Chapter Ten

Every comminity seems to need to divide its history into manageable parcels. Before the Flood and after. Before and after the Conquest. Pre-war and post-war. The policemen of Flaxborough, or those of them at least who had had occasion to deal with death, habitually sliced the past into two sections, uneven in size and of utterly different connotations.


The first, and larger, was The Old Man’s Time.


The second was Since Amblesby, or Now That The Old Bugger’s Gone.


Sir Albert Amblesby, the senile, scrawny, shambling, agate-eyed lawyer who had confused and terrified inquest witnesses for nearly half a century, had died—still in his office of coroner—in 1974: choked, it was said, upon the honour of knighthood belatedly bestowed for the political skulduggery of his long-gone prime, as a dehydrated miser may choke upon a rich tit-bit.


His successor, another solicitor, James Bell Cannon, was a much younger and less malevolent man.


The coroner’s officer, Sergeant Bill Malley, was glad of Cannon’s correct attitude towards the grieving and distressed.


But sometimes he missed the challenge of the late Sir Albert’s wickedness and the satisfaction he had gained in thwarting it. Cannon was careful, proper, dull. His officer felt like a Saint George turned chauffeur.


So it was that when, on Friday morning, the analyst’s final report on the contents of Robert Tring’s stomach was delivered by hand at Flaxborough Police Station, Malley acquainted Mr Cannon with the findings before taking the report to Purbright. It was a piece of punctiliousness that would have been unthinkable in The Old Man’s Time.


Cannon received the summary gravely. He said that it would appear to complicate the issue somewhat. When was the inquest due to be resumed?


“September twenty-second, sir. Ten days.”


“Very well. We shall just have to see what else turns up, Sergeant. If a further adjournment is necessary, I don’t doubt that Mr Purbright will make application at the proper time.”


And he restored his attention to a nice meaty bit of conveyancing.


Malley found the inspector studying another analytical report. This, although issuing from the same laboratory, had been brought round a little later. It looked a good deal briefer than the first.


“Not very helpful,” remarked Purbright, handing the single sheet to Malley. “It’s the whisky.”


“Nothing?”


“Nothing very exciting. The sample was too small—as we thought it would be. I hadn’t the heart to disappoint poor old Johnson, though, after he’d carried that bit of bottle corner all the way here from the Market Place.”


Malley passed over his report in silent exchange. Both read for a while. The Sergeant, finishing first, waited.


When Purbright looked up, it was to give Malley a pout of meaningful inquiry. “So the odds are that Digger was nobbled?”


“That’s what it looks like.”


“Oh, dear.”


Malley shrugged. “He wasn’t a very lovable character, mind. Not Digger.”


“Oh, I’m well aware of that, Bill. It’s me I’m sorry for. I’m due to see Mr Chubb in five minutes. He thinks the only thing we have on hand at the moment is the Police Houses Chrysanthemum Competition.”


Which was true. The chief constable, himself a diligent gardener, believed horticulture to be an almost perfectly suitable pursuit for policemen off duty. Its simple symbolism could not be bettered. A rose was an honest life; a cucumber a useful one. Canker and mildew were the crimes to which weak and foolish men would soon fall victim if the police did not go round with spray and secateur. Flaxborough, fortunately, was fairly free of infestation.


“Morning, Mr Purbright.” Mr Chubb turned from his contemplation of the big, oak-cased aneroid barometer on his office wall after giving the glass one final tap with a knuckle.


“The death of Robert Tring,” proclaimed the inspector, hoping that brusqueness would forestall mention of chrysanthemums.


“Tring?” A second’s pause. “Ah, the youth who fell out of some aerial contrivance at the fair.” Mr Chubb indicated a chair for Purbright, then walked to the window, where he continued to stand, curator-like, for the rest of the interview.


“You will remember, sir, that the inquest was opened for evidence of identification. Dr Heineman also appeared, but only to give the actual cause of death.”


Only? How do you mean, Mr Purbright? I should have thought that determining the cause of death was Heineman’s entire function.”


“In the ordinary course of events, yes. But there were certain circumstances that he noticed during the post-mortem investigation which struck him as odd. They are included in his full report, but he agreed there would be no point in mentioning them in advance of the analyst’s findings. I do have the analyst’s report now, sir.”


“I have the impression that something about alcohol came up at the inquest. Heineman didn’t keep that back.”


“He had no choice. The Q.C. for the fairground people drew it out in cross-examination. He wanted to suggest irresponsible behaviour on Tring’s part, of course.”


Mr Chubb sniffed. “That shouldn’t take much establishing. Very unruly lot round there, I believe.”


“The Tring family are not notably conformist, sir. On the other hand, Robert—or Digger, as they call him—never got into trouble through drinking, let alone drugs.”


“Drugs?” The chief constable looked nervous. He was not by nature an imaginative man, but he once had attended a Home Office film show on the subject that had so harrowed him that he could not now pass herbalist Gingold’s shop in East Street without half-expecting a fuddle of junkies to reel from its doorway.


“Heineman noticed some dilation of pupil, sir,” Purbright explained. “I don’t need to tell you, of course, that it is a symptom of narcotic poisoning.”


Mr Chubb’s anxiety was clearly increasing. “Do you mean to tell me, inspector, that Tring was poisoned? I thought it was the fall that killed him.”


“So it was, sir. But he had been drugged first. By...” Purbright quickly found the appropriate section of the analysis—“By two point seven milligrams of hyoscine hydrobromide.”


The Chief Constable looked grave. Hyoscine hydrobromide had a peculiarly menacing sound. “Where would he get hold of that?” he asked, putting just enough emphasis on the final word to suggest actual knowledge of what it was.


“I have no idea, sir,” Purbright admitted. He added, off-handedly: “Apart from the two obvious sources, of course.”


Chubb lacked his inspector’s advantage of having chatted over the phone half an hour previously with the branch manager of Boots. He waited a moment, then yielded. “Those sources being?”


“Two types of proprietary medicine, sir, both unrestrictedly on sale, I understand. One is a tablet for the relief of menstrual pain; the other is intended to prevent motion sickness—a so-called travel pill, in fact.”


“In that case, the man could have taken the stuff himself. Even an overdose by accident. They are not too bright in that district, you know.”


Purbright knew better than to dispute the chief constable’s method of assessment by address. He said merely: “It was a fairly substantial overdose—probably ten tablets or more.”


“Of the travel sickness stuff, you mean?”


“I doubt if even a man living in Abdication Avenue would suppose himself to be suffering from period pains, sir.”


“Perhaps not,” conceded Mr Chubb, impassively. He frowned at his finger ends. “What does this hyoscine whatsitsname do? In that sort of quantity.”


“I’m told the effects would vary a good deal from person to person. There would almost certainly be excitement, though, to begin with, quickly followed by loss of control and even collapse.”


The chief constable sighed. “I suppose this is all part of what they call getting kicks nowadays. It seems a pity, though, that a grown man has to play the fool on a roundabout. Fairs are for children. This sort of thing spoils them.”


“We do not know,” Purbright pointed out, “that Tring took the drug of his own volition. There was another man with him on the ride. Girls in the car behind say that both men were having drinks from the same bottle, but Tring more than his companion.”


“Who was this other fellow?”


“He hasn’t come forward, sir. And no one so far has been able to identify him. The fairground attendant who took their money remembers the pair, but only because of the things they were wearing—their motor-cycling outfits. He didn’t get a look at the face of either.”


By this time, Mr Chubb was wearing that expression of mournful omniscience which betokened an inability to make sense of what he had been told. Purbright recognised that he need offer only a couple more pieces of confusing evidence for the chief constable suddenly to consult his watch, express alarm lest he be late for an undefined appointment, and hasten away to the sanctuary of the greenhouse at his home in Queen’s Road.


“A bottle,” persisted the inspector, “which might well be the one from which Tring and his friend were taking nips, fell among the crowd just before Tring’s body came down. It was smashed, of course, but P.C. Johnson very sensibly collected the pieces, including a corner of the base that still held a few drops of whisky. I asked the analyst to do what he could with it.”


Purbright glanced at the second report before replacing it in his pocket. “The sample wasn’t big enough to yield much information, but there’s no doubt it was whisky, or something very similar. One queer thing, sir. An unusually high proportion of sugar.”


“What about that drug, though?” Mr Chubb inquired. “The hyoscine?” He began to move a hand towards the watch pocket of his waistcoat.


The inspector shook his head. “Too small a sample, sir. It’s the sugar reading that could be significant, though.”


“Oh, yes, Mr Purbright?” Finger and thumb closed upon the silver watch chain.


“The motion sickness pills I mentioned earlier consist mainly of a chewable, palatable base—some kind of sugary substance. Ten or a dozen dissolved in part of a quartern bottle of whisky would account for what the analyst found. Of course, I don’t need to tell you that a straight malt is not normally sweetened for drinking.”


The chief constable perceptibly paled. It was two or three seconds before he hauled up his slim silver watch and muttered “Gracious me, road safety committee.”


“You will wish me to push ahead with inquiries as a matter of some urgency, sir?” Purbright rose to his feet.


“Certainly, Mr Purbright. If there is anything further you wish to ask me, please don’t hesitate.”


“Thank you, sir.” Almost at the door, Purbright turned. “One small point, sir. Glenmurren whisky is a fairly unusual brand, I understand; do you happen to know anyone who buys it? We shall be asking the various suppliers, but short cuts are always appreciated.”


Mr Chubb stared ruminatively at the opposite wall. He shook his head. “It does ring a bell.” A pause. “But rather distantly.”


Purbright grasped the door handle, then saw the chief constable raise his hand.


“Gwill,” said Mr Chubb, very affirmatively and with satisfaction. “Gwill. Old Marcus. He used to drink the stuff. I remember they kept some in for him at the club before he passed on.”


Purbright’s ease of recall of the “passing on” in question was not surprising. The bizarre electrocution in 1958 of Marcus Gwill, proprietor of the Flaxborough Citizen, had provided the inspector with his first murder case. 1


“Mind you,” added Mr Chubb, “I can’t see that poor old Marcus’s preferences can have any bearing on this business of yours. Just one of those odd little memories.”


