Hopjoy Was Here

“That I can believe.” Ross watched her face. She was smiling faintly.

“Is your husband about?”

“Naturally. You didn’t think he worked in an office. He’s down on the bottom field. Harrowing.”

“It must be.”

The girl suppressed a giggle, then frowned. “I don’t like sarcastic people. If you’ll just tell me what you want...”

“I’m trying to trace a friend of mine.”

“Someone round here, you mean?”

“I think he’s been here.”

“What’s his name?” She leaned along the back of the couch and stretched to turn down the volume of the set. She could just reach the knob with the tips of her fingers. Ross noted appreciatively the hardening of the nearer buttock into the semblance of a lute. “Hopjoy,” he said, “Brian Hopjoy.”

“Never heard of him.” She settled again into the cushions, drawing one leg closely beneath her and allowing the other to trail to the floor. Ross abandoned himself to a familiar sense of wonder at the contrast between a stocking’s steely, slippery containment and the petal-white vulnerability of overtopping flesh. He once had thought the Can-Can a vulgar and pseudo-, indeed anti-sensual concession to callow tourists. Now he understood its truth. It was a sermon upon the insubstantiality of what separated the pretentiousness and artificial properties of civilization from venal reality—a division no greater than a garter’s width.

Ross leaned forward in his chair. “Mrs Croll...”

Abstractedly she felt for her skirt hem and tugged it down to her knee. Her fingers straightened and travelled on, in the lightest self-caress; then she raised the hand and held it towards him. He grasped her wrist and experienced a sort of contentment in exploring, with one finger-tip, its complex of fragile bones.

“You might not have known him as Hopjoy,” Ross said.

“Mightn’t I?” Still she stared at the screen; only the tiniest twitch of the hand Ross held contradicted her attitude of absolute indifference to what existed outside it. He slackened his hand and extended it slowly, her forearm slipping through the cupped fingers until his thumb nestled in the soft, warm hollow of the arm’s crook. A pulse—his own or hers, he did not know—stirred gently within the area of contact; it seemed a microcosmic prelude to...

“Here, we’re wasting time.” He withdrew his hand and reached into an inner pocket.

She looked round, startled by his brusqueness. Immediately she saw the photograph, her eyes widened. “Is that your friend?”

“Tell me about him.”

She pouted. “Why should I? I don’t know who you are. You haven’t even got his name right, anyway.”

Ross saw the look she gave the photograph of Hopjoy; it was compounded of fondness and a curious detachment, like that of a marksman turning over a shot bird with his foot.

“Names,” he said, “don’t matter much in our game, Mrs Croll. I don’t care what you called the man, nor what he meant to you...”

“And just what are you insinuating?” She had put on a tradesmen’s entrance voice. Ross decided that he recognized the dissimulation of the bored middle-class wife, hungering for sexual humiliation. “Your antics in your husband’s hay-loft are rather beside the point, my dear. I am interested solely in what brought Mr Hopjoy to this farm and in what he learned here. Now perhaps we understand each other.”

She had risen at his first words and stood now in what he diagnosed as trembling enjoyment of the insult he had offered. The rigidity of her indignation, he noticed, thrust into satisfying prominence a narrow, muscular belly and slightly flattened breasts like burglar alarms.

Mrs Croll turned, switched off the television set as if for ever, and faced him again. “There is nothing,” she announced coldly, “in the relationship of Mr Trevelyan and I that is any of your damn business.” She paused. “So damn you!”

Ross felt a twinge of pity. The clumsiness and inadequate sonority of the retort, its little grammatical discord, betrayed the girl’s uncertainty. He smiled at her. Into the suddenly silent room threaded the thin, clattering whine of a distant tractor.

“Trevelyan, you say?”

“Howard Trevelyan.” She pronounced the words defiantly and with schoolgirl relish.

“Sit down.” He took out his pipe and ruminantly fingered the rim of its bowl. The girl hesitated, then moved farther off and sat on a straight-backed chair in an attitude of prim exasperation.

Not looking at her, Ross said: “You are going to have to trust me, Bernadette. I could tell you my name—it’s Ross, as a matter of fact—and the nature of my work, but there really would be no point in doing so. I can neither prove my identity nor give you convincing evidence of my profession. If I could, it would cease to be my profession. You don’t understand. Naturally. You are not expected to understand. But at least let me assure you that what might seem to you duplicity and mystification are terribly necessary.”

He glanced at her face, which had become more bewildered than angry. “Don’t worry, you’ll not get hurt. I can see no need for your husband to learn anything you don’t wish him to learn concerning, er, Trevelyan”—he lingered sternly over the name as if he personally disapproved of it—“provided you are frank with me.”

“Are you a detective, or something?”

He considered, smiling again. “A something—I think we’d better settle for that.”

“Are you working with Howard?”

“We have certain objectives in common.”

Mrs Croll looked at the door. Then she crossed the room and settled in her habitual place on the sofa. Her face was turned fully towards Ross. She ran her tongue-tip over her lips before she spoke.

“Has anything happened to him?”

Ross shrugged. “We can’t trace him just at the moment.”

“He’s not back in hospital?”

Ross went quickly back over his mental copy of the Hopjoy reports. There had been a spell in hospital. Attacked with iron bar. Assailant thought to be Bulgarian. Never traced; probably smuggled out of Flaxborough dock. For victim, special compensation grant. But all that was some time ago. “No,” said Ross, “I think he got over that all right.”

“I was terribly worried. That’s where he came down...” She nodded towards the window. “Right on top of an old kennel that used to stand there. I thought Ben had killed him...”

“Ben?”

“My husband. He threw Howard out of the bedroom window.”

Ross stared at her, trying to bore through to the motives for the lie. Was she simply the willing victim of sexual fantasy? Or had someone coached her in a deliberately discreditable explanation of Hopjoy’s injuries?

“Tell me about it.”

She raised a hand and moved the middle finger lightly round the braided coil of her hair. The bunched strands shone, thought Ross, like the newly baked croissants of the Orgerus Region. Her frown was doubtful. “I don’t think I ought to say any more. I promised Howard...”

He leaned forward and grasped her shoulder. Tightening the grip, he saw a flicker of gratification in her eyes before the heavy lids drew down in white, lazy assent. The long kiss he gave her was an interrogation subtly wavering on the borders of brutality. Before it was over, she half opened her eyes and moaned through his teeth, like a prisoner entreating merciful execution.

Ross disengaged with controlled, skilful gradualness. As might a superb driver cast his eye over his engine after a trial burst of speed, he made a brief inward check of the muscular and glandular apparatus of his prowess, He dismissed as imaginary a touch of breathlessness, a fleeting impression of cramp in his right shoulder. No, these were nothing; the old mastery was unimpaired. He prepared to inaugurate the second, the behold-my-need phase. As he gazed earnestly down into her eyes, he set off at irregular but artistic intervals a tiny tic at the corner of his now tightly compressed mouth. He raised one eyebrow in mute request for licence, while simultaneously contracting the other to indicate the irresistibility of his desire. This refined and difficult performance had never failed to win compliance with the subsequent phase of his technique, the tactile assessment and breach of dress fastenings and his hands’ assured colonization of their discoveries.

But at this point Ross’s calculated progression was disrupted utterly and with no hope of the re-establishment of his control. With a cry like that of a teased and hungry seal seizing a dangled fish, Bernadette suddenly arched and twisted her body, pincered him between iron-like legs, and bore him to the floor, where she proceeded to chew his neck, shoulder and ear with every indication of determination and delight. Within seconds, the rhythm of seduction had been checked, perverted, and monstrously accelerated in reverse. Through the hot clamour of Bernadette’s love-making, Ross seemed to hear, as if from outer space, the thin, mocking laughter of enemies.

An hour and ten minutes later, Ross was making his way back to the car while Bernadette Croll, her face as animated as a calf’s, watched a pan of potatoes and cabbage frying for her husband’s tea.

Ross felt like the survivor of an ambush. He glanced wearily at the peewits that glided and side-slipped above his head and plunged to the furrows in an untidy, tumbling descent as if they, like him, had been drained of impetus. Yet he felt neither self-pity nor rancour. What mattered now was to sift from the more embarrassing memories of the past hour the story about Hopjoy that he had been able to extract from his conquest during the few and brief periods of respite from her importunities.

Hopjoy, as his own reports indicated, had called at the Crolls’ farm in the first instance to make inquiries about some European labourers who were employed there. On that and subsequent visits, it was Mrs Croll whom he had seen. The farmer, Benjamin Croll, spent all daylight hours in his fields except at mealtimes, which were strictly predictable. Mrs Croll had told ‘Howard Trevelyan’ what she knew and what since she had been able, on his instructions, to find out about the three workers, but this amounted to little and seemed innocent. It had been nice, though, to see Howard once or twice in each otherwise killingly boring week and she had been thrilled and proud when he told her—on his third visit—that he was a British counter-espionage agent.

Ross dwelt a moment on this somewhat surprising circumstance. He did not think the girl was lying when she said the confidence had come from Hopjoy. There must, therefore, have been some very compelling reason for the breaking of so elementary a rule of security. Had Hopjoy hoped thereby to draw his quarry into the open? To offer himself as bait? If so, it meant the situation had become critical.

Such a likelihood was strengthened by Hopjoy’s urgent assertion to the girl, whom obviously he had decided to accept as an active ally, that his life was in danger. She had responded by hiding him in her bedroom on a number of occasions when the absence of her husband at Flaxborough market might have encouraged the enemy to arrange a convenient accident.

The accident when it did come was of entirely unexpected authorship. Not sharing his wife’s knowledge of the situation at the farm, Croll had returned early from a cancelled ram sale and gone straight up to the bedroom to change his clothes. He had brushed introductions aside, and, according to Mrs Croll, ‘behaved dreadfully’.

Ross opened the gate into the lane and thoughtfully latched it behind him. Who, in fact, had been Hopjoy’s assailant? Was it really Croll, the misunderstanding husband, who, if his wife’s story were to be credited, had regretted his impulsiveness, picked the unconscious man from the roof of the dog kennel and driven him to hospital with a tale of a fall from a stack?

Or had Bernadette’s account—so sharply at variance with the F.7 reports—been concocted and rehearsed in fear of reprisals from the organization that had spirited back to the East the practitioner with the iron bar?

Within fifty yards of the Bentley, in which he saw glimmering the pallid paraboloid of Pumphrey’s skull, Ross paused to listen. The sound of the tractor engine, to which he had kept tuned a wary ear during the whole time he had spent in the farmhouse, was in the air no longer. Its sudden extinction loosed a third and startling possibility into his brain.

Was it Benjamin Croll himself who had been the real object of Hopjoy’s investigations? Whose agent had struck too clumsily? Who then prepared in person and with deadly thoroughness to finalize Hopjoy’s elimination at the villa in Beatrice Avenue?

