Bump in the Night

Had Mr Biggadyke been in the custom of visiting the Trade and Haulage Club at Flaxborough? Yes, he was a member and at one time had regularly spent an evening there each week.

And afterwards had he availed himself of Mr Smiles’s hospitality until the following morning? He had, and very welcome had he been.

When had the custom lapsed? Oh, quite a while since—four months or more. They had met, yes, and had a few drinks from time to time. On good terms? Excellent terms, excellent. Yes.

“But in recent weeks, Mr Smiles, you are quite sure that Mr Biggadyke did not stay overnight at your house on Tuesday?”

“Not for several months, he hasn’t. I’ll be perfectly honest, mind—I did promise him I’d say that’s where he’d been if anybody asked. But now the poor chap’s passed on, well, I can only tell the truth.”

“As you swore to do,” the coroner dryly reminded him, nodding at the testament between them.

“Yes. As you say...of course.” Mr Smiles regarded the little black book as apprehensively as if it had borne the imprint of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue.

The last witness was Sergeant Worple.

He presented, with a wealth of technical detail that Mr Chalice let pass without recording, an account of the demolition of the Courtney-Snell memorial, the beheading of Alderman Berry’s statue, and the destruction of the great eye of Mr Hoole. No one, he observed, had been apprehended for the commission of these felonies (or crimes), which, at the time of the death of Mr Stanley Biggadyke were still officially ascribed to a person or persons unknown.

On the night of July the first, Sergeant Worple continued, a call was received at Fen Street police station from an officer of Chalmsbury Fire Brigade who reported the finding of a body near a burnt-out caravan at the rear of the premises of the Chalmsbury Carriage Company. He went to the scene that night and again the following morning. On the second occasion he was accompanied by Chief Inspector Larch and Constable Wraby.

Extensive inquiries were made and the site of the occurrence carefully examined.

The examination, though yielding clear indication that the caravan had been destroyed by an explosion and subsequent fire, provided no clues as to the cause of the explosion.

Inquiries also drew negative results apart from mutually corroborative statements by night drivers and fitters at the depot that the explosion occurred at 11.50 p.m. and was of considerable violence.

“These men knew, did they, that their employer had left the premises to go to his caravan?”

“Yes, sir. He arrived in his car at about 11.35 and told one of the mechanics to put the car in the garage. Then he walked down the yard to the fence and let himself through the gate into the field.”

“Were you able to learn, sergeant, whether anyone other than Mr Biggadyke had access to his caravan?”

“I did ask that question of several of the staff, sir, and they all said he was the only person who ever used it. He kept it locked and no one else at the firm had a key to it—or a key to the gate in the back fence, for that matter.”

“Did any of Mr Biggadyke’s employees know for what purpose he used the caravan?”

“They had no certain knowledge, sir. One or two offered guesses but I did not encourage what seemed to me to be rather improper speculation.”

The coroner glanced up at Worple, who was looking virtuous. “And that is all, is it, sergeant, that you can tell us? Nothing else occurs to you?”

Worple stared at Mr Chalice’s pen for a few seconds then said suddenly and decisively: “No, sir.”

The coroner leaned back, half turning, and addressed Larch. “Is there any question you would care to put, Chief Inspector?”

“I believe the witnesses have covered all the points that I can think of, sir.”

Mr Chalice nodded and faced the table once more. Although he was sitting without a jury, he did not believe in recording a verdict without giving his reasons. He drew the grey hair tangles down over his bright, shrewd eyes and began to speak.

“As the last witness so properly remarked”—Worple’s chin tightened with gratification—“guessing should not enter into an inquiry of this nature. Unfortunately, however, the evidence available to us is mainly of the kind that in a court of law would be called circumstantial. And forming conclusions from circumstantial evidence is a matter of putting two and two together: it is in some degree a speculative process. What we must guard against, of course, is making the answer more than four.

“Now, to start with, I am going to exclude the possibility that the four explosions of which we have heard today might have been unconnected incidents. The evidence leaves no doubt in my mind that the first three were contrived by one and the same person. What purpose that person entertained I cannot imagine, but some gesture or other would appear to have been intended.

“The fourth explosion did not follow the pattern established by the earlier ones. For one thing, it seems to have been the most violent of all. It was not staged in a public place, nor was it directed against a monument or symbol. An exhibitionist motive is not discernible.

“Moreover, it cost a human life.

“I conclude from these points of difference that the fourth explosion occurred spontaneously and accidentally.

“That brings us to its victim, Mr Stanley Biggadyke.

“It was his caravan in which the explosive substance lay—unless, of course, he had taken it with him when he left his car that night. In any case, he alone had access to the caravan, so we must presume that he was responsible for the explosive being there.

“That presumption is strengthened to virtual certainty when we take into consideration this fact. On all the nights when the first three explosions were engineered Mr Biggadyke had deliberately given a false account of his whereabouts and had even arranged for his story to be borne out by his friend, Mr Smiles, who today very rightly repudiated it.

“It is no part of my duty to accuse the deceased of activities for which he might have been called to account in a court of justice. But in so far as those activities provide the only explanation of his death that seems tenable, I must express my view that Mr Biggadyke was the person responsible for the explosions on the third, seventeenth and twenty-fourth of June, and that he unintentionally caused the one which killed him in his caravan a week later.

“My verdict, accordingly, is death by misadventure.”

“And no one,” the man from the Daily Sun murmured to Mr Kebble, “could say fairer nor that.”

Chapter Twelve

Mr Kebble could not remember when last a policeman had bought him a drink. It was therefore with a feeling of pleasurable awe that he accepted the brandy that Inspector Purbright brought to their table in the Nelson and Emma.

“So it’s all over, old chap,” said Kebble, having plunged his brandy into a half tankard of water and pledged the inspector’s health.

“It looks rather like it.”

“You’ll be going back now, I suppose. I’m sorry.”

“That’s nice of you, Mr Kebble. Actually, though, I shall probably hang on for a few more days. Chalmsbury’s quite an attractive little town.”

Kebble beamed, but about his eyes was a flicker of inquisitiveness. “What do you want, a list of the places of interest?”

“I have my own list, as a matter of fact. For what it’s worth. I was wondering if you could give me a few directions, though.”

“You don’t want to bother Larch?” Kebble was still smiling.

“Well, I feel that would be somewhat ungracious of me. He’s a busy man, is your chief inspector.”

“Yes, isn’t he?” Kebble sighed and took a slow drink. “All right, then; tell me where you want to go?”

Purbright revolved his glass on the smooth oak table top and eyed the dark, frothless column of beer. It was a sweet, oily local brew that soothed rather than stimulated. “For a start,” he said, “I should like to take a trip into the past life of the gentleman on whose body Mr Chalice has just conducted his admirable inquest.”

“So that’s the sort of tour you’re on, is it?” Kebble had started to clean his nails with a little pearl-handled pen-knife that hung from his watch-chain, and his voice seemed to come through the folds of his chin and neck.

“Idle curiosity,” said Purbright. “This Biggadyke must have been quite a practical joker.”

Kebble chuckled. “They tell me it was Stan who got in here one night after closing time and sawed all the handles off the beer pumps.” He ruminatively surveyed the results of his manicure. “Then there was the beetle, of course. But you’ll have heard about that.”

“Beetle? No, I don’t think so.”

Kebble looked up. “Good lord! Haven’t you really?” He brushed shut the little penknife across his palm. “I thought everyone knew about the Broadbeck beetle. Broadbeck—do you know where that is?”

Purbright shook his head.

“Never mind; it’s a small village just outside the town. Biggadyke’s house is there, next to the parish hall. The hall’s a scruffy little place, but the rural district council has always used it for meetings and about three years ago they had an outside lavatory built—R.D.C. meetings are liable to go on all day, you know. Big was fearfully annoyed because they put the thing bang up to the edge of his garden, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

“Of course the councillors were like kids with a new toy to begin with. Even after two or three months it still seemed to fascinate them. They kept popping in and out of council as if they didn’t trust each other not to pinch the damn thing.

“It would be about the fourth monthly meeting after it was built that I could see something queer had happened. The councillors were taking it in turn as usual to slope off when things got a bit dull and I happened to notice one of them come back looking pale and worried as hell. Then another tottered in a bit later in the same state. I kept an eye open after that and damn me if five or six didn’t come back looking as if they’d seen a ghost.

“When the meeting was over, I thought they’d all get together and talk about whatever had happened outside. But they just shot off home without a word. Actually avoided one another. You’d have thought they’d just been tipped off that the bailiffs had called for the telly.”

Kebble drank some of his brandy and water, glanced solicitously at the level of Purbright’s beer, and went on: “I couldn’t draw as much as a whisper for weeks afterwards. Then quite unexpectedly I got the whole story. It was the R.D.C. medical officer who told me.

“What put him on to it in the first place was the way one or two doctors in town pulled his leg. A bright lot you’ve got on that council of yours, they said to him. How do you mean, he said. Well, they said, half of ’em came rushing round to surgery the other night begging for confidential check-ups.

“The M.O. was tickled to death, naturally. He cornered one of the councillors he was fairly friendly with and wormed the truth out of him. The bloke admitted he’d thought something horrid was wrong with him because when he left the hall and began to pass water he got the most terrible burning and tingling sensation. He hadn’t told anyone, except his doctor, because that wasn’t the sort of thing he’d like spread around. He certainly didn’t know that half the other fellows on the council had had exactly the same experience.”

The editor paused to salute benevolently some new arrival in the tap room. Then he leaned further towards Purbright.

“Suppose,” he said, “that you saw some insect or fly or something on the white porcelain of a urinal stall. Your natural instinct would be to try and flush it down, wouldn’t it? I doubt if you or anyone else would be able to resist it. Well, what the M.O. found when next he was round at the village hall was a little beetle, oh, about that long”—he held up finger and thumb—“just where it would be most tempting.” Kebble gazed admiringly into the middle distance. “He showed it to me; it was beautifully made.”

“Copper?” ventured Purbright. “Soldered to a wire?”

Kebble seemed not to resent the expert short-circuiting of his tale. He smiled dreamily. “Aye, that’s it. And a hole drilled right through, of course. They spotted the battery and the coil, or whatever it was, under Biggadyke’s hedge.” After a while he added: “Bloody good job he didn’t use the mains, wasn’t it?”

Purbright stared out of the window and watched the moving finger of a mast beyond the yard walls and outhouses. “Tide time,” he murmured, obedient already to platitudinous custom.

“Aye,” agreed Kebble. He shuffled off to the bar to buy more drinks.

When he returned the inspector invited him to give further details of Biggadyke’s history, adding that he would accept the playful character of the man without more illustration.

Kebble obliged with the facility of one long drilled in obituary composition.

“Let’s see, then,” he began. “He was about forty-eight years old and a native of the town. He went to the Grammar School until he was asked to leave after some trouble with a girl. Big was always a pretty forward lad, which is odd in a way because he was absolutely hideous as a kid and didn’t improve much as he got older. Never mind, he left school and went straight into his uncle’s haulage business. He played around for six or seven years, landed a few more girls into trouble, drank a lot of ale, joined the Rowing Club—you know the sort of thing. Then the old uncle crumbled: they tell me he took to writing backwards, you know. Anyway, he didn’t last long after that and Big got the firm.

“He was no mug, mind. He knew the business by then and soon started to lay in the cash. Big had more sense than to pay for his wild oats out of capital; wine and women were for after office hours. In those days, at least; he relaxed a bit during the war when he was making more money than he knew what to do with. Of course, the business saved him from being called up.

“When did he get married, now? Oh, it must have been just after the war, 1946 maybe. His missus used to be one of the Jackson girls. Pretty, simpering little thing. I’ll bet you didn’t hear any girlish giggles from her today, though. She’s spent the last ten years cooped up on her own in that whopping great ideal home exhibition out at Broadbeck. Big only used the place for sleeping, and not every night either.”

“Any children?” Purbright asked.

The editor shook his head. Then he picked up his tankard and stared into it, tipping it slowly from side to side. “There’s not much else I can tell you. As a matter of fact, the fellow was rather a dull number when you get down to a straight life story. We’ve quite a few of the same kind here. Not quite old enough to hoard their pennies and become respectable, but too old to play the fool without getting everybody’s back up. You’d never believe the number of bald heads and pot bellies among that Rowing Club mob. One heave at an oar and they’d drop dead. It’s all tankards and totty-tickling, old chap. Bloody desperate, if you ask me.”

“Biggadyke wasn’t in the Forces, you said. What about Home Guard or Civil Defence?”

“No, I think the Observer Corps was Big’s war club.”

“I’m just wondering where he might have acquired his taste for explosives.”

“Can’t imagine, old chap.”

“Has that firm of his any connection with quarrying?”

Kebble looked doubtful. “I’d be surprised if it had. It handles agricultural stuff mostly. There’s not a quarry within ten miles of here.”

Purbright sighed. “You see my difficulty, don’t you, Mr Kebble?”

“Oh, I do. Aye.” The editor regarded him with a slightly too wide-eyed expression of sympathy. “You’re trying to trace the...”

“Biggadyke’s source. Exactly. Chalmsbury probably accepts these little diversions as perfectly normal, or at least in character. But what I must call the Authorities take a somewhat jaundiced view. High explosive, Mr Kebble, is the very apotheosis of un-Englishness. And when someone appears to have been in a position to stick free samples of it all over the place the Authorities are naturally concerned.”