“Yes, sir. Funny old world.” And Purbright departed before Mr Chubb could decide whether the remark had been philosophic or fatuous.


Back in his own office, he found Detective Sergeant Love in wait, looking pleased.


“We’ve been trying to get hold of you,” Love announced. “A missing person case has turned up.”


“Do you mean that a disappearance has become apparent?”


“No, it’s this tottie. She’s gone.”


Purbright closed his eyes and lowered himself gently into the chair behind his desk. “Look, Sid—one thing at a time. First of all, I want a whole lot more questions asked about the Tring business. I’ll help you make a list, then we can get the infantry organised.”


A programme of inquiry was devised. The main task would be the thankless one of questioning Tring’s known associates in an effort to find the identity of his companion on what Love, a reckless coiner of journalistic phrases, was pleased to term his “death ride”. Also there would need to be a closer and more persistent examination of the man’s activities both at his place of work and elsewhere, on the principle, as expressed by the sergeant, that “nobody gets done in without asking for it”. And lastly—again the definition of objective was owed to Love’s earthy percipience—there was that “pricey Scotch jollop” to be traced to source.


“And now,” Purbright said after disposition of manpower had been sketched out, “what is this about a missing tottie?”

1 Reported in Coffin Scarcely Used




Chapter Eleven

Upon Mr and Mrs M. H. Rothermere, of Hampstead, London, emerging from connubial slumber on the first floor of the Jesmondia Hotel, attended the proprietoress in person, with breakfast tray borne in her wake by her husband, the major.


Mrs Cartwright gave a featherlight knock with one hand while with the other she peremptorily pass-keyed entry.


Mr Rothermere, hair and beard tousled, hauled himself by the bedclothes to a sitting position. He looked a good deal alarmed for some seconds, then noticed that Julia was making semi-conscious stirrings beside him. He solicitously replaced over her naked breast the sheet his own rising had disturbed.


Mrs Cartwright opened the curtains and inspected the scene with quicksilver eye before beckoning the major through the doorway. He set the tray down on the floor in the corner furthest from the bed.


Mr Rothermere said thank you. Julia pretended to be still asleep. The major, who wore a loose drill jacket over the shirt and trousers of the night before, stood by the door for a few moments staring at Julia and the tray by turns, as if hopeful that she might suddenly dash to retrieve it. His wife bustled him out.


In the corridor, she looked at him thoughtfully and said: “It’s him. You’re quite right. It’s Mr Hive.”


“Said it was.”


“Yes, but he didn’t have the beard before. Just the moustache. A beard suits him.”


“Thought he’d retired.”


“Detectives never retire.”


The major lifted the corner of his lip derisively. “Detective? The man’s a professional co-respondent. Always was. A blasted paid bed-jumper.”


“Used to be.” Mrs Cartwright was shaking her head. “Used to be. And even then he was very select. Very select. He once told me that this hotel was very handy for the Sandringham trade. I expect that’s why he’s here now. And why he’s not let on to me who he is. Because of her.”


Speculation and dispute continued to the end of the corridor and down the stairs. Then other breakfasts demanded attention, other awakenings.


Mr Rothermere, formerly Hive, told Julia, on her return to bed with the tray, that he sincerely valued womanly independence and never tried to erode it by displays of pseudo-chivalry. He also told her—to her even greater gratification—that she picked her way amongst furniture with the grace of the nude eighteen-year-old Indonesian waitress he once had seen at the home of Godfrey Winn.


They balanced the tray between them and surveyed its contents. There were sausages, four fried eggs, some rashers of bacon, mushrooms, fried bread, a rack of toast, butter in a dish, marmalade and honey, and a large pot of coffee.


“Among the many excellent attributes of the English,” remarked Mr Rothermere, spearing sausages, “is their recognition of adultery as healthy exercise.”


“We are supposed to be married,” Julia observed.


“Mm-yes.” He slid a couple of eggs on to her plate and added bacon. “Hampstead address, though. Sinful connotations. How nice to have really crisp fried bread.”


“Oh, it is, it is. I hate it when they fry only one side and leave the blank side down on the plate to get steamy and soggy.”


“God, yes. They used to do that at Marlborough. I’ve never forgotten. Nor forgiven.”


“Hotel, was it?”


Mr Rothermere saw innocence in the eyes above the raised forkful of bacon and mushroom and quelled his conditioned reflexes. Instead of murmuring “School, actually,” he nodded.


Julia, happily determined to prolong the novelty of conversation at breakfast, indicated the butter with her knife. “How much more appetising,” she said, “than those dreadful little foil-wrapped tablets.”


“Indeed, yes.” He sought with his eyes the bowl of demerara. “And no wrapped individual sugar cubes, you notice. They always look to me like instruments of polite euthanasia.”


Julia thought: How nice and warm he is, under the bed-clothes and not forever shuffling about.


Mr Rothermere thought: There is a graciousness about this woman that I like: when my stomach rumbled just now, she pretended to look pleased, as if by birdsong.


And as they ate and drank and discoursed, her left foot and his right came together and little toe linked companionably in little toe.


They rose and dressed at half-past nine. In the hotel lounge they were scrutinised by two women and an elderly clergyman, all looking worried; and by a family in chairs at the window: father, mother and two adolescent boys, whose general expression was of gloomy pique, as if they had been put into quarantine.


“Anyone for beach cricket?” Mr Rothermere jocosely inquired of the room at large.


The clergyman and his escort quickly looked away from him and froze in contemplation of one another’s knitwear.


The two boys, reddening horribly at the sudden eruption of a loony into their lives, gazed down at their hands and had breathing trouble, on noticing which their father went red also. He leaned forward, pulled ears, and hissed admonition, leaving his wife to offer sole response to Mr Rothermere’s invitation. This she did by smiling flickeringly (loose connection? wondered Mr Rothermere, compassionately) and saying that it was nice of him, Mr—er—but not just now, thanks all the same, Mr—er...


“Rothermere,” he supplied, beaming. “I own the Daily Mail.”


The respiration of the smaller of the two boys grew suddenly more erratic. He began to wet himself.


Julia tugged at her companion’s arm. “You have some business to attend to, remember? And it’s a long way to Flaxborough.”


They went out into the lobby.


“What are you going to do?” he asked her.


“Some shopping. And I should like to walk along the beach if it’s not too cold.”


“Don’t forget that you have been done away with. At least remember not to ask a policeman anything.”


She grinned, but almost at once looked serious again. “It won’t come to that.” She took hold of his sleeve. “Look, Mortimer—you’re not to carry this thing too far. Scare the bugger a little, certainly; I don’t mind that. But I couldn’t go through with the real thing. You did realise that, didn’t you?”


He took her hand. “Of course. He must feel that we are ruthless, though. That is why you must stay out of the way. Leave it to me to keep up the pressure.” And Mr Rothermere made wheel-turning motions with his free hand and looked as grim as Captain Ahab having his leg off.


“No police, then?”


“No police. I promise.” Ahab was gone and back was Edward the Seventh, kindly, genial, reliable.


Julia posted a quick, schoolgirlish kiss in the gap between beard and moustache and walked lightly to the door. She looked back. “You’ll ring tonight?”


“Without fail, dear lady.”


She smiled and was gone.


Mr Rothermere went over to the reception counter, where Mrs Cartwright had been straining, under cover of busy-ness with ledgers, to catch what she could of the conversation. He bowed, holding his silver-grey, curly brimmed hat close to his diaphragm, and handed her the room key.


“I shall be away for a day or two—probably until after the weekend—but I’m sure my wife will be consoled by the excellence of your cuisine.”


Mrs Cartwright bobbed and shuffled with pleasure. She looked more than ever like a parrot on a perch.


“As soon as we saw her,” said Mrs Cartwright, her head a little on one side as if inviting a scratch, “my husband and I thought what a nice lady. Mrs Rothermere, I mean.”


Mr Rothermere gave another small bow.


“Do you know who she puts me in mind of?” Mrs Cartwright leaned forward a little.


“I have no idea.”


The beak came nearer. Softly: “Princess Anne.”


There was a long pause. Then Mr Rothermere clapped upon his head the curly brimmed hat and with one tug set it at a jaunty rake.


“I am confident,” he said, “that among all the excellent attributes of this establishment, discretion is not the least noteworthy.”


My God, thought Mrs Cartwright, I’ve put my finger on something there. Her thoughts raced ahead. The Sandringham Room—no, the Royal Suite—well, why not?—thirty per cent surcharge...


Mr Rothermere drove south at a gentle pace, enjoying the softly undulating Norfolk countryside, mistily gilded by weak September sunshine. But when he reached Norwich, instead of taking the western road that would have led him to Wisbech and thence across the fenlands on the way to Flaxborough, he chose the south-bound A11 and was soon being sluiced along in the traffic for London.


Just north of Woodford, he turned off the main road and penetrated a maze of suburban avenues. The Fiat finally drew up at the gate of a three-bedroomed semi-detached villa with a loggy name board above its door proclaiming the dwelling to be “MAYSTEAD” (cleverly commemorative of its inmates, Maisie and Ted Robinson, art dealers).


Mrs Robinson only was at home, her husband having gone to Walthamstow to replenish their stocks of plain paper wrappers. She greeted Mr Rothermere with the utmost affability and said goodness me, wasn’t it a long time but, my, he was looking a hundred per cent.


Mr Rothermere made suitable response, helped himself eagerly to Mrs Robinson’s offering of home-made scones and raspberry jam, and announced that he had brought a little commission—a somewhat delicate montage job upon which much depended.


Declaring that she liked nothing better than a challenge, Mrs Robinson accepted the camera her visitor had brought, together with an envelope containing a photograph of the late Robert Digby Tring, motor-cyclist, and retired to the rustic garden shed that housed, unsuspected by neighbours, a splendidly equipped darkroom and photographic laboratory.


