know yet how long these things have been going on, nor at what point did a society genuinely devoted to local folklore become dominated by its witchcraft lobby. The newspaper stories are not only extremely unreliable in detail; they have been deliberately inspired by somebody who knows about the black magic activities and for some private reason wants to embarrass their organizers.”

“They’ve certainly embarrassed me,” said Mr Chubb, with feeling. “That fellow Hessledine was on the phone yesterday, making what I suppose he thought were jokes about magic spells. I had to be rather short with him. Never mind about that, though. What I can’t understand is how a decent sort of chap like Persimmon got mixed up in all this nastiness.”

“You don’t know, sir?”

“Of course not. Why, do you?”

Purbright pondered how favourably he could present the manner of the passing of a vice-chairman of the Conservative Club.

“He was a member of a small but very public-spirited group of citizens—something on the lines of Rotary, I gather—formed to try and counteract the influence of the black magic cult. They had what I believe self-dramatizing politicians like to call a ‘hot line’. A number that can be rung in an emergency.”

“It sounds rather far-fetched,” observed Mr Chubb.

“So I thought, sir, when I heard about it. But someone called that number on Wednesday night, and it was Persimmon who went to the rescue.”

“Rescue of whom?”

“His mistress, actually.”

The chief constable took his arm from the mantelpiece.

“His what?”

“His mistress, sir. Miss Hillyard.”

Purbright waited, in case Chubb should wish to express shock or disbelief, but the chief constable silently motioned him to proceed.

“As soon as I learned about that call to Persimmon, other facts seemed to fit in. At first, I reasoned that the girl had gone to the affair at Mrs Gloss’s out of curiosity or for a thrill and was then inveigled or even forced into taking part in the sexual shenannigins. When these became too violent or too bizarre for her taste, she took fright and managed to persuade one of the other women to get out to a telephone and send for help.”

“How would the Hillyard girl have known the number of this ‘hot line’, as you call it?”

“Persimmon would have told her. He and his friends unquestionably took this self-appointed task of theirs very seriously. Actually, knowing something of Miss Hillyard’s reputation, I wouldn’t be surprised if the evangelistic attitude of her lover had put the idea of going to Aleister Lodge into her head in the first place.”

“Morally unstable, I suppose.”

“That is one way of putting it, sir.”

“And yet you say Bertram Persimmon took up with her. There are some strange depths in people, you know, Mr Purbright.”

“Yes, sir. I was saying, though, that the idea of Edna Hillyard’s taking fright and sending for help was my first interpretation. I now think quite differently.

“For one thing, it was näive of me to assume that the clothes in her car were evidence of her having changed into others. She was naked when found and clearly had stripped that evening without any compulsion. Which suggests a good deal more than mere curiosity.

“It is probable also that the girl lost no time in priming herself with the liquor that undoubtedly was available. I suspect that modern witches are no different from ancient ones in having to use potions to get them off the ground.

“Then there is the matter of her complicity in shifting Persimmon’s body. Forensic are quite convinced of that because of the grouping of her prints on the car.

“Lastly—and this could be the most significant circumstance of all—we find that the place chosen as a temporary hiding-place for the car is a Corporation depot. It is largely derelict, certainly, and unlikely to be entered by workmen or anybody until the ploughs are wanted again for snow-clearing, but normally it is kept locked and the keys hung with others on a board in the Public Health Department.”

Purbright paused.

“You see the implications, sir.”

“I can see a connection,” said Mr Chubb. “The girl worked in that department, if I remember rightly.”

“Exactly, sir. She had access to those keys. But not in the middle of the night. So if she took them—and I can think of no one more likely—she must have done so in advance and presumably with full knowledge of what they would be needed for.”

“In other words, Mr Purbright, the woman was a partner in a murder conspiracy. Is that what you are saying?”

“It is extremely difficult to put any other construction on the facts as we know them, sir.”

“But there are facts that we do not know, surely. If that crime was premeditated, there must have been a motive. What was it?”