Chapter Twelve

Mr Alfred Blossom, proprietor of the South Circuit Garage, Flaxborough, received with considerable scepticism his foreman’s report that one of four carboys of battery acid had disappeared from the yard at the side of the servicing bay. “Even our blokes couldn’t lose a thing like that,” he declared. “And who the hell would want to pinch it? You’d better count them again.”

But not all Mr Blossom’s homely humour, developed over long years of stonewalling the complaints of milched motorists, could alter the fact that where four carboys had stood there were now only three. So he stared awhile at the empty space, bent to retrieve a small object that shone in the shadow of the next caged and straw-pillowed bottle, and put through a telephone call to the police.

There the matter rested until Inspectdr Purbright’s request for a check on all local garages, wholesale chemists and factories for news of missing sulphuric acid struck a chord in the memory of the clerk who had filed the peculiar little item from South Circuit.

Purbright found Mr Blossom an affable informant, graced with that air of sincerity and solicitude characteristic of the habitual inflator of invoices.

“It was the queerest thing,” said Mr Blossom. “I mean, we’ve had stuff disappear before. It goes on all the time, as a matter of fact. Between ourselves, I don’t make much of it. Put it down as wastage—sort of evaporation, you know. But a bloody great thing like that... Dangerous too. And it’s not as if you could flog it.” A good foot shorter than the policeman, he stood with his head tilted sharply upward like a bespectacled mole.

“Have you any idea of how it could have been taken?”

“Oh, in a car or on a truck, I suppose. People are always in and out of a place like this. We don’t watch everybody all the time. Some poor barmy sod probably took a fancy to the thing and heaved it into his boot when no one was looking.” He spread his hands and smiled forgiveness.

“They’re pretty heavy, though, aren’t they?”

“About a hundredweight apiece. A fairly strong bloke could manage one on his own.”

“When you talk of people being in and out, you mean customers, I suppose.”

“That’s right. They just bring their cars into the yard there or back them into the shop. Some of them might want to help themselves to the air line, or a grease gun. We don’t bother so long as they’re not in the way.”

“Free and easy.”

Mr Blossom shrugged. “Why not? You can’t run a garage like a jewellers.”

“You feel that this thing must have been pinched during the daytime?”

“I really haven’t thought about it. As I said, I expect some idiot whipped it on the spur of the moment. He wouldn’t do that at night, would he? In the dark, I mean.”

Purbright walked to the corner of the L-shaped yard, looked round it, and returned. Mr Blossom forestalled comment. “Oh, yes, it’s open to the street. There’s nothing to stop anybody coming this far at any time if they wanted to.”

“Or if they knew these carboys were kept here and happened to want one.”

Mr Blossom slightly relaxed his smile to signify regret of the world’s waywardness and blinked. Purbright saw the set of pale blue concentric circles dissolve from the thick, upturned lenses and then spread back, more watery than before.

“Do you happen to keep a list of your customers, Mr Blossom?”

“We do, yes.”

“I wonder if I might take a quick look at it.”

Mr Blossom turned and led the way across the shop and up an open wooden staircase to his office. He pulled out the drawer of a small box file and graciously stepped aside.

The names were in alphabetical order. Purbright saw that Hopjoy’s card had a little scarlet disc gummed neatly to the upper left-hand corner. There were a few others similarly decorated. The name Periam was not listed.

“May I ask what the red circles mean?”

Mr Blossom peered innocently at the open file. “Oh, it’s just a sort of private mark we use in the accounting system...”

“Bad payers?”

“Well...” Mr Blossom spread his hands. “Oh, by the way...” He unlocked and opened the top drawer of his desk and handed Purbright a heavy cigarette lighter. “Found it on the scene of the crime. None of my chaps had lost it.”

Purbright turned the lighter over in his hand. It looked expensively durable and efficient but bore neither decoration nor brand name. “Might be helpful. Thanks.” He slipped the lighter into his pocket and pencilled a note of receipt.

“By the way, I notice you’ve done work on a car belonging to a man called Hopjoy, of Beatrice Avenue. Does he always bring it in himself?”

“The Armstrong, you mean. No, not always. A friend of his drives as well. The servicing’s not done in his name, though.”

“What’s the friend called?”

Mr Blossom wrinkled his helpful nose. “Perry, I think...no, Periam. He keeps a cigarette shop.”

But doesn’t smoke, Purbright added to himself. “All right, Mr Blossom. We’ll let you know if your magnum turns up.”

Not to be outdone in jocularity, Mr Blossom sang out in rasping baritone: “And if one green bottle should accidentally fall...” and wrung Purbright’s hand like an old friend.

Back at police headquarters, the inspector found Ross and Pumphrey awaiting him. The Chief Constable, faced with a bewildering variety of requests for information about a one-legged snooker player, a barber, a farmer, and a Scandinavian pig slaughterer, had gravely assured his questioners that “Mr Purbright handles all that sort of thing” and gone home to do some, gardening.

Purbright listened attentively until his visitors, judging him to have been put squarely in the picture, invited him to deliver reciprocal revelation.

He rose. “I think, gentlemen, that the best thing will be to call in a couple of our local experts.”

Pumphrey looked startled. “I don’t know about that, inspector. You realize all this is top secret...” He glanced at Ross.

Purbright leaned against the door frame. He sighed. “I don’t pretend to be an encyclopaedia, you know. Some of my men have a much wider range; they might save you a lot of time.”

“That’s all right, Purbright,” Ross said. “I’m sure you can question your chaps in a way that won’t set any rabbits away.”

When the inspector re-entered the room five minutes later, he was accompanied by Sergeant Love, looking as pink and innocent as if Purbright had just recruited him from a Dresden pastoral, and by a genial mountain whom he introduced as Sergeant Malley, the coroner’s officer. The inspector arranged chairs so that while the two sergeants and the men from London faced each other, symmetry suggestive of opposing quiz teams was avoided. Then he sat down behind his desk, lit a cigarette, and leaned back.

“George Tozer... Now, then, let’s hear what you know about Mr Tozer.” He blew a cloud of smoke at the ceiling.

Love and Malley glanced uncertainly at each other in mutual suspicion of having been drawn into some absurd game.

“But...but you know old George, inspector. The barber. Down in...” Malley scowled and snapped his fingers.

“Spindle Lane,” supplied Love.

“That’s it—Spindle Lane. The Rubber King.”

“You know George, sir,” insisted Love, looking at Purbright with concern.

“Of course I know him. But these gentlemen don’t. And it’s for their benefit I’m asking these things, not mine.”

“Oh, I see.” Malley turned his big friendly face to Pumphrey. “He’s a rum old sod, is George. Ugly as vomit. But he’d help anyone, wouldn’t he, Sid?”

Love grunted confirmation.

“They reckon it was George who fixed up Lady Beryl with that third husband of hers...”

“Fourth,” corrected Love.

“Fourth, was it? Never mind. That book salesman with one ear, I mean. Everyone reckoned Lady Beryl had had it for good when her third chucked in. She’d started drinking hair restorer by then. That’s how she came to know George, I suppose...”

Pumphrey, who had been nodding and making impatient noises in his throat, thrust in a question. “What are Tozer’s political affiliations?”

Malley’s eyes widened. He looked round at Love, who did his best to be helpful at such short notice. “Lady Beryl’s Conservative,” he said.

Malley regarded Pumphrey once more. “That’s right, she is. Although they don’t risk letting her open fêtes any more, of course. Mind you, I’m not saying George Tozer’s a snob—you’re Labour, perhaps, are you, sir?—well, the Labour people have done some good in their way. That’s neither here nor there, though; I’m sure George wouldn’t let your politics stop him doing you a good turn if he can...”

“He’s a bit of a flanneller, mind,” Love saw fit to warn Ross.

“Oh, aye,” agreed the coroner’s officer. “Reminds you of the barber’s cat, doesn’t he, Sid? All wind and .,.” He checked himself at the sight of Pumphrey’s frown of exasperation. “Still, I’ll say this for him—there’s many a family in this town would be too big to be fed if it hadn’t been for George’s eightpenny reliables.”

Ross shifted a little in his chair. “Perhaps we’re not quite on the right tack, sergeant. Can you tell us anything about this man’s associates?”

There was a short silence while Malley and Love looked at each other and then at Purbright. The inspector, however, was unhelpfully preoccupied with the tip of his cigarette.

Love scratched his head. “I’ve an idea that he’s in a team of bellringers...”

“They reckon he’s quite religious,” added Malley, cautiously. “On the side, like...”

“But I don’t think he’s what you might call associated with anybody specially,” wound up Love. “I mean, why should he be?”

The hint of defiance in his voice earned a sharp stare from Pumphrey. “The man who seems to have no associations, sergeant, is generally one who has taken good care to conceal them.”

Ross beamed a take-no-notice smile at Love. “So much for Mr Tozer, I think. Now then, what about...what’s his name. Purbright?—the hopalong character...”

“Crutchey Anderson.”

Malley chuckled. He winked at Pumphrey. “You want to keep clear of that old villain; by God, you do. Don’t tell me he’s been asking you to teach him how to play snooker. Oh, Christ!”

Ross quickly intervened. “It was I who came across Anderson, sergeant, not Mr Pumphrey. I’d like to know who he is, that’s all.”

“Bookie’s runner, that’s what he is. Used to be on the shrimping boats at Chalmsbury until he put one leg into the shrimp copper when he was drunk. It was cooked to the bone before they could pull him clear. But if he thinks he can touch you for a pint, he’ll give you a tale about sharks. It is sharks, isn’t it, Sid?”

“Mostly. Except when it’s frostbite at Archangel.”

“Archangel,” Ross repeated, half to himself. He looked across at the inspector. “But tell me, Purbright, surely bookmakers don’t employ runners any more. I presume Flaxborough has betting shops like everywhere else.”

“Oh, yes. But we still consider them rather infra dig. They look to the working classes like sub-offices of the National Assistance Board. And the middle classes seem to think they’re something to do with the Co-op.”

“You mean street betting still goes on here?”

“I’m sure it does. After all, furtiveness confers a certain cachet; don’t you find that, Major Ross?”

“Anderson was once a sailor, you say.” It was Pumphrey speaking now. Purbright noticed his habit of jerking his long, pointed head forward and from side to side, as if his thoughts had to be continually shaken in their box to prevent them sticking together. “That means he could have established contacts abroad, doesn’t it?”

Malley grinned indulgently. “Abroad? If you call sandbanks two miles off the estuary abroad, I suppose he could. That’s as far as the shrimpers ever go.”

“To the best of your knowledge.” By lightly stressing the ‘your’, Pumphrey conjured the vision of a whole fleet of small boats slipping off to dark continental anchorages while Malley slept.

“What’s this fellow’s style of living?” Ross asked.

