Lonelyheart 4122

Trelawney looked amused. “And do you really not know anything about them?”

“Only that I can’t get at them without a fearful amount of bother. A trip to London, for one thing. I have to sign things in person on the spot. And then there’s always a teeny glass of Madeira afterwards and everybody is referred to as Mister James or Mister Charles. Oh, you’ve no idea...”

“But I have, my dear. One of my own companies is just like that. To this day they still hold their annual general meeting in a chop house, with tankards of porter all round and something they call the Chairman’s Gammon....”

“Oh, lovely.!” cried Miss Teatime.

“...and, of course, a quill to sign the minutes...”

“Yes, of course!”

“...and would you believe it, nobody can cash a single share without filling in a special requisition that has to be signed by a clerk in holy orders, the headmaster of Eton and the editor of The Times!”

“Marvellous!” laughed Miss Teatime. “Absolutely marvellous!” (Within her merriment was a tiny doubt: the headmaster of Eton...was that quite the correct title? Never mind, the point was rather trivial.)

They chatted for a while in sustained good humour until Trelawney suggested that a stroll by the river might be a pleasant way of working up an appetite for lunch. Miss Teatime agreed and they entered the series of gently descending streets, lined with old fashioned shops, that led to the Sharms—Flaxborough’s harbour district.

This had been once the residential preserve of successful shipping merchants and retired master mariners, but with the ebb of the port’s prosperity their big, rather severe looking homes had become tenements or lodging houses. Here and there was one of those depressing English institutions at whose doors and windows can always be glimpsed men in vests and women in curlers and bad tempers, that on the continent would be called brothels.

“Pretty hard tack, this lot,” the commander remarked of a group of inhabitants taking their ease outside a betting shop on the other side of the street. “That’s one reason why I like the country. If you want to leave your doors open, you can, and there’s nothing worse than good fresh air can get in.”

Miss Teatime commended his philosophy, but ventured to suggest that there was an even more secure refuge.

“And what’s that, Lucy?”

“You ought to know,” she said, giving his arm a gentle squeeze.

“Tell me.”

“A boat. A little ship.” No expectant mother could have referred more coyly to her own embryo.

Trelawney frowned but managed to look indulgent at the same time.

“Oh, but there are lots of practical difficulties, you know. You’d have to have a crew. And, my word, you have to be careful there. Then there are things like...oh, port dues and so on. And navigation. Have you thought about navigation?”

“Oh, I don’t mean a big boat. It was what I believe they call in the trade a forty-footer that I had in mind.”

“I say! You have picked up the lingo, haven’t you! I should ima...” He stared at her. Their walking slowed to a halt. They had reached the quay and the stern of a rusty old coaster towered above them.

What Miss Teatime readily identified as a roguish smile appeared on her companion’s face as he leaned against a bollard and continued to regard her intently.

“Do you know, I believe you’ve been up to something!” declared the commander.

She smiled up at the coaster’s limp red flag. “I suppose I shall have to tell you. But you mustn’t laugh. I won’t have you laughing at me, even if I am a poor landlubber.”

Trelawney clapped a hand to one eye. “Nelson’s honour!” he declared, looking more roguish than ever. Then suddenly his face was serious, perhaps even a little anxious. “Go on.”

“Well,” said Miss Teatime, polishing the clasp of her handbag with one gloved hand, “it started with father, really. He used to keep a very nice cabin cruiser—a forty-footer, I think he called it—moored on the Thames at home. Of course, during his illness it wasn’t used and then when he passed on and there was all that business of the estate being settled I really wasn’t in the mood to think about things like pleasure boats.”

The commander nodded sympathetically. “So I let it go to one of father’s old business friends who had often sailed with him and was very keen to have it. I knew what the boat was worth, because it was in the valuation at two thousand three hundred pounds—and that was only just over half what it had cost two years before. But I also knew that Mr Cambridge wasn’t terribly well off, so...well, I made him take it for five hundred. He was quite pathetically pleased and insisted on giving me an undertaking that if ever he wished to part with the boat, it would—what is the word—revert?—it would revert to me for the same money.

“Anyway, I received a letter from Mr Cambridge’s daughter. He is in hospital, poor man, and terribly worried about that silly promise. And strictly between ourselves, he needs the money desperately. I wrote at once and told her to sell the boat for as much as it would fetch, but not for a penny under two thousand...”

An almost indetectable tremor passed over Trelawney’s face.

“...and now back has come that dear, foolish woman’s reply. No—I must have the boat or no one else will. Final. Flat. Now can you understand how anyone could be so stubborn?”

The commander’s expression said that he certainly could not.

“Mind you,” Miss Teatime added, “I must admit that the temptation is almost irresistible. When I look at that water, I can just picture the Lucy—did I tell you he named it after me?—gliding along with that funny little thing on the mast going round and round...”

“Do you mean to say it’s got radar?”

“I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s something to do with being able to steer in fog. Anyway, she really is a beautiful little ship and there’s nothing I’d love so much as to...”

She stopped, suddenly serious.

“Yes?” Trelawney prompted. Boats had become an altogether fascinating topic.

Miss Teatime remained silent.

“I do believe,” he said, doing his best to be roguish again, “that you’ve let out that secret ambition of yours. It’s true, isn’t it? You want to cast off.”

She nodded, but something seemed still to be troubling her.

He asked: “Was it the Lucy you had in mind all the time?”

“Oh, no. When I mentioned my...my ambition in that letter, I certainly was thinking of the sea and going to all those wonderful places like Naples and Marseilles and, and Mozambique—perhaps with someone to share the adventure. But it was only afterwards, when I got Miss Cambridge’s letter, that the idea of the Lucy came into my head. Oh, but no—no, it’s impossible. It would be like taking advantage of a sick old gentleman.”

“Come now,” said Trelawney bluffly, “you mustn’t look at it like that. These old chaps are very proud; it wouldn’t be kind to go against what they believe to be right.”

“Dear Jack,” she sighed, “you are so masculine and sensible about these problems. I suppose that comes of your having had to deal with—oh, I don’t know—storms and mutinies and all that sort of thing.”

He laughed, and she was smiling, too, but in the next moment she looked glumly into the distance and murmured: “I don’t know why I’ve told you all this. You see, there is nothing I can do about it, in any case.”

“Simple, my dear. Send Mr Cambridge the money. Ease his conscience.”

“I am afraid you are wrong. It is not simple. I do not have the money.”

Trelawney waved a careless hand. “How long would it take? A week?”

“Oh, no, longer. Perhaps three. As I told you, my financial advisers are an old fashioned and you might say excessively fastidious firm. They have no faith in any process that takes less than a fortnight. And by then...well, it would be too late.”

“How do you mean, too late? The man’s not dying, surely?”

“Not dying. But in a serious condition in quite another sense. Something called a distress warrant has been applied for by some people to whom he owes money, apparently. Miss Cambridge says that unless the boat is sold within the next week it will be taken from him.”

“Good lord!” Thoughtfully, the commander straightened up from his bollard and took her arm. They strolled in silence towards the lock gates beyond which lay the tidal stretch of the river.

They had almost reached the lock when he stopped and faced her, frowning.

“Suppose,” he said, “that I were to buy that boat...”

She shook her head quickly. “He would never let it...”

“Wait, though,” he interrupted. “Suppose, as I say, that I were to buy it—but in your name...”

“I do not quite understand, dear.”

“In other words, let him think that you are the buyer—at the agreed price, of course—five hundred pounds—when it’s really me who’s put up the money.”

“But Jack, I could not ask you to do anything of the kind. You do not even know these people.”

“I know you, Lucy, and I think I’m a fair judge of character.”

She looked down modestly.

He took her hand. “And what would you say if you saw the Lucy bearing down the river here with me at the wheel, eh? Would you be ready to board her for better or for worse?”

“Jack!” Her eyes were shining.

“As a matter of fact, that’s just about what I was going to ask you in any case today. About us, I mean. Sailing in convoy.”

It was clear that Miss Teatime was much moved.

The commander gave her hand a reassuring squeeze.

“And now,” he said, “I’m going to tell you a little secret. Do you know why I happen to have five hundred pounds handy for the doing of good turns to old gentlemen with motor boats?”

He really was so droll. Miss Teatime could not suppress a little giggle.

“I’ll tell you why,” said Trelawney. “Being a very confident cove, I said to myself as soon as I saw you: that dear lady is going to be your lawful wedded, and as such she will want to live in a little cottage in the country!—of course, I didn’t know then that you were a sailor! No, a cottage, I said to myself, is what that charming woman will want, and you, Jack, know the very place...”

“Really?” exclaimed Miss Teatime.

“Really. The said cottage is for sale and may be secured, as estate agents say—one did say so this very morning—for a deposit of five hundred pounds. So now you know the little piece of business that brought me into town so early-O!”

“You’ve paid this deposit already?” She was quite flustered with excitement.

“Not exactly. The cash won’t be available until tomorrow. But I came to a firm understanding with the agent. The channel’s clear, old girl, absolutely clear.”

“Oh, Jack, how wonderful it sounds!” She paused. “But the money for the boat...I mean, how can you use it and still pay that deposit?”

Trelawney took her arm.

“That,” he said, “is something we shall have to have a little pow-wow about over lunch.”

Chapter Thirteen

After a meal which Commander Trelawney described as “confoundedly good messing”, he and Miss Teatime withdrew to a small deserted lounge where the proprietress of the Riverside Rest brought them coffee.

Miss Teatime poured, watched by the fond and by now slightly indolent eye of her companion.

“I love to see you do that,” he said. “Very womanly. Very homely.”

“Very ordinary,” corrected Miss Teatime, looking pleased.

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d spent your life between decks and had your tea handed to you in great slopping mugs by fellows looking like Robinson Crusoe.”

“No, perhaps not.” She passed him a cup.