Purbright shrugged regretfully. “That remains to be established, sir. But I should not expect anything conventional. There is more than a little madness about this case.”

“Another point bothers me,” said Mr Chubb. “To lure that poor chap off in the dark to a remote part of the town—yes, I understand the cunning of that. But what about all those characters cavorting about on broomsticks or whatever you say they were doing? Potential witnesses. Very risky.”

“By that time, most of them would have been mutually preoccupied, I think, sir. And we should remember that they were much too heavily compromised to be keen on giving evidence.”

“Do you know the names of the people who were there?”

“Oh, there’s no secret about that, sir. They’re in the local paper. Or some of them are. I think the bogus publicity must be felt to add to the thrill. They actually have a press secretary, a chap called Parkin.”

“Good gracious,” said Mr Chubb, much disgusted.

“Naturally, I am having them very closely questioned,” Purbright added. “As the girl will be, as soon as she’s considered fit enough.”

“By the medical staff, presumably.”

“Yes, sir. They’re rather apprehensive of brain damage, actually. She had barbituric poisoning.”

“You did mention the possibility when you rang from the hospital. It’s confirmed, is it?”

“They’re pretty sure.”

Purbright thought for a moment.

“Which leads, I’m afraid, to another question I can’t answer. Why was the wretched girl doped to the eyes and left lying in that place? It seems an odd way to treat a collaborator.”

“As I understand it,” said the chief constable, “people of that sort pass dangerous drugs around as you or I might hand out peppermint lozenges. Hippies. All that.” He wagged his head gloomily.

Purbright was wondering if Mr Chubb would appreciate his pointing out the contradiction between a love-in and a black mass when the telephone rang.

Mr Chubb walked to his desk and picked up the receiver with cold fastidiousness.

“Sergeant, I did tell you that I would be engaged in conference for at least half an hour. That half an hour has not yet elapsed.”

He seemed about to replace the phone, then to change his mind. The lean, ascetic features sharpened to attention. One slim hand slipped half-way into the side pocket of his jacket and rested there delicately.

“Good afternoon, councillor,” said Mr Chubb into the telephone.

It was a brief and mainly one-sided conversation. The chief constable made occasional noises of judicious concern and said that he would certainly... Also that he quite... And finally that he would be glad to see if...

Purbright meanwhile looked impassively out of the window.

“Hideaway,” said the chief constable after he had put down the phone. His face was stony. Purbright could sense behind it the black swirl of private opinion.

“He is the brother-in-law, it seems, of Mrs Persimmon,” said Mr Chubb.

Ernest Hideaway, estate agent and humorist, was possessed of a tidy fortune that had been his reward for compounding the felonies of local jerrybuilders over the years. He was a member of Flaxborough Town Council and a diligent giver of advice.

“Hideaway says,” Mr Chubb went on, “that Mrs Persimmon is very upset indeed, and if what the man alleges is true, she has some justification. You will have to look into it, I’m afraid, Mr Purbright.”

“If you’ll tell me what the complaint is, sir...”

“Well of course I’ll tell you,” Mr Chubb retorted irritably. “That’s what I’m doing now. It’s about the man’s body, actually. Very distasteful. You’ll remember that after the post-mortem and the adjournment of the inquest the coroner issued a burial certificate.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, well the family fixed the funeral for tomorrow. All the arrangements were made. The undertaker collected the body. Everything normal, everybody happy. And then, dash me if the blessed woman doesn’t ask to see the corpse.”

The chief constable shook his head.

“Very ill-advised. Just morbidity, you know, but there you are. They let her.

“And straight away she played Holy Harry. Wanted to know what business the hospital had to stamp her husband like something going through the customs. The hospital people said post-mortems were the business of the police and nothing to do with them, so she went along to her brother-in-law.

“He confirms what the woman says. Somebody, at some time, has stamped a black cross on the bottom of her husband’s foot. And it won’t come off.”