Love took his turn. “Squatter, I suppose you’d call him. One of those big Nissen huts on the old ack-ack site down Hunting’s Lane. He keeps a wife at each end of it. I’m told those two have never met. That seems a bit queer, though,” He looked inquiringly at Malley.

“That’s just a tale,” Malley said. “I saw the two of them pass in Woolworth’s the other day. They recognized each other, all right.”

Purbright looked at his watch. There was, he felt, a limit to the time he ought to spare from his own relatively uninspired prosecution of the Hopjoy case. He stubbed out his cigarette. There were no more questions about Crutchey Anderson, apparently. “That,” said Purbright, “brings us to Mr and Mrs Croll, out at Mumblesby. All right, sergeant.”

The others looked at Malley. He stroked the back of his head, seeking suitable words in which Mrs Croll might be sketched without intemperance. He cleared his throat. “I should say young Bernadette’s had more ferret than I’ve had hot dinners.”

Purbright translated. “It seems that she has something of a reputation for promiscuity.” He looked at Ross over his arched fingers. “Do you find that to the point, Major Ross?”

It was Pumphrey who fielded the question. “Security-wise, moral turpitude is always to the point, inspector. The...the person in whom we are interested was following a sound principle when he put Mrs Croll under surveillance.” He spoke aside to his companion, whose expression had stiffened a good deal: “This might be our best lead yet, you know.”

Malley gave a short laugh at the thought which had just occurred to him. “Funny we should have been on about old Tozer a minute ago. The talk is that he used to send young blokes out to keep Bernadette company.”

“Tozer did, you say?” Ross was suddenly attentive.

“Aye. He fancies himself in the matchmaking line, you know. They say he has a list of all the lonely wives in Flax. I don’t know about that, but old George is sharper than he looks; he soon finds from a customer whether he’s happily married or not and how much time he spends away from home. Mind you—“ Malley rubbed his chin—“I reckon George’ll think twice before he sends another stand-in for Ben Croll.”

Malley paused and patted out a crease in the front of his enormous uniform. He waited complacently.

“Why, what happened, Bill?” Purbright supplied, after an interval properly respectful to the coroner’s officer.

“Well, the last one damn nearly became a client of mine. Ben turned up and caught him. He chucked him through the bedroom window like a fork-load of sugar beet. Sykes in the path lab. at the General told me they had to operate the same night. The bloke was lucky to pull through.”

“What was his name?” Ross asked.

“I don’t know. No one could find out. They put Trevelyan on his case sheet but that wasn’t his name. Harton gave orders for the whole business to be kept quiet.”

“Harton?”

“The surgeon, Mr Ross. Sykes heard Harton tell the ward sister that it was a very special case and that no information was to be given to anybody.”

“Yes, but George Tozer would know, wouldn’t he?” Love put in. “Who the chap really was, I mean.”

“No doubt he does. And keeping it to himself. If Ben thought George had had anything to do with it, he’d run a muck-loader through his guts.”

“I might get something out of Mrs Croll,” suggested Love, hopefully.

Purbright levelled a pencil at him. “You stay away from Mumblesby, Sid. Good God, they even go in pairs to read meters in that parish.” He turned to Malley. “By the way, did you gather what the man’s injuries actually were?”

“No, they were hushed up, too. But Harton does abdominals. Practically nothing else.”

Purbright raised his brows at Ross.

“Rassmussen,” Ross said.

“Ah, yes; Rassmussen. Anyone know who Rassmussen is?”

Love volunteered. “He’s a Dane. He used to have a farm of his own at Pollard Bridge until the Government took all that land over. I think he does odd jobs mostly nowadays. Slaughtering, for one. Some of the farmers still like to have a pig killed for their own use now and again, but not one in a hundred knows how to tackle it. So they send for Hicks here in Flaxborough—he keeps a butcher’s shop—or else Rassmussen.”

“There’d be nothing unusual in Croll wanting a pig slaughtered, I suppose?” said Ross.

“What, right now, you mean, sir?”

“Yes, now.”

Love smirked. “It’s funny you should ask that. They did have one killed about a fortnight ago, but someone pinched half the carcass from where it was hanging in the barn during the night. Croll rang us up about it. He was swearing blue murder.”

“Who did that killing?”

“Hicks, I should think. I don’t know, though.”

“So Croll might have sent for Rassmussen since then—having lost a big part of the first animal.”

“He might. If Hicks couldn’t come the second time.”

Ross inclined his head. “Just one other thing, sergeant. You said the Government had taken over Rassmussen’s farm. How did that come about?”

The question seemed to surprise Love a little. “Well, all the land round there was taken. Compulsory purchase, I suppose. It was for that big what d’you call it at Thimble Bay.”

Chapter Thirteen

The next day, assiduous Sergeant Warlock, pert and primed, stuck his head round Purbright’s door and announced: “We’ve done the car.”

He enumerated what suggestive finds there had been. A few fragments of straw lay on the floor of the boot—a capacious boot, Warlock agreed—and four or five bloodstains were in the same place. The straw was of a kind similar to wisps in the garage at Beatrice Avenue and in the wardrobe in the late Mrs Periam’s bedroom. It was safe to assume the trail to be that of the acid carboy.

The blood was less easily explained. The stains were of recent origin but decidedly not human. “And there you are, squire,” concluded Warlock, with the air of an energetic retriever dropping a particularly unimpressive rabbit.

Purbright stared thoughtfully at the pile of Hopjoy’s belongings that still lay in a filing tray at the side of his desk. “Tell me, sergeant: this business of bloodstains... You can tell fairly easily whether they are human or animal, I take it.”

“Oh, rather. And the various human groups are identifiable. But only as groups, mind; we don’t label individual chromosomes yet.”

“Quite. But suppose blood structure is damaged badly—destroyed, in fact. What chance would your analysis have then?”

“None, obviously.” Warlock’s tone implied that he considered the question pretty wet.

“Let me put it another way. Suppose some blood, flesh and bone were reduced right down to basic chemical constituents—carbon, water, calcium salts, and so on—is there any possible way of deciding what sort of an animal they belonged to?”

“You don’t really want an answer to that, do you?”

Purbright rose and walked slowly to the window. He stood looking out, his hands clasped behind him. “You know, this should have occurred to us before.”

Warlock’s usual posture of athletic eagerness had been abandoned. He looked anxious. “If you’re thinking of the drain washings...”

“I am, indeed.”

“Yes, well I’d better say straight away that there’s no way of proving whether that sludge was man, woman, or the Archbishop of Canterbury’s pet kangaroo.” He waited, then waved a hand. “Oh, but surely to God...I mean this bod of yours has vanished—there couldn’t be a more obvious tie-up.”

“That’s just what I’m afraid of.” Purbright turned. “There are several things about this case that look a little too obvious. And you didn’t imagine I’d forgotten that doctored hammer, did you?”

“That was queer, certainly. As,” Warlock added firmly, “I pointed out.”

“You did. And I think you deserve to know something else. The presumed victim was—or is—an exceptionally fly gentleman, very hard pressed by creditors and husbands. His speciality was trading on his employment in a highly secret and I suppose romantic profession.”

“So that explains Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee.”

“Oh, you’ve met Major Ross and his colleague, have you?”

“Met them? I’ve practically been tried in camera by them. That one who looks like a pox-doctor’s clerk—the little bloke with a sharp nose—he was bloody offensive. I told him so.” Warlock’s recollection of the encounter restored his restless elasticity. He danced his weight from one foot to the other and threw a shadow punch at the wall. “Never saw a weasel with ringworm before. Ah, well; press on.” Opening the door, he glanced back quizzically at Purbright. “D’you really think all this was a put up job, then?”

The inspector smiled, but made no reply.

“Oh, by the way, I nearly forgot about this...” Warlock came back into the room, fishing from his breast pocket a glass tube which he tossed down on the desk. “Fibrafon think it’s from a baby’s hairbrush, Portland Plastics say fishing line, and Hoffman’s plump for a retaining thread in a gyro compass. Take your pick.”

Purbright recognized the nylon strand gleaned from the Beatrice Avenue plumbing. “Not terribly helpful, are they?”

“I’ll try a few more if you like. But I must say it seems a matter of asking silly questions and getting silly answers.”

The inspector put the tube aside. “Forget about it for now. There’s no point in putting your people to more trouble while there’s a possibility of our having been led up a garden. Which reminds me...”—he looked up at the clock—“that I ought to be having a word with the Chief Constable.”

Mr Chubb was in his greenhouse, counting out his cuttings. He looked cool and tall and grey behind the glass. Purbright closed the side gate, with its enamelled NO to hawkers, circulars and canvassers, and skirted a small crescent of lawn. The grass was littered with rubber bones, savaged tennis balls, and other no longer identifiable articles associated with the appeasement of Mr Chubb’s Yorkshire terriers, whose excreta, marvellously variegated, was everywhere. The animals themselves, Purbright noted gratefully, were absent; he supposed them to be dragging a triple-leashed, panting Mrs Chubb on their daily expedition against the peace and hygiene of the neighbourhood.

The Chief Constable acknowledged Purbright’s arrival with a small patient smile through the panes. The smile announced his readiness to put the public weal before petunias and duty above all delights. There clung to him as he emerged from the green-house the warm, aromatic redolence of tomato foliage.

Purbright was waved to a seat on a rustic bench screened by laurels from the next-door garden, where the wife of the City Surveyor could be heard scraping a burned saucepan bottom and sustaining with a periodic “oh” or “did she?” the muffled monotone of a kitchen visitor’s narration.

Mr Chubb leaned lightly against a trellised arch and gazed into the middle distance.

“This case from Beatrice Avenue, sir,” Purbright began. “I’d like to give you what we’ve gathered so far and to hear your opinion of it. Our first impressions may have been mistaken.”

“Ah...” Mr Chubb nodded almost approvingly. “That’s always to be expected, Mr Purbright. There’s no discredit in finding one’s calculations at fault. Seeds don’t always produce what’s on the packet, you know.”

“No, sir.”

Mr Chubb relinquished a few inches of his Olympian advantage and put his hand on the back of the bench. “I’ll tell you one thing, my boy. I’m very pleased that you’ve pegged away at this thing instead of leaving it to the heavies. Major Ross and his man are absolutely capable, I’ve no doubt, but outsiders never seem to understand just why people in a place like this behave as they do. It’s important, you know. Very.” The assertive frown cleared and Mr Chubb’s face went back aloft. “Sorry to have interrupted. Carry on.”

“Just before I left the office”—Purbright delved into the briefcase he was holding—“I had an idea about the anonymous letter that started off this affair. You’ll remember it, of course.” He handed a creased, pale blue sheet to the Chief Constable. “And now look at this, sir: it was among the papers we found in Hopjoy’s bedroom.”