“I hadn’t really thought of it like that,” confessed Kebble. “Perhaps we do tend to be easy-going down here.”

“Do you suppose Biggadyke might have known someone who would supply him with explosive? Or did he dream up all his practical jokes by himself?”

“He didn’t know any safe-blowers, so far as I’m aware. Not that I’d rule it out.”

“Had he any special friends?”

“Couldn’t say. Wait a minute, though”—Kebble’s eye had brightened—“male or female?”

“Either.”

Kebble glanced about him, then beckoned Purbright to lean closer. “I’m going to tell you something, old chap, but for God’s sake keep it to yourself.” Again he looked quickly round the room. “That caravan was no more an office than this pub: you probably guessed that. Aye, but I bet you’ll never guess who the totty was that old Big played gypsies with...Mrs Chief Inspector Hector bloody Larch, none other!”

He jerked back in his chair to enjoy the effect of his revelation.

At first, Purbright gave no sign of having heard. Then his lips slowly protruded in a soundless whistle. “Mr Kebble,” he said at last, “this little township deserves to be administered by the Sodom and Gomorrah Joint Sewerage Board.”

The editor nodded delightedly.

“You’re not pulling my leg, are you?” Purbright was suddenly grave.

“Good heavens, no. Poor Leonard’s too dumb to make up a story as good as that.”

“Leonard?”

“The lad you’ve seen in the office. He’s my reporter, or what I try and use for one.”

“And what does he know about it?”

“He watched them together. It was very wicked of him and I fancy he feels rather guilty about it now, but I’m perfectly certain he was telling the truth. He even wrote what he called an ‘exposure’.” Kebble shuddered and reached for his drink.

“When did he see these...goings on?”

Kebble considered. “It was a Tuesday night: now which one?...Oh, yes—when old Barry Hoole’s eye was blown out. I remember the boy saying that he heard the bang when he was just coming away from...Good Lord!” He stared at Purbright. “Then Big must have been in his caravan when the thing went off.”

“Why not? He didn’t need to be there with a match, you know.”

Kebble subsided. “No, I suppose it had a time fuse or something.”

“They all did. The first three, anyway.”

“Aye, of course. Still, it does seem a bit odd to set a bomb ticking and then push off to a date with your totty. Damn me, I’d want to stay and see the fun if it was mine.”

“Do you know Mrs Larch?”

“Not terribly well. She’s Ozzy Pointer’s girl, you know. Quite a good-looking lass but hard boiled. You’ll not get much out of her.”

“I shouldn’t imagine her husband would thank me for trying.”

“No. Quite so.” Kebble looked at him shrewdly. “You might fare better with the old man, though. Ozzy’s an awkward bloke but dead straight. He and his son-in-law don’t hit it off too well, they tell me.”

“Do you think Larch would have known of his wife’s relationship with Biggadyke?”

“God, no! That’s why I told young Leaper to be careful. If Larch did find out he’d go up to Hilda, give her a nice smile, and then slowly pull her head off like a prawn’s.”

“Hasty tempered, is he?”

“Not hasty, old chap. That wouldn’t be so bad. He’s the sort that wouldn’t fall out with you until he’d got a grave dug ready. You want to watch your step with brother Larch.”

Purbright promised that he would indeed.

“Now then,” said Kebble, more cheerfully, “how’s Mrs Crispin looking after you?”

“She’s very”—Purbright groped for a word—“conscientious.”

“Grand. I thought you’d be all right there. You’re on your own except for old Payne, aren’t you? Not that he’d bother you.”

“On the contrary; we get along rather nicely. An ally is always welcome.”

“What, against Mrs Crispin?” Purbright thought Kebble sounded slightly offended.

“No, no; but all lodgings are intimidating, however hard a landlady tries to make one feel at home. In fact it is precisely their homeliness that always alarms me. I half expect to find an embalmed mother propped opposite the teapot.”

“Payne’s been in digs for years,” Kebble said. “He must be an authority.”

“Oh, he copes expertly. But even the most competent, self-possessed lodger is essentially a sad fellow. And Payne is too intelligent to be able to hide it.”

“You’ve spotted that? I’m glad. Sometimes I forget what I think of people—d’you know that? It sounds queer, but life drags on from year to year in a little place like this without anything happening to confirm an opinion. I mean nobody’s going to give Payne or Barry Hoole a Nobel Prize, for instance, yet there was a time when they seemed absolutely brilliant.”

“Talking of Hoole,” Purbright said, anxious lest Kebble’s sudden lapse into subjective philosophy should prove intractable, “I cannot fathom why he qualified for one of Biggadyke’s infernal machines.”

The editor brightened at once. “Oh didn’t you hear the story?”

He might have known, Purbright reflected, that there would be a story. “No,” he said, “I haven’t heard that one either.”

Kebble told him at some length about the sight testing, the belladonna, the collision.

“Rather a murderous trick,” commented Purbright, a fraction more censoriously than he had intended. The editor looked surprised, then pained.

“Well, rather ill-advised, shall we say?”

Kebble accepted the amendment with a shrug. “Mind you,” he said anxiously, “I only told you for your own amusement. Barry would be very upset if he thought that I’d let a confidence slip into the police files.”

“It doesn’t seem terribly important now that the man’s dead. I shouldn’t worry about it, Mr Kebble.”

Kebble nodded gratefully. “Trouble is, old chap, we’re used to the gendarmerie here being a bit on the heavy-handed side. They don’t enjoy it, but Larch pushes them, you know. I can’t get used to a policeman who isn’t for ever holding a cell door open, as you might say.”

“I don’t want to spoil my holiday, that’s all,” Purbright said. “Let’s go out and get sunburned, shall we? Then perhaps you can show me where Mr Pointer might be found.”

Chapter Thirteen

As it happened, there was no need to seek out Councillor Pointer. When Purbright and Kebble rose from their table they saw him framed in the narrow, raised doorway, peering about him like an angry little sea captain disturbed by voices in the hold.

Spotting them, he nodded curtly. “They told me I’d find you in here.”

Purbright marvelled once again at the omniscient ‘they’ without whom, it seemed, all channels of information in Chalmsbury would dry up. To Pointer he said: “Won’t you stay and have a drink, sir?”

The courtesy elicited only a sharp stare and “Aren’t you on duty?”

“Not rigidly so, sir. No.”

Pointer grunted. “I never drink outside my own place and even there it’s only in the way of business. Doesn’t do, you know,” he explained in a slightly more conciliatory tone. He turned and led the way to the street.

In the sunshine Purbright was able to gain a clearer impression of Larch’s father-in-law. He saw a short, angrily energetic man, whose restless and inflamed eyes had a faint smile about them even when he was being offensive. His moustache, though diminutive, was eloquent: it could bristle furiously, twitch to an angle expressive of sceptical amusement, or, most rarely, lie straight and sad in the shadow of the councillor’s cavernous nostrils and testify to its master’s essential simplicity.

“I’d like a word with you, Mr er...”—Purbright supplied his name and rank—“if you’ve time. You are the chap the Chief Constable sent over, I suppose? Oh, you needn’t look coy, man. I know all about it.”

Kebble, of whom Pointer seemed inclined to take no notice at all, decided that he was not going to be invited to share whatever frankness the wine merchant had in mind. He glanced at an imaginary sky-clock, appeared to note that it was much later than he had thought, said “Ah well,” and strode off cheerfully.

Pointer led Purbright to his car, a large and costly pale blue affair. “I don’t suppose,” he said, “that you want to sit in a stuffy office on a day like this. We’ll just have a ride round.” He climbed in stiffly, stretched what he had in the way of neck until he could just see between the spokes of the steering wheel, and switched on the engine.

They left the town by the coast road, passed swiftly through the flat, intensively cultivated acres from which Chalmsbury drew most of its prosperity, and began to climb the gentle incline of the spine of hills on the town’s eastern side.

Pointer kept silent save for an occasional terse comment on some feature of the landscape. He drew his companion’s attention to several churches of a massiveness at odds with the obvious sparsity of population in these sleepy folds of pasture, trimmed with dark, narrow woods; and urged him once or twice to look back at a view of the receding plain, its patchwork of fields now obscured by the blue-grey haze of noon.

After about half an hour, Pointer slowed and drew the car on to a patch of turf on the brow of a hill more steep and rugged than the rest. Below them was the great scoop of a sandstone quarry. Behind lay the falling undulations of fields and woodland, ribboned with the yellowish lanes that linked hidden hamlets.

Almost immediately the car came to rest, it filled with the oppressive scents of hot leather, rubber and steel. Purbright stepped out gratefully upon the short, springy grass.

“They say you can see both Chalmsbury steeple and Flaxborough Cathedral from here,” Pointer informed him. They tested the theory but could discern neither. “Perhaps they mean with a telescope,” added Pointer, sourly. “Still, it’s as good a spot as any for a private chat. And I mean private, mind.”

Purbright met his sharp, challenging stare with his own mild gaze. “You’ve no need to say anything at all if you don’t wish to, sir. I’ve not sought this interview and I think you ought to remember that I’m not a private confidant, even if I have no official status here as a policeman.”

Pointer shrugged and looked down at a handful of change he had taken from his pocket. “You’re perfectly right, of course, Inspector. I realize I can’t impose conditions on you: that was silly of me. The fact is that I’m rather worried.”

“About the Biggadyke case, sir?”

“That comes into it, yes.” Pointer cupped his hand and gently rattled the coins.

“But the affair’s closed now. You don’t disagree with the verdict, do you?”

“No, certainly not. It was what everyone expected. We went as near as we decently could—the council deputation, I mean—to telling the Chief Constable that Biggadyke was the fellow he ought to be after.”

“The fellow your son-in-law ought to be after.”

Pointer accepted the correction with a scowl. “Don’t you worry: I’d already made sure that Hector knew the risk he’d be running if he ignored Stan Biggadyke, for all he was a personal friend—because of that, in fact.”

“And he acted on your advice?”

“He certainly questioned Biggadyke officially. And with a witness. I don’t think that any stories—malicious stories, mark you—about protection or turning a blind eye would stand up after that.”

“A timely demonstration, was it, Mr Pointer?” Purbright’s tone was guileless.

“If you like to put it that way. I’m quite sure that Hector was doing his duty without prejudice.”

“Prejudice occasioned by friendship?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me, Mr Pointer: did you approve of that friendship?”

Pointer answered without hesitation. “No, I did not. Biggadyke was a scoundrel. He was the last man in the town anyone in my son-in-law’s position should have mixed with.”

Purbright said nothing. His companion regarded the coins that he still shuffled irritably in his hand and finally thrust them back in his pocket. “Look here,” he said, “what exactly did you come over here to find out?”

“Oh, come now, sir...”

“No, don’t dodge, man. You weren’t sent to help a bunch of country bobbies catch a joker who couldn’t even work his own tricks properly. I’m not fool enough to believe that.”

“What do you believe?”

“I’m not sure. Unless it’s politics—is that it?”

Purbright smiled.

“You might well smile, Inspector, but I wouldn’t put it past that Special Branch lot, or whatever they’re called, to believe the blatherings of that poor idiot Mulvaney. He confessed, you know.”

“Yes, sir. There was something mentioned about a Mr Mulvaney.”

“Don’t let him hear you call him mister. It’s lieutenant. He thinks he’s in the I.R.A. We’ve all known him for years, though. The poor fellow wouldn’t know a bomb from a baby’s bottle.”

The inspector seemed preoccupied with the prospect of the opposite hill.

“Do you mind telling me, sir, if your daughter was friendly with Mr Biggadyke?”

Pointer stiffened. “My daughter?”

“Yes. sir. Mrs Larch.”

“Both Hector and Hilda saw a good deal of him, I believe.”

Purbright turned to face him. “Did you know that Mrs Larch was seen, on one occasion at any rate, to visit Biggadyke’s caravan on her own and late at night?”

Pointer’s expression changed, but not as Purbright had expected. Instead of furious disbelief, it registered bitter resignation. He shook his head slowly. “No, I didn’t know.”

“Do you suppose Mr Larch may have been aware of it?”

“It’s very difficult to say. Hector keeps his feelings to himself. Some people think he hasn’t any, but they’re wrong. When there’s something on his mind it just smoulders away until he can do something positive about it.”

“At all events, he gave no sign?”

“Oh, no. Not the slightest.”

“I don’t want to intrude into your family’s private affairs. Mr Pointer, but if I could have a word with your daughter...perhaps on your introduction and in your presence, if you wish...”

Pointer frowned. “Talk to Hilda? But what about?”

“About Mr Biggadyke, for one thing.”

“Do you mean to say you’re prepared to come over into another’s man’s police division and start snooping into his family affairs just because you’ve heard some unsavoury gossip about his wife? Damn it all, man, I think it’s high time you told me exactly what you have been sent here to ferret out!” Pointer looked as if he had just swallowed a heavy draught of his own port.

“Very well, sir,” replied Purbright patiently, “I’ll tell you. We wish to find where Biggadyke obtained his fireworks. Also, if at all possible, the real reason for his using them.”

He hesitated. “You see, sir, there are three disturbing things about this case—disturbing, that is, when considered in association. One is the disappearance from a Civil Defence store in Flaxborough of a quantity of explosive. The second is the fact that Mr Larch is an instructor who has access to that store. Thirdly, as you’ve told me yourself, Mr Larch was a close acquaintance of the man we now know to have been addicted to blowing things up.”