Mr Rothermere took a turn in the garden. Ted’s dahlias were at their best and were rivalled only by a double row of huge shaggy chrysanthemums, white, yellow and bronze, each lashed to a neat but sturdy stake, a sort of floral Andromeda. He admired the Nymphs’ Grotto and the Merry Fisher Lad and the big model windmill, painted bright blue and red, with sails that really went round whenever the wind blew from Wanstead, and he recognised Maisie’s handiwork in the Lord’s Prayer done in musselshell mosaic round the concrete base of the bird table.


“Hey, these are pretty dinky, Mortimer.”


The door of the darkroom had opened, presumably after whatever period of segregation had been necessary for the development of Mr Rothermere’s film roll.


He peered in. Mrs Robinson was rocking something in a flat white dish. “Anything come out?” he asked carelessly.


“Nice as ninepence, all of them but one. Who’s your modelling lady?”


“Just someone I happened to meet at this ridiculous grouse shoot.”


He explained his requirements. Mrs Robinson, who wore a housewifely apron, tested solution temperatures with the tip of her little finger and timed immersions by counting “dickory one, dickory two, dickory three...” seemed to find nothing difficult or exceptionable in the task. Mr Rothermere left her humming happily over her tanks and enlargers and went back into the house, where he poured himself a glass of port and relaxed on the big green sofa in the bay window.


In less than half an hour, Mrs Robinson entered the room and handed him three small prints. Mr Rothermere gave them long and admiring examination. He looked up.


“You know something?—these are quite incredibly good—I mean, incredibly.”


“You old soft soaper,” said Mrs Robinson, pushing him in playful reproof. “You’re as bad as Lucy Teatime when it comes to laying it on.”


“Which reminds me,” said Mr Rothermere, raising one finger, “I must give Lucy a call before I leave her neighbourhood.” He put the prints into their envelope and slipped it in his pocket.


“Give her our love,” said Maisie.


Mr Rothermere stood before the mirror and preened his beard and moustache with the curled forefinger of his right hand.


Mrs Robinson regarded him thoughtfully. “You’ve not married again, then, Mortimer?”


“Not recently.”


“Are you sure you cannot stay to lunch? Ted will be very sorry to have missed you.”


Protesting equal regret, he took his leave. At the gate he turned, waved to the little pinafored figure in the doorway of “Maystead”, and blew her a kiss as gallantly as a recalled hussar. He left the gate open for the postman who had just arrived at that moment with the Robinsons’ not inconsiderable pile of mid-day mail.


Mr Rothermere drove back towards the main road until he saw a public telephone box. He pulled up beside it, made a brief call, and resumed his journey. At Ware he bought petrol and made for Stevenage and the A1. He reached Newark a little after four o’clock and by half-past five he was exploring the interior of a pie in the parlour of the Waggon and Horses public house in Pennick village. Discovering nothing overtly dangerous in the pie, he anaesthetised it with mustard and quickly devoured it. He was still hungry, so he ordered another pie. He had almost consumed this one when someone entered the bar and sat on the trestle opposite. It was David Harton.


Mr Rothermere leaned towards him, indicated the remains of the pie with his fork, and said very earnestly: “Look, you must try one of these; they are quite remarkably good. Why don’t you let me order you one?”


By his framing of the question, by his manner, by the confidential pitch of his voice—somehow Mr Rothermere contrived to convey the impression that not only was he the sole agent for the dispensing of pies in Pennick but in all probability the patentee of the process of their manufacture.


Harton declined. “Let me get you a drink,” he offered in compensation.


Mr Rothermere considered solemnly, then nodded. “Half a pint of ordinary bitter beer. Thank you.” He popped the last bit of pie-crust into his mouth and dabbed his lips with a handkerchief.


When Harton returned with drinks, Mr Rothermere unobtrusively handed him one of the three prints fabricated by Mrs Robinson.


“That should solve your little problem.”


Harton stared stonily at the photograph for some seconds, his mouth tight. A muscle at the side of his jaw twitched. High in the cheek a patch of skin flushed darkly.


“This man,” expounded Mr Rothermere, “is probably the finest photographic technician in London. He did the Kennedy assassination picture that beat the news agencies by eight minutes—and without leaving his studio.”


Harton frowned, questioning.


Airily, very rapidly—as if anxious not to insult his hearer’s intelligence by too clearly articulating the obvious—Mr Rothermere murmured: “Computerised filing system, three buttons— who— where— what— then advanced montage technique...not difficult, not to this man.”


Harton looked at him. “Did you get her to pose like this?”


“Now look, you must be absolutely objective...”


“Did you?”


“I think she was a little intoxicated at the time. It was all quite impersonal, anyway.”


Harton’s grin—the boyish one—was suddenly there. “My dear chap, I’m not criticising. This is just right. Great.”


“Our mutual employer,” said Mr Rothermere after a pause, “is concerned, I understand, that you should get your divorce as quickly and cleanly as possible. That is how that Charles fellow put it, anyhow; he didn’t seem to see any contradiction between cleanliness and fake adultery.”


“It’s a very sensitive field, dog food,” said Harton. “I mean, hell, I couldn’t care less, but here’s a market that can go up or down by a million at the wag of a tail on television. Customers of that kind are terribly fussy about morals.”


“Your wife would readily settle for reasonable alimony. Wouldn’t that be less complicated? Less risky?”


“Christ! I know her ‘reasonable’. She’s cunning enough to have worked out her own estimate of what value Cultox puts on the fair name of its executives. She’d bleed us white.”


Mr Rothermere drummed his fingers on the side of his tankard and ruminatively inspected its depths. “I rather fancy,” he said, “that I could name a likely figure.”


“Don’t tell me the bitch got you to come here and bargain for her.”


“Not at all. She believes precisely what I was engaged to persuade her to believe.”


At once, Harton gestured with open hand. “That her poor sod of a husband was going to be framed for knocking her off. She’d believe that, all right. And love it.”


“As a general rule,” said Mr Rothermere, “I counsel against complicated plots. In this case, it seemed that something elaborate—a little bizarre, even—was more likely to appeal to your wife’s particular mentality. I have been proved right. But now that she has responded as planned, my advice is that she be offered prompt accommodation.”


“I don’t follow you, friend.” The slightly pained brow above the open smile bespoke a desire to understand.


“In short,” said Mr Rothermere, “I suggest you settle at once. You have the lever you wanted—the photograph, which Mrs Harton has not seen, incidentally, but which I am sure she would not care to have to contest in court—so you can afford to be generous.”


“Generous to what extent?”


“Listen, I think she would accept fifteen thousand. Offer twelve and I’ll work from there. I do have some little experience in the mediation business, as you know.” Mr Rothermere gave a small self-deprecatory shrug. “At least I shouldn’t have gelignite or Arabic idiom to contend with on this occasion.”


Harton took a couple of seconds to allow the image conjured by the latest of Mr Rothermere’s potent non-sequiturs to clear. Then he scowled and leaned forward. Slowly and emphatically, he said:


“That woman was prepared to see me dragged into court on a murder charge and quite possibly be put away for life. The only accommodation, as you put it, that I’m prepared to offer her is what she wanted me to have—a prison cell.”


Almost before Harton had finished speaking, Mr Rothermere was pouting disagreement and shaking his head. “No, no, no, no. You have misread the situation. I’m sorry, but you really have. She would never have persevered with that absurd pretence. It was a game, nothing more, and she knew that.”


“She is a murderous bitch.”


“Oh, come now...”


“She is a murderous bitch. And we are going to see that she is recognised and treated as one. Right?” The brittle politeness of Harton’s smile proclaimed, for the first time in the interview, the relationship between employer and hired man.




Chapter Twelve

“I don’t care what she’s done, inspector. I just want her home again. If she’s in trouble—well, we’ll have to see what can be done to help her. Nothing’s so desperately bad that human beings can’t get together to try and put it right.”


“How true, sir,” said Purbright, never one to dispute a worthy sentiment. But he added, before Harton had time to express another, that he would be interested to hear what he supposed the “trouble” encountered by Mrs Harton was likely to be.


The interview was taking place in the drawing-room of the Hartons’ house in Oakland. It was Saturday morning, a time which normally would have been at Purbright’s disposal for shopping with his wife or mending a fence or changing library books or indeed any of the ordinary weekend activities that bring even policemen in Flaxborough back into circulation as citizens and neighbours. But that could not be helped. Julia Harton was the daughter of a headmaster and a J.P. and the wife of a substantial employer. Her vanishing was a matter that demanded the immediate attention and attendance of a senior officer.


“Trouble?” Harton repeated the word as if putting it up for examination. He considered, then shrugged. “Yes I think we must assume that she is in trouble. She would not otherwise go off without explanation of any kind.”


“But doesn’t it seem unlikely that she has gone? In the sense of taking a journey, I mean. Her car is still at the factory.”


“That is true. But there are other means of going away. Public transport, such as it is. A lift with a friend.”


“You make it sound as if you believe your wife left deliberately, sir.”


“Well, I do. Yes.” Harton looked surprised. “What else should I believe, inspector?”


“Do you rule out forcible abduction?”


“Kidnapping? Oh, no; surely not. Not in Flaxborough.” Harton shook his head. “To be quite honest, I could wish that were the explanation. Then it would simply be a matter of money.”


“Demands are sometimes very extravagant—especially when someone such as an industrialist is involved.”


“The money would be raised,” said Harton, quietly and simply. “Julia was not kidnapped, though,” he added in exactly the same tone.


Purbright waited a few moments.


“When you telephoned yesterday to report that your wife had not been seen since Thursday evening,” he said, “my sergeant advised you—and I should have done the same—to make inquiries among her friends and members of her family before assuming that something had happened to her. By now, you have done that, of course.”


“Of course. Absolutely no result. Nothing.”


“Do you know if she took anything with her—clothing, luggage of any kind? Have you been able to check that?”


“A suitcase, I think, but I’m not certain. I mean, one doesn’t keep an inventory of these things.”