Mr Chubb turned back the cover of the writing pad Purbright had taken from his case. He compared the letter with the top sheet of the pad, then smoothed one over the other. They corresponded in size, colour and texture.

“You can follow the ball-point indentations that have come through,” Purbright pointed out. “They persist for two or three pages down.”

“Not very anonymous now,” remarked Mr Chubb drily. He watched Purbright re-fold the letter and slip it into its parent pad. Then he frowned. “What the dickens are we supposed to make of it all? Some sort of a joke, or what?”

“It would have been no joke for Periam if he’d been convicted of murder, sir.”

“No, by jove, it wouldn’t,” murmured Mr Chubb.

“And yet,” said Purbright, “he very well might have been. The evidence that he killed his lodger and then disposed of his body is very impressive at first sight. We get this letter and naturally presume it’s from a neighbour who has heard a quarrel and might even have seen something suggestive of violence. It makes particular mention of the bathroom—a rather convincing touch, somehow. We have no choice but to investigate. And there they all are, the signs of very nasty goings on—bloodstains, wax coating on the bath, acid burns on the floor, a hammer stuck up with blood and hair. And buried in the garden, the smashed carboy, whose iron basket—too big to bury and too tough to be broken up—has been hastily pushed out of sight in a wardrobe.

“We look in the drains—quite predictably, of course—and sure enough they prove that a body has been destroyed by acid. Whose? Obviously, the loser of the midnight fight in the bathroom which was so considerately reported to us by a watchful neighbour. The winner, if and when we trace him, is bound to be the murderer.

“The survivor, Gordon Periam, is duly found. He is not far away, but that fact in itself is consistent with the self-confidence of the sort of man who can commit and conceal an exceptionally horrid crime. Indeed, all the circumstances in which he is found (as you doubtless recognized yourself, sir) are classically in line. The refuge in sex relations, the flashy hotel with its novel comforts and expense, enjoyment of the victim’s car as well as his girl...the pattern’s complete and absolutely damning.”

The inspector paused to light a cigarette. Mr Chubb regarded him very thoughtfully. He was trying to persuade himself that the point about the classic behaviour of murderers had, indeed, already occurred to him.

“And that, sir,” resumed Purbright, “was the situation as it was presented to us. ‘Presented’ is the operative word, of course. It could have gone straight to the Director of Public Prosecutions there and then, and I dare say that Periam’s indictment would have been automatic. But you were wise not to rush it, sir.”

The Chief Constable modestly turned his gaze to a group of border plants near his foot.

“It was almost inevitable,” Purbright went on, “that some part of so elaborate a set-up would prove faulty. The lab. people spotted it. Those hairs on the hammer were Hopjoy’s all right—or at least they corresponded with some found on his clothing—but they hadn’t arrived there through his having been bashed over the head. According to Warlock, they’d been snipped and stuck on.”

“Yes, but the blood...”

“It doesn’t need too much of a self-inflicted cut, possibly with the corner of a razor blade, to provide enough blood to be smeared on a hammer head. And perhaps a few splashes around the place as well.”

“There was a quarrel, though, Mr Purbright. I don’t think we should let ourselves be led too far away from that fact by chaps with microscopes.”

“Oh, yes, there was a row,” Purbright agreed. “Periam didn’t deny that, as he could very well have persisted in doing. But I think I told you that he said it was a very one-sided affair, with Hopjoy doing all the shouting. If we accept that, might we not consider whether the noise had a special object—to disturb neighbours and put in their minds the presumption of a quarrel?”

“And were they disturbed?”

“Those I’ve spoken to myself say they heard nothing. But Sergeant Love is making inquiries in the houses that back on to Beatrice Avenue. The people there are far more likely to have heard whatever there was to hear; the sound would travel straight across the gardens.”

The Chief Constable nodded. “All right. Now about this business of the body—how do you explain that away? The stuff in the drains and all that.”

“Have you ever read anything about cannibalism, sir?”

“Not avidly, Mr Purbright, no.”

“Well, it seems that human flesh quite closely resembles pork.”

“Indeed.”

“And I learned more or less by chance yesterday that half a pig carcass was stolen recently from a farm where Hopjoy had been a regular and quite intimate visitor. In the boot of that car of his, and in one or two places at the house, Warlock turned up traces of animal blood.”

For nearly a minute, Mr Chubb silently regarded an earwig’s progress along one of the trellis spars.

“I suppose we have to remember,” he said at last, “that tom-foolery of that kind was just the fellow’s line of country. It’s perfectly disgraceful, though, when you think of all the money that’s being spent on the intelligence service. The trouble is, they live in a world of their own. I can’t see that there’s anything we can do about him. I mean there’s nothing we can charge him with.”

Purbright pursed his lips. “Conduct likely to lead...”

“...to a breach of the peace?” Mr Chubb capped the phrase with a sort of sad derision. “You can see his people letting us go ahead with that one, can’t you? Worse than the blasted Diplomatic Corps. He’ll turn up somewhere else with a cock and bull story and start working up a new set of creditors, just you see.”

“There’s rather more to this,” said Purbright slowly, “than mere debt-dodging. A man can arrange his own disappearance without leaving somebody else to face a murder charge. In this case, a great deal of trouble and ingenuity was spent specifically on the incrimination of Periam. But the only thing poor old Periam wasn’t carefully provided with was a motive. Why should he have wanted to kill Hopjoy? If anyone had a motive for murder it was Hopjoy himself—the man whose girl Periam had appropriated.”

Mr Chubb considered. “I see your point. But surely Hopjoy was a bit of a blackguard where women were concerned. Would he have been all that upset about one in particular?”

“Promiscuity and jealousy are by no means incompatible, sir.”

The Chief Constable raised his brows.

“In fact, the more sexually adventurous a man is, the more violently he tends to resent trespass on his own preserves.”

“Oh,” said Mr Chubb, meekly. “You think then...”—he turned to see where the earwig had got to—“we should be wrong to let the whole thing drop?”

Purbright rose. “I quite agree with you, sir; we should keep an eye on things a little longer. Hopjoy certainly ought to be traced, even if Major Ross tries to go against your judgment.”

Mr Chubb resolutely picked the earwig from the trellis and trod on it.

“After all,” said Purbright, “there has been, in a sense, one attempt on Periam’s life. When it is seen to have failed, there may be another—on less unorthodox lines.”

Chapter Fourteen

To the multitude of elusives for whom watch is proclaimed to be kept at British ports, rail termini and airports, was added the name of Brian Hopjoy. If encountered, he was to be asked simply to get into touch with the Chief Constable of Flaxborough. The request had been difficult to frame. “What do we say we want him for?” Mr Chubb had asked; “...to collect his hat?” He had carefully refrained from mentioning the matter to Ross or Pumphrey, although he did ask, at Purbright’s suggestion, if he might borrow from them the photograph of Hopjoy which, as far as anyone could find out, was the only one in existence. Pumphrey, looking as if he had been casually requested to assassinate the Prime Minister when he next happened to be in London, had emphasized with some asperity the topness of the secrecy involved and begged him to be more circumspect.

The withholding of the photograph made local inquiries more difficult, too. Purbright prepared a composite of descriptions offered by the next-door neighbours, Mr Tozer, and the manager of the Neptune Hotel—who seemed especially eager to help—and gave it to the two plain clothes men who could be spared for visits to railway stations and bus depots and taxi firms within a radius of three or four miles. The usual feats of memory were forthcoming: Hopjoys had entrained for London, Birmingham and Newcastle simultaneously with their journeys by road to Lincoln, Cambridge, Swindon and Keswick.

Sergeant Love, conscientiously but fruitlessly urging the residents of Pawson’s Lane to recall sounds of angry altercation in a house ‘over the back’, found time to present the inspector with a theory he had evolved on his own.

“This chap was in hospital fairly recently, according to Bill Malley, wasn’t he?”

“He was. A lover’s tiff, I gather—with the husband.”

“Yes, well if it was something serious he might still need treatment. You know—you hear of fellows on the run who have to nip into a doctor’s when they use up their special pills.”

“That field’s a bit narrow, Sid. We should have heard if Hopjoy were a diabetic, surely. Still, it’s worth a try; that description badly needs strengthening, if only with a scar or two.”

The sergeant, one of whose private dreams accommodated Editor Love, waistcoated and dynamic, appraising a re-plated page one, set off again for Pawson’s Lane with his mind embannered by SCARFACED PLAYBOY SOUGHT IN WARD TEN: MUST RENEW MIRACLE DRUG.

No such dramatic and socially desirable potentialities appeared to have occurred to Sister Howell, in charge of the male surgical ward at Flaxborough General Hospital. She was a cool, smooth, stiffly laundered woman, with an indestructible smile guarding the pink sugar fortress of her face while her eyes were absent on their continual darting quest for faults. Purbright delivered his inquiry with the sense of being accounted no more important than one of the dust motes that submissively descended through a shaft of sunlight to the level of Sister Howell’s sensible shoes.

She heard him out. Then she slightly re-arranged the smile (the eyes still could not be spared, even for the briefest introduction) and told him that much as she would like to be obliging, he would, of course, understand that it was quite, quite impossible to divulge confidential medical matters even to an inspector of police.

Purbright assured her that he did appreciate and respect her loyalty, but wondered if perhaps she could modify it in the wider interests of justice. It had, unhappily, become the task of the police to trace her former patient, who had disappeared, and knowledge of his late injuries or ailments might be of considerable assistance.

“I’m sorry,” said Sister Howell, folding fingers devotionally over her apron.

“Then perhaps if I were to refer to Mr Harton personally...”

The eyes, instantly obedient to recall in appropriate circumstances, were trained upon him at last. “Mr Harton is a very busy man. He’s probably in theatre. I really couldn’t...”

The door at the end of the corridor swung open abruptly. A procession bore down upon them. Sister Howell plucked Purbright’s sleeve and drew him against the wall. “There’s Mr Harton now,” she whispered urgently. Purbright wondered if he were expected to kneel.

The surgeon advanced with a slow, easy stroll. Keeping precisely level with him were the short, sturdy legs of the Matron, to the rhythm of whose ponderous trot her cassock-red dewlap rose and fell. Harton and his consort were closely followed by a young nurse who carried a stack of folders and gazed idolatrously at the back of the surgeon’s head. Then came a pair of house physicians in white coats, unbuttoned and trailing black tentacles from the pockets. Seven or eight students, murmuring to one another and looking at their hands, shuffled along in the rear. Every now and again the parade was halted while Mr Harton paid particular, head-inclined attention to the Matron’s commentary and rewarded her with a mellifluent ring of laughter.

As the procession was about to wheel off into the ward, Purbright politely but firmly removed Sister Howell’s restraining hand and stepped forward. He smiled apologetically at the Matron, then introduced himself to Harton. The surgeon, imperturbably gracious, took him aside into the empty duty room. Through the closed glass door Purbright saw the retinue congeal into attitudes of respectful patience.