“Are you saying that the theft of that explosive has been traced to my son-in-law?”

“Not at all. The Chief Constable believes that one of the instructors must have taken it because they have keys to the store, but he might be adopting too narrow a view. From what I know of the place, almost anyone of moderate initiative could lift what he liked if he waited for an opportunity. The point is, though, that this Biggadyke affair lays Larch open to ten times as much suspicion as could possibly have attached to him otherwise.”

“But why on earth should he have wanted to pass the stuff to Biggadyke—even if he did steal it?”

“I’ve wondered a good deal about that, Mr Pointer. I suppose you can see how serious some of the possibilities are?”

Pointer gave no sign of seeing anything of the kind.

“Your son-in-law,” Purbright went on, “is an expert in the handling of explosives. Biggadyke, to the best of our knowledge, was not. But he couldn’t resist spectacular jokes. It is conceivable, you know, that he might have been encouraged to dabble in what he didn’t understand in the hope that he’d make a fatal mistake. Long odds, perhaps, but they could have been shortened by a wrong instruction. Detonators, now...they’re extremely tricky little things, I understand.”

“But that would be a wicked thing to do,” exclaimed Pointer. “Absolutely wicked. Hector would never have thought of anything so dreadful.”

“Not even if he’d learned of his wife’s relationship with his friend?”

“I’m certain he didn’t know of that. Hilda gave no one the slightest excuse for suspecting.”

“You suspected, though, Mr Pointer.”

“I happen to be the girl’s father. Naturally I...” He faltered.

“What about her mother? Did she know?”

“Her mother? Good God!”

Purbright saw the wrinkled flesh around the councillor’s little eyes constrict suddenly with bitter contempt. The revelation of marital loathing shocked him, but he repeated his question. “Did Mrs Pointer know of her daughter’s affair?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Pointer sullenly. “She...she doesn’t discuss things with me.”

Purbright waited. Pointer’s earlier air of officiousness had gone. He seemed depressed and nervous. When finally he spoke, the edge to his voice was occasioned, Purbright thought, not by irritation but by fear.

“There’s something I wanted to tell you before we got on to this business about Hilda. It’s something that happened a year ago, but I’ve been thinking it over and I can’t help feeling it might have had some connection with...with what you’ve been hinting.”

He paused and continued more resolutely.

“I’m not going to give you any details, but this is roughly how things went. Last summer—it was just about this time of year—a girl was knocked down and killed by a car in Watergate Street. It was Stan Biggadyke’s car, a great powerful sports thing, and Biggadyke was pretty drunk. He was arrested and taken to the police station. Hector was there and he took charge. He sent the sergeant out to fetch a doctor he said Biggadyke had chosen to examine him. The doctor was out of town. There were some more delays and by the time a doctor did arrive Biggadyke was dead sober. A case went to the assizes but although the policeman who made the arrest stuck to his story that Biggadyke had been drunk at the time the fellow was acquitted. The lack of medical evidence and a good bull-shitting barrister saved him.

“What puzzled everyone who knew Biggadyke and his habits was how he’d managed to sober up so quickly in the cells. There were rumours of pep pills and cold douches and so on, but I knew that no drunk would have been able to get up to tricks like that while an experienced policeman was keeping an eye on him.”

Pointer gave a short, mirthless laugh. “That’s what I thought, anyway. Then about a couple of months after the trial I happened to be in the White Hind on business when I heard Biggadyke braying away just behind me at the bar. He was pretty far flown and I was just about to scoot out of range before the damn fellow spotted me. Then something he said caught my ear.

“I’ll never forget it. ‘Payne, old man’, he said—he’d buttonholed that blackguard who lodges at your place—‘Payne, old man’, he said—and these were his exact words—‘if ever you get pulled in for being drunk, just ask for a bucket of Larch’s luscious larrup.’ That’s what he said. Payne asked him what he meant but I couldn’t hear any more after that.”

“You drew your own conclusions, though?”

“I did, Mr Purbright. And I think I was right, too. You see, I once asked Hilda whether she packed supper for Hector when he stayed late at the station. She said no, nothing to eat, because if he wanted it the caretaker’s wife would make him a few sandwiches. But he often took a big flask of coffee, she said. Strong and black was how he liked it.”

Pointer was silent. Then he looked with anxious appeal at Purbright. “You’ll not take this any further, will you? I mean...well, nothing could be proved now, anyway.”

“Why have you told me this, Mr Pointer?” Purbright asked quietly.

“It’s worried me. That’s one reason. I have public responsibilities and I’ve always liked to have a clean conscience. You’ve no idea what an ordeal it was for me when I was pushed on that deputation to the chief. I’d been told that people here suspected Hector of covering up for Biggadyke. But theirs were only suspicions. I knew damned well he’d protected him once before and got him off one of the most serious charges in the book.”

“Can you suggest why, sir?”

“Does it matter?”

“It may matter a great deal.”

Pointer shrugged. “Well, Hector owed Biggadyke money, for one thing. Quite a lot, I believe. And Biggadyke had helped him in other ways. Socially and so forth. He was generous enough to anyone he palled up with, I’ll say that for him.”

“I see. So you don’t think it likely that Mr Larch could have wished him any harm? You reject that rather fanciful theory of mine about Biggadyke’s accident?”

“That Hector kidded him on to play with explosives, you mean.”

Purbright nodded and waited.

“No,” said Pointer in a low voice, “I don’t reject it, and that’s the truth. Just now when I said that Hector wouldn’t be capable of doing such a thing, it was because...”—he spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness—“Oh, I don’t know: he’s a member of my own family. But of course he’s capable. It’s just the sort of method he’d choose.”

“And are you still convinced that Mr Larch never found out about his wife’s meetings with Biggadyke?”

Purbright saw that Pointer was trembling. He sat down on the grass and motioned the wine merchant to join him.

Pointer squatted, wiping his brow and staring gloomily across the valley. “I know this much,” he said. “If Hector does find out about Hilda—and it must be common knowledge when you managed to pick it up so soon—if that happens, I wouldn’t give much for my girl’s chances.” Pointer clutched the policeman’s arm. “Suppose she’d been with Biggadyke that night in the caravan. It could have been meant for her, too.”

“Look, sir,” said Purbright, “I think we’d be wise at the moment not to envisage too many possibilities. The chances are that your son-in-law is a perfectly decent and harmless fellow and that your daughter’s in no danger whatever. They’ll probably get over their troubles like any other married couple who hit a bad patch.”

He hoped that these shameless platitudes would have sedative effect upon poor Pointer. The last thing he wanted was for the man to panic; he had underestimated his vulnerability to suggestion.

But Pointer showed an entirely unexpected reaction. Mottled with sudden anger, he stared savagely at Purbright. “What the hell do you think you are? A marriage counsellor?”

“I’m sorry; I don’t quite...”

“You don’t quite,” Pointer mimicked bitterly. “Oh, but you do quite. You must have got something for your rooting and grubbing. They’ll have been ready enough to tell you.”

Purbright watched the inflamed, protuberant little eyes. To his embarrassment, they were beginning to flood with tears of self-pity.

He shrugged gently. “Unless I know what you’re talking about, sir...”

“Lovers, Mr Purbright.” He forced out the word like a distraught shop girl pronouncing some indelicate medical term for the first time. “They run in families, you know. But of course you must know. A busy-bodying detective inspector. My God, man, they even told me! The very day I got back.”

Purbright divined that he was expected to help the man play out some familiar rite of self-abasement. “I see,” he murmured.

Down the wine merchant’s memory-puckered cheek a tear rolled. “I was away in France all that fortnight. In the Rhone Valley. An extraordinary summer. Marvellous.” He looked woodenly at Purbright. “But you’ll remember it yourself, I expect?”

Purbright glanced warily at his watch. “Hadn’t we better be getting back now, sir?”

“I asked you,” said Pointer in the tone of a moneyed diner putting a waiter in his place, “if you remembered the summer we had in 1937.”

The inspector gave a controlled sigh. “Not very clearly, sir. It...was a long time ago, wasn’t it.” He got up and stood by the car.

Pointer remained sitting in silence for a few seconds more, then rose and climbed in behind the wheel. When next he spoke it was to draw Purbright’s attention to some village church.

Chapter Fourteen

Mrs Crispin fully realized that gentlemen boarders needed an adequate substitute for the ministrations of absent or non-existent mothers and wives. They were deprived creatures, leading an unnatural life from the moment when they returned from business (she used the term with flattering lack of distinction, whatever their employment) until they retired to that good-night-sleep-tight whither they were consigned some five hours later by their guardian, still beamingly solicitous as she stood holding ajar the door of the staircase cupboard and beginning silently to count up to the hundred at which she would switch off the electricity and glide to her own chaste and immensely strong couch in the kitchen.

But how could the gentlemen’s exile from homes proper and complete be rendered less arid? She had given the question much thought and it was in accordance with her conclusions that the appointment, furnishing and tending of the gentlemen’s sitting room had evolved.

Cosiness, Mrs Crispin had mused, was what the domestic male valued above all else. She therefore sank some of her capital in a hook and stable wherby the door connecting the sitting room and kitchen could be held open on winter evenings, thus allowing air warmed by the kitchen stove to circulate freely through both apartments.

Mrs Crispin considered next the frequent use, in magazine stories about happily integrated husbands, of such adjectives as old, battered, well-thumbed, chewed, shapeless. These, she noticed approvingly, nearly always appeared in conjunction with favourite (his favourite old pipe/hat/old easy chair, moulded into comfortable contours by his grateful frame, etc.) Such guidance to masculine predilections in the furnishing line was perfectly clear, and Mrs Crispin followed it faithfully.

She showed consideration for eyes tired after a day at business by making the room lighting as discreet and restful as a single forty-watt bulb could render it.

The same motive partly dictated her decision not to install a television set, but in this case, too, she was influenced by her gleaned knowledge of male psychology. In the comfort of their well-moulded old easy chairs, their favourite pipes drawing well, men wished to chew the fat and swap yarns, not to gaze dumbly at a little screen.

Unfortunately for Mrs Crispin’s careful designs, neither Cornelius Payne nor Inspector Purbright shared her idealist conception of manly leisure. After the celebration of high tea, they would retreat, a trifle furtively, to one or other of their bedrooms and there play chess.

On the evening after Purbright’s excursion with Councillor Pointer, it happened to be Payne’s turn to provide hospitality. This meant that he sat on his bed while his guest occupied a small cane-seated chair by the window. The chess board was set between them on a pile of three suitcases.

Purbright was by far the inferior player and Payne had handicapped himself by a bishop, a rook and two pawns. His victory would thereby be postponed long enough for the game to last until dusk when Phyllis, prompted by a mistress who associated lodgers’ silence with suicidal intentions and a possible sudden rise in the gas bill, would burst in and ask if they were ready for supper.

“How did the inquest go?” asked Payne, opening the game with one of his depleted pawns.

Purbright surveyed the board while he reached for cigarettes. “Misadventure,” he said. “All it could be really.”

“Wouldn’t an open verdict have suited?”

“Too, vague. All right for drownings. Explosions, no.”

“There couldn’t have been much evidence, though.” Payne accepted a cigarette and struck a match for them both.

“Nothing direct. It really boiled down to the rejection of coincidences. One, two, three explosions in a small town. Then another. How could they be dissociated? Then there was Biggadyke’s reputation, of course.” Purbright leaned forward and moved a pawn.

Payne placed a finger lightly on one of his knights and considered. “His reputation, yes...” He moved the knight to threaten Purbright’s advancing pawn. “But what evidence could be brought to prove reputation?”

“None, now that you mention it. It seemed taken for granted.”

“Not very legal. Did no one suggest why he had been doing those curious things?”

“Motives weren’t questioned. It might have been interesting if they had been.”

Payne smiled. “You haven’t been making guesses, then?”

“The coroner seemed to assume that the man was simply an exhibitionist. I never met him, but from what others have said about him I should think that explanation is the most logical, bald as it is. Did you know him, by the way?”

“Slightly.”

Purbright catalogued. “Arrested development; pot-pinching sense of humour; technical expertize of sorts, combined with irresponsibility and a touch of dipsomania. How’s that?”

“Not bad,” Payne said. “Actually, though, there are thin threads of reason running through this business, you know.”

“Ah, now those,” Purbright said promptly, “I should like to hear about.” Spotting the threat to his pawn he moved out a knight to cover it. “Let’s take the explosions in order. What grudge did he bear the drinking fountain?”

“Not an aesthetic one, I assure you, though God knows that would have been understandable. No, the thing was a memorial. It was put up by the widow of a man called Courtney-Snell. And Courtney-Snell, in his time, had won an action for slander against Biggadyke.”

“Posthumous vengeance, you think?”

“Niggardly; but satisfying, perhaps.”

“All right. And the statue?”

Payne paused to open a path for his remaining bishop. “The statue,” he repeated. “That gesture was a little less personal, but if you knew Chalmsbury you would appreciate it. Does the name of the late Alderman Berry mean anything to you?”

Purbright shook his head.

“He was a notable zealot—or notorious bigot—according to taste,” Payne said. “I scarcely remember him, but they say that when he died the local brewery issued their draymen with white ribbons to wear in their hats.”