“No, sir. And clothing? Perhaps that would be even more difficult to be sure about, though?”


Harton smiled in a withdrawn, regretful way. “I am not the most observant of husbands, I’m afraid, inspector. There are many things about Julia I notice rather late in the day, if at all. Not very flattering.” Suddenly, Harton struck his knee with his clenched fist. “God! I can’t understand how women put up with our damned insensitivity.”


“Does that mean, Mr Harton, that you believe your wife has ceased to put up with what you consider your failings? That she has left you, in fact?”


“Sounds very simple, doesn’t it,” said Harton, mournfully.


“If it were that simple, you would have gone to your solicitor and not the police. Don’t you think, sir, that it’s time you told me what you really think has happened? What you fear has happened, rather?”


Harton looked up. “You’re very perceptive, inspector. Fear—yes, I suppose it’s there. But I couldn’t sketch it out for you. It’s quite formless. You know? What I can do, though, is to tell you certain things—very odd things, I think they are—that have puzzled and worried me a great deal, especially since Julia disappeared.” He rose from his chair and went to the sideboard. “Are you sure you won’t have anything to drink?”


Purbright saw him uncork a bottle of sweet sherry. There were several other bottles and a decanter. “Not in that sense; no, sir. I should appreciate a cup of tea, though, if it’s not too much trouble.”


“Surely.” Harton moved to the door. “I’ll ask my woman to get you one.”


Mrs Cutlock came into the room five minutes later. She ogled Purbright with enormous curiosity while pretending to look for a suitable landing for the tray she held. The interview was suspended until she could no longer affect blindness to the empty and adequate table between the two men. As she was leaving, Harton called to her:


“Oh, Mrs Cutlock, you’ll remember what I said about the kitchen, won’t you? Not to move anything—just to leave it exactly as it was when you came.”


“Don’t worry. I heard what you said.” Mrs Cutlock looked offended. She resolved to tell that yellow-thatched pollis about the Hartons’ slanging match as soon as she could get him on his own.


Harton told Purbright that the significance of what he had said to his woman would be clear a little later. In the meantime he had some rather, well, some rather distasteful things to tell him. They concerned his marriage.


“Mark you, though,” he said, “I want to be absolutely fair. I do not consider myself a wronged husband or anything of that kind. Whatever has happened is attributable to shortcomings of my own. What those shortcomings are, I have never been sensitive enough—perhaps I ought to say intelligent enough—to understand.”


Purbright put milk and sugar in his cup and tipped the pot experimentally. The tea was of a reasonably amber shade but several leaves bobbed at once to the surface and remained swirling there, mutely accusing Mrs Cutlock of having neglected, in her haste to return and overhear more of the conversation, to boil the water properly.


“This matter of understanding,” said Harton, frowning at his sherry. “You can guess the area in which mine was most likely to fall short. I was an only child and I had the sort of monastic upbringing that is still the norm at public school. Not to put too fine a point on it, I had been led to regard sex as a function, not an art.”


Harton silently watched the inspector chase errant tea leaves with his spoon and land them, like dead fish, on the saucer’s edge. “You must think me very näive,” he said.


“Not particularly, sir. I appreciate that you are preparing to tell me something that has shocked you. It is perfectly sensible of you to make me understand how susceptible to shock you happen to be.”


Harton smiled gratefully and took several short, quick sips of his drink.


“My wife and I,” he resumed, “seemed to get along fairly well until a couple of months ago. I mean, it wasn’t one of these starlight and music marriages, admittedly, but we weren’t tearing into each other every five minutes, and we had a sort of mutual respect thing. Anyway, I thought she was pretty content, within limits. Mind you, the bed side of it—you know what I mean?—that was definitely short on viability. My fault. Sure. I mean I just had a different sort, a different degree, of appetite. She as good as asked me once if we couldn’t go out and—you know—do it—in the garden. She said she’d always wanted to, in a deckchair. That shook me. Unreasonable? Prudish? Right. Right. I know. But it’s just me. I can’t stand freakishness, as we old reactionaries call it. It’s like imperfection. To me, a woman has to be unblemished. Listen, you’ll think this silly, and I suppose it is, but do you know I couldn’t bear to sleep with a person who had a physical defect. Julia’s front teeth were a bit crooked when I married her. Once I noticed, I knew she’d have to do something about them or our marriage would crash. She was very understanding, actually; I got my London man to cap them. It cost me a couple of hundred, but there you are. It was that important to me.”


There was a knock at the door, and the head of Mrs Cutlock was introduced.


“All done now, Mr Harton. At least, I think so. Has Mrs Harton anything she wants seeing to? She doesn’t seem to be about this morning.”


“My wife is away visiting, Mrs Cutlock. I don’t think there will be much point in your coming on Monday. Make it Wednesday, will you?”


“Wednesday. Just as you like. All right—Wednesday.” The head gave Harton a formal nod. Purbright, in contrast, was favoured with one of Mrs Cutlock’s most confidential grins. “Mornin’, superintendent,” she said in a husky baritone of admiration. “Nice to see you on the trail again.”


“What did she mean by that?” asked Harton as soon as the door was shut once more.


“I’ve no idea, sir. I think perhaps she comes of a family of a naturally cheerful disposition.” Purbright saw no reason to add that the Cutlocks had achieved by long persistence in criminal endeavour that degree of intimacy with the police which looks to the uninformed observer very like comradeship.


“Anyway, now that she’s gone I can show you something that has been worrying me a great deal.” Harton drank off the rest of his sherry and walked to the door. His movements, Purbright noticed, were quick and unequivocal; they were those of a man who expected others to follow promptly and to do as they were told. Curious, that hidden area of sexual ingenuousness.


The kitchen looked very clean, almost clinical. As soon as Harton entered it, his manner became a fraction less sure.


Purbright guessed that he was not a man accustomed to, or indeed capable of, looking after himself.


Harton stared around for a moment, then bent and tugged open first one cupboard door, then another. On seeing what lay inside the second—it was immediately beneath the sink—he said, ah, yes, this was it, and pulled out a bundle roughly wrapped in newspaper.


“I was searching round for a saucepan to warm some milk before I went to bed last night, and just happened to look in here. There was this parcel, pushed up towards the back. I wouldn’t have taken any notice in the ordinary way, but I spotted this boot heel sticking up through the paper like it is now, and thought, odd place to put boots—whose are they, anyway? So I heaved the stuff out.”


Harton stepped back, and with his hand invited Purbright to examine the parcel.


The inspector squatted beside it and folded back the newspaper layers.


Delicately, he sniffed. A feminine, cosmetic smell was noticeable first, but closer trial brought into prominence a tang of engine fume and oil.


“Not yours, I presume, sir.” He spoke over his shoulder.


“Hardly.”


Purbright transferred in turn to an empty table the tunic, breeches and long boots.


“And you’ve never seen them before?”


“Not until last night, no.”


Purbright made a careful but not prolonged examination. When he spoke again, he looked directly at Harton.


“You had better tell me what significance you think ought to be attached to these things, Mr Harton. I may be a little obtuse, but I can’t pretend to have grasped instantly their relevance to what you have been telling me up to now.”


“Of course not. I wasn’t trying to be dramatic or anything of that sort. I’m still pretty confused myself, as a matter of fact. Look, if we can sit down, I’ll try and tell you what’s been going on.”


“Shall we go back to the other room, then, sir? I’d appreciate another cup of tea.”


“That’s all right. I’ll fetch the tray.” Harton pointed to a chair and hurried out. The sudden courtesy seemed to Purbright uncharacteristic; it was a measure, perhaps, of the distress the renewed sight of that leather costume had aroused.


When Harton came in again, both men sat at the table. Harton had brought on the tray a second glass of sherry for himself. Purbright poured more tea.


“A few weeks ago,” Harton began, “my wife picked up acquaintance with a chap at the factory. She used to come through the works sometimes on the way to my office. The men knew who she was, of course, and generally spoke to her.


“This particular fellow, though, fancied himself as a bit of a lady-killer. He was the kind who would say things right out of line just to see what effect they would have. A cheeky bastard, in fact.


“I saw them together one evening just before the end of shift. Not for more than a few seconds, but I noticed how he looked at her—you know, brassy—what I call working-class obstreperous—and I also saw him put his hand on her back, here, low down. And damn me if she didn’t look pleased, as if he’d paid her some kind of compliment. I just felt disgusted. I never said anything to her.


“Of course”—Harton looked down at his finger ends and smiled weakly—“I realise now that I should have felt disgusted at myself, not at poor Julia. I suppose I must have let her get into such a frustrated state that her self-respect wasn’t operative any more.”


He looked up again at Purbright, impassively tea-sipping. “Be that as it may, from about that time our life together was utterly transformed—and in a very nasty way, believe me, inspector. Hostility, sneering, nagging, tears, tempers—and frigidity—my God, such frigidity! That I didn’t need ask her to explain. I knew.”


Purbright hoped he was not looking as unsympathetic as he felt. A large piece of precious Saturday morning was already lost. Marriage counsellors did not work weekends; why should he?


He set down his cup. “Look, sir, I don’t want to appear indifferent to your domestic difficulties, but my concern—and no one regrets this more than I do—is crime. Before you tell me anything else, I must put the question which perhaps I should have asked at the outset. Have you good reason to suppose that your wife is dead or has come to serious harm, and has not simply left you?”


A look of innocent surprise came over Harton’s face.


“My dear inspector, I may be unhappy and confused, but I am still enough of a business man to know better than to waste the time of a professional. No, I don’t think Julia is dead—pray God she wouldn’t be that desperate—but I do believe she is in very serious trouble.”


“Life and death,” said Purbright drily, “was a phrase you used, I understand, when you asked the chief constable to send someone to see you.”


“Yes, I did. I think with good reason.” Harton rose and pointed to the clothing. “These you have seen. Now I have something else to show you.”


He led the way into the hall and began ascending the stairs. Purbright, close behind, noted they they were covered with heavy cream carpet, meticulously cut to fit every contour.