Harton, whom Purbright had thought it politic to give fairly fully the reasons for his inquiry, nodded with good-humoured sagacity. Nearly as tall as the policeman, he had skin the colour of an advertisement for tinned ham. This slightly incredible wholesomeness of complexion was emphasized (quite horridly, some thought) by strong, disciplined waves of prematurely white hair. His were the bright, steady eyes of one who has learned to render charm intimidating. The flawless cheeks flanked an unexpectedly tiny, drawn-in mouth, his only unrelaxed feature, which ambition had prinked like a flan edging. When he spoke, which he did most musically, his lower teeth were displayed more than the upper.

“My dear inspector...”—he felt behind him for the table and leaned against it with some of his weight supported upon spread fingertips—“you mustn’t take all this medical etiquette too seriously. It’s designed to give our dear old girls something to occupy them.” He grinned boyishly through the window at the Matron.

“So you’ve no objection to giving me this information, sir?”

“None whatsoever.”

Purbright waited, but Harton merely continued to regard him placidly.

“Well, sir...?”

“Well, inspector?”

“You were about to tell me the nature of the operation you performed upon Mr Trevelyan.”

“Oh, no; that is not so.”

Purbright stared. “Perhaps we’ve misunderstood each other, sir.”

“Ah, possibly we have. What I said was that I, I personally, you understand, have no objection to telling you what you wish to know. That is quite true. But I did not say that no objection existed, did I?”

The inspector sighed. Here, he reflected, was the type of man who would enjoy confusing shop assistants with pedantic pleasantries.

“The fact is, inspector”—Harton thrust a hand deep into his trousers pocket and energetically stirred some coins—“that I simply am not at liberty to follow my personal inclination to tell you what was the matter with our mutual friend.”

“Oh, you do know, then, sir?”

Harton smiled away the calculated impertinence. “Certainly I know. Surgeons do occasionally remember what they have done and why. In their own way they are possibly as methodical as policemen.”

“I suppose that what you really mean to say, sir, is that you have received instructions to divulge nothing concerning Mr Trevelyan’s stay in hospital?”

“I must say I do not much care for the word ‘instructions’ but, roughly speaking, that is the position, inspector. Dare I whisper that old cliché ‘national security’?” Elegantly, Harton drew himself erect and stepped to the door. “Incidentally, we found Mr Trevelyan a most charming fellow; I do hope your anxiety regarding him proves to have been groundless.”

Placing a hand lightly on Purbright’s shoulder, he opened the door with the other. “I am sure it will, you know.” He patted him out and jauntily gestured the procession to re-form.

Purbright drove at once to Brockleston.

Among the cars in the Neptune forecourt was Hopjoy’s Armstrong, which he had ordered to be placed again at the disposal of Mr and Mrs Periam. The honeymooners he found playing clock golf in the hotel grounds. Doreen, her coiled plaits looking like some kind of protective sporting gear, wore a long pink cardigan over a flowered dress. Her husband was in flannel trousers and the dark brown blazer of the Flaxborough Grammar School Old Boys’ Association.

When he saw the inspector, he picked up his ball and led the girl forward. “Has Brian shown up yet?”

“I’m afraid not, Mr Periam.”

“Oh. We thought that’s what you’d come to tell us.” The solemn, femininely smooth face turned to the girl. “Didn’t we, darl?”

Periam grouped three of the bright canvas chairs at the edge of the putting green. They sat.

“No, Mr Hopjoy has not returned. I rather doubt if he will. But I think it’s only right for me to relieve your minds on one point.” Purbright glanced from one to the other. “It now looks as though we were mistaken in assuming that your friend was dead.”

Doreen seized her husband’s hand. “There! What did I say?” At Purbright she pouted in mock indignation. “And fancy chasing us with that ridiculous story when we hadn’t been married five minutes? It wasn’t what I’d call tactful.”

“It wasn’t, Mrs Periam. I’m sorry. But in the circumstances we hadn’t much choice.”

Periam looked at the handle of the putter he had laid across his knee. “That’s all right, inspector. It hasn’t been very nice for us—I mean we should have felt rather responsible if anything awful had happened to Bry—we did let him down, you know, darl—but the police couldn’t be blamed for that.” He raised his head and smiled wryly at Purbright. “Now you know what sort of capers you ask for when you run off with your best friend’s young lady.”

Doreen sighed and pressed Periam’s hand to her stomach. Hastily he withdrew it. “Oh, there’s one thing, inspector...the house. You have finished there, haven’t you? You see, we...”

“If you can wait just a couple of days, sir, everything will be put straight again. We’ll see to that for you, naturally.”

“And thanks for letting us have the car back.”

“Was it covered in blood and fingerprints?”

Periam cast a quick glance of rebuke at his wife. “Doreen, really...”

“I suppose,” Purbright said, “that you’ll settle down in the house when your holiday’s over. Or are you thinking of a change now you’re married?”

“No, we shan’t move. Not yet, anyway. It’s been home for so long, you know, and I am rather a home bird. Anyway, I’m sure mother wouldn’t have wished strangers to take it over.”

“I expect you know there are various odds and ends belonging to Mr Hopjoy. We’d rather like to hang on to them for the time being, but if you do hear from him perhaps you’ll let us have a forwarding address; would you mind doing that, sir?”

“Not at all.”

“There’s one other matter I’m mildly curious about, Mr Periam. A short while ago Mr Hopjoy was in hospital. I believe I know the circumstances in which he was injured—we needn’t go into them now—but I wondered if you could tell me what his injuries actually were.”

Periam ran a finger thoughtfully round his heavy, globular chin. “Well, not in doctor’s parlance, I can’t. But he had what I’d call a gammy foot.”

“How serious was it? I mean was there any permanent effect—scars, disfigurements, anything of that sort?”

“My goodness, no. He came home right as rain. Between you and I, I think old Bry had been coming the old soldier in hospital. He’d probably been giving the glad-eye to some pretty nurse.”

“He wasn’t disabled in any sense, then?”

“Not a bit of it, inspector. It would take more than a tumble to put Bry out of action, wouldn’t it, Darl?”

“Rather,” agreed Doreen. She had coyly abstracted a packet of biscuits from Periam’s pocket and was nibbling one after having prised it open to inspect its filling.

“He’s as strong as a horse,” Periam went on. The theme seemed to intrigue him. “I shouldn’t care to tangle with Bry when he’d got his dander up.” Purbright reflected that Hopjoy must have been sadly off form on the occasion of his tangling with Farmer Croll. Or was it in the matter of danders that Croll had enjoyed a decisive advantage?

Periam grasped his putter and looked inquiringly at the inspector.

Purbright rose. “I don’t think I need interrupt your game any longer. I’m sorry if I’ve been something of a...” He faltered, suddenly averse to making even conventional apology.

“...a skeleton at the feast?” suggested Periam, almost jocularly.

“Oh, but such a nice skeleton!” Purbright had the brief but disconcerting sensation of Doreen’s bosom being nuzzled roguishly against his arm. Then she was walking away and looking back at him over her shoulder as she munched another of Periam’s biscuits.

Sergeant Malley breathed hard but contentedly between puffs at a pipe in which seemed to be smouldering a compound of old cinema carpet and tar. He sat in the windowless little office in the police station basement where witnesses at forthcoming inquests were induced by the huge sergeant’s calm and kindness to give more or less lucid expression to their recollections of tragedy.

Malley, whom even inspectors and superintendents treated as host in his own confined quarters—if only because they could not bear to see him trying to uncork eighteen stone from an inadequate chair—listened without surprise to Purbright’s account of his call at the hospital.

“I could have told you that you’d be wasting your time. Harton’s about as obliging as an empty stamp machine. And those bloody women...” He shook his head.

“Look, Bill, I’ve no objection to these people playing at guess-what-God’s-up-to if that makes them happy. But I’d still like to find the character who started all this phoney M.I. Fivemanship.”

Malley wriggled forward a few inches and folded his arms on the desk. “If you’re really interested in that operation, I think I might be able to find you someone who’ll talk. He’s one of the theatre assistants and a pal of Jack Sykes—the bloke in the lab I was telling you about. Do you want me to have a go?”

“I wish you would. It may not be important, of course; Periam said Hopjoy just hurt his leg slightly and carried no sign, but I suppose he can’t know for certain.”

“Hurt his leg?”

“That’s right.”

“But Harton doesn’t do legs. He’s an innards man.”

“Oh.” Purbright considered. “Yes, you said something about that before. Then perhaps Hopjoy was just spinning Periam one of his celebrated tales.”

“Maybe.”

“I wonder why...Never mind—let me know if you get hold of Mr Sykes’s friend, won’t you.”

A face, thrust inquisitively into the narrow doorway, creased with nausea on encountering Sergeant Malley’s pipe fumes. “Christ!” said Sergeant Love, adding ’sir” when he discerned the inspector through the haze.

Purbright joined him in the corridor.

“I’ve gone right through the people in Pawson’s Lane, sir. And guess what?” Love’s eye glistened with something more than reaction to smoke.

“No, you tell me, Sid.” The inspector put a paternal arm round his shoulder.

“I’ve found the woman who wrote that anonymous letter.”

Purbright stared at him. “What anonymous letter?”

“The one we got about the do at Periam’s place. You know, sir. The thing that started all this.”

Chapter Fifteen

“My Dear Sidney, we know all about that letter. It wasn’t written by a neighbour. Hopjoy wrote it himself.”

Love shook his head. “I’m afraid I’m not with you, sir.”

“I said Hopjoy wrote it. He wasn’t terribly subtle; a pad of the same paper was among the stuff in his bedroom.”

Love grudgingly digested the information. “Well, all I can say is that there must have been two, and that the Cork woman’s got lost. It was one of the first things she said. ‘I feel rather bad about sending that letter,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to cause trouble.’ I told her not to worry about it because it hadn’t really made any difference and anyway she hadn’t put her name to it, then she cheered up a bit and said something about it being the least she could have done for the poor boy’s mother. I think,” Love added by way of explanation, “that she’s a bit clobby in the cockpit.”

“There are two women there; which one are you talking about?”

“The daughter. There wasn’t a squeak out of Ma. She just hovered.”

“You asked about the row in the bathroom?”

“Yes. She said she didn’t hear shouting or anything like that although she’d been watching the window while the light was on.”

“But if she was awake, surely she must have heard something. There’s not thirty yards between those houses. And even Periam admitted Hopjoy was yelling his head off. He of all people had nothing to gain by making that up: very much the reverse. Anyway, if there was no disturbance why the devil should she have taken it into her head to send off this letter she talks about?”