Nothing of boats or cottages had been said during the meal, apart from an off hand request by Trelawney to be reminded of the valuation figure on the Lucy. Two thousand three hundred, was it? That’s right, she had said, with equal indifference.

Now Trelawney scratched one of his long ears, smoothed back his pale, sand-coloured hair and said that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get down to a few plans.

“The best thing,” he began, “would be for me to take the money down to your friend, Mr Cambridge—or his daughter, rather—together with a letter from you saying that I’m acting as your agent. Not cash, mind—it would be silly to carry all that much on a train journey—but a cheque signed by you...”

“Oh, but the bank...”

He raised a hand. “I know what you’re going to say, but I’ll deal with that in a minute. I’ll give Miss Cambridge the cheque, make sure the boat’s seaworthy and bring her up here. She’ll be your property of course...”

“No, Jack. Yours.”

Trelawney made a grimace of good natured reproof.

“You’ll never be a business woman at that rate, my love. The deal will be in your name, so the Lucy will belong to you. For the time being, we’ll just look on the five hundred as a loan that I’m happy to make.

“Now this point about the bank. You were going to say that you haven’t enough to cover the cheque, weren’t you? Well, this is what we’ll do.

“There’s something called a joint account, you see. Lots of husbands and wives have one, and business partners and people like that. We’ll go round and open one at my bank, and tomorrow I’ll transfer into it the five hundred pounds I was going to use as a deposit on our cottage. Then you can sign the cheque for the boat and it will be drawn on that joint account, all shipshape and Bristol fashion. Do you see?”

Miss Teatime said that indeed she did and thought him terribly good at managing such things. But what about...

“The deposit on the cottage? Ah...” Trelawney beamed at her. “It so happens that the estate agent is quite an old friend of mine—that’s how I got to hear of the place, as a matter of fact—and he’ll be perfectly happy to reserve it for me on the strength of my post-dated cheque. That’s a cheque which is payable in, say, a month’s time. A sort of promise, really, and quite usual.”

“You are sure, Jack? I should not like you to be placed in an awkward situation.”

“Quite sure. And by the time the cheque has to be honoured, your money to repay the five hundred for the Lucy will have come through—you did say three weeks, didn’t you?—and been put into our joint account.”

He leaned back, smiling. “Now then, what do you think of that?”

“Well, it certainly does sound an excellent plan. I had no idea banks could be so accommodating. Mine seems so terribly unapproachable. Perhaps it is because I have never asked about such things.”

“Probably,” Trelawney said.

He looked at his watch.

“I think we’ll just have nice time to go round and set things moving.”

Inspector Purbright, blissfully unaware of the failure of the Pook-Love consortium, was looking into the windows of his favourite shops in Northgate as he made his way slowly towards the Oxmove mission hall.

Long before he arrived there, the light breeze carried to his ear the eternal song of the blessed. Did they ever leave the hall for meals, he wondered, or were nutrients administered to them where they stood, as was done for the stalwart and single-minded bellringers of St Luke’s, Chalmsbury, into whose mouths were thrust sponges soaked in egg nog and set on sticks.

He entered the gloom of the porch—a sort of corrugated iron Galilee chapel stuck on the main building—and felt for the farther door. Pushing this open, he was met and winded by the full force of the hymn.

The light from three bare electric bulbs hung high in the garage-like roof was reflected stickily from match-boarding walls and from rows of benches that seemed to have been fashioned from treacle toffee. The air was cold and smelled like old women’s washstands.

Having regard to the noise, the congregation was incredibly small—a knot of perhaps a dozen at the left front.

Just beyond them, a woman wearing a big black hat jerked backwards and forwards before a harmonium. There was an air of desperation about her; she held down first one lot of keys, then another, then quickly submerged a third bunch—just as though they were a litter of black and white kittens, too numerous and too resilient to drown.

The minister, the Reverend Leonard Leaper, stood by the harmonium, leaning lightly upon it and singing like mad.

Purbright advanced a little way down the aisle. He made polite beckoning gestures towards Mr Leaper.

Mr Leaper gave him a cheerful wave and sang even louder.

The inspector again caught his attention and signalled more peremptorily. Leaper abandoned the harmonium and walked up to him. The congregation seemed not to notice the defection; it just went on bellowing on into God’s ear.

“Hello there, brother,” greeted Leaper.

Purbright merely nodded. He remembered Leaper’s previous existence, as a young newspaper reporter, when it had always been Hello, chief. Obnoxious modes of address seemed endemic to his nature.

They went into the relatively hymn-proof porch.

“I was wondering if you could help me, Len.”

“Fire away, brother.”

“Do you know a woman called Reckitt—Miss Martha Reckitt?”

Leaper’s eyes crossed to regard the end of his long, spiky nose; it was his way of aiding thought. “Yes,” he said after a while, “I think I do.”

“How well?”

“I used to talk to her sometimes, try to offer her comfort and tidings, brother, tidings.”

“Have you seen her lately?”

“Not of late, I should say. No, definitely not of late.”

“You don’t happen to know of any friendships she might have struck up in the last couple of months or so? There’s been some mention of a clergyman. First name, Giles.”

Again Leaper’s vision converged upon his nose tip, but this time to no avail. “Of a Giles I know nothing. Or a clergyman, so called? Nix, brother, nix.”

“We understand that Miss Reckitt subscribed to an organization called Handclasp House, a sort of matrimonial bureau...”

“That’s right,” confirmed Leaper proudly. “I advised her to.”

“You, Len?”

“I did, brother. And within scripture. Multiply, remember. That’s one way of looking at it. The widows of Sidon? Oh, yes, but I’m not to be caught on that. Do you know Sister Staunch?”

“I have met her.”

“A goodly woman. I am glad, brother, to help where I can.”

Good lord, thought Purbright; was this tatter-minded pepperminty young man a Rasputin to the Staunch’s Tsarina? Absurd. Finding him a bit simple, she probably encouraged him to hang around in order to give the impression that her agency enjoyed church patronage.

“And do you know if Miss Reckitt found a friend through this agency?”

“I expect so. She is very deserving.”

“But you don’t know for certain?”

“Ah...No. To that one, no is the answer, brother, and I can’t say otherwise. How is Mr Kebble keeping?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“What a pity. I often wonder.”

“Goodbye, Len. Many thanks.”

“Likewise. Go in peace, brother, and cheer-ho.”

At the police station, Purbright found pook and the sergeant waiting to make confession. He was still feeling the vague light headedness that had been induced by conversation with the Reverend Leaper, and it was a minute or two before he realized what Love, who spoke first, was talking about.

“Oh, Christ, Sid—do you mean to say you’ve lost her again?”

“It wasn’t me who lost her,” protested Love.

“But I thought it was your job to follow her?”

“She went out the wrong way again.”

“That’s right,” said Pook. “Straight at me. And I hadn’t had any instructions.”

“You were supposed to intimidate her, Mr Pook. Why didn’t you? You were the stopper.”

“Well she didn’t stop.” Pook’s tone suggested a suspicion that the others had known quite well what was going to happen. He had been reading a book lately about double agents.

“And so?” prompted Purbright, more gently.

“I followed her.” There was a short pause. “Until she lost me in a shop.”

“She lost you?”

“Oh, yes, it was on purpose, all right. She kept dodging up and down in a lift.”

“Did she, indeed?” Purbright sounded thoughtful. “Well, we can’t do anything about that now. All right, Mr Pook,” he nodded his dismissal, “don’t reproach yourself.” Alone with Love, the inspector stared vacantly at the ceiling.

“This Miss Teatime,” he said at last, “seems to be quite an interesting character.”

Love gave a short, bitter laugh.

“There would appear,” Purbright went on, “to be very little to be gained from continuing to play hide and seek with the woman in lifts. She’s obviously aware that somebody’s following her, and she’s astute enough to do something about it.”

“I reckon she’s a bit of an old villain,” said Love, irreverently.

“Well, we don’t know that. As I said before, I don’t blame anybody for dodging narky coppers if they’ve a mind to. It doesn’t mean that they’re criminals. But in a case like this, it’s not encouraging to have our excellent intentions thwarted by a shrewd and surprisingly nippy female.”

“So what do we do?”

“I’ve been thinking again about a suggestion of yours, Sid. About taking Miss Teatime into our confidence. I was against the idea before because she seemed likely to be a bit silly and easily flummoxed. On her showing during the last couple of days, she’s nothing of the sort. I think she’s capable of being very helpful. At the same time, she will have to be warned of the risk she’s running.”

“Can I be taken off the long distance lark, then?”

“With pleasure.”

“Thank God for that. By the way, what joy did we get out of that break-in business?”

“Mrs Staunch’s office? What I expected. Damn-all. It made Harper happy, though. He’s got lots of lovely prints that might have been left by anybody from the window cleaner to the Archbishop of Bombay. It was a bit much to hope for that Rex should turn out to be some felon on file at Central.”

“And the letters to Mrs Bannister?”

“Just smudges.”

“So much for the miracles of forensic science.” Love’s feet were beginning to feel better already. A little cynical truculence did not seem too bold a mark of celebration.

Chapter Fourteen

If there was one thing about Miss Teatime that seemed predictable, it was her appearance at breakfast shortly after nine o’clock. Purbright decided that this occasion, while perhaps unorthodox, would be the best opportunity of cornering her.

He arrived at the Roebuck at ten to nine and explained his purpose to a very sleepy Mr Maddox, whose stiff morning attire was in curious contrast to the state of its occupant. He appeared to droop within his suit rather like a tortoise inside its up-ended shell.

The manager showed Purbright to a corner table and left him to his own devices after sending one of the waitresses to fetch him a pot of coffee. The inspector tried to decline the coffee, but Maddox said no, it did not do for anyone to sit in the dining room unprovided: the consequent, ah, lurking look was not quite, er...