Harton opened a door and went inside. Purbright stood beside him and glanced at the twin beds, as far apart as they would go; at the dressing table and chest of drawers and the cupboards built into the wall; at the great mirror in which was another bedroom, incongruously inhabited by a smartly dressed businessman and a tall police inspector with not very tidy yellow hair and the middle button missing from his ageing broadcloth jacket.


Harton moved closer to the dressing table.


“Last night I didn’t know what the hell to do. That stuff downstairs—I couldn’t make any sense of it, and that worried me. So I began going through all her things. I thought I might find something, some clue to what she was up to. Oh, yes, I knew bloody well she’d been having it off—isn’t that what they call it nowadays, having it off?—with that oaf at the plant, but hell, he’d been dead a week so whatever her reason for leaving, it couldn’t have been to shack up with him.”


“Just a moment, sir.” Purbright had held up his hand. “You haven’t mentioned so far what this man’s name was.”


Harton smiled faintly. “It ought to be familiar enough to you, inspector, if what our personnel manager tells me about his family is correct. Tring. On the Council estate.”


“Robert Tring?”


“I don’t know his first name.”


Purbright shook his head as if dismissing an irrelevancy. “You were saying, sir?”


Harton moved round in front of him and squatted a little to one side of the dressing table. He pointed. “This I left until last. It was always something private to her; I didn’t have a key.”


Purbright leaned close. Harton was showing him a small drawer, the lowest of three on the left hand side of the dressing table. Some of the rosewood veneer was split away near the keyhole. “I had to force it,” Harton said. He pulled the drawer out and laid it on the cover of the nearer bed.


Without saying anything, Harton picked up the topmost object in the drawer and handed it to Purbright.


It was an envelope. A slightly grubby, unaddressed, unsealed manilla envelope.


Purbright lifted the flap and took out the photograph it contained. He glanced immediately at Harton and saw that his face was tense and almost white. He motioned him to sit on the edge of the bed.


“It’s not very nice,” said Harton, “to have to show you a thing like that.”


“No, sir.” The simple, gentle negative was kinder than any formally framed expression of regret. Privately, though, Purbright was wondering why Harton had thought it necessary to share knowledge of the photograph.


Then he saw that bluish indentations on the surface of the picture were in fact words. They had been scrawled with a ball-point pen. He tilted the photograph slightly towards the light from the window and read what the words were.


Worth £2000, ducky? Ask your old man.


Purbright indicated them to Harton. “Crude. But explicit.”


“Certainly.”


“Do you think she made any attempt to raise this sort of money, Mr Harton? Recently, I mean?”


“Not from me.”


“Do you suppose ‘old man’ could mean Mrs Harton’s father?”


“I doubt it. He’s only a school teacher.”


“Still, it’s the implication that matters—the threat of exposure. That’s clear enough.”


Harton put forward his little finger, hesitantly, as if wishing to indicate something hateful. “The boots, you see? The same.”


“Yes, sir; that is my impression, too.”


Angrily, Harton turned away his head. “By Christ! I wonder if she’d have looked so pleased with herself if she’d known she was posing with a bloody blackmailer!”


Purbright replaced the photograph in the envelope. “I’ll take this with me, if you don’t mind, sir. You needn’t worry. It will be treated with the very greatest discretion.”


Harton made as if to object, then paused, shrugged. “Of course, inspector.”


The little drawer was between them on the bed. Purbright bent and looked into it, gently shifting its contents about with one finger.


“What are these, sir?”


Purbright held forward in his palm two pale blue plastic tubes, each about four inches long and fitted with a white cap.


“No idea. It’s all her stuff in there. Odds and ends. There was only the photograph that was important, though.”


While Purbright examined the tubes and read what was printed upon them, he addressed Harton in a quiet, almost absent-minded manner.


“Do you have any suggestion to offer, sir, as to why your wife is missing? By ‘serious trouble’ I’m sure you mean something more drastic than running away from the consequences of a rash affair, even if they do include attempted extortion.”


Harton made no reply. Purbright looked up. “Am I right?”


Harton got up abruptly and strode to the window. He stared out.


“Inspector, I want you to believe that I am only talking to you now because there seems no other way of helping my wife. I would have kept silent—I would have lied—I would have done anything, however stupid, if she had asked me. But she simply ran away, so I have to make my own decision. All I can do is to pass to you such facts as I have, also my impressions. I hope to God some of those impressions are mistaken. But we shall only know when she is found and everything thrashed out in the open. Pray God I’m not making things worse for her.”


Harton turned and faced the inspector. He was rubbing the tops of the fingers of his right hand into the palm of the left and watching the action as if expecting something to come of it. Purbright waited silently.


“I’ve told you that I knew about Julia and Tring—well, knew half and guessed half. You can imagine that hearing at work last Monday about his getting killed in that accident came as a bit of a shock. Later on, I thought about it and read what there was in the paper. I suppose I ought to have felt some sort of satisfaction, but I didn’t. Things didn’t feel right. I kept on watching Julia for signs of reaction, but instead of looking upset she seemed actually calmer than usual. Then, all of a sudden, she wasn’t there any more. From that moment I was really scared. And why?—Because it was then that I admitted to myself the possibility I’d been afraid to recognise immediately after the accident.”


“Which was, sir?”


“That Julia had had something to do with it.”


“With the accident?”


Harton nodded. “I was awake nearly all the night, wondering and worrying, but it wasn’t until the next day—last night, actually, as I told you—that I came across that motor-cycling kit. And after that, the picture, that filthy bloody picture. From then on, I tried not to think. I just rang Chubb and waited for somebody to come.”


Purbright replaced in the drawer the two tubes.


“I’m sure you’ve acted for the best in the circumstances, Mr Harton. I appreciate what a strain this business must be. What I propose to do now is this. I shall ask my sergeant to await me at headquarters. Then, with your permission, we shall come back here again as soon as possible after lunch and take a thorough look round the house. We can also use the opportunity to ask you a few more questions and perhaps take your formal statement.”


Harton seemed to be only half aware of Purbright’s words. He stared in front of him for two or three seconds, then gave a start. “Yes, sure, of course...” He looked round the room, saw the phone as if for the first time, and waved towards it.


“Thank you, sir.”


Sergeant Love, Purbright reflected as he picked up the phone, was not going to be pleased. He had planned, with that abiding childlike confidence in the inviolability of sporting fixtures which made him one with Drake, to travel to Peterborough that afternoon as a co-opted member of the Flaxborough Furnishing Company’s mixed hockey club, for which his young lady played goal.




Chapter Thirteen

Before that Saturday was over, the immediate enjoyment prospects of more officers than Sergeant Love were dashed. On Purbright’s urgent application, Mr Chubb agreed that every CID man who could be reached either on or off duty, should be mobilised, together with three or four uniformed constables.


Their tasks, consisting of nothing more dramatic than walking about and asking much the same questions over and over again, had four main objects: to bring to a conclusion the inquiry already instigated into the local provenance of Glenmurren malt whisky; to find some person among the relatives and known acquaintances of Julia Harton who knew or could suggest her present whereabouts; to seek among the showmen, odd job men and hangers-on in the fair a more satisfactory clue to the identity of the second rider in the module “Hermes” than had been forthcoming so far; and to speed the interrogation of counter assistants at every chemist’s shop in the locality where someone might have bought recently two tubes of “Karmz” pills for the prevention of travel sickness.


Aid on a wider, but not necessarily more productive, scale was canvassed in a message for transmission to all police forces throughout the country. This asked that Mrs Julia Harton, aged 31, housewife, of number six, Oakland, Flaxborough, who might have registered at an hotel on or subsequent to September 11, be detained for questioning in relation to the death of a man in a fairground at Flaxborough on September 6. The picture circulated was a wedding portrait by Spoongate Studio, Flaxborough, and not, Purbright thought, much of a current likeness, but he had firmly vetoed Love’s suggestion that a more lively response to their appeal would be secured by the circulation of copies of the other photograph in their possession.


First result of the local campaign of inquiry was achieved in less than an hour. The officer responsible was P.C. Hessle. In the second pharmacy he entered, a shop on East Street, he found a girl who remembered very well selling two packs of “Karmz” the previous week. The double sale was what impressed the occasion on her mind; it was the normal thing to buy one pack only—well, they weren’t sweets, were they?


P.C. Hessle, overwhelmingly conscious of the gravity of his mission, forbore from trading opinions. He demanded instead an effort to recall the age, sex, and physical characteristics of the party who had made the purchase.


“Well, it was this bird in motor-cycle get-up, wasn’t it?” replied the girl, in that curiously rhetorical tone of disdain that implied the questioner to be an ageing mental defective.


“I’m asking you, Miss,” said Mr Hessle, icily.


“And I’m telling you, aren’t I? Of course, it could have been a feller. You can’t tell, can you?”


Pressed for less equivocal details, the girl conferred with the shop manager and then told the policeman that yes, it was last week—on the Thursday morning, actually—and it must have been a bird because she spoke, well, a bit posh, sort of, but nobody could be sure, not with that great skid-lid hiding half her face.


P.C. Hessle’s finding, such as it was, proved an isolated success. None of the “Moon Shot” operators could add to what they had told both police and insurance men already, which was simply that apart from noticing a number of motor-cyclists among the customers (a not unusual circumstance) they had seen nothing memorable in the way of faces or behaviour on the night of the accident.


The two plain clothes men entrusted with the straightforward but substantial labour of visiting every one of the forty-three innkeepers of Flaxborough and the manager of every shop and off-licence where spirits were sold, had worked by closing time about two-thirds of the way through their list. They had found no one who could recall having stocked Glenmurren whisky within the past ten years or even having been asked for it. It was, the more knowledgeable declared, a very pricey liquor and not often encountered in these hard times.


Perhaps the most discouraging outcome of the day’s work was the discovery that Julia Harton’s sole surviving near relative, her father, Mr Clay, headmaster of Flaxborough Grammar School, was not only ignorant of his daughter’s disappearance but resolved to treat it with the utmost scepticism until the police could prove to his satisfaction that she was not making a melodramatic gesture in the hope of discrediting him, Mr Clay, “in the eyes of my boys”.