Love remained silent for a few seconds. Then, as if trying to compensate for some lapse of his own, he said: “Mind you, she did say she thought she heard a noise like breaking glass later on when she’d gone to bed. That could have been the acid thing, couldn’t it? And she said she got up again and saw somebody moving about in the garden.”

“I rather think,” Purbright said, “that I should have a word with Miss Cork myself. In the meantime, Sid...”—he drew from his pocket an envelope—“I wonder if you’d mind hawking this lighter around Hopjoy’s acquaintances to see if they can identify it.”

Contrary to Purbright’s expectations, the Corks received him with something approaching affability. The daughter led him to a parlour with the temperature of an orchid house—a small but fierce fire burned in the scrupulously tidy grate—and went off to make tea. Mrs Cork greeted him with a slow inclination of the head. She sat in a tapestried chair in the window bay. While her daughter was out of the room, she said nothing but stared at him approvingly, nodding from time to time as if she were half afraid that he might, if not thus encouraged, take himself off before the kettle boiled.

Purbright looked about him at a room that he supposed its owners would describe as a treasure chest of memories. Scarcely a single feature of its clustered contents had the look of ever being put to use. Books in a glass-fronted cabinet had been pushed into obscurity to make shelf room for ornate china cruets, an old calendar, dusty oddments of barbola work, and a collection of cards from bygone Christmases. Vases, of which there was a great number, were dry and flowerless, although a spray of paper roses emerged lopsidedly from a biscuit barrel. Within a set of three square decanters were the pale ochre stains of ancient sediment. An alabaster ashtray, bearing a card suit indicator, was lodged with a box of counters, a china boot and a manicure set, inside a cut glass salad bowl.

Pictures blockaded the room. Their flagships, so to speak, were a heavily framed lithograph depicting a horse thrusting its head through an open cottage window during the family meal (‘An Unbidden Guest’) and an enormous tinted engraving of Windsor Castle with besashed and garlanded picnickers in the foreground. A dozen or so photographs, standing on pieces of furniture or suspended on long cords from the picture rail, projected the sad, sepia stares of dead relations, trussed for their appointments with posterity by studio palm or rustic bridge.

The room smelled of linoleum and passed-down sewing boxes. There hung also upon the over-heated air the faintly mothballish odour of female old age.

Miriam Cork prepared the three cups of tea with finicky expertise on a tray balanced on her lap. Pouring tea, the inspector noticed, was an occupation that gave this stringy, straight-backed woman a kind of fulfilment. Her thin mouth was set in concentration. The big nose with a wart on its side seemed to stretch forth in anxious assessment of the strength and fragrance of the brew. Her eyes, pale and uncalm with hypochondria, steadied to measure the mounting amber line; there even shone in them a little pride.

Purbright began his questions. They invoked the sort of loquacity of which only that woman is capable who receives confidences from God in proportion to her readiness to interest herself in the frailties of mankind.

Oh, yes, she had known the Periam family ever since Gordon was a little mite. He had been a blessing to his mother, poor soul, whom God in His wisdom had sent widowhood through the agency of a brewer’s van with a loose wheel. Right through the years he had maintained his devotion to her—in spite of everything a certain brazen Miss Come-and-get-me had been able to do to take him away and have him marry her.

“He had a girlfriend in those days, had he?” Purbright found the notion intriguing.

“If that’s what you can call her. She was hanging round him ever since he was at school. But he didn’t let his mother be worried. That girl never stepped over the doorstep until after Mrs Periam was in her coffin. Of course, I knew when the end was coming, and it wasn’t just because I’d heard about the operation. It was a terrible operation, mind; they took all her insides away. No, the day before she passed on I saw my man in the black overcoat walk slowly by the window there. And I said straight away to mother, ‘Mother, Mrs Periam’s going: that man’s been by again’.”

Mrs Cork, gazing out of the window with rheumy, unseeing eyes, gave a tired nod of corroboration.

“It was just the same with Uncle Will. And with old Mr Elliott at the corner. Each time I saw the man in the overcoat. I always know when blinds are going to be drawn.”

Association of ideas prompted Purbright to interrupt with: “That night the sergeant was asking you about, Miss Cork...tell me just what you saw across the way.”

She switched without the slightest hesitation to the new line of reminiscence. “It was one of my bad nights”—two bony fingers stole gently to explore the neighbourhood of her solar plexus. “The doctors warned me never to take anything with pips for fear they might lodge, and that teatime I’d had just half a fig roll, no more, but it was enough; I was in agony until first light and then the paraffin started working, thank the Lord—I did thank Him, too—right there on the what-have-you and I wasn’t ashamed to. But didn’t Dr Harris give me what for the next day when I told him. ‘Mirrie,’ he said—he always calls me Mirrie—‘what did I tell you about pips? I said if one lodges after what you’ve gone through, it’s a box for you, my girl.’ Well, he was smiling, of course, but you could see how worried he really was; he was quite white round the mouth...”

“You were sleepless, Miss Cork: I’d gathered that much from Sergeant Love. Now what did you hear and see at Mr Periam’s house?”

“Well, the bathroom light was on for one thing. Oh, for ages. I thought they’d gone to bed and forgotten it. But then the dining-room light came on. It was quite late—past midnight—but once I get one of those turns it’s no use trying to get to sleep...”

“Did you see anyone in the dining-room?”

“No, the curtains were drawn. And of course the bathroom window is that ripply stuff. You can see shapes through it, but not to make them out very clearly. I mean you can tell if anyone’s going to have a bath because the shape’s pink. Then, naturally, you stop looking. But that night there was no need not to look. There was only Mr Hopjoy washing—he never even takes his shirt off for that—and then a bit later Mr Periam doing his exercises.”

“Exercises?”

“Yes, he has one of those chest expander things. Mind, he shows for it, too: Mr Hopjoy’s a poor stick beside him.”

“And that’s all you saw, Miss Cork?”

“That’s all. I went back for a lie-down a bit later when the pains were getting too much for me. They were just easing off after about an hour when there was that breaking noise. I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like glass—muffled, though. I got up and looked out again. This time the only light I could see was round the side; I think it must have been the garage. Then somebody came out into the garden.”

“Could you make out who it was?”

She shook her head. “It was really just a dark shape moving about, a sort of shadow.”

“What happened after that?”

The woman looked thoughtfully into her teacup. “Nothing, really... Oh, except that a light did go on for a few seconds in Mrs Periam’s bedroom—what used to be her bedroom, I mean, though Gordon’s kept it exactly as it was, you know. Whoever went in must have pulled the curtains first; they were closed when the light was switched on.”

“You can’t think of anything else?”

“Not that night, no.”

“On another, then.”

She was silent for a moment. “I might have been imagining.”

“Never mind. Tell me about it.”

“Well, it was three or four nights later; I can’t remember exactly. I’d been downstairs for some Thermogene and was dozing off again when I heard water running. It made just the sort of gurgle that the Periams’ waste pipe always makes. But I’d seen no one about there for a few days, so I thought perhaps it came from one of the other houses. I didn’t think about it again until that day we saw some policemen messing about with the drains.”

Of course, Purbright told himself, the bath would have had to be emptied after the day or two needed to dissolve its occupant—or half occupant. He had not got round to giving the point much thought. Yet it would have been simple enough for Hopjoy either to have lain low in the house or to have made a quiet return visit at night for long enough to pull a plug. There was another matter he found much more puzzling.

“Tell me, Miss Cork,” he said slowly, “why these apparently insignificant things impressed you so deeply that you thought it your duty to send an anonymous letter.” He saw the look of surprise and alarm in the woman’s face and held up his hand. “No, don’t worry—there’s no question of your getting into any sort of trouble. As a matter of fact,” he added, “I haven’t even seen it.”

“But of course you haven’t seen it. It wasn’t sent to you. And anyway it had nothing to do with what I’ve been telling you. Had it, mother?” In her perplexity, Miriam made her first acknowledgment of the old woman’s silent presence.

Mrs Cork stared stonily at the inspector, then gave a stern little shake of her head.

Purbright frowned. “I don’t think I quite understand, Miss Cork. It was you who mentioned the letter in the first place to my sergeant. We assumed...”

“Oh, no. There’s been some mistake. I don’t think I want to talk about it. Not about that, I mean. I couldn’t.” Miss Cork’s sparsely fleshed features registered a mixture of righteousness and disgust.

“The letter was about something you saw?” Purbright gently persisted.

“Naturally.” Her lips closed again primly.

“At the house over the back?”

She nodded. Her expression guided Purbright’s next guess.

“There were...” he paused delicately, “...goings on?”

The woman turned and stared icily at the fire, as though willing it to go out.

Either Periam’s confession of disloyalty, reflected Purbright, had been a masterly understatement or else Miriam Cork possessed sensitivity remarkable even in a middle-aged spinster. He probed further.

“In a bedroom, I presume?”

Like the slow striking of a match came her reply. “On Mrs Periam’s bed.” There was a long pause. “Romping like dogs on a grave.” Another pause. “In the middle of the afternoon.”

“The girl...her name was Doreen: am I right?”

Miss Cork raised her eyes from the obstinately still burning fire and directed them at a big pair of binoculars that kept a Bible text propped against the wall above the mantelpiece. “Doreen Mackenzie,” she said, in a voice deliberately drained of tone.

“I see... Well, we needn’t dwell on that. Now this letter—I suppose you sent it to her fiancé?”

Again Miss Cork offered no immediate reply. Her hand crept once more to the centre of her ordeal by fig roll. “I’ve had this out in prayer,” she announced finally, “and I was told that I had taken the right road. The answer to your question is yes, if you feel it will do you any good. But I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

The inspector, taking her at her word, departed gracefully and not without satisfaction. Something which had puzzled him considerably was now clear.

The decision to encompass a man’s destruction by convincingly attributing a murder to him required very powerful provocation.

And the sort of revelations Miss Cork seemed capable of penning to a betrayed lover would provide, Purbright now felt sure, just that.

Chapter Sixteen

Charles Fawby, chief reporter of the Brockleston Shuttle and district correspondent for evening papers at Nottingham, Leicester and Lincoln and of all the national mornings as well, would have been the first to admit that his district was less productive of hard news than most. Its houses never burned down; no gunman had ever sought a share of the small turnover of Brockleston’s two branch banks; the hotel registers remained innocent of the aliases of adulterous celebrities; even the beach was lamentably safe.

And yet Brockleston-rooted stories flowered in the Press as persistently as daisies in a city lawn.

Like daisies, they were small. They appeared always at page bottoms. Fawby did not mind that. A guinea for a three-line drollery represented a much more satisfactory return for labour than ten pounds or so for a page lead that might take the best part of a day to work upon and half the evening to telephone to morose, sceptical and hostile copy-takers.