“A warrior of abstinence.”

“He was indeed. He also made a great deal of money, with a modest fraction of which he endowed an ugly chapel, so canonization—in Chalmsbury terms—was inevitable. We immortalized him in gunmetal, or whatever it was that Biggadyke found so challenging.”

“You suggest, then,” said Purbright, bringing up another pawn, “that Biggadyke’s second onslaught was that of a drinking man upon a totem of teetotalism.”

“You express it neatly. Yes, a gesture of principle, I should say. Biggadyke was not richly endowed with principles, so he was all the more likely to proclaim spectacularly what few he had. Had he lived, I feel he might have founded a Fellowship of Bad Templars.”

Purbright silently scrutinized the new position of Payne’s queen, which his opponent had just moved to the van of his bishop. Then he said: “And what of the great eye of Mr Hoole? That affair has a Kiplingesque flavour, to my mind.”

“The most intriguing of the three,” Payne agreed. He groped beneath the bed and produced a bottle. Without taking his eyes from the board, Purbright felt in his pocket and handed Payne a corkscrew. Soon they were sipping from tooth glasses one of Councillor Pointer’s more moderately priced clarets.

“You’ve met Barrington Hoole, I presume,” said Payne.

“Fleetingly, yes.”

“Quite a brilliant chap, oddly enough. We were in the same year at Cambridge. I never dreamed then that we’d wind up by being fellow shopkeepers. However...” Payne eyed his wine quizzically and scratched a fragment of dried toothpaste from the glass rim with his nail. “It seems he was rather unkind to the oaf Biggadyke—absolutely deservedly—about a month ago. Hence, I think, the reprisal on the eye. He was very fond, of it, poor chap,” Payne added sadly.

Purbright blocked with a pawn the line of threatened advance by Payne’s queen, and went on: “The question that no one seems able to settle is where Biggadyke obtained his explosive. It looks as though I shall have to go back without an answer.”

Payne looked up. “So that’s why they sent you, is it? I was wondering if you were M.I.5 or something. Kebble’s convinced of it.”

Purbright grinned. “That’s probably because I took your advice and was shockingly indiscreet. Tell me, though, from what you know of Biggadyke how do you imagine he’d set about that queer campaign of his? Where would he get the stuff?”

Payne considered. “As a haulage contractor he made some useful, if questionable, contacts during the war, I believe. Perhaps there’s a black market in gelignite, or something.”

“There is, unquestionably. But I should suppose that quotas are pretty well taken up by gentlemen with banking interests. I’d be most surprised to learn that Mr Biggadyke had been able to whistle any his way. Anything else occur to you?”

Payne poured out some more wine before replying. “There was a rumour,” he said slowly, “of some explosive having disappeared from that Home Guard place...”

“Civil Defence,” Purbright corrected.

“Yes, but that’s at Flaxborough anyway. You’ll know all about it.”

“Not all, no. But the connection with this lot seems very tenuous.”

Purbright returned his attention to the game. Payne’s last move, he noticed, appeared to have no immediate object. But his own interest had waned and he contented himself with advancing another pawn. After quite a long silence he asked: “Would it be possible, do you think, for Biggadyke to have manufactured his explosive himself?”

Payne hesitated. “Chemically, you mean?”

“Yes. Say it were some nitro compound. Nitro...well, nitro-glycerin: I suppose that’s the best known.”

Payne thoughtfully caressed the waxed points of his moustache, then shrugged. “Feasible, I imagine. Very dangerous, though.” He got up and crossed the room to a bookcase. “There may be something among these that will help. They’re a little out of date as textbooks go but organic chemistry is less subject to fashion than physics.”

Purbright watched him kneel and pull out, one by one, the books on the bottom shelf. The lettering on the spines of most of them was nearly indiscernible; they probably had been second-hand when Payne acquired them in his university days.

At last Payne found the volume he had been seeking. He reached up and put it on the top of the case between a pair of photographs while he tidied the rest of the row. Purbright glanced idly at the two pictures. One was a faded sepia portrait of a woman in late Victorian or Edwardian dress; the other was of a small girl standing beside a television camera.

Payne brought the book over, referred to its index and thumbed back to the section he wanted.

“Simple enough in theory,” he said after a while. “Allow a mixture of concentrated nitric and sulphuric acids to act on ordinary glycerin and separate the oily liquid that rises. There you have it—nitro-glycerin.”

“Well, then: even Biggadyke...”

Payne shook his head. “No, I said it was simple in theory. But the stuff is deperately unstable, remember. You can’t carry it around like lemonade. One good jolt and—whoosh!”

“Yet dynamite is safe enough to handle, surely. Isn’t that nitro-glycerin in some form or other?”

Payne turned a page. “It is, actually. Hang on a minute.” He read further through the text. “Yes, here we are: they absorb the liquid nitro-glycerin in something called kieselguhr.”

“And what’s that?”

“No idea. Here it just calls it ‘an inert, clay-like substance’.”

Purbright, feeling somewhat inert himself, said nothing for a few moments. Payne closed the book and waited.

“Detonators,” Purbright said suddenly. “All these timebomb things are set off by detonators, aren’t they?”

“Yes, I suppose they are.” Payne frowned at the cover of the textbook. “I don’t think this would be any use,” he said. “You’re still thinking along do-it-yourself lines, are you?”

“More or less.”

“Well, the only detonating agent I can call to mind is mercury fulminate. I don’t know whether it’s still used nowadays.”

“It could be made at home, though? Or something like it?”

“I wouldn’t like to say offhand.”

Purbright stretched, yawning. “Never mind,” he said, “it all sounds terribly unlikely. Anyway, from what I’ve heard of Biggadyke I can’t picture him tackling anything so complicated.”

Payne smiled gently and began to pour more wine. “We all have our unsuspected talents,” he observed.

The next morning, Purbright caught an early train to Flaxborough in order to report upon his perplexities to the county chief constable.

Mr Hessledine’s manner was courteous but clinical. He had, he said, studied already a verbatim report of the inquest. The affair had been closed to the coroner’s satisfaction, certainly, but the essential question of the source of that impossible fellow’s explosive had not even been touched upon. One of his officers was under a cloud, and he trusted that Mr Purbright had produced evidence sufficient either to eliminate Chief Inspector Larch—which was much to be desired—or to prove his complicity. Now then, what had Mr Purbright to say?

Mr Purbright confessed unhappily that he was in no position to relieve the Chief Constable of his doubts one way or the other. He had been unable to resolve the ominous coincidence of the explosions and the theft from the Civil Defence store. Worse, far worse, his inquiries had revealed a relationship between Biggadyke and the chief inspector that was at once paradoxical and pregnant with possibilities that did not exclude murder itself.

Hessledine listened impassively to the account of Larch’s friendship with Biggadyke; of the local rumours of their collusion; and of the seduction of Hilda Larch.

When he had finished, he looked apologetically at the Chief Constable and said: “I don’t seem to have made matters any easier, do I, sir?”

Hassledine gave him a magnanimous smile. “You’ve been very thorough, Mr Purbright. I’m only sorry that you found yourself placed in such invidious circumstances. Of course, I had no idea that...” He blinked and left the sentence unfinished.

“Quite so, sir.”

Hessledine rose from his desk and walked gracefully to the window. “The proper thing to do now,” he said to his reflection in its panes, “would be to suspend Mr Larch from duty until some sort of an official inquiry could be made. But you see the difficulty, don’t you?” He half turned in Purbright’s direction.

“I think I do, sir. You mean that if nothing more definite could be established, Mr Larch would appear to have been unjustly treated.”

“Exactly. Tantamount to wrongful arrest.” The Chief Constable shuddered and faced the window again. “I wonder,” he said very quietly, “if Mrs Larch could be prevailed upon to help.”

“I really don’t know, sir; I haven’t yet met Mrs Larch.”

“You don’t fancy trying?”

“No, sir.”

“Ah.” Hessledine nodded thoughtfully. “It would be rather awkward, wouldn’t it? Snooping on the wife of a colleague. I wouldn’t ask anyone to do that. Not unless some serious crime were involved. On the other hand, it is sometimes possible to have a confidential chat without giving offence or sowing suspicion, you know.”

Purbright said nothing.

“Of course,” the Chief Constable went on smoothly, “if you do happen to meet Mrs Larch in propitious circumstances at any time, I’m sure you won’t allow false chivalry to blind you to her possible value as a witness.” He waved his hand elegantly. “After all, she must have been moderately fond of this Biggadyke person. She ought to have some idea of what he was up to, if anyone has. And for all we know she might be eager to tell.”

“There’s just one thing I should like to know, sir.”

“Yes?”

“Has it occurred to anyone to ask Chief Inspector Larch about this explosive that is supposed to be missing?”

Hessledine moved a little from the window and stared at him. “I don’t think you quite understand,” he said. “Discrepancies in Civil Defence stores are a most serious matter. National security is involved.” He paused to make sure Purbright was impressed.

“Strictly between ourselves,” he went on, “this matter came to light as the result of stocktaking. No one apart from the Civil Defence Officer and the county committee has been told. They asked me to make confidential inquiries. It so happens that you’ve been, well, unlucky so far; but, my goodness, Mr Purbright, I do hope you realize the whole thing is fearfully hush-hush.”

He leaned forward from the waist to emphasize the import of his final sentence: “It’s quite on the cards that the Home Office will come into it.”

“I take it, then, that Mr Larch has not been questioned, sir.”

“Certainly not. The C.D. Officer was most insistent on maximum secrecy. He was in Intelligence during the last war you know. Very well up in this kind of thing.”

“I still think you should tackle Mr Larch directly, sir.”

The Chief Constable raised his brows. “Aren’t you being a little direct yourself, Mr Purbright?”

“You might put it that way, sir.”

There was a short silence, during which Hessledine seemed to find his left cuff-link a new and intriguing subject of study.

“You feel you would rather not proceed with this investigation: is that so?”

“Not in the role of a sort of security policeman. It goes very much against the grain.”

The faintest flush appeared in Hessledine’s cheek. “Just as you like, Mr Purbright. I should be the last to expect you to undertake anything you felt to be unethical.” He paused. “If I can think how Larch might be approached tactfully I may have a word with him. Meanwhile you’d better stay on in Chalmsbury for a couple more days just to give the impression that you’re clearing up the loose ends. I don’t want coroners to get the idea that they’ve only to say the word for the police to go skipping off like hired ponies.”

“Then you wish me to return to my own division at the end of the week, sir?”

“I think so, yes. I shall let your chief know, of course.”

They parted with cool formality.

Chapter Fifteen

Barrington Hoole humed contentedly as he dangled his short, plump legs from the visitor’s chair in the Chronicle office and read the galley proof of Kebble’s account of the inquest.

“A fitting consummation,” he remarked when he had finished.

Kebble rolled up the proof and put it like a telescope to his eye.

“Guess who saw it happen,” he invited, squinting round the room.

“Saw what happen?”

“Stanley’s catastrophe, old chap.”

“I didn’t,” said Hoole. “Worse luck.”

Kebble grinned and brought the paper tube to bear on Leaper, gloomily occupied with scissors and paste at his desk. “He did.”

Hoole turned, then looked back at Kebble. “You’re not being funny?”

The editor shook his head.

“Good Lord!” said Hoole, then, more softly: “But he didn’t give evidence, did he?”

“He’s told nobody but me. He was there all right, though. Nearly trod on the corpse.”

“Shouldn’t he have gone to the police?”

“What, and be third-degreed by Larch?”

Hoole wrinkled his nose. “You’ve a point there.”

“All the same, the lad is going to talk to a policeman. I advised him to.” Kebble had lowered his voice still further.

“You remember that Flaxborough fellow I mentioned? He’s coming in this morning.”

“The local force must be far gone in corruption if outsiders need to be imported to look into our fatalities. Anyway, I thought the whole thing had been cleared up at the inquest.”

Kebble leaned close. “They tell me this Purbright’s an absolute bloodhound. He must be on to something or he’d have left by now.” He added that he had met the inspector and found him an uncommonly decent fellow.

“Obviously an imposter,” propounded Hoole. “All policemen are repressed rapists. Tell me: Did you look at his neck?”

“Not specially. Why?”

“Their necks are characteristic. Bright pink. Hairless. Like columns of luncheon meat straight out of cans.”

The street door swung open. “Here he is now,” muttered Kebble. He got up and hurried round the counter.

Purbright allowed himself to be led to a chair at the back of the office, where Kebble presented Leaper to him in the manner of a farmer dubiously confronting a veterinary surgeon with an ailing sheep. The editor then returned to his conversation with Hoole, having first stolen a glance at Purbright’s neck. “Not a bit like meat,” he announced, resuming his seat. “Perfectly nice chap.”

The inspector had little heart for his interview, which he had undertaken solely out of good nature. Yet as he listened, at first with politely concealed indifference, then with a sharpening sense of this youth’s having unknowingly observed something significant, he realized that he was now more eager to discover the truth than at any time since his arrival in Chalmsbury.

“You say there was a hole in one of the caravan windows. Do you mean the window was smashed?”

“No, the rest of the glass was all right. There was just this hole low down. Nearly round. No jagged edges.”

“Was it light enough for you to see that?”

“Oh, yes. You’d be surprised how bright it is out in the open, even quite late.” Leaper’s tone indicated pity for the inspector’s lack of experience.