Miss Teatime came through the door at precisely nine o’clock. Purbright felt sure of her identity even before he saw Maddox pass behind her and give a tired nod.

She looked alert and ready to be pleased. Even a glance at the menu, which she took through spectacles that she fished from her handbag and afterwards replaced, did nothing to modify her blandly sanguine expression. A character of some strength, Purbright decided.

He waited until she had finished eating and was pouring out another cup of coffee. Then he crossed to her table and introduced himself.

Miss Teatime showed sign neither of surprise nor of apprehension. She might have been in the habit of breakfasting with inspectors of police every other morning in her life.

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr Purbright,” she said, sounding as if she meant it. “Would you like me to ask the girl to bring you some coffee?” In the way she said “gairl” Purbright recognized a relic of the well-to-do female education of forty years ago.

“That’s very kind of you, but I’d rather not have any more.”

She gave a graceful little inclination of the head and began stirring her own coffee. “And what is it you wish to talk to me about, inspector?”

“In the first place, I must apologize for the intrusion.”

“Not at all.”

“Oh, but yes. You see, the intrusion has gone more deeply than you are perhaps aware. My appearance this morning is, so to speak, the tip of the iceberg. There have been inquiries—very discreet inquiries, if that is any consolation—into what normally would be rightly regarded as your private affairs. A watchful eye has even been kept on you for part of the time you have been in Flaxborough. Now then, Miss Teatime, don’t you think you are entitled to my apologies?”

Her frown was of puzzlement rather than anger.

“It all sounds very intriguing, Mr Purbright, but I am sure you did not come here to work up my indignation against these things you say you have been up to.”

He smiled. “No, but I thought I’d better prepare you for the explanation which I propose to give now.

“There has been much concern felt here over the disappearance of two local women. They were perfectly respectable and, as far as I am aware, unknown to each other. We don’t know if any harm has befallen them, but if not, it seems quite incredible that neither has got into touch with any of her relatives or friends.

“One factor is common to both these cases, Miss Teatime. The women had registered, not long before their disappearance, with a matrimonial agency here in the town called Handclasp House. I’m not going to be obtuse about this—we do know that you have approached the same organization...”

He paused, as if to invite comment.

Miss Teatime, who had been listening intently, one finger touching her cheek, said simply: “That is quite true.”

“...and naturally we hope that whatever has transpired will have a happy outcome for you. On the other hand, I think you ought to be on your guard.”

“Against disappearing?” There was a twinkle in Miss Teatime’s eye.

Purbright shrugged. “Both the women who did had recently been successful in finding companionship through this agency. The coincidence cannot be ignored. We think it was the same man in each case and that he was responsible for whatever has happened to them.”

“But you must not stretch coincidence too far, must you, inspector? Are you suggesting that this hard working gentleman has now turned his attention to me?”

“I am suggesting nothing,” said Purbright. “But I believe that a plausible and dangerous man is using the agency as a means of finding victims. If that sounds a trifle melodramatic, I’m sorry; it just happens to be the only explanation for what has been going on.”

“Then why have you not found him?”

“Because plausible and dangerous men are also as a rule very clever,” said Purbright, a shade defensively.

“Someone must have seen him in the company of these ladies, surely?”

“No one who had reason to be observant. The accounts we have been able to obtain are sketchy, to say the least.”

“You have no indication at all of his identity, then?”

Suddenly her manner relaxed.

“I’m sorry if I seem to be cross-examining you, inspector. You must see, though, that a mere general suspicion could have terribly unjust consequences. Let me be frank. I have met a gentleman through this bureau you are talking about. He impresses me as being kind and honourable. In due course, I shall doubtless learn more about his background. But the relationship is scarcely likely to prosper if I must now regard him as a police suspect.”

The inspector reflected that in Miss Teatime he, like poor Love, had got rather more than he had bargained for.

“Of course I see your point,” he assured her. “And if I may say so, you certainly don’t impress me as a gullible or incapable person. The fact remains that your—how shall I put it—your qualifications—are exactly those which we could expect to attract the attention of the man we are looking for. For instance, I believe you are not without means...”

“That is so.”

“You are also a newcomer to the district and living on your own.”

“As you can see, Mr Purbright.”

“Yes, well I don’t have to spell this out for you, do I? No policeman in similar circumstances would be doing his duty if he failed to warn you.”

She surprised him with a broad, fond smile.

“Of course not, my dear inspector. I appreciate it. But I must beg you not to worry.”

“I shall try not to,” he said drily.

“Good. Now is there anything else I can do for you? Are you sure you will not have coffee?”

“Quite sure, thank you.” He reached to an inside pocket. “But there is one way in which you can be specifically helpful. This gentleman you say you have met...oh, what’s his name, by the way?”

She hesitated, then shook her head. “I think, if you do not mind, inspector, that I should keep that to myself for the time being.”

“Are you sure you’re being wise?”

“Not unwise, I hope. Ethical, certainly.”

He shrugged. “As you wish. But at least you can tell me if you have received any letters from him.”

“Naturally. That is how these introductions are effected, you know.”

Purbright placed on the table a slip of stiff white paper on which were five or six lines of writing.

“This is a photographic copy,” he explained, “of part of a letter which we are satisfied was written by the man who made contact with the two missing women. Would you mind letting me see one of the letters you have received from your friend?”

“I should have no objection at all, Mr Purbright, but there is not one here for you to see. They were simply formal meeting arrangements. I did not keep them.”

Purbright looked disappointed. “Mightn’t you be able to find something, Miss Teatime? Even an odd piece or two in a wastepaper basket would be enough.”

She smiled. “In an hotel, Mr Purbright, one does not throw letters into a wastepaper basket. One tears them up and consigns them to the toilet.”

“I see. Well, will you take a careful look at this writing and tell me if you notice any resemblance to what you can remember of your friend’s.”

He waited until she had taken out her spectacles, then handed her the slip.

Miss Teatime scrutinized it for nearly a minute. She removed her glasses, replaced them in her bag, picked up the slip and gave it to the inspector.

“Quite, quite different,” she said. “Of that I am perfectly sure.”

The inspector sighed. “At least I seem to have been able to put your mind at rest.”

“Oh, but it was never anything else, Mr Purbright. Not really.”

When the inspector had gone, Miss Teatime had a nice long think. Then she left the table and sought out the young lady in the reception office, whom she asked to recommend a car hire firm that might be able to oblige her at somewhat short notice.

The girl gave her an address in St Ann’s Place. Ten minutes later, Miss Teatime was on her way there, unfollowed by policemen.

The garage manager prided himself on an ability to guess, from his first look at a customer, what kind of a vehicle was likely to be preferred.

He regarded Miss Teatime judiciously while she made her request, then nodded like a store Father Christmas and announced: “Just the very thing for you.”

He led her behind the service bay to an enclosure where about a dozen cars were standing. He went straight to a pale blue Ford Anglia and opened the door.

“Full tank. Key’s in. Just drive away. Lovely.”

He shut the door and motioned Miss Teatime to precede him back to the office where minor formalities could now be disposed of.

To his surprise, she stayed where she was.

“Is this the only car which is available?”

“Well...not exactly, but...”

She stood back, to get a view of the line.

“May I choose from these?”

He shrugged, a prophet without honour.

Miss Teatime scrutinized the row of bonnets in a single, slow-ranging inspection, then stepped forward and placed a gloved finger on the bronze paintwork of a car near the end.

“I shall have this one, if you please.”

The manager gazed dubiously at the low, clean-lined Renault, crouched in the row like some cat-napping athlete.

“I’m not sure you’d find that very suitable. It’s not English, you know.”

“I am prepared to forego the luxury of patriotism in the interests of comfort and dependability on this one occasion, Mr Hall.”

He made a last effort to redeem his own judgment.

“It’s awfully fast,” he said, in the tone wherewith a child is warned to throw away a sweet picked up in the street.

“Good,” said Miss Teatime. “I should hate to think that all those modifications to the cylinder head and manifold and valve springs and suspension had been wasted.”

The managed closed his eyes and offered a little prayer to the god of garages: O, please let her hit a lamp-post! Please let these old eyes see her being towed in!

Even after Miss Teatime had driven off—with depressing obvious proficiency—the man was still so upset that he filed away her agreement form and cheque without noticing that to the latter she had quite forgotten to add a signature.

From St Ann’s Place, Miss Teatime drove directly to the station. She parked the Renault neatly in the forecourt and went into the booking hall.

On the wall was a table of departures. Miss Teatime donned her spectacles and took out a pencil and her little memorandum book.

It was the four minutes past eight train, she recalled, on which Commander Trelawney had always left for home. She moved her pencil point down the time-table. Here it was. All stations to Chalmsbury, then Horley Bank, Stang and Brocklestone-on-Sea.

She made a list of all the stops on the route, closed the notebook and put it away.

It was nearly half-past ten.

Buying a platform ticket, she passed through the barrier and glanced up at the signals beside the footbridge. She was just in time to see one of the arms lurch to the “clear” position. A train from Brocklestone—Trelawney’s usual train, she supposed—was due.

Miss Teatime hurried to the bookstall counter.

“I should like a map of this area, if you happen to have one. From Flaxborough to the coast is what I want, actually.”

An ordnance survey section? Oh, yes, that would do admirably. There was no need to wrap it.

The rumble of the approaching train stirred a nearby knot of people into movement.

Miss Teatime took the map, told an astounded assistant to keep the change from a pound note, and hurried from the platform just as the train’s leading coach went by. Choosing a route unlikely to be taken by the commander on the way to his bank, she was out of sight of the station entrance before the first passenger off the Brocklestone train emerged.