It was Sergeant Love who had gone directly from the Hartons’ home to interview Mr Clay at the house on Field Street still known by its eighteenth-century name of the Headmaster’s Lodging.


“Do you mean you think Mrs Harton may have gone off just to annoy you?” he asked.


“I wouldn’t say that, exactly,” replied Mr Clay. He rubbed his nose, as if to impart an even higher polish to it, which would not have been easy, for every feature between Mr Clay’s stiff white linen collar and the first ledger-line of his thin but strictly distributed hair was as shiny as glazed porcelain. “No, no—not to annoy me.”


“Why, then?” persisted Love.


“Why does any young person in these times do anything? To express what he or she supposes to be freedom from obligation and independence of authority. A passing phase, one hopes.”


“Your daughter’s a bit of a campus rebel, is she?” inquired the sergeant, good-naturedly desirous of showing himself familiar with the phraseology of higher education.


Mr Clay looked strongly inclined to put Love in detention, but asked instead if it was “that husband of hers” who had taken the story of disappearance to the police.


“Mr Harton telephoned us yesterday.”


“Mm,” said Mr Clay, pursing his lips so that his cheeks looked shinier than ever. Then, with sudden end-of-interview resolution, he strode to the street door, opened it and bade Love a good afternoon.


As the sergeant walked from the Lodging, he would not have been surprised to hear Mr Clay call out: “Next boy!”


The police station that evening presented to such pedestrians as still were about in Fen Street the sight of an unusual number of lighted windows, associated, it seemed, with the presence at the roadside of several cars and the occasional arrival or departure of men who looked as if they had been on their feet all day.


Among the cars was the chief constable’s Daimler. Mr Chubb, anxious to subscribe to the principle of equality of sacrifice, had closed his greenhouse, noted that it was a poor night on television, and deputed to Mrs Chubb the feeding of the dogs. He then had looked in at his club for an hour or so and was now, at a little before nine o’clock, asking Love in the front office if Mr Purbright was still in the building.


“The inspector’s in the murder room,” Love declared.


Mr Chubb stared at him in alarm. “The what?”


“In the CID office,” the sergeant amended.


The chief constable found Purbright and two detectives seated at the big central table. One of the detectives was screwing some sheets of newspaper into a ball. Purbright was wiping his hands on his handkerchief. There was a smell of fried fish.


“Ah—a little ad hoc nourishment, gentlemen?” Mr Chubb donned a democratic smile. It put Purbright in mind of toothache, bravely endured.


The two detectives murmured something about “pressing on” and went out with their ball of fish and chip wrappings.


“And how are things going, Mr Purbright?” Mr Chubb placed a pair of yellow pigskin gloves inside the slightly raffish county cap that he wore as a sign of off-duty diligence. The cap he set on the top of a filing cabinet, beside which he remained, leaning lightly back against it, hands clasped behind.


Purbright gave him first a summary of the interview with Harton.


Mr Chubb listened, as he always did, with courtesy and every sign of attention. But then he frowned dubiously.


“Rather bizarre goings on, I should have thought, Mr Purbright. I know odd things happen nowadays even in the nicest districts, but the liaison alleged by this man sounds right out of character.”


“Do you know Mrs Harton, sir?”


Mr Chubb blew upon some imaginary porridge. “Not to say know her exactly.” He perked up one eyebrow. “Of course, you know who her father is?”


“Clay. Headmaster at the Grammar School“.


“Not very nice for him,” said Mr Chubb, ruminatively.


The inspector said no, he supposed it wasn’t. Then he handed to the chief constable the photograph that had been found in the dressing-table drawer at Oakland.


Four or five seconds went by.


“Goodness gracious me!” breathed Mr Chubb at last. He gave the picture further scrutiny, holding it for a while upside down.


When he finally handed it back, it was with a slow shake of the head.


“I simply do not understand,” he said, “how a young woman of good family and decent schooling, who has married well and lives in a beautiful house, could sink to behaviour like this. I sometimes am tempted to despair of human nature, Mr Purbright, I really am.”


The inspector said: “The implication of a blackmail attempt is very strong, sir. That message could mean nothing else. So Mrs Harton’s reaction—assuming that she did engineer the death of her lover—might almost be construed as a reason for you not to feel too pessimistic.”


Mr Chubb frowned. “I don’t quite see what you mean.”


“Well, sir, she must have been sensitive to the value of her respectability, after all. Otherwise, she would not have sought to protect it.”


Mr Chubb was a far from unintelligent man. But in his long and, on the whole, amicable relationship with his detective inspector, he had never been able to decide to his own satisfaction whether Purbright’s observations were intended to flatter or to bewilder him. He therefore had evolved a specially pliable defensive shield which could take, as seemed apposite at the moment, the shape of wisdom absolute, of a democratic willingness to learn, of the remembrance of an important engagement elsewhere, or even of a good-humoured and altogether spurious stupidity.


On this particular occasion, still winded perhaps by what he had just seen, he contented himself with: “Be that as it may, Mr Purbright,” and asked what progress there had been towards tracing Mrs Harton.


“None so far, sir. She has some distant relations in the West Country, according to her husband, but he thinks they are virtually strangers so far as she is concerned. Such friends as we have been able to interview up to now profess themselves completely ignorant.”


“Why should she have taken it into her head to run away when she did, instead of straight away after that fellow’s death? She waited four or five days.”


“I put that point to her husband, sir. He believes she went off with a man. But of course he’s been seeing lovers under the bed ever since he found that photograph. Her having waited for some specific acquaintance—accomplice, even—might explain the delay in leaving. I’m not convinced, though.”


“You’re not?”


“No, sir. There was no reason, so far as she could have known, to run off. Her association with Tring had been kept reasonably secret. She had gone to a lot of trouble to disguise herself as just another motor-cycling pal of his. And there was a very fair chance that the coroner would record a misadventure verdict. The most likely explanation is that she panicked because of something she learned that evening at her husband’s works. There may even have been a row; he’d not admit it, of course. He says he didn’t actually see his wife when she came to the factory.”


“She must have gone for some purpose, though.”


“You would think so, wouldn’t you.”


“Tell me, Mr Purbright”—the chief constable shifted his position slightly—“what do you make of this tale that’s going around the club tonight?”


Purbright knew that Mr Chubb would not make such a crassly enigmatic reference just to annoy him or to sustain some sort of “old buffer” act. It was a sign of his being worried about something. Purbright patiently awaited enlightenment.


“It is being suggested,”said Mr Chubb, very carefully, “that... no, no, not suggested—hinted—it is being hinted that Mrs Harton has not left Flaxborough at all. That she is still—you take my point, don’t you?—still at her husband’s factory. In, ah, one form or another.” And the chief constable looked down at his impeccably polished brogues with an expression of grave distaste.


“A very attractive theory,” said the inspector, with a cheerfulness that earned him a sharp glance from Mr Chubb, “and one that was bound to be put forward sooner or later, bearing in mind the nature of the factory’s product.”


“You don’t think there might be something in it?”


“No, sir. Not unless Harton is incredibly devious—and lucky enough to have had what they call the ingredient intake section of the plant to himself long enough to butcher his wife—and I’m afraid I mean that literally, sir, in this context—clean up, and dispose of clothing and so on. The machinery is very sophisticated, apparently. It rejects manufactured substances such as cloth and also anything harder than bone—teeth, for instance, and metal objects.”


Mr Chubb looked impressed. “You’re extremely well-informed, Mr Purbright.”


“I thought it would do no harm to learn something of the mechanics of the thing. Harton’s works manager was at the plant when I went to look round earlier this afternoon. He was very helpful. He was also insistent that there is a rule that the intake section should never be unattended while the machinery is running, so that would seem to preclude any attempt by Harton to dispose of a body. Incidentally, it was at the intake that Tring used to be employed.”


“Indeed,” said the chief constable. He turned and retrieved his cap and gloves. “Should you require any further help, Mr Purbright....”


“That is very generous of you, sir, but I propose to run the thing down now until tomorrow. Our main hope of a development lies in efforts which doubtless are being made elsewhere to find our fugitive. There should be a story of sorts in some of the papers tomorrow. The Press is a great turner over of stones.”


Purbright’s confidence proved not to be misplaced. No fewer than five national Sunday newspapers carried accounts the following morning. They ranged from the Express’s concern for a missing heiress to the revelation in the Graphic that a fun-loving housewife was being sought by the police following the death of a local Hell’s Angel in a Tunnel of Love.


Perhaps the most intriguing suggestion was that offered by the Empire News, which argued from the presence in Flaxborough of a travelling fair that Julia Harton was likely to have become involved in “a raggle-taggle gypsy-type elopement situation”.


The Dispatch contented itself with an almost unexpanded version of the official police circular. And somehow it was more chilling to learn simply that Julia Harton, aged 31, married woman, was thought able to help the police in connection with the death of a young man on September 6th, than to be treated to the high-pitched speculation of more enterprising journals.


The paper which Hugo Rothermere succeeded in borrowing (“I’ve just flown in from Ankara—would you mind?”) from a fellow customer in a Camden Town coffee bar, happened to be the Dispatch. Mr Rothermere’s idle survey of the news pages was brought to a sudden halt by his catching sight of a youthful Julia, waxenly demure in bridal headdress, below the headline: “Missing After Fairground Death Mystery.”


He stared. The picture had the flat unreality, the curiously posthumous-seeming air of any studio portrait transferred to newsprint. It looked, he thought, sinister.


Mr Rothermere read and re-read the accompanying text. The owner of the paper got down from his stool and shuffled around a little to indicate his desire to depart. Wordlessly, Mr Rothermere handed back his property and stared past him at the wall.