“Would you say that the window was the kind that opens? You know, like a transome window, hinged at the top, that you can push outwards?”

“That’s right. It was like that.”

“So it would have been possible to put your hand through the hole in the glass, unfasten that little bar thing with holes along it, and pull the window open?”

Leaper scowled. “I didn’t touch it.”

“I know you didn’t,” said Purbright patiently. “I just want to know if anybody else could have done so.”

“No reason why not.”

“Right. Now you said something about a shelf, or fixed table.”

“Just under the window, yes. There’d been bottles and things on it the first time. Not when I saw it again, though.”

“What was on it the second time? Anything?”

“It looked like a box. I could only make out the shape. Like a shoe box.”

“A parcel, do you think? In paper and string?”

The youth considered. “I didn’t notice if it was wrapped up. The light wasn’t all that good.” He looked defensively at Purbright, who smiled and said never mind, he’d been remarkably observant and without doubt would be most successful in his chosen career.

“Oh, there’s just one other thing, Mr Leaper”—for the second time in his life Leaper was warmed by a respectful form of address and he helpfully perked his head—“Did you happen to meet or see anyone on either of the nights when you went out to Mr Biggadyke’s caravan? Apart from the lady, of course.”

“I didn’t see anyone the second time. Not as to remember.”

“And the first time?”

‘Kebble’s boy’ hesitated for only a moment before replying: “I did meet someone then. It must have been nearly midnight. I met Mr Hoole.”

The subject of this confidence, Purbright noticed, was no longer in the office. Kebble, alone, was sharpening a pencil with slow deliberation. As each shaving fell he picked it from his waistcoat and dropped it into an ashtray. Purbright walked across and sat in the chair lately vacated by Hoole. Kebble grinned at him and shut the penknife with his perilous palm-sweeping action.

“Like some coffee?” The editor squeezed out of his seat and went to a door marked Ladies. “Put an extra cup on, ducky,” he shouted at its handle.

Nearing his desk once more, he accepted one of Purbright’s cigarettes. As he was lighting it, he made with his free hand a gesture of sudden recollection and smokily announced: “Something to show you, old chap; hang on.” He bobbed down and Purbright heard a drawer open.

“This,” said Kebble, handing him a sheet of paper on which was pasted a cutting, “went in last week’s issue. What do you make of it?”

Purbright read the five lines of verse, then shrugged. “What’s it supposed to be?”

“It’s an ‘In Memoriam’. At least, it was sent in as one. There was no name or address given but the money came with it so we printed it. I thought it was a bit odd; there seemed no harm in it, though.” He paused and added: “Now I’m not so sure.”

Purbright read the cutting again more slowly. He heard Kebble say: “Look at the date.”

“July the first.”

Kebble nodded. “The day Biggadyke blew himself up.”

“Do you mean you think he sent this in himself? A suicide proclamation, as it were?”

“What, Stan? Poetry?” The editor’s voice sounded like a skidding car.

“But you do suggest a connection?”

Kebble hitched his chair forward in a businesslike way and turned the paper sideways so that they both could read it. “I don’t know if you ever look at these ‘In Memoriam’ things,” he said, “but you can take it from me that this one’s a bit out of the ordinary. For a start, it doesn’t make sense—not that all the others do, for that matter, but at least people know what’s meant by ‘Sleep on, dear father’ provided the bloody printer hasn’t left the comma out, which has happened before now, incidentally. Then the number of lines is odd. Listen...” He intoned, with exaggerated emphasis on metre:

“The thirst that from the soul doth rise

Doth ask a drink di-vine.

There’ll be that dark pa-rade

Of tassels and of coaches soon:

It’s easy as a sign...

“Well—you see what I mean, old chap.”

Purbright thought he did. “The thing’s curiously disjointed, isn’t it? But modern verse often is.”

“Modern?” echoed Kebble. “Oh, no; it’s not modern—not with a ’doth’ in it.”

“It’s familiar, though, somehow.” Purbright closed his eyes and murmured several times: ‘The thirst that from the soul doth rise...’

“Hoole would know,” said Kebble, watching the inspector’s face. “I should have asked him just now. He’s an expert on poetry.”

“Something to do with school,” Purbright said, his eyes still closed. “A song, surely...”

His trance was broken by the arrival of Muriel. She placed on the desk the two brimming cups she had carried carefully and silently from the place of their concoction. Purbright sniffed and opened one eye. Then he sat suddenly upright. “Drink to me only!” he exclaimed.

Muriel glanced nervously at Kebble and departed.

Purbright pointed at the cutting. “That’s it. Drink to me only with thine eyes and I’ll not ask for wine—The thirst that from the soul doth rise doth ask a drink divine. The rest doesn’t belong. It’s from something else altogether. The final rhyme is fortuitous.”

“Then why have the two been stuck together?” Kebble asked.

“We can come back to that. For the moment I think we might consider them separately. You don’t happen to have any verse anthologies handy, do you?”

Kebble, suspecting irony, at first made no reply. Then he noticed that Purbright was looking at him expectantly. “I can send Leonard round to the library,” he offered. “It’s only in Fen Street.”

Leaper, flattered by his being dispatched on so extraordinary an errand, returned within quarter of an hour bearing half a dozen volumes.

“We’ll probably find the Ben Jonson in Palgrave,” said Purbright in a manner so suggestive of familiarity with such things that Kebble stared quite rudely at him for several seconds.

“Yes, here we are.” Purbright quickly scanned the whole poem. “There seems nothing significant in the rest of it. Now why were those two particular lines chosen? Thirst—a spiritual thirst. That might be longing, a regret for someone dead. It fits the context of an epitaph, anyway. A drink divine, though...What would that represent, do you think?”

“Brandy,” responded Kebble, without hesitation.

“It could be some sort of spiritualist cliche. Contact with the departed, you know.” He shook his head. “No, they would incline more to abstentionist metaphor.”

There was a pause.

“What about revenge, old chap?”

“I doubt if Ben Jonson was after quite that effect. Still, he doesn’t really come into it. Vengeance it might be. That would tie with the second quotation, at any rate.”

“The ‘dark parade’ bit?”

“Yes. You notice the future tense. Threatening, isn’t it?”

Kebble looked again at the cutting, his lips moving. Suddenly he shut his eyes tightly and groaned. “Damn me if I havn’t only just tumbled! A funeral!”

“Oh, yes,” said Purbright with mild surprise. “ ‘Tassels and coaches’—an evocative phrase.” He was about to close the book when something caught his attention. He looked up at Kebble. “Do you know anyone called Celia?”

“Celia...no, I don’t think so. Why?”

“Well, everyone thinks of this poem—or the song, rather—as ‘Drink to me only’. But its actual title is ‘To Celia’.” He picked up the cutting. “These things refer to anniversaries, don’t they, as a rule?”

“Always. The genuine ones do, anyway,” Kebble added grimly.

“Do you think that if you worked back through the files you might come across someone called Celia who died on the first of July?”

“Possibly. Provided a death notice was put in at the time.”

Kebble went over to a recess packed with tall, broad, leather-bound volumes. As he carried one back, clutching it before him so that it entirely concealed his body from neck to knee, Purbright received the grotesque impression of a book walking.

“Last year’s,” puffed Kebble, setting it with a great slam on the desk.

As if conjured by the sound. Sergeant Worple appeared at that moment in the doorway. “Good morning, Inspector,” he called across to Purbright. “They said I’d be likely to find you in here, sir.”

“Oh, they did, did they?” Purbright was beginning to wonder if the hidden army of his observers would follow him for the rest of his life, cheerfully and loyally camping at a discreet distance from wherever he might choose to visit.

“Yes, sir,” said Warple, unabashed. “Chief Inspector Larch would be much obliged if you could spare him a minute or two as soon as it’s convenient.”

Purbright said he found it convenient there and then. Before he left he suggested to Kebble that Leaper might enjoy the novelty of seeking the source of the second quotation.

At the police station, Purbright found Larch standing before his desk. He looked rather like a prison governor putting a cheerful, fatherly face on the announcement of a refused stay of execution.

“Come in, Mr Purbright. I have a message for you from the Chief Constable.” He pushed back a tray of papers from the front of the desk and perched there, his long fingers drumming his knee. “I don’t quite appreciate its significance myself, but doubtless you will understand. He asked me to tell you that the explosive he was worried about has turned up. Or rather”—Larch looked coldly amused—“somebody has discovered that it was never really missing.”

“I see,” said Purbright.

Larch’s smile broadened. “It seems that the Civil Defence Officer had several cases moved to another store two or three months ago so that he could park his golf clubs there. He’d forgotten all about it.”

“How very remiss of him.”

“Fun and games, eh, Mr Purbright? You didn’t tell me you shared the Chief’s concern over that explosive. Now I suppose you’ll have to—what’s the word?—reorientate your theories.”

“Any theories of mine about Biggadyke’s death—and I suppose that is what you’re talking about—are quite without importance. If you care to think of me as an ineffectual and discredited interloper, by all means do so. Now that this affair has translated itself, as it were, it only remains for me to do likewise.” Purbright held out his hand.

“You’re not leaving us?”

Purbright smiled pleasantly at the author of this somewhat crude acidity. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I’m afraid I must. The traffic’s simply dreadful in Flaxborough at this time of year. But I’m sure you’ll be able to handle a little local murder case without any help from me.”

The expression of sardonic jubilation faded from Larch’s face as if he had been knifed from behind. He slipped slowly from the desk, drew himself erect and gave Purbright an agonized stare. “You know that? You’re...you’re sure that’s what happened?”

“I’m virtually certain that Biggadyke was murdered. If you want to know why, I’ll tell you.”

Larch nodded absently. “Yes...yes, of course you must tell me.” His normally aggressive sibilants were now weak: the whispered evidence of a rather pathetic oral deformity. Purbright described his interview with Leaper. When he had finished, Larch walked round to his chair and sat down. He looked tired, and spoke with obvious effort.

“Mr Purbright: I’ve a favour to ask of you. It’s that you stay on here a little longer.”

“That may be difficult. After this week, impossible. Why do you ask?” Purbright had the curious feeling that he was delivering the lines of a bad play.

“Because I don’t trust myself to be able to find out the truth of this thing. You see, I am personally involved, though not in the way Hessledine seems to have thought.”

Larch’s glance fell slightly as he went on: “You won’t know this, Mr Purbright, but Biggadyke was what I believe they call a close friend of my wife’s. I happen to have learned that they’d arranged to meet that Tuesday night when he was killed. She was to have gone to his caravan. There was nothing to stop her going. I was away from home. And I understand she’s pretty punctillious about that sort of appointment.” The small twisted smile lasted only an instant. “You see, of course, what I’m afraid of. That Hilda knew what was going to happen. That...somehow or other, she’d...had a hand in it.”

Meeting his eyes, Purbright said quietly: “You know, you’re talking absolute nonsense.”

“Am I?” Larch brought his fist crashing down on the desk. “Am I, Mr Purbright? Then why in God’s name wasn’t she there when that thing went off? Why isn’t she dead too?”

Chapter Sixteen

If the sight of Purbright and Larch entering his office together and apparently in amity surprised Mr Kebble he did not show it. But nor did he say anything about the interesting discovery he had just made, which, in the absence of the man he called Old Acid-guts, he would spontaneously have announced.

Purbright, however, went straight to that very point. “The Chief Inspector and I,” he said, “are very interested in Celia, Mr Kebble. One might almost say we have high hopes of her.”

The editor glanced up at each of the policemen in turn, like a plump poodle flanked by a pair of Afghan hounds. “Celia,” he muttered. “Ah, yes...”

“Any luck?” Purbright was looking down at the open newspaper file. He caught sight of a column headed in black Gothic type.

Kebble pursed his lips and began moving a stubby, nicotine-stained finger down the page. Larch and Purbright peered at the point where it came at last to a reluctant stop.

They read: ‘July 1st, suddenly: Celia Grope, aged 20 years’.

Kebble broke the silence. “That’s the only Celia I’ve been able to find. Mind you, I’m not...” His voice tailed off unhappily as he looked up at the graven solemnity of the chief inspector’s face.

“We can’t let personal feelings worry us now, Mr Kebble,” said Larch, sententiously. “You mustn’t get the idea that you’ve let someone down, or anything of that sort.” He turned to Purbright. “I suppose you won’t have heard about that business?” He nodded towards the year-old newspaper.

“She was knocked down by a car, wasn’t she?”

“She was. And you can guess the name of the driver.”

“Biggadyke.” Purbright saw no reason to point out that he was not guessing.

Larch nodded and stared past him as if looking at a now familiar ghost that he had given up trying to exorcise. “We did our best with a manslaughter charge—that was before the new Act, of course—but it didn’t stick. He was very lucky.”

“Luckier than Celia.”

Larch flicked at him his cold, sad glance. “As you say, Mr Purbright: luckier than Celia.”

“And what,” Mr Kebble put in, “are you going to do now?” He was beginning to find oppressive the towering proximity of the two men carrying on their conversation over his head.

“Will Grope still be over at the cinema?” Larch asked him.

“He should be.”

Kebble watched the policemen go. Larch’s purposeful stride took him first to the door. He looked, the editor reflected, like an executioner. Following at a stroll, Purbright turned and smiled. “Thanks for the coffee, Mr Kebble.”