Today’s meeting was to be half an hour later than the usual eleven o’clock. Miss Teatime debated whether she should risk taking a quick whisky or two first...(I felt so foolish, Jack, having to sit down on the stairs while this man brought me a glass of something to pull me round—I do believe it was spirits’)...No, better not, perhaps.

When she reached the Garden of Remembrance, she walked past the gate and turned instead up the path flanked with yew and cypresses that led to the porch of St Laurence’s. She entered the church and sat down near the back. In the cool, grey solitude, she unfolded the map and supported it on the back of the chair in front of her.

She studied it for nearly half an hour.

Chapter Fifteen

The clock in the tower of St Laurence’s Church struck falteringly. It was half past eleven. Miss Teatime looked away from the drinking fountain, at which she had been watching a little girl methodically scrub out her doll’s clothes, and gazed towards the garden entrance. There was no sign of Trelawney.

She felt a twinge of anxiety. Up to now, he had shown himself an almost aggressively punctual person. Behaviour out of character was one of the very few things that made Miss Teatime nervous. It tended to upset calculations, and earning a living was difficult enough these days without one’s having to re-cast the horoscope, as it were.

However, two minutes later she saw the commander’s fair hair bobbing along beyond the hedge. He pushed open the gate and strode towards her. Even while he was still twenty yards away, she could see from the set of his head and the briskness of his step that he was in a good humour.

“A thousand apologies, dear lady. I was prepared to find you flown.”

“Nonsense, I have only just arrived myself.”

“Excellent!” He patted her thigh, as he might a gun dog. “In any case, I’ve a perfectly good excuse in my locker—or rather in ours, as it’s a joint account. The money’s paid in—five hundred nice shiny Jimmy O’Goblins!”

(Dear God! Where had she last come across that one? Sapper? Henty?) She widened her eyes commendingly. “My word! You are not one for wasting time, Mr Trelawney.”

“Hello-o-o...” Mock despair was on his face. “Who’s this talking to Mister Trelawney?”

“Commander,” she corrected mischievously.

“What! Pulling rank now, eh?”

Her glance fell. “Jack...”

“I should jolly well think so!” Again he patted her thigh, but this time his hand remained. He gazed closely into her face while his fingers contracted. She was about to draw sharply away when she saw in his eyes genuine interest and surprise.

“I say...” He withdrew his hand and stared at where it had been. “You’ve got some muscle, haven’t you?”

Miss Teatime straightened her skirt. “I do try and keep in trim, as a matter of fact. Just a few toning up exercises.”

His air of bright purpose returned. “Did you write that letter?”

Opening her bag and holding it so that the map she had bought that morning stayed out of sight, she took out an envelope and handed it to him.

“The cheque is there as well,” she said. “I have made it out to the daughter just in case there is some difficulty in Mr Cambridge’s dealing with it in hospital.”

He nodded. “Very sensible.”

The envelope was unsealed. He drew out the letter and began to read.

Dear Evelyn [Miss Teatime had written],

This is to introduce my good friend, Commander John Trelawney, who has kindly agreed to act on my behalf in the matter of the boat. He will hand you my cheque, which, as you will see, is for five hundred pounds (I wish you would let me make it a sum nearer the true value of the Lucy, or even half of it, but it seems that you and your father have made up your minds). Please give Commander Trelawney the receipt, and also the boat’s manual and the other documents—of which you will know more than I—and take him to the mooring. He is going to sail the Lucy here himself (a task for which I could scarcely have chosen anyone better qualified than a one-time Naval officer!) and he will wish, of course, to satisfy himself that she is in good condition for the voyage. I think there is nothing much to add, except perhaps the telephone number of my hotel (Flaxborough 2130), in case you wish to ring me about any details I have forgotten to mention. I do hope and pray that the money, ridiculously inadequate as of course it is, will be of some immediate use in easing your troubles.

Yours sincerely,

Lucilla.

Trelawney looked up. “I should say she is very lucky to have such a good friend,” he said solemnly.

“Just as I am,” replied Miss Teatime, with no less sincerity.

He put an arm round her shoulder and squeezed in a comradely fashion.

“Now how do I find this good lady?”

“Do you know Twickenham?”

“Only as a rugger ground, I’m afraid. I used to go down for the navy matches whenever I happened to be ashore.”

“I do not think that would be very near where the Cambridges live. Their address is on the envelope, by the way. It is a rather nice old house in a place called The Turnills. Number eight. It is not so much a street as a sort of close, with the river at the lower end. Ask anyone for the old part of Twickenham and you should have no difficulty in finding it.”

“Is there a station handy?”

“Your best plan probably will be to go to Richmond Station and cross the river. It is a pleasant walk and not very far.”

“Fine.” He put the letter in his pocket.

“When do you intend to go?”

“Tomorrow morning. There’s a London train just before ten o’clock.”

“I shall see you off,” announced Miss Teatime, with an air of sudden decision.

“Oh, you don’t need to trail round specially for me.”

“But I shall, Jack. I know you are going up by train, but I cannot help thinking of you as embarking on a voyage. After all, it will be a voyage back—a real one. Are you not afraid of storms?”

Trelawney could not help laughing. For a moment, Miss Teatime looked abashed, then she joined in his amusement.

“You must think of me waiting here like Madame Butterfly,” she said. “I wonder if there is a hill top from which I can watch out for you.”

“O-o-one fine da-a-ay!” sang the commander, not to be outdone in drollery.

Miss Teatime sighed. “It all seems like a dream,” she murmured.

“Yes, doesn’t it...”

“It sleeps four, you know. She does, rather.”

“She?”

“The Lucy. And there is the loveliest little kitchen.”

“Galley, my dear.”

“Of course. Galley. You will not believe this, but I am really a very good sailor.”

“I do believe you.”

“Do you think we shall be able to sail in her all the year round?”

He smiled. “Hardly. At least we shall have to winter in our cottage.”

“Yes, the cottage...Tell me about the cottage, Jack.”

“You shall see it for yourself very soon. White walls thatch—little windows under the eaves. And central heating!”

“Marvellous!”

“And scarcely a soul within hail.”

“Whereabouts is it, Jack?”

“You’ll see.”

“Tell me.”

“That’s enough, my girl. You’re sailing under sealed orders. Just leave everything to the navigator!”

“What an old tease you are!”

That evening, after she had waved goodbye to Trelawney when he looked back from the other side of the ticket barrier, Miss Teatime did not immediately leave the booking hall. She waited, listening for the arrival of the Brocklestone train. Only when she had heard the last of its departing coaches rattle over the level crossing at the station’s east end, did she walk out into the forecourt and make her way to the car.

She got in and put the map on the seat beside her, together with the list of the train’s stopping places.

The first of these was Pennick, a village just beyond the outskirts of Flaxborough, whose expansion would eventually absorb it as a suburb.

The Pennick road ran almost parallel to the railway. Its first mile, while fairly free of traffic at this time of the evening, was lined with houses and shops. It was within the speed restriction area, and Miss Teatime was careful to observe the limit, give or take twenty miles an hour, until she saw the crossed white discs at the beginning of a comparatively sparsely built-up stretch of ascending road. Then she let the Renault hum happily into the eighties.

A series of three sharp double bends constrained her to drop gear and halve the car’s pace, but on emerging from the last corner she found herself at the start of a straight descent into Pennick village.

The station could be seen quite clearly. It stood on its own, a little to the right of the village and connected to its main street by a fenced path. The train from Flaxborough was just drawing in.

Ten seconds later, Miss Teatime’s car stopped precisely opposite the station path.

The first passenger was coming out of the door of the little booking office. A woman, carrying a shopping basket. Two young men followed, then another woman with a little girl. No one else. Behind a window in the station, a shutter-like movement of light and shade grew faster and faster; then suddenly the window showed clear daylight. The train had gone.

Hambourne was its next stop, about two miles farther on. The map suggested the road to be fairly free of complications. Miss Teatime set off again.

Once beyond the last of Pennick’s cottages, she saw with surprise just how straight the road was. It might have been built as a third rail track. Hambourne was actually in view, a tiny cluster of russet-coloured roofs, glowing in the last of the sun.

Here it would have been simple enough to pass the train, but she decided against doing so. Rail passengers had nothing to do except look out of their windows and even at twenty or thirty yards it was not difficult to recognize the driver of an overtaking car. So she drove slowly into Hambourne and again was able to pick a vantage point near its station before any travellers made an appearance.

There were two. Neither was the commander.

She drew another blank at North Gosby.

Between there and Strawbridge, she encountered an almost disastrous hold-up in the form of a flock of sheep that was being driven along the road to fresh pasturage. This lost her five minutes, and only a hazardous, if exhilarating, passage through Gosby Vale at a fraction over ninety saved her from missing Strawbridge’s homecomers altogether.

By the time she reached Moldham it was decidedly dusk and she was alarmed to find that the railway line, together with Moldham Halt, had somehow contrived to put between themselves and the road a broad and seemingly bridgeless canal. Helplessly, she watched the train come to a stop on the far side of the water.

Then, almost at once, it moved on. She had not heard a single door slam. Moldham, apparently, had sent none of its sons and daughters to the big town that day.

Miss Teatime switched on the lamp behind the driving mirror and consulted her map.

Only Benstone Ferry now, then Chalmsbury Town. Its true that the train went on from Chalmsbury to Brocklestone, but that was nearly thirty miles farther on. Surely Trelawney did not come all that way to press his suit? No, at Chalmsbury she would call it a day.

Darkness steadily deepened as she drove the five miles to Benstone. It spread out from the hollows in the fields and gathered beneath hedges. The road, winding now, and with a disconcerting way of slipping suddenly away to right or left as if alarmed by her headlights, was of the greyness of grey cats. She could defeat it only by remaining constantly alert and using the lower gears to whip the car into pursuit of every advantage that its lights revealed. The Renault’s cornering, she told herself happily, was tight as a turd in a trumpet.