He knew exactly what would tickle a sub-editor’s fancy and help meet the insatiable demand for short ‘fills’. His remunerative gleanings ranged from scraps of unconscious humour in the officialese of the district council minutes to whimsical remarks by old gentlemen arraigned in the local magistrates’ courts for drunkenness. Quips, parochial paradoxes, providential puns on street names, ironic errors, quaint coincidences: all these fed Fawby’s paragraphs.

What even this perceptive and adroit young man could never have foreseen, though, was that one of his modest guinea-earners was destined to confound an inspector of police, snap a chain of singularly plausible but false evidence, and reveal a murderer.

The piece appeared at the foot of the fourth column on page one of the county evening having the largest sale in Flaxborough. It was headed SALT PORK, and ran, in Mr Fawby’s admirably pithy prose: ‘The season’s oddest catch was landed at Brockleston South jetty this morning by a Sheffield angler. It was half a pig, rather the worse for immersion. And the name of the fisherman? Mr Andrew Hogg.’

Purbright stared at the page as though he had spotted his own obituary. Then he rang for Sergeant Love. There was no reply from the C.I.D. room. Purbright remembered that Love was touting a cigarette lighter round the friends of the late Hopjoy.

The late... He realized with a start that the words had sprung quite spontaneously into his mind. Had he, despite the credit he had so readily accorded Hopjoy as an ingenious schemer, known all along that...

He read the paragraph again, and sighed. Coincidence in the matter of such relative rarities as wandering sides of pork was too much to hope for. And Brockleston, of all places...of course, the sea was precisely the sort of dumping ground that would have occurred to a man returning in a hurry to his seaside hotel and anxious to dispose of a murder prop that had served its turn. Even if the carcass were to wash up again, there was scarcely any possibility of its coming to the notice of a police force twelve miles away.

Purbright rose abruptly from his desk and walked to the window. It was seldom that he felt annoyed with himself—or anyone else, for that matter—but now he experienced a strong temptation to punch a hole in the glass. There was something—some unwarrantable assumption or piece of credulity on his part—which had turned this whole case the wrong way round almost from the beginning. What the hell was it?

Hands in pockets, he prowled to the door, round his desk, again to the window. He thought back over a dozen interviews, peering again at faces and listening to voices in the hope of catching some hint of what had led him so hopelessly astray. The impression grew that a single cardinal error was responsible—his swallowing without question of a whopping lie. He concentrated on recalling the occasion most likely to have produced large lies—his first meeting with Gordon Periam.

And with Mrs Periam. Doreen. Doreen Mackenzie. The erstwhile ‘young lady’ of Brian Hopjoy, the girl whose sportive tendencies in mid-afternoon had so shocked observant Miss Cork...

Suddenly Purbright turned from the window. He snatched from his desk a large envelope that awaited posting to Periam and tore it open. He sought hastily among its contents for a letter in the spidery handwriting of a condoling aunt, glanced through it, and made for the door.

This time, Miss Cork did not ask her visitor in. She remained standing just inside the porch and looked at Purbright as if she had never seen him before. After only the tersest preamble, he launched from the doorstep the one question he had come to ask.

“Miss Cork, when you told me of writing a letter to Miss Mackenzie’s fiancé, did you mean Mr Hopjoy?”

She stared as she might at a detergent promoter who had gabbled an idiotic jingle and awaited some prescribed and equally inane response before handing her a pound.

“This is most important, Miss Cork. Was it Mr Hopjoy to whom you wrote that letter?”

“I don’t know what you mean. No, of course it wasn’t Mr Hopjoy. I wouldn’t”—the thin frame stiffened—“soil paper with that man’s name. It was Mr Periam she was engaged to. And had been for four years.”

“So it was Hopjoy with whom she...whom you saw...”

For a moment the woman’s eyes closed. The big nose twitched in confirmation of the unspeakable.

Purbright half turned, ready to leave. “I’m sorry if I’ve seemed rather stupid about this; I just wanted to make sure there was no misunderstanding.”

Miss Cork breathed with the slow self-control of the determinedly delicate. “But I really don’t see what there can have been to misunderstand. I told you that...that girl”—a twisted mouthing of the one word tumbled Miss Mackenzie into a broth pot of precocious lust—“had been after poor Gordon practically since they were children.”

Purbright fingered the letter in his pocket. “As a point of interest, do you happen to know if Doreen Mackenzie ever had a nickname?”

“I know what they called her at the Sunday school. Probably other people called her it, too. Mackie. Sometimes just Mack.”

Once all the little elements of truth began, as it seemed, to surrender themselves, Purbright found their marshalling together into a whole and obvious exposition of what really had happened at Beatrice Avenue quite exhilarating.

Sensing the inspector’s mood, Sergeant Malley beamed avuncularly as he ushered in his hospital informant, friend of a friend, and as anxious to meet the obligations implied by that compelling relationship as he was, in his own phrase, “to do that supercilious bastard Harton one in the eye”.

Male nurse Peter Tewkes was a curly-haired, florid and robust young man whom impudent good nature had made popular with patients and, in axiomatic consequence, the despair of his superiors. He eyed Purbright approvingly, as if cataloguing him as an ambulent case, no bed pans or blanket baths, maybe beer in locker and good for a fourth at solo after night sister’s round. “Fire away, sir,” he invited.

“It was very good of you, Mr Tewkes, to come along and help us. I need hardly tell you that we are not seeking this information out of idle curiosity.”

Mr Tewkes raised his brow. What better motive, he seemed to ask, could there possibly be?

“You’ll remember a patient being admitted under the name of Trevelyan—Howard Trevelyan, I believe.”

“I remember him,” said Tewkes, “but I don’t think that was his real name.”

“Nor do I, but never mind. He’d had a fall, hadn’t he?”

“So we were told. That fitted his injuries anyway.”

“Ah,” Purbright said, “now those are what we should like to hear about. Can you oblige, Mr Tewkes?”

Tewkes gave a wide, easy shrug. “Why not? He had a ruptured liver, that’s what.”

“I see. And that made an operation necessary?”

“Oh, rather. Straight away. It’s a rather nasty thing, you know.”

“I imagine it is. And the operation itself—is it very drastic?”

“I don’t know that I’d call it that, exactly. The idea is simply to mend the thing, as you would a...well, a torn cushion, say. Sew it up.” Tewkes paused. “Mind you, I don’t mean to suggest the business is particulatly easy or straightforward. The biggest snag...I say, you don’t want a lot of technical stuff, do you?”

“Not if you can avoid it.”

“Right you are. I’m not awfully strong on jargon, anyway. The point is that livers don’t mend themselves like most other bits of insides, so the artificial repairs have to be permanent—that’s why they use non-soluble sutures—and they’ve got to be treated with a good deal of respect ever after.”

“I follow. Now I’ve been told that this man came out of hospital in reasonably frisky condition. Is that likely, in your opinion? Would he have been able to...well, to lift heavy weights, for instance?”

Tewkes grinned. “The only thing he’ll be lifting for a bit will be a glass, and he’d better not make too regular a habit of that, either.”

“I don’t fancy he will,” said Purbright soberly. He remained thinking awhile, then pulled open a drawer of the desk.

“You mentioned just now something you called non-soluble sutures. Would they be made of nylon?”

“I believe they are, as a rule, yes.”

“Have a look at that, will you?” The inspector placed before Tewkes the small glass tube bequeathed by Sergeant Warlock.

Tewkes held the tube to the light and squinted at the fine, yellowish-white strand it contained. “Could be, certainly. Where did you get it?”

Purbright was so pleased with Mr Tewkes that he nearly rewarded him there and then with a true and full answer. Deciding after all that really wouldn’t do, he said simply: “It was stuck in a drainpipe.”

Tewkes wrinkled up one eye. “Stuck in a...”

Purbright nodded.

“But how bloody queer!” Tewkes gazed again at the tube, turning it this way and that in his big hands. He looked up and smiled. “Go on—I’ll buy it.”

Purbright returned his grin, a little apologetically, and reached for the tube. “Sorry. The price is too high, Mr Tewkes. Far too high.”

Chapter Seventeen

“But the lounge, sergeant...the lounge! He can’t be left in the lounge!”

Sergeant Love, who was feeling by no means happy himself, found the distraught manager of the Neptune increasingly hard to bear.

“Now look, Mr Barraclough, I regret this as much as you do—perhaps more, because I feel a bit to blame—but what’s done is done. The inspector will be here very soon and he’ll make all the decisions. In the meantime everything must be left exactly as it is.”

“But it’s nearly six o’clock.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

Mr Barraclough, in his agitation, nearly retorted: “Opening time, of course,” but he just managed a more seemly formula. “Six is the licensed hour for non-residents.”

Love was unmoved. “That doesn’t matter. I’ve locked the door. Nobody’s going to get a fright.”

He sat down in a chair near the lift. From it he commanded views both of the receptionist—of her upper parts, anyway; for the moment Love found sufficient the mere memory of his earlier glimpse of those portions he had appraised, after his first surprise, as ‘snazzy’—and of the main hotel entrance.

Through that entrance at exactly a quarter past six walked Inspector Purbright, Major Ross, Pumphrey, and the county police surgeon. Behind them, an ambulance drew across the forecourt in a half circle and backed somewhere out of Love’s line of vision.

The sergeant rose and hurried up to Purbright. His face had lost a good deal of its usual expression of luminous equanimity. Purbright gave him a concerned glance. “Don’t look so woebegone, Sid; they don’t charge you just for being here.”

“I’m ever so sorry, sir, honestly...”

“Nonsense. You had nothing whatever to do with it. If anyone’s to blame, it’s me. Now then...” Purbright looked about him—“I suppose we’d better view the remains. Where’d you put them?”

“I didn’t put them anywhere. They’re...he’s just sitting there in the lounge.”

Purbright took the key Love offered. He paused. “By the way, where’s the girl?”:

“She’s up in their room.”

“Upset?”

Love looked uncertain. “Well, shocked of course; she was there when it happened. But not hysterical or anything.”

Purbright beckoned the others. He unlocked the door.

On the far side of the long room, with its indigo ceiling, pearl-grey walls and scallop-backed armchairs panelled with alternate plum and yellow, sat a solitary figure. It seemed to have been waiting for them there a long, long time. Slumped a little sideways in the big, embracing chair, it stared stupidly as if just awakened from a doze.

In front of the chair was a low, kidney-shaped table bearing a tray set with a teapot, milk, sugar and two cups and saucers. One eye of the corpse seemed directed at the pot; the other fixed upon the advancing party, defying them to ask for a share in the refreshment.

The police surgeon bent over the body, lightly touched eyelids, wrist and neck, and stood back. With a pencil he pointed to a spot just above the dead man’s collar, an inch or so to the left of his windpipe. “There’s the puncture,” he said to Purbright. “That little bluish mark.” They all drew close and peered, heads together, at the throat of the dead Mr Periam.