The editor smiled weakly and raised his hand. Then his attention was caught by Leaper holding aloft a book and gesticulating. “Oh, Mr Purbright!” he called. The inspector came back to the counter.

“I forgot to tell you,” said Kebble, handing him the book, “that Leonard’s tracked the other half of that quotation.”

“Has he now.” Purbright beamed at the youth. “Smart work, Mr Leaper; smart work indeed!” He nearly added ’The Commissioner shall hear of this’ but refrained on catching an agonized look from Kebble and the murmured warning: “No praise, old chap. Like firewater to an Indian. Queer lad.”

The foyer of the cinema was empty. Shafts of sunlight, aswarm with dancing dust motes, slanted from the side windows upon the plastic stucco and struck back a chilly, colour-drained gleam. Where they fell across the carpet, the golden patches were scabbed with innumerable lozenges of blackened, trodden-in chewing gum. There was a smell of ashtrays and vitiated deodorant. Above the whine of a distant vacuum cleaner rose occasionally the cackle of ladies making discoveries under seats.

Larch pulled one of the auditorium doors slightly open and peered through. “Grope’s there now,” he said to Purbright, “but I’d like to get a few things straight before we have a word with him.”

They sat on the outskirts of an enormous chesterfield.

“I suppose,” Larch began, “that you’re satisfied that whoever sent in that piece of poetry meant it as a hint that Stan Biggadyke had something coming to him?”

Purbright did not answer immediately. He opened the book that Kebble had handed him, found the turned down page, and read a couple of verses to himself.

“Are you familiar,” he then asked Larch, “with the works of Emily Dickinson?”

His companion accepted the question as purely rhetorical and began picking his teeth.

“She wrote, among other things,” Purbright explained, “a poem piquantly entitled ‘There’s Been a Death’. The last line of the penultimate verse, together with the whole final verse, read like this:

“ ’There’ll be that dark parade

Of tassels and of coaches soon;

It’s easy as a sign—

The intuition of the news

In just a country town’ ”

Larch disengaged his matchstick. “Tassels and coaches...a funeral, of course.”

“Obviously.”

“Dark parade...I like that bit. Very neatly put.” He frowned. “But you’ve read out more than there was on the newspaper cutting. Has that crook Kebble been snipping at it, do you think?”

“Of course not.” Purbright felt a little impatient with Larch’s extravagant view of the criminal propensities of his fellow citizens. Apart from the likelihood of its being fatuous and unjust, it kept the field of suspects disconcertingly packed.

“No, the quotation in the paper ended with ‘easy as a sign’ so that there would be a final rhyme with ‘divine’. You remember the first part—‘The thirst that from the soul doth rise doth ask a drink divine’—the object of that was twofold. It hinted strongly at vengeance, as Kebble noticed, and it subtly identified the person whose death was to be avenged. Ben Jonson’s dedication was ‘To Celia’. Our murderer’s dedication was to a girl with the same name. Quite clearly, this Grope female.

“Now, then...”—Purbright tapped the open page—“The lines of Emily Dickinson that have been so oddly welded to those of Mr Jonson complete the story. It’s been most admirably done, you know. Especially, I think, the omission of Miss Dickinson’s last two lines.”

“You said that was just to get a rhyme,” Larch pointed out.

“Primarily, yes. But the force of a quotation is immensely increased when it is partly submerged, so to speak. Lawyers, you’ll notice, never quote their Latin tags in full. Tempora mutantur, m’lud...hrrm, hrrm, careless wave of the hand, judge flattered, case dismissed—you know the sort of thing. But that’s very ordinary stuff. Look at what’s been left unsaid here...‘the intuition of the news in just a country town’. It sums up the whole purpose of this extraordinary notice. Yet the murderer has had the subtlety—and self control—to hide the crux of his message from all but the kind of person who likes to grapple with intellectual literary competitions. He must have an extremely rarefied sense of drama. If this is a symptom of criminal vanity, I’m inclined to think he has something to be vain about.”

Larch gazed at a morticianly tinted portrait of Ramon Navarro on the opposite wall. “It sounds like one of our culture birds to me,” he observed. “I told you they were the ones to watch. Hoole was my bet, as I told you, but I suppose Grope’s odds-on favourite now.”

“Is he cultured?” Purbright asked doubtfully.

Larch snorted. “He’s Chalmsbury’s poet bloody laureate. What more do you want?”

“I didn’t think Mr Grope’s poetry was quite in the same category as the stuff we’ve been talking about. Still, he probably has a fairly catholic taste.”

“You know he writes those ‘In Memoriams’ for the paper, don’t you?”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Don’t you think, then, that when he set out to do a crafty one for poor old Stan he’d deliberately disguise his style? It strikes me that the simplest way of doing that would have been to pick up a few lines written by one or two other people and mix them up.”

“It’s conceivable.”

Larch shrugged. “Well, then; that’s obviously what he did. The rest ties up. He’s the father of the girl Stan killed. The accident probably tipped his nut and he’s been scheming ever since to take revenge. The anniversary of her death would be just the day.”

“The motive’s strong enough,” Purbright agreed. “What about opportunity?”

“Grope had that, all right. He hangs on here until all sorts of odd times. I’ve known him sleep all night in one of the seats. He could easily have slipped out to that caravan, got the window open as you suggested, popped the bomb inside and scarpered without anyone being the wiser. His old woman doesn’t keep tabs on him.”

“And the earlier explosions?”

Larch considered. “Aye, well I suppose he must have worked those too. The same argument applies, though. Grope always had a good excuse for being out at night.”

Cradling his shins in clasped hands, Purbright drew up his knees and pensively rested his chin upon them. When again he began to speak, his voice was flattened by the posture and Larch had to bend forward to catch what he said.

“The idea of setting off a chain of explosions in the form of practical jokes for which Biggadyke might be blamed was clever. It had precisely the intended effect. A good many minds were already made up by the time the last explosion was fixed—the only one that really mattered. Even the coroner, who’s no fool, was prepared to assume what the murderer intended him to assume. It’s important, I think, to grasp that planning of this order indicated an altogether exceptional mind. Unless we do, we might easily fall into whatever second or third line traps that so gifted a gentleman would undoubtedy have devised.”

“I would hardly call Grope gifted,” said Larch, after pausing to wonder what Purbright was getting at.

“You wouldn’t?”

“He’s a bit peculiar, but not in the way that would make him a genius. No, this business has just turned out luckily for him, that’s all. You’re reading too much clever stuff into it.”

The stalls door opened and one of the charwomen waddled through. She glanced blankly at the waiting policemen and went into a closet. They could hear her singing a wordless, wavering dirge.

“Will he be long, do you think?” Purbright asked.

Larch rose immediately. “I’ll root him out.”

“No; don’t let’s ruffle the fellow. If he’s the one you want, it’s going to be difficult enough to lead him into court in a friendly way. Pushing him would be hopeless.”

Larch smiled sourly, but he sat down again. “Grope’s no master mind. I wish you’d get that idea out of your head. I tell you once he sees that we know what’s what, he’ll give us all we want.”

“It’s your case.”

“I know these people.” Larch waved his hand. “They're incapable of elaborate planning and plotting. You said something just now about traps—second and third line traps, wasn’t that it?” He waited for Purbright to nod. “Yes, well it’s all so much fanny. What did you mean.”

Purbright thought that behind the bluster he detected anxiety. He explained quietly.

“It seems to me, d’you know, that whoever removed Mr Biggadyke took good care to build around the killing a number of defences in depth, as it were. Or traps, if you like, in which the inevitable investigation would be caught and either made harmless or turned away against somebody else.

“The first and most intelligently devised trap was very nearly successful in ending the matter. Almost everyone gleefully leaped into it. As I said before, it was the assumption that Biggadyke had killed himself by his own ridiculous prank-playing.

“Certain knowledge was needed for that plan. The murderer must have been aware firstly of Biggadyke’s reputation as a practical joker—no difficulty there, of course. Secondly, he must have had a good idea of the sort of targets Biggadyke would choose. You’ll admit the selection was most convincing. The third piece of knowledge could have been acquired only by careful observation—or else”—Purbright regarded Larch steadily—“by receiving or overhearing a confidence. I’m talking now of Biggadyke’s private arrangements for Tuesday nights, his caravan appointments.

“So much for the preparation of trap number one. All very ingenious and thorough. But there was one danger...” He paused.

“Your wife, Mr Larch.”

The Chief Inspector said nothing. He slowly brought up his hand and looked at the open palm as if examining a derisory tip.

“The odds were that she would keep clear, as indeed she has,” Purbright went on. “But there was always the possibility of her telling the truth about those Tuesday nights. Once that was out, the misadventure set-up would collapse. And the fact of murder would be left in broad view.

“As it happens, we spotted it from a completely different direction. But that was by the sheer luck of Kebble’s having seized on that queer obituary.

“The murderer was intelligent enough to realize that by the very act of intervening and thereby destroying his first defence Mrs Larch would prove the perfect decoy into trap number two. Once she allowed her relationship with Biggadyke to be known, suspicion would automatically fall on the man with the best reason in the world for wishing her lover dead—the man who, by curious coincidence, is another of the town’s regular Tuesday night absentees—and, to crown it all, the man who is an expert in the use of explosives, a quantity of which happens to have been missed from the depot where he is a part-time instructor.”

Larch drew in a long, rustling breath. The grey face had whitened round the mouth. Yet he forced his thin, humourless smile. “We’d better get the bastard pulled in before you make me confess.”

“Mrs Weaver!”

Both men looked to see the face of Mr Grope thrust through the auditorium door. Again rose the querulous bleat: “Mrs We-e-e-eaver!”

There was a clatter of buckets and dustpans and the charwoman emerged from her haven, blinking and hostile.

“Kindly bring a paper bag, Mrs Weaver. Third one-and-nine from the radiator on the clock side. Seventh seat in.”

The woman glowered. “That Mr Follicle’s not been taking ’is bandage off again?”

“Looks like it, Mrs Weaver.”

Grope spotted Purbright and Larch as they rose. He shook his head. “You mustn’t start the queue inside, sir,” he said reprovingly, adding after further scrutiny, “You are patrons, I suppose?”

“No, Mr Grope, we are not,” retorted Larch. “I think you know who I am. Would you mind coming over here a minute?”

Grope lumbered up, looking from one to the other. Mrs Weaver, incurious, padded purposefully away. “Now then,” Larch said, “you’ll kindly do your duty by answering a few questions. You’ve nothing to be nervous about if you tell the truth.”

“What kind of questions?” asked Grope sullenly.

“All kinds.” Larch was plunging into the interview with a horrid briskness that prompted Purbright to nudge his arm and frown. Larch misinterpreted this as a request to be introduced. “Oh, yes; this is a colleague of mine. Inspector Purbright. And if you think my questions are rough, just you wait until he starts.”

Grope gazed mournfully at Purbright and began buttoning up his long, green commissionaire’s coat. He looked like a bewildered old general, captured in a washroom miles behind the lines.

“How long,” Larch was asking, “have you been working here?”

“Fourteen years, or very near.” The rhyme flowed out so effortlessly that Larch did not notice it; he merely felt Grope’s reply to be indefinably insolent.

“And who employed you up to then?”

“I was at Barlow’s foundry...gentlemen.”

Larch scowled. He still could not place what it was about this docile, cheese-faced fellow that annoyed him. “What sort of work were you doing there?”

“Tool-room fitting...it took some care.”

“Precision engineering, eh?”

Grope, perplexed by the sudden appearance of a predatory gleam in Larch’s eye, hesitated and then blurted out: “That’s all I am going to say today.”

Larch looked at him with contemptuous disbelief. “Surely you realise the inadvisability of an obstructive attitude. My colleague and I are investigating a serious matter.”

Grope sat down on the chesterfield. He looked prepared to withstand a seige.

Larch spoke softly in Purbright’s ear. “He’s fly, this one. You followed the point about engineering? Those bombs. Could be.” To Grope he said: “Now let’s be sensible, shall we? Can you remember what you were doing on Tuesday, July the first?”

“No.”

“Come along. You haven’t even thought about it. It was the night Mr Biggadyke was killed. Remember?”

Grope probed his ear with his little finger.

“You were seen out in the town that night,” Larch persisted. “Quite late. How about telling us where you went?”

“Home.”

“Before that. Stop being awkward.”

“Go away,” Grope said.

Larch looked at Purbright with mock surprise. “He’d like us to go away. I wonder why?” Purbright’s eyes closed in despair as Larch turned back on his victim and rasped: “You had a pretty strong grudge against Biggadyke, didn’t you?”

The commissionaire remained silent.

“You hadn’t forgotten what happened to your daughter, had you? That was on July the first. Just a year ago, wasn’t it?”

Purbright tried desperately to think of some way to block this preposterous inquisition. He saw on Grope’s otherwise expressionless face a twitch of annoyance, or of pain.

“You don’t have to be ashamed of your feelings, Grope,” Larch went on. “You were bound to feel cut up. Even a bit vengeful, perhaps. Is that it? Understandable, you know. Your own flesh and blood.”

This embarrassing parody of Hollywood third-degree, Purbright knew, was simply Larch’s way of taking reprisal for the destruction of his own self-confidence. He was like a blinded man still lashing out when his torturers had departed. But he would have to be restrained somehow. Purbright coughed and was about to interpose a firm “It seems to me...” when he was put off his stroke by a totally unexpected reply from Grope.