Even so, on such a road at this time of day there was no better than an even chance of reaching Benstone Ferry before the train. Would there still be a waterway between her and the line? She would need to have another look at the map as soon as she got to the village.

A long mass of darkness loomed up on her left. She was passing a plantation. A brown blob moved erratically from the side of the road ahead. It was in her path, creeping first one way and then another. She braked, dropped into second gear and skirted round it, smiling at the glimpse she had had of tiny eyes and a wet boot-button snout. Hedgehogs, she considered, were very endearing creatures.

Against the glimmering west, the black peaks of roadside cottages began to appear. An isolated street lamp’s yellow rays fell upon the signboard of an inn...George the Fourth, tight-collared and archly surprised, a great pale blue, bejewelled, silk-bound dropsy in the sky. Farther on were the lighted windows of four shops and a cabin in which a group of Benstone villagers stood waiting before a fish and chip range.

Miss Teatime pulled up and held the map in the light from the cabin. The station was about a quarter of a mile away, along the next road on the right. And this side, thank God, of the canal—here called the Benstone Eau apparently.

She made the turn and almost at once saw the train’s lights, a distant golden chain moving slowly to the left. From the station, just visible at the far end of her headlamps’ beam, four or five people were walking up the lane towards her. They drew to the side to let her pass and she scanned their faces. Strangers.

Then she spotted a figure on its own, moving past the corner of the station. She recognized Trelawney as he stooped to unlock the door of a car.

Miss Teatime drove straight past, continued for about a hundred yards, and stopped just beyond a gateway, into which she reversed. As soon as she saw Trelawney’s car emerge from the station yard and turn towards the village, she swung back on to the lane and followed it.

In Benstone, the other car crossed the main road and gained speed down a hill. Miss Teatime kept a fifty-yard distance from the two red tail lights. These flickered every now and then, presumably when the car went over one of the frequent patches of uneven surface.

The descent ended in a left turn, after which the road climbed steeply for a while before levelling off between what seemed to be stretches of common. Another turn led them past a grove of silver birch and down into the valley of a stream.

It was at the moment when the commander’s car reared to cross a hump-backed bridge over this stream that its tail lights winked twice and died. Miss Teatime accelerated to close the gap but by the time she reached the bridge the short stretch of road between it and the next corner was empty.

The rest of the climb from the valley was so tortuous that only an occasional white glow among the trees indicated that Trelawney, who obviously knew the road well, was still ahead.

At the top, Miss Teatime found herself in high, open country. Not far away, skeins of cold violet light evidenced the main streets of a town. Chalmsbury, no doubt. But where had dear Jack got to?

There...She saw the narrow, rather weak beams lift and fall, swing round, turn again...

Odd. They had gone out.

She drove on to where she thought Trelawney’s headlights had last been visible, but realized how difficult the darkness made her judgment. On her left was the opening to a little lane. Farther on was another turning. And on the opposite side of the road, a third. He could have gone up any of these.

Pulling up, she quickly switched off the engine and opened the window. She listened intently. A faint throbbing came to her for a few seconds only, but from what direction she could not be sure. Then, distantly, the sound of a closing door. Silence.

She put on the mirror light and traced on the map the journey she had made from Benstone Ferry. The common, the valley with the stream, the bridge...the route was quite easy to follow. And so—her ringer moved on—she must now be exactly...yes, here. She pencilled a ring round the three little side roads.

Miss Teatime leaned back in her seat and considered. She was certainly not going to traipse around on foot in the darkness. At least she knew now where to come. Ten minutes in daylight would be enough for finding out the rest. If that proved necessary. It might not, of course. She knew better than to be greedy. Particularly in this case. Goodness, yes. If all went as it should tomorrow, she would leave well alone. If not...well, a girl had to live and there was more than one way of skinning a cat.

Chapter Sixteen

Commander Trelawney leaned from the carriage window and blew a kiss to the receding figure of Lucy Teatime. Not until she was out of sight, lost in the straggle of hesitant, slightly embarrassed seers-off on the Flaxborough up platform, did he withdraw his head, close up the window and sit down.

The train was that recommended by Flaxborough booking clerks as “the best of the day”—a testimonial that might have had a brighter ring had it not sounded, in their mouths, synonymous with “the best of a bad lot“. In fact, it was quite reliably fast and comfortable and a good deal cleaner than expresses from more notable centres of population.

The commander had lunch “aboard”, as he would have said if Miss Teatime had been there, and filled in the rest of the time before the train’s arrival at Euston by reading a boat-builders’ catalogue which had arrived for him by that morning’s post.

He was surprised and more than a little gratified to learn how expensive a relatively humble river craft was. The more ambitious models were comparable in price with the best makes of motor car. As for the builder’s largest and most lavishly equipped offerings, these were illustrated without mention of such vulgar irrelevancies as cost, but it was obvious from the scale up to that point that the four thousand mark was by no means high water.

It was nearly two o’clock when Trelawney left the train and took a taxi to Waterloo. London was colder than he had expected. The sky was full of low, curd-like cloud, driven by a wind that swooped fitfully into the streets and set grit and bus tickets swirling in the shop doorways.

By the time he came out of Richmond Station, a fine rain was being blown in from the direction of the river. He kept in the shelter of shops as much as possible until he reached the bridge. At the sight of its gleaming parapet and the sound of bus tyres hissing at the heels of what few pedestrians were braving the crossing, the commander reeled back beneath a café awning and prepared to hail the next taxi to come in view.

His third sortie was successful. As he hunched thankfully in the dry, leather-smelling gloom, he caught a glimpse of the river over which the cab was carrying him, and groaned. It made him think, for a moment mercifully brief, of what the sea was in all probability like.

And now here he was, he supposed, in Twickenham. He watched the passing scene. It might have been Acton, or Streatham, or Balham, or Reading. Or anywhere. What did names mean here? Why did people still pretend that there were individual oats in this great bowl of porridge?

But when he got out of the taxi and saw the deserted, gently curved street of Georgian houses, each with a little railed garden into which raindrops splashed from the boughs of old, imperturbable sycamores, he had to admit that homogeneity was not yet absolute even in Middlesex.

He found number eight The Turnills half way down the right-handed terrace—the taxi had been unable to enter the street because of three bulbous iron posts set across the carriageway at its upper end.

His knock was answered by a slim, fair-haired girl of eleven or so, whose glasses gave her small, fastidious-looking face an attractive air of solitude.

“How do you do?” she inquired of him, seemingly anxious to gain a truthful reply.

“Good afternoon,” said the commander, with a big is-your-mother-in smile. “Do some people called Cambridge live in this house?”

“Yes, they do,” said the girl. (A neighbour’s child, perhaps? A runner of errands?)

He peered down amiably. “I should rather like to speak to them. To Miss Cambridge, that is.”

“I am Miss Cambridge.”

The commander laughed. “No, no. Miss Evelyn Cambridge, I mean.”

“But that’s me. I’m Evelyn. What is your name, please?”

“Well, fancy that...No, I’m afraid I haven’t made myself very clear. My name is Commander Trelawney and I wish to speak to the other Miss Cambridge—the lady who is the daughter of old Mr Cambridge.”

The girl considered this, her natural politeness prompting her to attempt some interpretation that would satisfy the visitor. The best she could muster was: “I don’t think Grandad had a daughter called Evelyn, but I’ll ask Daddy if you like.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes. He’s called Mr Cambridge, as well.”

“Ah...well, perhaps if I were to have a word with him...”

The girl turned, then looked back at Trelawney apologetically and pulled the door fully open. “I should have asked you to come in, shouldn’t I?”

“That is most kind of you, my dear.” He stepped forward and stood within the doorway.

After giving him a careful glance, as if to make sure that he fitted properly and would not fall over when left alone, she trotted off down the corridor and disappeared round a corner at the end.

The commander stuck his hands in his pockets and stood frowning out at the rain. He told himself that the apparent surplus of Cambridges was nothing to worry about. The child, no relation at all but simply avid for security and affection, was doubtless identifying herself with Lucy Teatime’s friend. “Daddy” would prove to be another dream figure—an imaginary father whom she pretended to consult when difficulties cropped up. Poor child. At any moment now, the real Miss Cambridge would come out and...

He turned, having heard a gentle scuffling noise. Also he was vaguely aware of being watched.

He peered along the corridor. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he discerned a number of small figures. They were ranged, apparently in some order of seniority, in a shadowy doorway and were gazing at him with dark, serious eyes. They reminded him for an instant of an unpacked nest of Japanese dolls, the sort that fit one inside another. But before he could begin to count them, they flitted away out of sight.

The commander’s frown deepened. There was something very odd about all this. Why had Lucy not mentioned that the house would be full of children? Were they old Mr Cambridge’s? A hobby, perhaps, that had finally landed him in his present financial predicament. Into hospital, too. Yet surely the brood didn’t belong to his daughter? The straight-laced Lucy was hardly likely to have fostered the friendship of an unmarried mother—least of all one whose irregular habits were of such patent regularity...

His anxious musing was brought to an end by the appearance of a man of pleasant aspect and with much the same expression of bespectacled helpfulness as the girl.

The man greeted him affably. His voice resembled that of a don, delighted to discover at his door a colleague bearing port.

“My name is Cambridge,” said the man.

To Trelawney, the announcement sounded like some elaborate pun. He felt by now thoroughly bewildered.

“Come along in,” said Mr Cambridge, leading him through a door on the right into a large, warm room that seemed at first sight to be a musical instrument museum; He waved him to a chair.

“My daughter says that you are Commander Trelawney.”

The commander nodded. He said, a little falteringly: “I’m very glad to see you’re...out of hospital again.”

“Hospital?”

“Haven’t you been in hospital?*

“Not for some years, no.”

“Oh...I’m sorry—I must have misunderstood. Anyway, you’re looking very fit. I’m glad.”