Chapter Fifteen

Sergeant Love and his posse swept up to the door of Aleister Lodge with something of the panache of a car full of bootleggers in a mid-1930s film. Mrs Gloss, alarmed and annoyed by the noise of the displacement of gravel, hurried from the house. She was in time to see the sergeant glance back with bland interest at the furrows in the drive while he fished a paper from his inside pocket.

The search of the grounds was lengthy, thorough, and, in the subsequently expressed opinion of Inspector Purbright, undeservedly fruitful.

The finds were distributed mainly in and around the grove of ash trees which earlier had attracted the attention of Constable Palethorp.

They included six empty wrappings representative between them of four different brands of prophylactic. Two of the packs were so worn and dirty as to be only just identifiable. Of the rest, one was almost new. It lay behind a tuft of grass in the lee of one of the four short pillars that supported a stone slab about eight feet long by two wide.

This slab was damp and green. It looked very old. The supports had sunk into the ground irregularly, and the slab leaned a little to one side.

Several dark brown splashes were discernible on the stone, a group of them at its higher end. A policeman noticed that dead leaves had been strewn about on the ground near by. He brushed them aside. Quite a lot of blood had soaked into the earth.

The policeman scrutinized this area inch by inch. Eventually he discovered a sliver of ruby glass. Nothing else.

A few yards away, just clear of the trees, one of his colleagues was busy with cast-making materials. He had seen in a bald patch of soft ground the impression of a tyre tread. It seemed identical in pattern with the tread of one of Persimmon’s tyres, blown-up photographs of which he had been using as a guide.

Constables three and four took turns-with notebooks and tape-measures. Painstakingly they charted from heelmarks and from crushed and stained grass the short haul of a body.

Farther away, incidental finds were made, less dramatic, but significant in context.

Two bottles, overlooked by a Folklore Society cleaning-up detachment the previous Thursday morning, contained still the potent lees of pumpkin champagne laced with rum.

A policeman who zealously, but with misgivings, investigated a small parcel he had found in the summerhouse censer, jumped when there fell out the shrivelled corpse of a bat. The creature’s shroud was a page of the Baptist Bugle embellished with a photograph of the Rev. William Harniss.

Lastly, high in the branches of a fine yew tree near the house, the searchers descried what at first appeared to be a great roosting bird of prey. It proved on closet eradication to be a black corset.

Sergeant Love himself made it his business to see that Mrs Gloss was given no opportunity to use the telephone.

He tried to offset the irritation his persistent presence obviously caused her by making a fuss of the big sleek cat which had appeared from the kitchen.

The cat walked round him three times, unhurriedly bit him on the calf, and strolled out.

Mrs Gloss told Love that if she ever saw him ill-treat an animal again she would have him removed from the Force.

At the home of the Goodings, Constable Brevitt did his best to cope with fauna of a different kind.

Out in the garden an enormous black dog paced up and down, baying, while a pair of macaws in a cage high in a corner of the living room were carrying on a dialogue that sounded like a continuous rail disaster.

Mrs Gooding appeared to find the uproar not only tolerable but enlightening. She smiled knowingly and every now and again glanced at Brevitt’s face as if to confirm some particularly unpleasant characteristic that the birds had just pointed out to her.

Questioning Mrs Gooding in such circumstances was not easy. Doggedly and without much imagination, Brevitt followed his brief.

Had she, on the night of the Folklore Society’s Revel, seen anything of a man called Bertram Persimmon? No. Or a Miss Edna Hillyard? Yes. With whom? Lots of different people. Did she know a Mr Persimmon? No. Had there been a fight at the Revel? No. Any unnatural practices? What an idea! Who had dressed up as a bull? She didn’t know what he was talking about. Who had put offensive articles in the parish church? Ask somebody else. On the door of Sir Henry Bird? How would she know. In the office of the Medical Officer of Health? Likewise.

Brevitt looked grim. He sighed through clenched teeth.

“If my George was here,” Mrs Gooding said, suddenly removing her regard from the birds and ferociously swinging her big, knobbly face close to Brevitt’s, “d’you know what we’d do?”

The policeman involuntarily reared back.

Again Mrs Gooding’s features were thrust up to his.