“Flesh and blood?” he echoed. “Flesh and blood nothing. If you’re talking about poor Celia, you’ve got it all mixed up.”

Larch looked up at the ceiling. “Ah. Mixed up. Thank you, Grope.” He glared down again. “I suppose you’re going to tell me she wasn’t your daughter.”

“No, I’m not. But you were talking about flesh and blood. And Celia wasn’t. Not ours, I mean. We adopted her.”

Purbright seized his chance. “Now, Mr Grope...”—he sat beside him—“there seems to have been some little misunderstanding. This news of yours is interesting.”

“Why?” Grope countered, with no sign of finding his new interrogator any less provocative. “We never pretended the baby was ours.”

“No, but twenty years is a long time. Things can come to be taken for granted. Tell me, Mr Grope; did you know who Celia’s real parents were—her natural parents?”

Grope said nothing.

“You don’t know?”

“Things like that are confidential.”

Seeing Larch prepared to swoop in once more, Purbright gently waved discouragement. To Grope he said: “They are indeed. You are fully entitled to keep Celia’s origin secret if you wish. On the other hand, you could save us a certain amount of time—in record searching and all that, you know—by telling us now.”

It was a poor inducement, as Purbright knew. But Grope was of an essentially helpful disposition. In any case, the ponderous process of deduction which had been going on in his head ever since Larch opened his assault had now produced something the effect of which he was anxious to enjoy there and then.

He looked away from Purbright and stared boldly at Larch.

“Celia was put out for adoption by Mr and Mrs Pointer,” he announced. “That was straight after she was born, of course. But even so you might say she was really your sister-in-law, Mr Larch. Mightn’t you?”

Chapter Seventeen

Amelia Pointer received Purbright in the garden. Although the shock of acquiring one as a son-in-law had almost worn off, she still regarded policemen with considerable apprehension. Like open umbrellas, they were unlucky things to have in the house.

Hilda had answered the door, prepared her mother for the requested interview (“He looks quite human actually”) and made introductions. She now stood protectively beside Mrs Pointer and motioned Purbright to have his say.

“This isn’t going to be terribly easy,” he began.

“No, of course not,” said Hilda, looking very much at ease. Mrs Pointer shook her head and gave a little smile.

“You may have heard from Mr Larch,” Purbright went on, “that further inquiries are being made into the death of Mr. Biggadyke.”

Hilda spotted some seed pods on a spike of lupins and began nipping them off. “No,” she said.

“Oh. I thought he might have mentioned it. Never mind. The point is, you might be able to help us, Mrs Pointer—in an indirect way.”

“Mother will be pleased to do what she can.” Hilda stretched in search of further seed pods. Her movements were lithe and confident.

“We have a notion, you see—there may be absolutely nothing in it, of course, but you know how policemen move round and round a thing—we have this notion that some connection could exist between a girl called Celia Grope and the way Mr Biggadyke...passed on.”

Mrs Pointer’s lips fluttered like comatose moths suddenly stimulated by a touch.

“Do you know anyone called Celia Grope, mother?” Hilda asked her cheerfully. “No, Inspector; it seems that she doesn’t.”

“But you did, didn’t you, Mrs Larch?”

She eyed him shrewdly. “I vaguely remember the name. Wasn’t she the girl who was killed in a street accident some time last year? Or passed on from one, perhaps you’d say?”

Purbright ungrudgingly marked Hilda one up.

“Neither of you ladies knew Miss Grope?”

“Not personally, no.”

“Mrs Pointer?” Purbright did not enjoy being rude but he felt that Hilda Larch was more likely to respect tactics than tact. However, the snub to the older woman’s guardian and interpreter was of no avail; Mrs Pointer merely looked helplessly at her daughter.

“Celia Grope was an adopted child. Her father told us that much and it was a fairly simple matter to trace her natural parentage from the court records. I tell you this,” Purbright explained, “in case you imagine I have come here to fish for information. I haven’t. The facts have been landed, so to speak. All I ask is a little assistance in weighing them up.”

“You are a very devious policeman,” said Hilda, “and a mysterious one. Won’t you say what this business is all about and what it has to do with us?”

Purbright sighed. “Obviously that is what I must do. I had hoped that making painful revelations was not going to be required. You, Mrs Pointer, know perfectly well what I am talking about. If your daughter really doesn’t know, don’t you think it would be kinder if you told her now yourself?”

Before Hilda could provide an answer on her mother’s behalf, Mrs Pointer broke her silence.

“Twenty years!”

The inspector was startled by the vehemence packed into the two words by a woman who had seemed to possess no more independent motivation than a ventriloquist’s doll. The cry was a harsh compound of anger, pain and pleading. Hilda stared at her mother. From her slowly unclenching hand lupin pods, bruised and split, dropped to the grass.

“Did you have to?” Mrs Pointer made as if to clutch Purbright’s sleeve but her arm remained faltering in mid-air like the limb of a crippled beggar.

A bee droned erratically round their heads. Hilda started, as if from sleep. She pulled out a case and matches from the pockets of her slacks, lit a cigarette, and released a tremulous “Oh, for God’s sake!” with the first drag of smoke.

Mrs Pointer regarded her appealingly. “There seemed no point in telling you dear. Celia never knew.” She looked down at her own hands, pulling at the stuff of her skirt. “I tried to think of her as having been born dead. But of course I couldn’t. It was...” The lips went on moving for a few seconds longer but no words came. Purbright was reminded of an old film running on when the sound track had failed.

Hilda had had time to throw a cloak of anger over her bewilderment and wretchedness. “I take it,” she said coldly, “that you and Daddy had some compelling reason for this extraordinary arrangement?”

“Your father thought...he said it would be better...” Hilda turned abruptly to Purbright. “I’m sorry if you find this embarrassing. Sordid disclosures always read rather better than they sound. You did ask for it, though.”

The policeman shook his head. He spoke gently. “Embarrassment is a selfish emotion, Mrs Larch. I think we can be of much greater help to one another at the moment if we dispense with it.”

“Oh, let’s be clinical, then. You take over the questioning and we’ll have a post-mortem on my sister.” She flashed a look at her mother. “Or half-sister, should I say?”

Purbright watched Mrs Pointer but she showed no reaction. “Is that true, Mrs Pointer?” he asked her. “Was the adoption arranged because your husband knew he was not the child’s father?”

The woman tightened her mouth and seemed to be marshalling strength for another attempt at the unaccustomed exercise of speech.

“He had been to France, hadn’t he?” Purbright prompted. “Was that something to do with it?”

Mrs Pointer moved closer to Hilda and accepted the arm that she slipped, almost absent-mindedly, round her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” the mother said. They were the only words she had been able to summon. Her life, thought Purbright, must have become a single, dreary act of apology, He felt sadness, yet no compassion.

“Have you anything more to ask. Inspector?” Hilda had resumed her role of manager.

“Yes,” said Purbright, deliberately. “I should like to be told the name of Celia’s father.”

“I...I can’t tell you that.”

“Please believe me: this is not idle and impertinent curiosity. The matter is important and perhaps urgent.”

Mrs Pointer shook her head. The action was more like a shudder.

“He’s still alive?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Oh, yes.”

“And living here in the town?”

She made no reply.

“Tell me, Mrs Pointer: had this man maintained a relationship with Celia over the years? Not necessarily as a father, I mean, but an affectionate relationship.”

“He used to see her, I believe.”

“They were fond of each other?”

“Oh, yes.” The words emerged dreamily, enviously.

“Won’t you tell me his name?”

The ghost of an old pride stirred in the faded frightened little woman. She looked directly into Purbright’s face. “Certainly not,” she said.

Purbright and Hilda left her there in the garden. She was kneeling beside some border plants, fussily easing them apart.

At the front door, Hilda Larch hesitated. “Why couldn’t they have told me? Now there’s so much...so much I can’t put right in my mind.”

Purbright said nothing. She passed a hand across her brow. “It’s too late.”

After a while she looked up at him. “That man who killed Celia...”

“Biggadyke.”

“Yes. He...I let him make love to me.” The muscles of her neck were tightly drawn.

“I see.”

She stroked the knob of the Yale lock with her palm “You think, don’t you...that Celia’s father...”

“Murdered...”

Her eyes blazed. “Executed, you mean!”

“That probably is a better word.”

She nodded. “I’m glad mother said no more. Goodbye, Inspector.”

On the step he turned. “There’s just one thing, Mrs Larch.”

She waited.

“That night when Biggadyke was killed—why did you decide to stay away from his caravan?”

A slow, careful smile passed over her face. “I had a telephone message, Inspector. From the Civil Defence people. They said my husband had finished early and was on his way home.”

“And was he?”

“There must have been some mistake. He arrived the following day—as usual.”

“The voice on the telephone...”

Her smile broadened. “Absolutely unidentifiable, Inspector, I assure you. But I liked it. I liked it tremendously.”

The door closed.

Purbright walked slowly down the path. He was searching his memory for something he knew had matched an impression just received. It was as though he had emerged from a market knowing that on two separate stalls were pictures or ornaments which, though unremarkable each in itself, once had formed a pair. He recalled Mrs Pointer’s pale, bewildered face; its expression of constant readiness to register regret for something. Had he seen it before? He thought not. Years of self-immolation had left it almost devoid of memorable peculiarities.

Hilda’s, then? Handsome, bitter, faintly mocking. He pictured Hilda Larch hiding intense shock and disgust beneath the simple mechanics of lighting a cigarette; she had managed it with the brusque carelessness of a horsewoman between gymkhana events. The sense of an unplaced resemblance grew stronger. It was something to do with Hilda, perhaps her whole features and bearing, or at least some look or mannerism of hers, that Purbright had seen in another person since his arrival in Chalmsbury.

He tried to conjure a mental identification parade, but it was no use. The faces blurred and merged, like images in wind-ruffled water. He crossed to the shaded side of the road and sauntered, with blank mind and painfully hot feet, back into the town.

Larch, in shirt sleeves, sat at his desk by an open window. He looked cool, but unrelaxed. Purbright gave him a somewhat dessicated account of his afternoon’s visiting.

“What a good job you’re a policeman, Mr Purbright. The husbands of bitches are terribly prone to be blackmailed. Did you know that?”

The pleasantry was ignored. Larch tried another. “Well, have you found poor Stanley’s bloody murderer?”.

“Certainly.”

“Go on, then, Mr Purbright.”

“He’s your mother-in-law’s lover.”

Larch stared, his face twisted as if he were trying to catch a scarcely audible sound. Then, suddenly, his jaw dropped like an excavator bucket and there emerged a guffaw that turned Sergeant Worple, sitting in the charge room fifty feet away, pale with alarm.

When the short spasm was over, Purbright demurely corrected himself. “Former lover, I should have said, of course.”

“Yes, by God you should!” A rumbling echo of amusement sounded in Larch’s gullet. “But it doesn’t take you much further does it? I’m afraid our filing system doesn’t run to records of the ex-boy friends of the town’s middle-aged ladies.”

“We might not need records. There are pretty long and retentive memories in a place like this.”

“Retentive in more than one sense. They don’t open up in the name of the law, believe me.”

Purbright looked at Larch thoughtfully. “Excuse my asking, but you’re a few years older than your wife, aren’t you?”

“What the hell’s that to do with it?”

“Only that it struck me that you might remember something yourself of what went on here twenty years ago. Gossip, you know. Were you around then?”

“I was, as it happens. But I hadn’t married into the bloody Pointers.”

“I didn’t mean family gossip—just parade room talk.”

Larch leaned back with a sigh. “Look, son: this was a real police force in the ’thirties. We didn’t sit around over tea and knitting. If you think...”

“Mr Larch,” Purbright interrupted firmly, “I don’t much mind your being aggressive, obtuse, bombastic and generally offensive. What I shall not tolerate, though, is the old copper gaff. Now, do we understand each other?”

There was a long silence. Then Larch gave a slight, dismissive wave of the hand and looked down as though calculating something rather difficult.

“No,” he said quietly at last, “I can’t recall a damn thing that might give you a lead. I knew the Pointers, of course. Not intimately; I hadn’t met Hilda then. And I remember something about Ozzy going over to France. That’s all.”

“How old would his wife have been?”

“Thirty, thirty-fivish.”

“Promiscuous?”

Larch seemed almost shocked. “Damn it, man. You’ve seen her. Even twenty years...”

“Perhaps not,” Purbright agreed. “We’ll give her credit for having been selective. It was probably a genuine first-and-last romance. And as discreet as a spinster buying a bottle of scent.” He paused. “Yet there was something...

“Tell me,” said Purbright, suddenly brisk, “you knew this Celia girl, I suppose?”

“Only by sight.”

“That’s what I mean. Would you say she showed resemblance to anyone in particular?”

“I realize now that she was remarkably like my wife.”

Purbright nodded. “That’s understandable. Anyone else? Anyone exceptionally tall, for instance?”

“Tall?”

“Whover stuck those bombs on the statue and that shop sign thing must have had a phenomenal reach. And no short man could have climbed the park railings, either; remember that the water fountain could only have been mined after the park closed.”

“What about a ladder? A box, even?”

“Too noticeable. It might have served for the park business, but not for the jobs in the main streets on clear summer nights. They were done very neatiy. A quick approach, a quick departure, no messing about.”