Mr Cambridge gave a little bow. His face remained calm. Wasn’t he bearing bankruptcy rather too well?

“I have come about the boat,” announced the commander.

There was a short silence,

“But I don’t think we want a boat,” Mr Cambridge said. He looked at the door and added: “I’ll ask my wife, if you like.”

Trelawney tried not to believe that a horde of impostors had taken advantage of the removal of the real Mr Cambridge to hospital and seized his house.

“I am not selling boats,” he said. “I am here to buy yours.” He reached in his pocket for the letter. “On behalf of its original owner.”

“A boat,” Mr Cambridge repeated thoughtfully. He looked up. “You’re sure you don’t mean a cello?”

Trelawney stared wildly.

Mr Cambridge stepped to a corner of the room where there was, indeed, a great fat stringed instrument. He stroked it fondly. “Edwin can’t really manage it, you know, and Estella’s got her hands full with a harp at the moment. I don’t like to see it go, but...”

Trelawney cut him short by leaping tip and thrusting the letter into his hand.

Mr Cambridge looked at it. “But this is addressed to Evelyn. She’s the one who let you in, you know.”

“Read it.”

Mr Cambridge slit open the envelope.

“How very odd,” he said, three minutes later.

Trelawney took back the letter and put it in his pocket. He continued to regard Mr Cambridge in grim silence.

“There obviously has been some misunderstanding, Mr Trelawney. To me, that letter is quite incomprehensible. I’m awfully sorry.”

“Then you don’t know this...this woman?”

“I have never even heard of her.”

Trelawney nodded. He looked very angry indeed.

When he had gone, Mr Cambridge sorted among the children until he found Evelyn, whom he led by the hand into the room with all the musical instruments.

“Tell me, Evelyn,” he said, “do you know a lady called Miss Lucilla Teatime?”

“Yes,” said Evelyn.

“And who is she?”

“I don’t know who she is, but I can tell you where she used to live.”

“All right.”

“Three doors up, on the other side. She was very nice.”

“But is she there now?”

“Not now. She went away. She said she was going to get married to Mr Jackman. He keeps that jeweller’s next to the paper shop at the top.”

“I see.”

“But I don’t think she ever did.”

Once the commander had been borne away on Flaxborough’s best train of the day to London, Miss Teatime quitted the platform and went at once to the Field Street branch of the Provinces and Maritime Bank.

As she entered, she received a nod of recognition from the clerk with whom she and Trelawney had arranged the opening of their joint account two days before. She smiled back at him and drew a chair to a small table set against the wall.

The clean, sharp-edged cheque book positively creaked with newness when she folded back its cover. Only one cheque had been used; it was now on its way to Twickenham. Little girls were lucky these days, Miss Teatime told herself. No one had travelled across half England with an order for her to be paid five hundred pounds when she was a child. The only bouncy thing she had ever been brought was a ball.

She dated the next cheque in the book and wrote “cash” in small, maidenly copperplate. Amount...now what should she put? To lift the full sum of dear Jack’s transfer of the previous day was feasible but crude. There were no grounds, of course, on which it could be challenged. The account was hers no less than his. And yet...No, taking the whole lump would be as bad as wiping up gravy with a piece of bread. There was too much wolfish behaviour in the world today.

She appended her neat signature, filled in the counterfoil and carefully tugged free the cheque.

“Good morning, Miss Teatime.”

(Her name remembered on only the second occasion? What a conscientious young man. What a nice bank.)

“Good morning, Mr Allen.” The name was engraved on a bronze plate set above the grille. (Bronze, not plastic: the employees of this bank were clearly no fly-by-night journeymen.)

Mr Alien picked up the cheque, glanced at it in the most cheerfully matter-of-fact way, and nodded. “Four ninety-seven, eighteen and six. Yes...I shan’t keep you a moment, Miss Teatime.”

He wheeled off his stool and disappeared through a door in the partition behind him.

Two minutes later, he was back, brisk and obliging as ever. But he was no longer holding the cheque.

He leaned forward, smiling. “If you will just go down to that end of the counter, Miss Teatime”—his head gave a slight tilt to his left—“Mr Beach will look after you.”

She looked in the direction indicated and saw a plump, friendly-seeming man standing twenty feet away. He beckoned her benignly, and showed her into an office. The office, with its orange carpet, glass and aluminium table, and long, bottle green velvet curtains, looked more like an advertising agent’s gin parlour.

Miss Teatime accepted the proffered chair. Mr Beach took his seat behind a desk of maple, inlaid with what appeared to be white porcelain lozenges, each initialled “P & M“.

He made of his fingers a prayer-pyramid and looked under it at Miss Teatime’s cheque, lying on a blotting pad.

“Now, Miss Teatime, I take it that you wish to withdraw a sum of four hundred and ninety seven pounds from the account which you have jointly with Mr Trelawney.”

“I do, yes.”

“You are aware, I expect, that a customer with a bank account—any kind of account—may not take out more money than there is credited to that account?”

There was a pause.

“Mr Beach, I really do not see any need for irony. It is pure coincidence that matters in connection with our business—Mr Trelawney’s and mine—have arisen which necessitate this withdrawal so soon after the money was deposited. But, after all, it is our money, Mr Beach, and...”

She stopped. Of course she knew what had happened. It was only some kind of professional reflex action that had made her pretend ignorance and indignation.

Mr Beach raised his eyes.

“How much did you suppose this account contained?” he asked.

Miss Teatime appeared to think for a moment.

“Five hundred and five pounds. Oh—less ten shillings for the cheque books, I suppose.”

“I regret to say that you are under some misapprehension, Miss Teatime. Deducting the cheque book charges—ten shillings, as you say—there remains of the original deposit exactly four pounds ten shillings.”

She stared.

“But...but Mr Trelawney called yesterday in order to transfer five hundred pounds from his personal account into this one.”

“If that was his intention, I’m afraid something must have prevented his coming in,” said Mr Beach. He sounded very sympathetic.

“Dear me...”

“Oh, you mustn’t worry about it, Miss Teatime. We are quite used to these small misunderstandings. They happen, you know, they happen. Even in the best regulated circles, I assure you...” (Oh, for crying out loud, thought Miss Teatime.) “The bank is not embarrassed. We are aware of how busy people are nowadays and how easily things slip their memories. In all probability—in all probability, I say—Mr Trelawney will be calling in some time today and then we can...”

She rose, ignoring the cheque that Mr Beach had begun to wave diffidently in her direction.

“All I can say about Mr Trelawney,” she interrupted firmly, before walking to the door, “is that he has a pretty piss-boiling way of going about things.”

Chapter Seventeen

It was the following morning that a letter with a Derby postmark and addressed to Inspector Purbright arrived at Flaxborough police station. He opened it eagerly.

About that little talk we had, [Miss Huddlestone had written], and the thing you asked me to try and remember—well I have puzzled it over and all of a sudden today it came to me what Martha (Miss Reckitt) meant by Catching a Crab.

When we were children and both living in Chalmsbury we went for walks a lot and often brought back fruit and things for our mothers to make jam. Well there was a cottage not far from my home, out towards Benstone Ferry, and it had a big, garden with fruit trees. An old lady lived in it then and we noticed that she didn’t pick the fruit much, so one day we knocked and asked if we could take some apples. She said Oh they are just crabs, you know, so we said we wouldn’t bother. Actually we thought she wasn’t quite right in the head and when we got home I told my mother that a funny old woman had made out that she had crabs in the garden, just as if it was the seaside. And mother said don’t be so silly, she just meant crab-apples and they were very good for jelly. Anyway we went back and got some, and the next year as well, but we often had a good laugh over getting that idea about crabs. Of course Martha would remember it straight away when this man took her to see it. It was called Brookside Cottage and the last time I saw it it had been done up a good deal and had a garage and that sort of thing. It stands on its own at the end of a lane—Mill Lane I think we used to call it—about two miles out of Chalmsbury on the Benstone Road. I do hope this is some use to you and that you soon find what has happened to poor Martha.

Purbright opened a drawer in his desk and took out a copy of the same ordnance survey section as Miss Teatime had bought on the station bookstall. The ring he pencilled on his, though, was smaller and more precise than Miss Teatime’s reference.

He went to the door and called in Sergeant Love.

“This”—he pointed to the ringed cottage—“is the place that Martha Reckitt’s intended said he was going to buy for her. He probably told the same story to Mrs Bannister. The address is Mill Lane, Low Benstone, and the cottage used to be called Brookside, although there’s no guarantee that it still is.

“There are two possibilities. Either the chap just picked the place at random as part of his scheme to string those women along, in which case he’s probably never even made an inquiry about it. Or it is genuinely for sale and he had some reason for knowing it. There’s just a chance of some connection. We’ll have to work on it.”

“You mean I will,” Love observed, without malice.

“For a start, yes. I’ve got this Teatime woman coming in this morning. You’d better try the estate agents first. Find out if the place is for sale, which agent is handling it, who the owners are and whether they are still living there.”

“Just the Chalmsbury agents?”

“They’re the most likely, but if you draw a blank there you’ll have to ask around in Flax as well.”

The sergeant left to provide himself with a classified telephone directory and a mug of tea.

Just before ten o’clock, Miss Teatime was shown in to Purbright’s office. The inspector fancied that her manner had a slightly more purposeful edge to it than when he had last seen her. And, indeed, she came straight to the point.

“I have given some further thought, Mr Purbright, to the matter we discussed the other morning, and I have decided that I might have been just the tiniest bit over confident in one respect. That is why I telephoned and asked to see you again.”

“I’m very glad you did, Miss Teatime. What has been worrying you?”

“Oh, not worrying, exactly, inspector. I am quite sure in my own mind that what I said then was true. But I cannot help feeling that the assurance I gave you about that handwriting was accepted by you more out of politeness than conviction.”