“We’d pray for you,” she growled.

One of the imported officers, a Brocklestone plain clothes man called Miller, had been assigned to call on Press Secretary Parkin.

Parkin was not at home. Nor was his sister, Amy. Miller learned from the woman next door that Miss Parkin did not normally return from school until nearly five o’clock.

“And Mr Parkin?”

“Isn’t he at the shop, then?”

“What shop?”

A chemist’s shop. Dispensing. Well, no, he’d not know, not if he was a stranger to Flax. But that’s where Mr Parkin would be. Amis and Jeffrey, in Eastgate.

Miller asked if the Parkins kept chickens.

The neighbour said that was a funny sort of question and who was he, anyway?

A buyer of cockerels, replied Miller, with spontaneous cunning. Black cockerels he was especially interested in.

The neighbour looked him up and down and said:

“That wouldn’t surprise me, either.”

And she shut the door.

Number 33 Partney Avenue was a semi-detached villa with a bay window, behind one of the five panes of which was displayed a pink poster advertising the forthcoming performance of “The Gondoliers” by the Flaxborough Amateur Operatic Society.

A precisely circular flowerbed had been cut in the centre of the few square yards of closely-mown lawn. It contained eight wallflower plants and one standard rose bush.

The concrete approach to the built-on garage was marked in imitation of crazy-paving. On the garden gate was an enamelled notice. NO CANVASSERS.

A man and a woman who had entered Partney Avenue from Arnhem Crescent stopped before the gate and read the notice. They looked at each other and the man gave a very thin smile. He opened the gate.

The man and woman stood side by side before the front door, awaiting response to the man’s double ring. They looked patient, disciplined, impermeable—a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses, perhaps, anticipating with flinty pleasure an hour or two of apocalyptic interpretation upon Mrs Pentatuke’s doorstep.

Suddenly the door was open and Mrs Pentatuke was revealed, more than a little Jehovah-like herself.

She looked imperiously from one to the other.

“Well?”

The man said: “We are police officers, ma’am. My name is Harper, and this is Policewoman Bellweather. May we come in?”

Mrs Pentatuke’s frown deepened.

“I haven’t sent for the police.”

“No, ma’am. We’ve called. We think you might be able to help us in our inquiries into certain matters.”

Fill his bowels with hooks, prayed Mrs Pentatuke. O Belial, make her miscarry in a Woolworths.

Aloud, she demanded to see documents of authorization.

They were produced.

Coldly, Mrs Pentatuke ushered her visitors into the room containing the Gondoliers poster. It was not a large room. The settee and its matching pair of armchairs in mustard-coloured miracle Carfelon had the appearance of having arrived the previous day, on approval. The fitted carpet, super tough yet fibre-groomed to give the caress of real lambswool, also had an unused look. There was one picture, a reproduction of a portrait of Winston Churchill. It hung above the fireplace, which had been sealed with a laminated plastic panel before which stood a chrome-plated, two-bar electric heater. This was not, and possibly never had been, switched on.

“It will save time, if you agree,” Harper said to Mrs Pentatuke, “for my colleague to take a quick look round the house while I put a few questions to you here. Of course, you may accompany her if you would rather.”

“And if I forbid her to do anything of the kind?”

Harper looked regretful.

“Ah, as to that, madam, I’m afraid there’s the matter of the warrant. We don’t as a rule expect any trouble over these things. Not in a nice neighbourhood like this.”

Mrs Pentatuke compressed her lips in angry resignation. O Astoreth, lead her great cow foot into the hair oil that Lionel spilled on the bathroom floor this morning. Let her horrid head be wedged down the poo-box.

Policewoman Bellweather gave her a nervous little smile, bobbed apologetically, and went out of the room.

A long pause having failed to win Harper an invitation to sit down, he lowered himself to a chair-edge perch on miracle Carfelon and started to put his questions.