For twenty minutes, Mr Rothermere morosely sipped at three consecutive cups of coffee. No one else entered the bar. The proprietor, a plump, bald-headed Lithuanian in shirt and trousers, whose main object in opening on a Sunday morning was to polish his urns in peace, glanced occasionally at the sad, preoccupied gentleman with the meticulously groomed whiskers and boulevardier’s hat, and wondered if he were an emigre nobleman, lamenting old days in Petersburg.


At last the nobleman roused himself and asked if he might use the establishment’s telephone. He had the look of one who had reached a difficult decision.


Sure, said the proprietor—right there at the end, by the pin table. He as nearly as dammit added “Your Excellency”.


Mr Rothermere dialled directory inquiries and requested the number of a Miss Lucilla Teatime, of Flaxborough. No, he did not remember the address, but he supposed that the duplication within one town of such a name as Teatime was very unlikely.


In less than a minute he was dialling again.


A woman’s voice answered. It was pleasant, carefully modulated, almost musical. Musical and, oddly enough, accompanied by harmonious sounds. Mr Rothermere listened intently for a moment before he spoke. Of course, bells. He remembered those Flaxborough bells.


“Lucy!” He made the word sound like a celebration.


“Who is that?”


“Oh, come now. Don’t you know?”


Recognition warmed the reply. “Good heavens...Mortimer!”


“Well, yes and no. Mortimer, yes. But this is one of my Rothermere periods.”


“I shall try and remember.”


“Lovely to hear you, Lucy.”


“You too, Mortimer.”


The exchange of pleasantries exhausted in a remarkably short time the first of the pair of tenpenny pieces that Mr Rothermere had set in readiness on the coin box. He inserted the second and swept straight to the point.


“My dear, I have been most shamefully betrayed by an organisation that hired my professional services. I cannot particularise at the moment, but you doubtless will be distressed to learn that a perfectly innocent young woman has been involved. If you will advise—nay, if you will help...”


Miss Teatime’s interruption was amiable, but firm. “You mean, I presume, that she is pregnant.”


“Pregnant? Who? Good God, no—nothing like that. Much, much more serious. I can’t tell you here. But it does all centre on Flaxborough and I’m sure you can help. Will you be at home this afternoon?”


Miss Teatime said that she would.


“You are near the church, I believe.”


“I am almost in it. The address is number five, the Close.”


“Good. I shall park unobstrusively amidst the vehicles of the faithful and come straight across. It will save awkwardness all round if my presence in the town is unremarked.”




Chapter Fourteen

Julia Harton went for a walk along the seafront. She thought about her husband and tried to imagine his increasing bewilderment and annoyance. David could never find even a handkerchief on his own initiative; what on earth would he make of a missing wife? All she could conjure, though, was the look of confident, spoiled-child amusement that he invariably assumed whenever she voiced an opinion divergent from his own. The more annoyed he was, the more case-hardened became that armour of charm. Sometimes, she thought, she had divined behind it something other than mere wilfulness and spite—something really dangerous.


Perhaps it was this reflection and not the cool off-sea wind that dissuaded Julia from walking as far as she had intended. She climbed up from the shore and entered the more sheltered streets of the town. Before returning to the hotel, she bought a Sunday Times; its bulkiness seemed somehow to justify her otherwise unsatisfactory excursion.


She went into the residents’ lounge. Mrs Cartwright abruptly deserted the elderly clergyman and asked her if she would like a nice cup of coffee. Yes, conceded Julia unthinkingly, she would. She began to turn the pages of the Sunday Times colour supplement. Five minutes passed.


“Made with all milk,” confided Mrs Cartwright, “and with just a pinch of salt to bring out the flavour. We don’t do it for everybody.”


Julia thanked her warmly; she had felt in need of a little friendliness. She tried not to look at the coffee. It was grey and had strands of boiled milk in it. She’s knitted it, Julia thought. The taste was terrible.


“All right?” asked Mrs Cartwright, looking eager to have her head patted.


“Out of this world!” declared Julia, with absolute sincerity.


She had finished the coffee and was feeling somewhat queasy by the time she came across her own name in the lower half of one of the news pages.


It was an unnerving discovery, not very different from one of the dreams she had from time to time in which she found herself strolling half naked through a crowded store, except that a dream—even the most strikingly circumstantial—always had a flicker of impending wakefulness round its edges. There was no chance of this being anything but what it appeared to be: a simple square of plain type announcing a plain fact.


Plain, certainly, but wrong. It was the wrongness that scared her, and much, much more than she had ever been scared by the chimerical predicament of semi-nudity in Woolworths.


Julia read the paragraph three times, slowly and with careful attention to every phrase. She could extract nothing to lessen her dismay.


What in God’s name had Mortimer been thinking of? It must have been he who had engineered the publicity. He had told her about his Fleet Street contacts, about the tiresome but useful “working breakfasts” with the editor of the Sunday Times. But the pressure his agency commanded was not to be applied—or so she had understood—unless and until David refused to onsider a reasonable settlement. Why had he not been given time?


There were other odd things about this newspaper report, things that not only were puzzling but had a ring of menace.


The police, it said, were “seeking” her. Well, yes; so they were, in a sense. She was missing, presumably murdered by her husband. So they were seeking her body. Then why was their search described in this story as “country-wide”? It sounded as if the police believed her to be mobile, to be still alive. You might search a house for a corpse, or dig up a field or two, but surely you didn’t look for it all over the country?


No mention of David. Again, very odd. Was he under arrest already? No, that surely would have been stated. But at least he must have been questioned as the one and only suspect. Nothing here, though, about “a man helping the police with their inquiries”. That’s what the husband was often called until an actual charge was made.


Queerest of all, and somehow the most frightening, was this mention of the accident in the fair. What the hell was that supposed to have to do with her?


Once again, Julia looked at the lines before her. “...wanted for questioning...” Hey, how could they question a body? She hadn’t noticed that before. It was she they wanted to question, not David. God, Mortimer really had ballsed it up.


And that fellow in the fair. He was just something in reserve, a name picked at random to fit the invented lover of hers who was supposed to have driven her husband mad with jealousy. It was a piece of fantasy dreamed up by Mortimer and shared by nobody else.


Or so she had believed. Now the man in the fair was the concern of the police. She, too. The police were actually looking for her, hunting her. Everything had gone wrong. And somewhere there in comfortable, dozy old Flaxborough, David was sitting, smug and untouched, not being sought, not being questioned.


Julia folded the Sunday Times and pushed it close beside her in the chair, obedient to a childish instinct to preserve her shame from questing eyes. Only when Major Cartwright came through the room a few moments later on his way to the kitchen and wished her good morning as Mrs Rothermere did she remember that Julia Harton did not exist as far as her present companions were concerned.


“In for lunch?” inquired Major Cartwright, leaning over her like an insecure scaffold pole.


“Yes. Oh, yes. Certainly.”


“Lamb,” he said. “Cooked in Mrs Cartwright’s special way. Yum yum.” He straightened and marched out.


Julia went to the box of mahogany and cut glass panels that housed the telephone. In her handbag was the diary in which she had pencilled the number given her by Mortimer. His Hampstead flat. Ring if worried or in trouble. Any time. She was worried now. She dialled carefully, moistening her upper lip with the tip of her tongue.


The telephone at the far end rang eight times. Then a voice, a woman’s voice, Julia thought, answered. The voice said that it spoke from the George the Fourth public house.


Public house? Odd. “May I speak to Mr Rothermere, please?” Perhaps the flat was attached. Upstairs or something.


“Who?”


“Mr Rothermere. Mr Mortimer Rothermere.”


“Is he a customer, dear? We’re not open yet.”


“He’s got a flat.”


“This is a pub, dear. No flats. P’raps you’ve got a wrong number.”


Julia read out what she thought she had dialled. “That’s right, dear,” said the voice. “But we’re a pub. No flats.”


“Sorry,” said Julia. She put the phone down.


Leaning back, she closed her eyes and tried to remember the address Mortimer had entered in the registration book (she would look very silly if she asked the Cartwrights if she might look it up). Something-or-other Lodge—that would be the name of the block of flats. And the street? Oil came to mind for some reason. The word oil. Olive? Oil-can...no. Oil well... Well Road. Of course. She dialled Directory Inquiries. Rothermere M., Well Road, Hampstead, London. Thanks.


The verdict was prompt. No telephone was listed under that name and address. Was the person a new subscriber, perhaps?


Julia said no, she didn’t think so, but anyway it didn’t matter.


Again she closed her eyes. There grew upon her a curious feeling that the air about her had thickened in the past half-hour and was now like jelly in which every movement was slow and laboured.


Somebody tapped the glass. Startled, Julia turned. One of the companions of the clergyman was staring in with wide, concerned eyes. “Are you all right, dear?” the woman asked, articulating in mime in case the cabinet was soundproof.


Julia gave her a reassuring smile and raised a hand. The woman nodded and crept off towards the staircase. At once, Julia began to cry.


No, this was stupid. Self-pity she could not afford. If some sort of a trap had been sprung, with her inside it, the best course was to look for an escape hole. First, though, she had to learn the nature of the trap. What had she let herself in for? What, for God’s sake, did the police think she’d done?


She put more change in readiness and dialled her father’s number.


“Flaxborough double two eight nine; Headmaster’s Lodging.” Clear, precise, no room for error. Good old dad. Tight-arsed as ever.


She slipped in the coin. “This is Julia, father. Ahoy, there!” The jocularity was really the tail-end of her weeping. It held a trace of hysteria.


“Julia! Where are you? What on earth have you been up to?”


She said she was at a place on the coast in Norfolk. A small hotel. Then new doubts assailed her. Why was the old man so surprised?


“Look,” she said, “this Rothermere character—I think he’s a crook. He’s skipped off.”


There was a short pause. “Rothermere? Who is Rothermere, pray?”


“Well, he’s from that Happy Endings set-up of yours, isn’t he. But it looks as if he’s ditched me. I mean, a false phone number doesn’t inspire much confidence, does it?”


“Have you been drinking, Julia?”


“Christ! I’m worried half out of my mind and all you can do is accuse me of being drunk.”