“I took your word for it, naturally.”

“Ah, yes; but I know that my word is not really evidence.”

“Not scientific evidence, perhaps.”

“No. And so for the sake of everyone concerned—my friend by no means least—I intended to try and give you an actual example of his writing.”

“I see.”

“It will be best, do you not think so?”

“I’m sure it will.”

Miss Teatime nodded and picked up her handbag and gloves. She regarded the inspector for a moment in silence, then smiled.

“Do you know, I really think you are anxious about me, Mr Purbright.”

“I am,” he said simply.

“There is no need to be.”

Purbright leaned forward. “Look, won’t you tell me now the name of this man?” His face was serious.

She appeared to consider. Then she said: “I am sorry, but I must ask you to wait a little longer. Where can I reach you at eight o’clock this evening?”

He looked surprised. “At home, I hope. Why?”

“What is the address?”

“Fifteen Tetford Drive.”

Screwing up her eyes, she wrote it in her little notebook.

“And now may I have that photograph? The handwriting, you know.”

He took it from the folder at his elbow and handed it across the desk. She put it into her bag.

Purbright watched her get up and wait for him to see her to the door. Then he, too, rose.

“I hope you know what you are doing,” he said quietly.

She gave him a bright smile of farewell.

“Oh, yes. I know,” she said.

Back in her room at the Roebuck, Miss Teatime lit a cheroot and took her first whisky sip of the day. As she stared thoughtfully at the gulls swooping down past the blind eyes of the old warehouse, her fingers tapped the sheet of writing paper spread ready on the table before her. She was devising a simple insurance policy.

She picked up her pen.

My dear Inspector Purbright: The enclosed letters unexpectedly came to hand today. They were written by my friend, who calls himself Commander John Trelawney. You will see that I was mistaken about the handwriting. I can plead only that loyalty clouded my judgment. His address is not known to me at the moment, but I have no doubt that Mrs Staunch will be able to give you the information you need. As you will notice, the reference number is 4122.

Yours sincerely,

Lucilla Teatime.

She folded the note, pinned it to the three sheets of the commander’s correspondence and put them all into an envelope. This she sealed and addressed.

Downstairs, she found the manager supervising the changing of flowers in the residents’ lounge. He bustled up to her in immediate response to a smile of inquiry.

“I wish you to undertake a delicate but important commission, Mr Maddox.”

At once he was fussily intrigued.

She handed him the envelope.

“I am going out today and probably shall not be in for lunch,” she explained softly. “I may even be away until early evening. If, however, I have not returned by eight o’clock, I want you to have this letter delivered straight away by hand.”

Maddox looked at the address and nodded earnestly. “Eight o’clock,” he repeated.

“I am sure I can rely upon you, Mr Maddox.”

“You most certainly can.” He peered at her, suddenly anxious. “I hope there’s nothing, ah...”

“Purely precautionary,” said Miss Teatime. “As I believe you know, I am being well looked after.”

At the door she gave him a reassuring wave. Mr Maddox stared after her, his hand feeling for the edge of the envelope in his pocket.

The journey to Benstone, this time without incidental vigils at railway stations, was much more quickly accomplished than she had expected. It was not yet twelve when she halted the Renault just short of the series of lane turnings where she had lost Trelawney’s car two nights before.

She took out the map. Three buildings were marked at distances from the road that could reasonably be supposed to be within earshot. There was one along each lane.

She started off again and took the left turn. About fifty yards from the road, a big, sombre farmhouse loomed behind an overgrown hedge. Miss Teatime did not need to get out of the car to see that no one had occupied it for many years. Through one of the glassless windows she caught a brief glimpse of sky as she drove by; part of the roof at the back had collapsed.

After returning to the main road, she made her way up the second lane—that on the right. She saw first a chimney stack and then thatch appear in a cleft in the lane’s banking.

Soon she drew level with a broad gateway. Beyond it was a gravelled enclosure in front of a long, low, white-walled cottage.

A garage large enough for two cars had been built against the right hand gable and painted white. It was open and empty.

Miss Teatime drove into the enclosure, made a half-circle turn, and got out of the car. She knocked on the front door of the cottage. After a minute, she knocked again, more insistently. There was no response. The door was locked.

She explored, going from window to window.

The interior had every sign of expensive conversion. There was central heating and a wealth of good, modern furniture. The kitchen was generously, almost lavishly, equipped.

It was not until she looked into the glass-paned annexe at the back of the cottage, however, that she found a clue of the kind she was seeking.

Thrown across a bench was the suede leather driving jacket with fur collar and curiously pink-tinged octagonal buttons that Trelawney had been wearing when he took her to the Riverside Rest.

So far, so good.

Sensibly interpreting the empty feeling induced by the sight of the jacket as an indication that she needed lunch, Miss Teatime got into the car once more and drove the rest of the way into Chalmsbury.

She had a meal at an inn called—irresistibly, she thought—the Nelson and Emma, wandered for half an hour around the shops in St Luke’s Square, and sat long enough on a bench outside the General Post Office to savour fully the grotesquerie of the town’s war memorial opposite.

Then she returned to Low Benstone.

The cottage was still empty.

She sat in the car and smoked a cheroot.

A full hour went by.

Miss Teatime jerked upright in her seat, realizing that she had been about to doze off. She started the engine. A drive around the byways would be as pleasant a means as any of killing time.

But when she came back at nearly five o’clock, she saw that the big garage remained gaping, unoccupied.

She sat watching a trio of blackbirds chasing one another in and out of the hedge bottom near the gateway. They were angry and coquettish in turns. Every now and then, one would hop away from the others, stick tail and chest up in the air and stare at her officiously. She thought of that policeman waiting at the back of the Roebuck Hotel. Then, possibly by some chain of subconscious association, of window cleaners going up and down ladders in threes. Her eyes closed and the blackbirds were white, dive-bombing a bucket of blood...They strolled towards her in naval uniform, saluting in the most supercilious manner imaginable...

Miss Teatime fell more and more deeply asleep.

Sergeant Love put down the phone and wearily struck out the last name left on his list of estate agents, valuers and auctioneers in Chalmsbury, Flaxborough and district. All he had gained from his labours was a sore throat and the suspicion that somewhere along the line he had made an unwise joke to a freemason friend of the chief constable.

He went in to Purbright and reported that if Brookside Cottage were indeed for sale, no one in the property trade was aware of it.

“No, well we had to check,” said Purbright. He made it sound easy, trivial almost.

“Would you like me to walk out to Benstone and ask at the cottage?” Love inquired bitterly.

Purbright glanced at the clock.

“Oh, not now, Sid. Leave it till morning.”

He went on with what he had been doing, but looked up again as Love noisily opened the door.

“I tell you what you can do. Give the county boys a ring at Chalmsbury and see if old Larch is in a good enough mood to get you the name of the occupants. It’ll save you asking at the door when you go. You’d better say it’s for me.”

Love knew that he better had. Chief Inspector Larch was a fearsome misanthrope and disciplinarian who, while conscientious within those rules he could not ignore, would have regarded a request from a mere sergeant as impertinence.

Even the quoting of Purbright’s name produced nothing more helpful from Hector Larch than an impatient grunt and a half promise to see what he could do if ever he disposed of a mountain of much more important matters.

In fact, Larch obtained the information in less than five minutes, simply by demanding it of the front office clerk whom he knew to live at Benstone. But he saved it for a couple of hours more on principle.

Thus it was that Purbright was anxiously examining the contents of an envelope that had just been delivered to his home by a porter from the Roebuck Hotel when there came a ring on the extension line from the police station.

By the time he replaced the receiver, he was looking more anxious still.

Chapter Eighteen

Miss Teatime swam up out of sleep with the sense of a cold current dragging at her legs. Then it seemed to be a wind. She shivered and opened her eyes. The car door was open.

“Ahoy, there! Why don’t you come ashore?”

The big fleshy face, converging roundly to its prow-like nose, hung just below the car roof. Trelawney’s eyes peered down with a glint of calculating amusement. His broad, stooped shoulders shadowed her.

“Good evening,” said Miss Teatime steadily. She knew by the greyness of the light that she had slept for at least a couple of hours.

He stepped back and remained holding open the door.

Miss Teatime got out of the car.

He nodded towards the cottage. “So you found my little surprise all by yourself,” he said, then added, more harshly: “As I did yours.”

“I think we had better go inside, Mr Trelawney.”

He lingered a moment, his smile thin and fixed, then he turned and walked to the front door of the cottage.

They entered a long, low-beamed room, thickly carpeted in blue, with yellow cushioned light wood furniture, an enormous television set and, in the three deep window recesses, earthenware bowls of cactus and succulents. The walls were of pale grey rough cast plaster. On that facing the windows hung a Gauguin reproduction, its flowers and flesh glowing like a stove.

Miss Teatime sat primly on a chair near the centre of the room, her handbag on her knee.

Trelawney walked slowly to one of the windows, where he remained with his back towards her.

“As a preliminary to our discussion...” she began.

He spun round. “Oh, it’s to be a dicussion, is it? How nice. Will you begin, or shall I?”

“Please do not be childish. I was saying that as a preliminary I should like to ask you not to use any more of those jolly jack tar expressions. I have suffered a number of courtships in my life, but never before one which made me seasick.”

“You’ll have something worse than seasickness to worry about before I’ve finished with you, woman.” He had flushed, and yet he spoke quite calmly and deliberately.

“Threats will serve the interest of neither of us,” Miss Teatime replied. “They are ill mannered and unbusinesslike.”

“I suppose that as a professional swindler you are all for the smooth approach?”

Miss Teatime sighed. “There you go again, Mr Trelawney. Abuse will get us nowhere.”

“So you don’t deny being a swindler, then?”