A quarter of an hour later, he had secured not a single admission from Mrs Pentatuke that promised to have relevance to the Persimmon murder, the abduction of Edna Hillyard, or the persecution of members of the anti-witchcraft committee. Her answers were curt—often a simple yes or no—but never evasive in a way that Harper could challenge. And she took so little time to deliver them that Harper was constantly being left unprepared with another question and had to look into his notebook like a schoolboy at a crib.

He was greatly relieved when Policewoman Bellweather came back into the room. She was holding a large translucent plastic box fitted with a lid. The box was thinly encrusted with crystals. It was steaming slightly.

Sadie Bellweather addressed Harper.

“I found this in the deep freeze cabinet in the kitchen,” she told him. She did not look at Mrs Pentatuke.

“Is that your property, madam?” Harper asked, trying to appear stern but at the same time scrupulously open-minded.

“And what in hell’s name,” retorted Mrs Pentatuke, “has that got to do with you?”

Harper signalled the policewoman to proceed.

She clutched the box to her bosom with one arm and levered off the lid. Out of the box she drew a bird, stiff as a Roman eagle but black-feathered and unmistakably domestic in origin.

“That your chicken, ma’am?” (In for a penny, in for a pound, reflected Harper, secretly nervous.)

“Of course it’s my chicken, you idiot.” Mrs Pentatuke made a grab for it.

“Cockerel,” corrected Policewoman Bellweather, who had been brought up on a farm.

“It’s for a dinner party tomorrow night,” said Mrs Pentatuke, “and I’ll thank you not to maul it about.”

Policewoman Bellweather carefully replaced the fowl, which she had been holding upright by the feet, like a feathered club. Next, she produced a small metal tray and handed it to Harper.

Harper gave a start, then peered cautiously at the tray’s contents before holding them out for Mrs Pentatuke’s inspection.

“These for dinner as well, are they? Starters, like?”

Mrs Pentatuke gazed, tight-lipped, at the frozen corpses of a shrew, two frogs, a mouse and another small creature less easy to identify because of its somewhat chewed condition.

“The cat brings them in from time to time,” she said, after consideration.

“Would you care to give me an explanation of why you have put these things into the refrigerator?” Harper asked. He ignored the policewoman’s whispered “deep freeze” and waited for Mrs Pentatuke to think up something convincing.

“I don’t consider I need give you anything of the kind.”

“As you wish, madam,” said Harper, handing back the miniature mortuary to Sadie Bellweather.

The third and last production from the box was a tiny notebook. The policewoman held it up between finger and thumb. It measured about two inches by an inch-and-a-half. Harper reached across and she put it in his hand.

Again the monotonously delivered question.

“This your property, madam?”

Mrs Pentatuke affected silent contempt, but her face had paled noticeably.

Harper slowly turned the pages of the notebook. After a while, he raised his eyes.

“Do you wish to offer an explanation of why you keep a memoranda book in the...” He sent an inquiring glance to the policewoman.

“It was taped behind a sort of dividing panel in the freezer.”

“...in the position my colleague has described?”

“I intend to say nothing more to you,” declared Mrs Pentatuke. “Your presence here is preposterous and your behaviour unspeakable. What your object is, I have no idea, but I warn you both that unless you can be shown to have had some very good reason for bursting in on my privacy you and your superior officers will find yourselves in the most serious trouble.”

Harper waited patiently for this speech to end. Then he returned the notebook to Policewoman Bellweather, motioned her to hang on to the box and its contents, and said to Mrs Pentatuke:

“I have to tell you that I propose now to take to police headquarters, Flaxborough, the articles which I have shown to you and which I believe to be your property. I shall give you a signed receipt for these articles, and they will be treated with all reasonable care. Do you wish to make objection to my removing them?”

But Mrs Pentatuke’s vow of silence seemed to have been put already into operation. The faint stirring of her lips conveyed nothing to Harper. Which was just as well, because she was then placing upon him in yellow, dun and black degrees, the miring malediction of Saint Gringoire.

Love and Miller nearly collided with each other in the corridor outside the CID room. Both were in a hurry.

“Conference,” said Miller. “You did know, did you?”