Purbright made a rapid survey of the table top. “Where’s the lighter, sergeant?”

“On the floor, sir. There, by his left foot.”

Very cautiously, Purbright picked it up and held it in his open palm. “You’d better tell us just what happened. From the beginning.”

Love gave a frown of concentration. “Well, I’d taken the thing round to everyone I could think of who knew Mr Hopjoy—George Tozer first, then one or two of the people in Beatrice Avenue. They didn’t recognize it, so I tried a few licensees in town. I hadn’t much luck with them, either. Then I thought that Mr Periam would be the best bet, even though it meant coming right out here. Well, they’d lived in the same house, after all. He recognized it at once. ‘That’s old Brian’s,’ he said. ‘Where did you get hold of it?’ ”

“They were sitting here, were they—Mr and Mrs Periam?”

“That’s right, sir. The girl at the desk told me to come through. They were quite friendly. Asked me to sit down—I sat in that chair over there—and I took the thing out of the envelope. I hadn’t let any of the other people actually handle it—well, I understood it was evidence, in a way—but Mr Periam leaned across and took it before I could stop him. He said, ‘Oh, yes, I’ve seen this lots of times’ and started to try to get it to light—you know, as anyone might out of curiosity. He kept on pressing the top. It didn’t even spark, though. Then he spotted that little trigger thing on the side and pushed it with his thumb nail. There was a sort of hiss—very sudden, with a bit of a pop about it—and he dropped the lighter and felt the front of his neck as if he’d been stung. He said, ‘That’s a queer do’—oh, three or four times; he kept on saying it and rubbing his neck. Then after a bit he couldn’t seem to get his breath and just sat there staring and choking. Mrs Periam ran out for help while I held him. But within a minute or two he’d had it.”

Purbright turned to Ross. Gingerly, but knowledgeably, Ross took the lighter between thumb and forefinger and examined it. “Very neat. Czechoslovakian, probably. I need hardly say that our people aren’t issued with quite this sort of thing.”

“Naturally not. How did Hopjoy get hold of it, though?”

“Won it from one of their people’s baggage, perhaps. Or he could have bought it. As a souvenir, you know. Some of their chaps are hopelessly mercenary.” He dismissed the point with a shrug. “See that little hole? The thing’s a sort of airgun, really. Primed with the plunger and set off with this catch. Tiny cyanide pellets, I expect. That’s the usual drill.”

Pumphrey heard the exposition with marked disapproval. He put his hand on Purbright’s sleeve. “You’ll see that this contrivance doesn’t get bandied around, won’t you, inspector? It would be most undesirable, security-wise, if...” He broke off, looking worried.

Purbright appeared not to have been listening. He gazed thoughtfully at the dead man’s face. It looked puffy, stupid, impotent. Purbright felt constrained, as he often did, to attempt the loan of some little dignity to one who had lost all his own. “You know,” he said quietly to Ross, “be would have done awfully well in your line.”

“He’d have needed a course in booby-traps first.”

“No doubt. But that”—Purbright weighed the lighter in his hand—“was just bad luck. Booby-traps, in a much more subtle sense, were his forte. The criminal who proves too clever is common enough; but I must say I’m enormously impressed with a criminal who is able to calculate exactly to what degree the police will prove too clever, and who arranges his crime accordingly.”

Two ambulance men and a constable had entered and were standing hesitantly near the door. Purbright motioned them over. Like tactful, proficient club stewards called to remove a member regrettably immobilized by port, they advanced noiselessly upon the corpse, tweaking up their sleeves. The doctor nodded and departed.

The others moved to a table farther away. Over his shoulder, Love stole a last glance at Periam before a sheet rendered him mere freight.

“It’s funny,” he said, “but he doesn’t look the type to smash a bloke’s head in with a hammer.”

“He didn’t,” said Purbright. “I think we’ll find that strangling was the method, actually. Warlock should enjoy himself looking for skin fragments on Periam’s chest expander. ‘Doing his exercises’ was how Miss Cork put it. Now we can add it to our collection of wisdom after the event.”

“You mustn’t be too hard on yourself, Purbright.” Ross delicately scraped a few flakes of carbon from the bowl of his pipe with a reamer fashioned (as he could have disclosed) from a secret Skoda steel tool and capable, when keyed to the spindle of an ordinary electric shaver, of grating armourplate away like cheese.

“I’ll try not to be,” Purbright said humbly.

Ross looked up. “There’s one question that hasn’t been answered. And it’s so important that I’m going to put it frankly to you here and now. For whom was Periam working?”

There was a long pause. Then Purbright sighed. “I’m afraid, Major Ross,” he said, “that this is where we must acknowledge that we inhabit quite different worlds. You see, the only answer I can honestly give to that question will be meaningless in the context of your work and your interpretation of this case. You will consider it fatuous, if not completely idiotic. Perhaps we should leave it at that.”

“Not at all. I’m interested in your opinion. I really am.”

“All right, then. I believe that in so far as Periam was working for anybody—and I shouldn’t have used that phrasing myself—it was for his mother.”

“Ah, Freud comes to Flaxborough!” Ross’s broad smile was caught by one of Pumphrey’s nervous, sidelong glances of inquiry, and promptly emulated; unfortunately, mirth sat upon Pumphrey’s countenance as gracefully as a drunk on a catafalque.

Purbright looked mildly surprised. “Oh, yes; even in Flaxborough we have our compulsions, you know. Periam’s, I fancy, was partly a natural desire to avenge himself on his young lady’s seducer—you’ll notice, by the way, how carefully he hid this motive by pretending that she was Hopjoy’s girl—but what really pushed him to murder could have been the knowledge provided by the Cork woman, and possibly confirmed by his own observation afterwards, that it was that shrine of a bedroom that had been desecrated.”

“In that case,” said Ross, “why didn’t he kill the girl as well?”

“We can’t say for certain. Perhaps he had something in store for her later—two murders at the same time would have been infinitely more difficult to conceal than one, and Periam had a strong self-preservative instinct. Or he may have considered that making her a party to the crime was a more fitting punishment.”

“You think she was in it, do you, sir?” Love asked eagerly.

“I think she believed Hopjoy was being got rid of, in the sense of being frightened out of the town—I put it no higher than that. She couldn’t have been averse to the idea; her affair with the fellow had been merely a bit of secretive self-indulgence to relieve the tedium of an unconscionably long engagement. As soon as Periam produced the special licence, Hopjoy was out. It was she, of course, who made that phone call, the one described so convincingly by Periam—and remembered by the night porter here, incidentally—which was supposed to have conveyed Hopjoy’s summons to a show-down at Beatrice Avenue. She may or may not tell us what she thought the object of it was, but it certainly made her an accomplice, if only technically.”

Pumphrey, who had been tugging his ear-lobes even more ferociously than usual, now impatiently tapped the table with one finger. “It seems that what you are trying to argue, inspector, is that Hopjoy was liquidated”—“Literally,” murmured Purbright, but the interjection was ignored—“for reasons quite unconnected with his work, his special work, I mean—I think you understand.” Pumphrey threw poor Love a quick glance of distrust, then glared challengingly at Purbright. “To be frank, I simply cannot understand how an experienced police officer could be so naïve.”

Ross shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Oh, come now, Harry. ..”

Purbright raised his hand. He regarded Pumphrey genially for several moments. Then he said: “Thimble Bay...that’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it, Mr Pumphrey? Right. Well, do you know the nature of the establishment at Thimble Bay?”

Pumphrey’s slightly open mouth snapped shut. He looked as if he wished to stopper his ears against impending blasphemy.

“I hadn’t meant to tell you this,” Purbright went on gently, “but I feel it’s only fair to...to put you in the picture fact-wise. About a month ago, a poacher friend of mine left England to live with a daughter in Tasmania. He told me he’d spent quite a lot of his time at Thimble Bay. All that perimeter wire has created a rather nice little wild-life sanctuary. And as long as he was careful not to trip over the remains of two old army huts and to avoid falling into a great overgrown pit, he could take all the hares and pheasants he’d a mind to.” He paused lightly. “You see, the place was abandoned for some reason or other nearly eight years ago. I feel sure there must be a mention of the fact somewhere in your people’s archives, even if Hopjoy seems to have been unaware of it.

“The point, Mr Pumphrey, is this. We all have a streak of naïveté in us. It is only when that natural simplicity is allied to an obsession of some kind that all power of discrimination seems to be lost. That is why the credulity of some clever men is so monumental.

“Hopjoy was a fraud. I think even you must see that now. He traded on credulity—and not least on the credulity of his own employers. What got the poor fellow into trouble finally was not his false pretences but his determination to seize every opportunity of...what shall I say?...of brushing up his carnal knowledge.

“He underestimated Periam, if indeed he thought of so dull a dog at all, and never guessed, of course, that the fantasy life he had created for his own purposes was a gift to the man who was going to murder him. Hopjoy’s end was a classic case of being hoist on one’s own petard, and Periam planned it brilliantly and precisely as such. He knew that the more thoroughly the ensuing investigation, the more compelling would-be the evidence of Hopjoy’s having engineered his own disappearance.

“Consider that pork we were meant to suppose the clever Hopjoy had purloined for his acid bath. Not just anybody’s pork, of course—but half a pig stolen from the Crolls’ farm, one of Hopjoy’s known haunts. It’s only now we know the rest of the story that we can see the significance of Periam the tobacconist having been on chatting terms with Hicks the butcher and slaughterman in the shop next door.”

Purbright paused to look down the room at where the heads of some of Mr Barraclough’s non-residents could be seen through the glass of the door. They peered in, pushed, and conferred. One or two stared resentfully at the privileged occupants, then made off with manager-seeking expressions.

“Tell me, Major Ross,” Purbright resumed, “did you ever actually see this man Hopjoy?”

“Not as far as I know. Of course, names don’t necessarily signify in our game.”

“Quite. No, I was just wondering about his physique. The point is one that I’ve been unforgivably slow to appreciate. Heaving ten-gallon carboys and sides of pork is not an exercise for the puny. Periam saw his danger there; he carefully provided a picture of his victim as a fit, husky fellow. One of his most risky lies was the pretence that Hopjoy had emerged unweakened from hospital. I’m sorry to have to say that our old and mutual friend, security, helped Periam there, too. But that doesn’t absolve me from having forgotten all about certain trophies of Periam’s on his sideboard. They were for weightlifting...

“Ah, well...” The inspector rose and stretched. “We mustn’t reproach ourselves, gentlemen. Things have really cancelled themselves out rather neatly after all. If they’ve proved anything, it’s simply that time wounds all heels”—his eye flicked slyly to Pumphrey—“as Marx so succinctly put it.”

Pumphrey gaped, as if with sudden gastric seizure.

The inspector patted his arm kindly. “Oh, not Karl,” he said. “Groucho.”