“That is not what is worrying you. It was the word ‘professional’ on which you laid stress, I noticed. If the acquisition of smoothness will allay your jealousy and bad temper, do for goodness’ sake stop imagining that amateurism is a virtue.”

He leaned back against the wall and folded his hands. High in one cheek a nerve throbbed spasmodically.

“What did you come here for?”

“For compensation, Mr Trelawney. I do not consider that I have been fairly treated.”

“You don’t cons...”

She raised a hand. “No, please let me finish. Your intention was to acquire a valuable motor boat by handing to a distressed family what you knew to be a worthless cheque. It was a very shabby design, which was thwarted thanks only to my having invented both the boat and the family’s distress.

“Thus your gain was an easy conscience, and it was I who accomplished it.

“But what did I receive in return?

“No one can compute the worth of an easy conscience; it is a priceless commodity. And so when I decided to draw a fee that would little more than cover my expenses, it hurt rather than embarrassed me to find that you had lied about putting five hundred pounds at my disposal.

“For that hurt, I believe I am fully entitled to recompense, and if you will now be good enough to write me a cheque—a genuine cheque this time—for five hundred pounds, I shall be much obliged, Mr Trelawney.”

Miss Teatime drew herself a little more erect in her chair, smoothed her skirt and stared solemnly out of the window.

Trelawney said nothing for several seconds. He was grinning as he explored one nostril with the tip of his middle finger. When he had finished, he looked at the finger and wiped it on the wall behind his back.

He walked across and sat in a chair facing her, three feet away. He leaned forward and nodded.

“All right. Joke over. Now just what is it you think you’re up to?”

She turned to him and raised her eyebrows. “This is not a joke, Mr Trelawney. I have told you quite simply what I require.”

“Do you mean to say,” he said slowly and with no trace now of amusement, “that you have the bloody neck to come out here and try and drag money out of me after what’s happened?”

“I do,” said Miss Teatime.

“You know what you are, don’t you? You’re a prissy-mouthed, four-eyed, chiselling bitch, and you can go to hell!”

She looked at him appraisingly.

“If you really feel that we have arrived at the exchange of compliments stage, I can only assure you that the choice between an hour of your company, Mr Trelawney, and being sewn for a week in a sack of discarded boil dressings would be by no means easy to make.”

“Cow!”

She shrugged and looked at her watch.

“I advise you not to waste further time on thinking up expletives. You lack the talent. If you will write me out that cheque at once, a great deal of trouble will be avoided—for you in particular.”

Watching her all the time, he moved his chair a little closer. There was menace now in his quietness, in the slow, deliberate manner of his watching and listening. With the tip of his tongue he felt his upper lip.

“Go on,” he said. “This trouble...Tell me.”

“The situation,” said Miss Teatime, “is not without a certain piquancy. I shall come to that aspect in a moment. First, though, let us acknowledge a few facts of which you imagine I am unaware.

“I have known for some little time that your intentions towards me are strictly dishonourable. You are doubtless vain enough to have supposed that I would not guess, but it really was not very difficult.

“I also happen to know—although I claim no personal credit for this—that you have already successfully imposed on the credulity of at least two other women. I know their names. One was called Reckitt, the other Bannister. And I know that the police are looking for the man who enginered their disappearance. For you, in fact.”

Trelawney, crouched on the edge of his chair as if in readiness to spring, was staring straight into her eyes. She looked back calmly.

“Now here is the amusing thing,” she went on. “Or at least I hope you will see the humour of it because then you might stop glaring quite so unpleasantly. The only reason why you have not been arrested is that I have personally vouched for your integrity. There, now—what do you think of that?”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“Oh, dear, you are so curmudgeonly...”

“What did you tell them?”

“That you are a bluff and honest sea-dog, of course. A sincere suitor. A gentleman whose handwriting bears not the faintest resemblance to that of the villain whose letters to poor Mrs Bannister have been discovered by the police.”

After a long silence, Trelawney’s hunched frame relaxed. He leaned back into his chair.

“In other words, you thought you’d set up a nice little line in blackmail.”

“Your moral judgments are as odious as your maritime metaphors. Kindly keep both to yourself.”

“I don’t believe this nonsense about letters.”

Unhurriedly, Miss Teatime opened her bag. She handed the photograph to Trelawney without comment.

He looked at it, then raised his eyes. “You say you’ve told them this isn’t my writing?”

“Emphatically.”

“And that Commander Jack Trelawney’s a fine chap who wouldn’t hurt a fly?”

“By a great effort of will, yes.”

“So I am not suspected of the awful crimes the police imagine have been committed?”

“No.”

He smiled. It was like a crack running across ice.

“Oh, dear,” sighed Miss Teatime, “you are so woefully transparent, Jackie boy.”

“Am I?”

“You are saying to yourself: Knock this lady off as well and all will be hunky-dory.”

“It does seem a damn good idea. In fact, I’m sold on it.”

She shook her head. “No, I do not think you are, really. Already there has crept into that incommodious mind the realization that I should never have been fool enough to come here without taking some precaution.”

“Oh, and what precaution?”

“It is in the form of a time limit. If I am not back at my hotel by eight o’clock, the police at Flaxborough will receive a packet containing your letters.”

“And my name and address, no doubt,” added Trelawney carelessly.

“No—just the means of learning them with singularly little trouble.”

“How little?”

“Simply a peep into the files of that excellent matrimonial bureau, Jack dear. Or should I say Mr Four-one-double-two?”

For a moment, he looked genuinely puzzled. Then he smiled, grinned, began to laugh aloud.

Miss Teatime heard a door close behind her. She looked round quickly.

“But surely you didn’t imagine that my husband’s name would be on the files, Miss Teatime? There isn’t a four-one-double-two. I think a burglar must have lifted it.”

Donald Staunch rose and grasped his wife’s arm.

“The car,” he said. “Get it out of sight somewhere and come straight back. I’ll want you to stay with her while I...see to things.”

Inspector Purbright found Love at his lodgings, being dotingly administered a late high tea by his landlady, Mrs Cusson.

He plucked him from the scarcely begun feast of buttered haddock, wholemeal scones, tinned oranges, Carnation milk and Eccles cakes; bustled him past a tearfully protesting Mrs Cusson, enemy of malnutrition; and thrust him to the car.

“You drive, Sid. Hunger’s good for alertness.”

It seemed a pretty good propellant as well. They were passing through Benstone Ferry less than twenty minutes later.

“Up here and across the common,” Purbright directed.

Four minutes more.

“First turning off on the right, now. Mind, it’s sharp.”

The car crunched to a stop on the gravel before Brookside Cottage. Purbright reached the door first. He knocked sharply and repeatedly on the thick wood.

Pausing, he heard movement within the house. The sergeant was beside him now.

“They’re in,” said Purbright. Again he knocked. They heard footsteps inside. The steps receded. Purbright knocked even harder.

“Sid, you’d better go round to...No, wait a bit.” The footsteps were coming back. The door opened.

“Good evening, Mrs Staunch.” Without further preliminary, the inspector stepped past her, followed immediately by Love.

Sylvia Staunch turned from the door and stared at them furiously.

“Would you kindly explain what this is all about.”

“Where is Miss Teafime?”

“Miss Who?” A perplexed glare.

“Your client. Miss Teatime. I have reason to believe she came here to see your husband.”

“Why on earth should she want to see my husband? He has nothing whatever to...”

“Is he in, Mrs Staunch?”

“Not at the moment, no.”

Love looked at the inspector. “Both cars are in the garage, sir.”

“Well, Mrs Staunch?”

“I think he’s gone to post a letter.”

Her composure was being re-established, her bewilderment more artistically controlled.

“But I am not going to stand here and have questions fired at me without knowing the reason for them. What authority have you got to come trampling in here, anyway?”

“We suspect felony, Mrs Staunch. That may be a somewhat stuffy answer, but it will serve at least until your husband returns.” He drew a curtain aside and peered out. “Which I trust will not be long. How far away is the post box?”

“At the end of the lane.”

“Odd that we did not see him.”

“There’s a path from the back. It’s quicker.”

Purbright nodded. He motioned Mrs Staunch to sit down.

“I might as well tell you now,” he said to her, “that we shall probably ask your husband to return to Flaxborough with us.”

“But what an earth for?”

“We think he may be able to help us to get at the truth about one or two matters.”

“You don’t have to use jargon with me, inspector. That just means you think he’s done something. What, though? Why can’t you say? And for God’s sake what’s all this about that Teatime woman?”

“If, as you say, she has not been here, you have no need to worry on her account, Mrs Staunch.”

“Yes, but why did...”

Purbright had held up his hand. He was listening intently.

From the back of the house came a small scuffling, fumbling sound. They heard a door being opened.

Mrs Staunch jumped up from her chair, but at once Purbright caught and held her arm.

The back door clicked shut. Someone was walking across the tiled floor of the kitchen.

“Don!” Mrs Staunch shouted. “There are two policemen who are asking a lot of silly questions. We are in here. I wish you would come and tell them that they’re...”

The door from the kitchen was pushed open. There entered a slightly dishevelled, slightly unsteady Miss Teatime.

Mrs Staunch stared, her mouth slowly opening. Then from the mouth came a scream.

“Where’s Don? Where’s my husband? Damn you! Where’s Don?”

She tried to throw herself forward, but Purbright’s grip did not yield.

Miss Teatime gazed at her regretfully.

“I am afraid he is in that cesspool thing down the garden.”

Mrs Staunch’s screams subsided into a low, sobbing howl. Her body folded helplessly across the inspector’s arm.

“I really am very sorry,” said Miss Teatime. “But it was his idea entirely to go waltzing about in the dark with his arms round my waist. The cover was off, you know.”

She turned her sorrowful gaze to Sergeant Love and added, as if for his own special information:

“I bloody nearly fell in myself.”