“Twenty minutes yet,” Love said. He dodged into a file closet and started pulling out drawers. “Tell Harper when you see him. Oh, and Brevitt, too.”

Purbright appeared at the end of the corridor, then turned and was gone again. Love heard the clanking of an iron staircase.

When Harper and Sadie Bellweather came in from the transport yard, it was Harper who was carrying Mrs Pentatuke’s deep freeze container. Encountering the bulky obstacle of Sergeant Mally, Harper halted and invited the coroner’s officer to take a look.

“Christ, we’re not having inquests on bloody frogs now, are we?”

“Where’s the inspector?”

“Upstairs.”

They squeezed past each other.

Harper was hailed by Love and told about the conference. Proudly, he displayed his collection. Love picked up the mouse by its tail, which had become limp in the warm air, and pretended to set off in search of Policewoman Bellweather. “No, don’t piss about,” Harper told him, grabbing back the mouse.

The face of Constable Palethorp appeared round the door.

“Tapes,” he said to Love. “The inspector says don’t forget the interview tapes. And can you come up straight away, he says.”

“Righty-ho,” said Love.

Palethorp moved closer. “Hey,” he said softly, “they reckon old Purby’s going to knock off the vicar for that Persimmon business. Has he said anything to you?

Love, slipped two cassettes in his pocket and started to leave.

He looked happy but said nothing.

Closeted in one of the two small interview rooms with a Mr George Tozer, Detective-Constable Pook frowned peevishly at the noise of all the comings and goings in the corridor. He had been hearing from Mr Tozer—a man of slow speech and gesture with black cavernous eye-sockets and hairy nostrils—about certain strange tribulations suffered lately by members of Flaxborough Chamber of Trade, whose current secretary and spokesman Mr Tozer was.

“I shall pass on these people’s complaints, sir,” Pook assured him. “It isn’t nice for that sort of thing to be happening. Especially in food shops.”

He was ushering his informant out when Sadie Bellweather, clutching a new notebook and two shiny red pencils, patted his arm as she bounded by.

“Conference. Now. They asked me to tell you.”

Love reappeared, waving his hand like a shipyard foreman trying to stop a launch.

“Sorry, slight delay,” he called along the corridor. “Not to panic, though.”

Purbright, slightly out of breath, joined him. The inspector was putting on his raincoat. He paused to beckon the two nearest men. They were Harper and Palethorp. All four hurried towards the transport yard.

“Quickest way would be by St Anne’s Place and Spindle Lane, wouldn’t you say, sergeant? Save going through the Market Place.”

Purbright took the wheel.

At the East Street junction, Palethorp got out, audaciously held up the cross traffic despite his being in plain clothes, and climbed back into the car.

“Who rang in?” Love asked the inspector.

“Grewyear. I’d asked him to keep an eye on the place until someone could be spared to make a search.”

The car travelled two-thirds of the length of Spoongate, turned sharply left between two stone gate pillars, and drew up in the lee of a big beige Daimler in the courtyard that separated the Vicarage from the Church Hall.

Two men were coming out of the hall’s back door.

They carried between them what appeared to be a small flexible raft. Not until they were within a few feet of the open boot of the Daimler did they notice the police car.

Purbright got out and strolled towards them.

“Do you need any help, gentlemen?”

Neither Sir Henry Bird nor Dr Cropper appeared to be in the slightest degree disconcerted.

“That’s extremely obliging of you, inspector,” said Bird, “but I think we can manage.”

“Unless,” remarked Dr Cropper, “you or one of your colleagues would be good enough to bring that old box across for us.”

He indicated with a nod something large and brown and cylindrical that had been left standing beside the hall door.

“It would save us making another journey.”

Purbright made a sign to Palethorp, who set off across the courtyard.

Love and Harper had moved quietly round the front of the Daimler. Love stood close to the door on the driver’s side.

Bird and Cropper lowered their burden into the Daimler boot. It could be seen now to be a narrow mattress, about six feet long.