Larch picked up his pen and peered into one of his trays. “Sounds a principle worth copying,” he remarked. “Anyway, I thought you were going to use this...this holiday of yours to get some sunshine.”

Purbright rose slowly from his chair, walked to the window and stood gazing absently at the roofs of the buildings beyond the courtyard.

“Sunshine,” he repeated. “Of course. No, I don’t want to miss that.”

As the inspector strolled across the Borough Bridge, glancing down over the massive, shabby cast-iron parapet into the ebbing river, he tried to decide what he should do about the killer of the unmourned Mr Biggadyke.

He recognized, and half-admired, the parochial loyalties, compounded with a sort of pagan amorality, that made the people of Chalmsbury policeman-proof. Although he normally enjoyed his job, if only as an exercise in ingenuity, he had no illusion of being an instrument of absolute justice. Some kinds of crime made him angry; none made him righteous. He gave every criminal credit for knowing, if not what he had been about, at least what he didn’t want to have happen to him in consequence. In this he was different from most policemen, who take as a personal insult the unwillingness of a wrong-doer to be caught.

Purbright was also well aware that the public is less zealous to see the triumph of the law than it likes to pretend. Its diffidence was shown in Chalmsbury to a degree suggestive of a Robin Hood fixation. Could long years of rule by men like Larch have been responsible, he wondered.

None would blame him—perhaps he would not blame himself—for slipping out of this town that was so obviously content to allow the false interpretation of Biggadyke’s death to stand as the official record. He had some sympathy with this communal conspiracy to let a dead dog lie.

By the time he reached Mrs Crispin’s front door and let himself into the cool, dark lobby, smelling of mackintoshes and vinegar, Purbright was very nearly resigned to desertion.

He went into the dining room. The table was set already for two, but his fellow lodger had not yet arrived. Purbright picked up the copy of the Chalmsbury Chronicle which had been put by Payne’s plate and sat down to await his meal.

The report of the inquest, solidly set and so explicitly headlined in depth as to render the reading of the matter beneath almost superfluous, had been given pride of place on one of the centre pages. Purbright began to scan it rapidly and without much interest.

Then, as he turned into the second column, his eye did what a car will do on being taken round a sharp bend too quickly and inattentively. It skidded and came to rest in column three.

The inspector went on staring at the photograph before him while the truth about Biggadyke’s murder took sharp and clear form like a crystal growing out of a suddenly cooled concentrate.

After perhaps half a minute he looked down and read the caption.

“Mr Joseph Mulvaney, senior projectionist at the Rialto Cinema, Chalmsbury, has been nominated to receive the Grand Brooch of Erin, an honour conferred upon Irish nationals ordinarily resident in this country for outstanding service in the cause of Anglo-Irish relations. Mr Mulvaney (pictured here in the projection room where he has worked for the past twelve years) hopes to be able to travel to Dublin to receive his award in person when the presentations are made next Tuesday.”

Chapter Eighteen

Purbright folded the paper and replaced it on the table. He went in search of Mrs Crispin. The only occupant of the kitchen was Phyllis, shaping fishcakes with the nonchalant expertise of a prize-fighter’s masseur. She bathed him in her dimpled sir-she-said smile and said that the Missus had gone out for the evening but that his tea was on the way.

“Has Mr Payne not come in yet?”

She slid the first of the fish cakes into the frying pan. “Not unless he went straight up to his room. I suppose his car will be at the door if he’s here.”

“No, it isn’t.” Purbright cast a nervous glance at the blue cloud rising from the pan and returned to the lobby. He opened the front door and looked out, then walked quickly and quietly up the stairs.

There was no answer to his knock on Payne’s door. He pushed it open. The room was as he had last seen it; tidy, ordinary, and wearing the faintly depressing air common to all apartments, whether prison cells or bed-sitters, in which a man must share his dreams with his shoe brushes.

Purbright took a step towards the bookcase and stopped. In the photograph frame on its top shelf there was only the white card backing. The picture of the little girl standing by what he had mistakenly assumed to be a television camera had been removed.

Not that it mattered greatly now. He was clearly aware that it was the child’s face he had seen in the features of Hilda Larch. Solemnly staring out upon Cornelius Payne’s lonely little world had been Celia, photographed ten or twelve years ago—probably by her foster father—in the projection room of the cinema where he worked.

He knelt and began looking through the titles of Payne’s books. Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury’ was among them, and next to it an anthology of modern verse. He took out the anthology and opened it by its ribbon marker. Half way down the left-hand page was the poem by Emily Dickinson. “There’s been a death...” it began. Purbright closed the book and put it back.

In the textbook on organic chemistry he found the chapter dealing with nitro-compounds to which Payne had made his deceptively cool and co-operative reference. The instructions for making nitro-glycerin were full and precise. Purbright thought it sounded an eminently feasible operation, given laboratory equipment and expert caution. The fragment of a conversation drifted into his mind. Kebble had spoken in the same breath of Payne and the Nobel Prize. Nobel...inventor of dynamite: the man who discovered that the dangerously unstable nitrate of glycerin could be tamed by soaking it into a subsance called kieselguhr.

Purbright searched further along the shelf. At the end, among three or four volumes in faded but undamaged bindings that suggested they were old school prizes, was one entitled ‘A Boy’s Dictionary of Natural Substances’. Without much hope, he thumbed through to the K’s. It was there. Kieselguhr.

‘Kieselguhr, or Infusorial Earth, by which name it is known in the jewellery trade, is a fine powder used as a polishing agent. It is also an ingredient of dynamite.’

Downstairs a door slammed. Purbright hurriedly replaced the book and left the room, closing the door. From the landing he heard Phyllis stun the dining-room table with a plate of fishcakes. Immediately after came his summons to tea. It was like a prairie cattle call. The inspector descended and told her that he would eat as soon as he had made a short telephone call from the lobby. Payne, he noticed, still had not returned.

Larch received Purbright’s revelation with a grunt and, “What did I tell you?”

“You didn’t tell me anything,” Purbright justifiably observed.

“Never mind. Go on.”

“It might be as well if I waited here for him. He’s late, but that’s not to say he won’t come. Meanwhile you might like to see if he’s still at his shop. A search warrant wouldn’t come amiss, incidentally.”

“Why?”

“There could be stuff there that you’ll need in evidence. Chemicals, lab equipment and so on. It will probably be a job for a Home Office fellow, but at least you can get the place locked up. Invoices might be interesting, too; check deliveries of something called Infusorial Earth. And don’t let your blokes fiddle with powders—Payne probably used some kind of home-made fulminate to set his things off.”

“Listen: I’m not a bloody Harwell professor.”

“That’s all right. Leave it to Worple: there’s nothing he doesn’t know. I’ll be here if you want me but as far as I can see it’s all yours now.” Purbright tried not to sound too relieved.

Larch said everything would be attended to, but he only hoped he was not being let in for an almighty balls-up.

Purbright said he hoped so, too.

“By the way,” he added, “do you happen to remember where it was that Biggadyke ran down the Grope girl?”

“Of course. It was in Watergate Street. Quite near Payne’s shop, as a matter of fact. Payne never came forward to say she’d been there. It was hardly relevant at the time, though, was it?”

“Not at the time, no.” Purbright rang off.

Within the next few hours Purbright answered the telephone four times.

The first two calls were from Larch, anxious to know if Payne had returned. The shop, he said, had been found in the charge of a young man with the intelligence quotient of a sea anemone. Not only was he ignorant of his employer’s whereabouts; he seemed uncertain of whether he had ever met him. At least he had not been obstructive. The shop was now locked and guarded. A proper search had not yet been made but at first sight it did look as if some of Purbright’s guesses might prove correct.

Purbright gravely acknowledged the tribute and asked whether Larch contemplated putting out a general call for Payne to be held for questioning. Larch retorted that this, of course had been done. He then rang off in order to do it.

The third call was from Sergeant Worple, who explained that he was just checking on the chief inspector’s behalf. Purbright informed him, a little tartly, that Payne was still missing—as Mr Larch might well have adduced from the fact that he, Purbright, had not telephoned to the contrary.

“I quite understand that, sir,” said Worple, unruffled. “Logic’s a great help, even in these days.” He paused to let Purbright make what he could of this obliquity and went on: “I thought you might be interested to know that wherever Mr Payne is he hasn’t taken his car. It was outside his shop.”

“Really?”

“Yes sir. You possibly have never noticed it yourself, but it’s quite an old-fashioned model with what they call a sunshine roof. A sliding panel in the top. I mention that because it explains something that has probably been puzzling you.”

Purbright relieved his feelings by glaring cross-eyed at the telephone mouthpiece and sticking out his tongue.

The unhurried, provocatively respectful voice droned on.

“You see, sir, it’s quite clear now that Mr Payne was able to fix his explosive devices on the statue and the shop sign by taking his car right up to the target, as you might call it, and standing up on the driving seat through the sunshine roof. It wouldn’t take him a minute; then he could sit down again and drive off. All unbeknown,” Worple added extravagantly.

“He could have used the same method to get over the park railings, couldn’t he, Sergeant?”

“Undoubtedly, sir.”

“Did the Chief Inspector work all that out?”

There was a brief silence. “He gave me that impression, sir.” Worple sounded like a man counting short change.

“Well, well. It does him credit. I’ll give you a call if there are any further developments at this end.”

It was some time after ten o’clock when the telephone rang for the fourth time.

“Purbright speaking.”

He heard a resonant click as the button in a public call box was pressed.

“It’s Payne here.”

Purbright swallowed. This he had not expected.

“Oh, yes, Mr Payne?” Did one deliver a formal caution when a man whose arrest one had been trying to contrive suddenly popped up on the telephone?

“Look,” the faint, strained voice was saying, “I rather feel I owe you something?”

“Yes?” I must sound like a deaf charlady offering to take a message, Purbright thought.

“I was going to leave you a note, but the idea seemed far from satisfactory. Awfully impersonal, and I’d probably have left out just the things you wanted to know...”

“Where are you speaking from, Mr Payne?”

“Where? Oh, I don’t think that matters, does it? You can hear me all right, I suppose.”

“Yes, I can hear you...” Purbright looked up to see Mrs Crispin, hatted and mildly Guinness-glad, closing the front door behind her. He beckoned and began writing quickly on the pad by the phone. She came and stood amiably at his side, like a lama waiting for a sugar lump.

“You know what happened, of course,” Payne was saying. “Those questions of yours last night were far too inspired to be passed off as what I believe policemen call routine inquiries. It was decent of you to give me a start like that, but I don’t want to get away. I don’t think I ever did, really. All that elaboration...oh, I can’t think why I bothered.”

“It was rather well done,” Purbright said quietly. He pulled the sheet from the pad with his free hand and gave it to Mrs Crispin. Her grin faded as she read the message. Then she glided with surprising speed off to the kitchen and squawked for Phyllis.

“The notice in the paper was silly, wasn’t it,” Payne said. He sounded tired and the words had a flat clumsiness like those of a man whose tongue is thickened with thirst. “I’m rather ashamed of it now. Pure exhibitionism. Criminals are supposed to find that sort of thing irresistable. Does justice become a crime when it’s put on a do-it-yourself basis? I don’t know...”

Purbright could hear fast, interrupted breathing, as if Payne was opening and closing his mouth, trying to find the right way to say something. Then, almost conversationally, Payne spoke again. “You know about Celia, I expect?”

“A certain amount. I’ve guessed, too. There was that photograph in your room.”

“It’s the only one I have. Old Grope took it a long time ago and let me have a print. He’s always been very decent to both of us. He used to send the kid along to the shop on some specious errand or other so that I could keep seeing her.”

Purbright glanced at his watch. “Tell me, Mr Payne...”

In the house next door Phyllis had replaced a phone and was trying to explain to its anxious owner the reasons (which she did not understand herself) for the 999 call she had just made.

At Fen Street Chief Inspector Larch was demanding from a night operator at Chalmsbury exchange the location of the kiosk connected with Chalmsbury 4116.

Within that kiosk, which Larch was about to be told was a few yards from the entrance to the municipal cemetery, a tall man clutching a parcel under his left arm bowed his head wearily as he listened to the question that was being put to him.

“How did I know?” he repeated. “By much the same process as Kebble’s young reporter adopted, I suppose. It wasn’t too difficult to establish Biggadyke’s habits. They were”—he smiled faintly in the dusk—“remarkably regular in their way.”

Again he listened. The man at the other end of the wire was asking something else and taking his time in doing so. Two minutes went by. Payne leaned against the side of the kiosk. Now and again he glanced at the parcel he held.

“You’re quite right,” he said. “Hilda told you about that call, did she? It seemed the most effective means of keeping her away that night. I only hope...”

He broke off and stared through the glass. The headlamp beams of an approaching car swept the roadside colonnade of trees fifty yards away, swung round and bore upon the kiosk. He heard the plunging tone of the engine as the driver braked.

Payne slammed the receiver clumsily on its rest, heaved open the door and ran for the cemetery drive. Larch and a uniformed constable raced after him.

The pursuit was short. After two turns along paths that he seemed to know well, Payne leaped a low box border hedge, took a few staggering steps across turf in which buttercups glimmered, and sank down upon a year-old grave. He clutched the parcel high up against his chest...Purbright was still holding the dead phone when the sound of the explosion reached him.