Purbright felt it. It was resilient, made probably of foam rubber. The canvas cover was stained brown here and there. He bent the mattress over, to examine the other side. Streaks of green. He touched the streaks with a finger tip and looked inquiringly at Bird, then at Cropper, but was careful not to put a question in words.

“Paint,” said Bird. “It’s pretty messy in that hall.” He reached across as if with the intention of lowering the boot lid.

Purbright stopped him and indicated Palethorp, approaching with the cylindrical object. It was a huge old-fashioned hat box made of leather.

“Ah, yes,” said Sir Henry. He called: “In here—there’s a good chap.”

Again Purbright was ready to intercept. He told Palethorp to set the hat box down on the ground, then turned to Bird.

“I’d be obliged if you or Dr Cropper would open this, sir.”

“Now look here, Purbright, don’t you think you’re going a bit...”

“Of course,” Dr Cropper firmly and loudly declared, before Sir Henry could say any more. He stepped to the box and unfastened the strap that secured the lid.

“Odds and ends, you see, inspector. They’ve been kicking about in there for ages. We thought the Scouts might devise a use for them.”

One by one, Purbright removed and handed to Palethorp the objects in the box. The biggest was a megaphone about a foot long, with some kind of detachable reed or vibrator fitted into the mouthpiece. There were also two small flashlight batteries; a card that had held three crimson “Santa-lite” electric bulbs, of which two remained; a pair of pliers; and a partially emptied Family Size pack of “Safemate” condoms.

“And now, gentlemen, I must ask you to accompany me and the sergeant while we examine the room from which you have removed these things. The key, if one of you will be so kind...”

Sir Henry slowly withdrew his hand from his jacket pocket and dropped a key into Purbright’s open palm. He was past the point at which indignation could still be conveyed in words. He tried instead to look contemptuously unconcerned. But his face was grey, blotched irregularly with nets of tiny inflamed veins.

Dr Cropper’s manner, on the other hand, became increasingly cheerful, almost jocose. He bowed Purbright into the small, musty-smelling room with a remark about ‘desirable business premises’.

The room contained a card table, three heavily old-fashioned dining-room chairs, and a leather-covered couch. There was a cupboard in one corner. A telephone stood on a shelf near by. Half the floor area was covered with carpet too badly worn to give any hint of its original colour or pattern.

The two policemen opened the cupboard, and surveyed what little it contained. They saw a few cups and saucers, a kettle, jars of instant coffee and dried milk and sugar, two part bottles of whisky, another of sherry, nearly full.

“Drink, inspector?” inquired Dr Cropper.

Purbright turned. He was not smiling. Love closed the cupboard door. With a sad, hardly noticeable tilt of his head, Purbright ushered them all out of the room.

They walked back along the short passage into the hall and picked their way between a case of hymn-books and some stacked chairs towards the door that led into the courtyard. Just before they reached it, Purbright stopped and spoke.

“Henry Loxley Bird and Halcyon Arthur Marshall Cropper, I am now taking you into custody. You will be charged, severally and jointly, that you did, on or about May the first, this year, at Flaxborough, unlawfully abduct Edna Hillyard and continue unlawfully to restrain and imprison the said Edna Hillyard. I have to tell you that you, Henry Loxley Bird, and you, Halycon Arthur Marshall Cropper, need not say anything either now or when you are formally charged, but that what you do say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence. Does either of you wish to say anything at this stage?”

The ensuing silence was broken only by the click of Love’s priming his retractable ball-point.

“I am now,” went on Purbright quietly, “going to put another question to you, but this time without formality.”

He threw a side glance at Love, who pocketed his notebook.

“Which one of you actually did the killing of Bertram Persimmon?”

Chapter Sixteen

Two weeks later, there presented himself at Fen Street a gentleman wearing a black morning jacket, pin-striped trousers, highly polished black shoes over silk socks and the hardest-looking bowler hat that Flaxborough ever had seen. His furled umbrella was as slim as a wand, his briefcase supple and well-matured.

“Who’s the pox doctor’s clerk?” Love inquired of Constable Braine, who had just escorted the visitor to Purbright’s office.