Mr Clay’s tone softened a degree. “Not at all. I was simply asking. It has happened before, you know. And I am at a loss to understand these very odd references of yours.”


“What odd references?”


“Well, really, Julia; what am I supposed to make of talk about happy endings and people called Rothermere?”


Julia gave a long sigh, part of which came out as “Bloody hell!”


Her father’s failure to reprove this lapse into vulgarity indicated that far from being merely annoyed he was now concerned. She described briefly, with one pause to insert more money, the events of the past six days that had led to her present plight. The amatory aspect she did not mention, partly because she did not wish to overfill the cup of her father’s disapproval and partly because the memory, to her surprise, quite sharply grieved her.


“You realise,” Mr Clay said quietly, when she had finished, “that I have been visited by the police and asked questions.”


“Oh, no...”


“Yes. I did not know quite what to say, and I fear that I may have given the officer an impression of indifference. What I was trying to do, of course, was to make light of your leaving home lest what I felt your real reason for doing so—to escape from that lamentable marriage of yours for a couple of days—should be bandied around the town by common policemen and worse.”


What Mr Clay might consider worse than a common policeman Julia was in no mood to speculate. She asked simply what he thought she ought to do.


“Have you any money?”


“Some. Not a lot. But I’ve my cheque book.”


“An hotel, I feel, would be reluctant to accept a cheque from an unaccompanied lady. You had better meet your obligations in cash. And the sooner, the better.”


Julia considered. There was bloody Mortimer’s share of the bill, of course. She might just manage, though. “Yes, father,” she said, without irony.


“Have you your car?”


“No. We came in Mor...in Rothermere’s.”


“I see. In that case, I think it will be as well if I drive down and bring you back. In the meantime, it will create a favourable impression if you take the initiative and telephone the police. Tell them only that you saw the newspaper report and intend to return home at once. Answer no questions other than simple and obvious ones. I shall tell Scorpe to be ready to look after your interests.”


Justin Scorpe, doyen of Flaxborough solicitors, was considered by Mr Clay to fulfil in the sphere of litigation a role analogous to that of the grammar school gates in the sphere of education: he effectively insulated the worth-while and the privileged from the rough-and-tumble world of the envious, the vicious and the undeserving.


“And now,” said Mr Clay, “perhaps you will tell me as clearly as you can how I best may reach the, ah, establishment in which you are lodged.”




Chapter Fifteen

“Lucy, my dear, I envy you. I truly envy you. There is nothing more comforting to the bruised spirit than Gothic glimpsed through green.”


Mr Rothermere, stretched at full length within a chintz-frilled armchair, gazed dreamily through the big window with its many small panes. The parish church of Saint Lawrence loomed only fifty yards away, across the closely mown lawn that once had been its graveyard. Two immense yew trees screened much of the lower fabric, but the tower rose stark and splendid against the afternoon sky of autumn.


He was speaking to a woman of perhaps forty-five, perhaps sixty, who looked as if she had always had her own teeth and her own bank account. Her bearing bespoke discrimination but not fussiness; her clothes testified to taste which had no need to refer to fashion more often than every ten years or so. She had the face of a listener. A certain tone, a sort of controlled vivaciousness, about her body suggested appetites healthily unimpaired. She had remarkably good legs. Her name was Miss Teatime, Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime, and such was her character that it had never got her down.


“Your spirit would not need comforting,” said Miss Teatime, “if you had continued to follow honest employment instead of prostituting your gifts on behalf of big business.”


“The life of a private detective is not only squalid,” replied Mr Rothermere, “it is dreadfully insecure. Security is important to one who has misspent his youth.”


“How long have you been misspending your youth, Mortimer?”


“About fifty years. Yes, but Cultox do have this marvellous pension scheme. The time is coming when I shall want a retreat. Something monastic. I think I have a latent spirituality.”


Miss Teatime rose, as if prompted by a reminder, and went to a small, bow-fronted corner cabinet. She returned with glasses and a half-bottle of whisky.


“I liked Hive much better than Rothermere,” she said. “It sounds villainous and suits the beard. How long have you had that, by the way?”


“Since August, last year.” Mr Rothermere accepted a filled glass, pledged Miss Teatime’s health, and sampled the liquor with knowledgeable nods and grunts.


“Cultox,” he resumed, “sent me to Brussels to pick up a little information about the Italian vintage expectations. Cultox have a process to make Chianti from methane (for God’s sake keep that to yourself) and they wanted to know where to hit the market. So there I was in Brussels—an Italian count!” And Mr Rothermere grinned a grin bolognese and swallowed some more whisky.


Soon, though, he was looking dejected again.


“Lucy, I’m bloody worried. I really am.”


“Very well. Tell me all about it.” Miss Teatime set down her glass, selected a small cigar from a box on the table beside her, and lit it after piercing the end with a pearl-headed hatpin which she seemed to keep for the purpose.


As a prelude, Mr Rothermere drew an envelope from an inside breast pocket and let it rest, unopened, in his left hand.


“This,” he said, “is a little mystery which I think is at the centre of this awful business that I’ve let myself in for. You can see it for yourself later. I’ll tell you what I know first—such as it is.


“Cultox have something they call their Security Division—Christ, yes, I know—I mean, who doesn’t these days?—and that is the set-up for which I work. Odd, how one’s past catches up: it must have been that Duke of Windsor business that gave them a cross-reference to me...”


“Mortimer!”


He stopped in mid-exposition, one hand aloft.


Miss Teatime frowned fondly. “This is Lucy—remember? Erstwhile associate in the Gentlefolk’s Gold Brick Promotion Society, of Hallam Street, West. No spiels, dear lad, I beg you.”


Mr Rothermere looked innocently surprised, then subsided more deeply into his chair. Within his moustache lurked a little smile of gratification.


“You will remember,” he said, “my Happy Endings agency?”


“I do, indeed. Marriage counselling in reverse, was it not; an ingenious enterprise.”


“One tried to ease the path of true divorce. Anyway, Cultox obviously remembered it. I was asked to come to Flaxborough and apply the old technique to a little local problem, as Sir Malcolm termed it—Malky Eisenbach, that is—he’s the chairman of Cultox UK—delightful fellow and the third biggest crook in England.”


Miss Teatime nodded in instant recognition. “One of nature’s gentlemen. He’s vice-president of one of my doggier charities.”


“The problem in question,” Mr Rothermere went on, “concerned the good name of a subsidiary company which contributes a disproportionately large slice of profit to the Cultox loot. Northern Nutritionals—you know it?”


“Certainly I do. It is a factory beyond Northgate, on the Brocklestone Road, and it is the source of a delicacy called WOOF.”


“The caviare of the canine world.” Suddenly he frowned and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Lucy. Fatuousness is an occupational disease among Cultox employees. But, dear God! We work for people who actually believe their own advertising. Our nerves are pretty taut.”


Miss Teatime uncorked the whisky. “Take your time, Mortimer. Then when you have finished what you have to tell me, you may care to listen a while to the evening service. The organ drifts across very prettily when there is no wind.”


Mr Rothermere said that he would enjoy that, as it would remind him of the days when he annotated Bach scores for Schweitzer. Ah yes, good old Albert, said Miss Teatime. Mr Rothermere smoothly returned to the subject in hand.


“Of course, you know what these incredible corporations are, Lucy. They try and offset their predatory commercialism with a sort of happy families ethos, especially on the managerial level. My own theory is that it’s a relic of the terrible personal puritanism of the old-time moneymakers. Carnegie—you know?” He shuddered.


“Anyway, the Cultox Corporation backs up its code of moral spotlessness by using the spy network that is euphemistically described as its Security Division to report on the private lives of all Cultox executives.


“Now, then. This man Harton and his wife score very badly indeed. Incidentally, do you know them?” Miss Teatime said, yes, but not well. “Up to the ears in turpitude,” declared Mr Rothermere, “and a grave potential risk to the WOOF image. Or so”—he paused significantly—“I am told when I am sent up here in my capacity of expert divorce fixer.”


Miss Teatime looked up from contemplation of her cigar. “But would not a divorce expose the company to even further embarrassment?”


“Not if it were undefended and consequently unpublicised. You could say that clean fission is my speciality—no fallout.” Mr Rothermere juddered in a silent chuckle and gave each side of his moustache a quick little stroke. But quickly his amusement faded.


“An academic point, anyway, Lucy. No divorce was ever in prospect, as far as my wretched employers were concerned. I have been sacrificed on the altar of commercial expediency.”


“No Happy Ending?”


“This is not a matter for amusement, Lucy. We are in very serious trouble with the police. And I mean serious.”


“We?” Miss Teatime looked startled.


“Julia Harton is, certainly. And I might easily be involved as well. In any case...” He paused and fingered his beard, dubiously this time. “In any case, I have a certain responsibility.”


“Yes?” Miss Teatime thought she had never seen him look so crestfallen. She hoped it was not due to the proximity of the church: the sound of hymns did depress some people quite alarmingly.


“I fear,” said Mr Rothermere with a sigh, “that I have been unaccountably näive.”


And he told her of the plan, formed in consultation with Harton and with Cultox Security, to break Julia Harton’s stubborn opposition to an agreed divorce by baiting the trap of self-compromise with promise of a huge cash settlement; of the invention of a motor-cycling lover; of the planted clothing; of the photograph (“Maisie and Ted sent you their love, by the way”); and of the final devastating, incredible invocation of the police—presumably by Harton himself—and the suggestion in the newspapers that the man supposedly picked at random as Julia’s fictional lover had died in a manner of which she had knowledge.


Miss Teatime, who had listened with such close attention that there now was nearly an inch of ash on her cigar, remained silent for several seconds more, then shook her head sadly.


“Oh, dear, Mortimer; why ever did you lend your simple talents to furthering the skulduggery of big business? You realise now, of course, where you will stand if ever your share in this affair becomes known?”


Rothermere made cheek-puffing affectation of indifference, but not convincingly.


“Unless my reading of the situation is woefully awry,” said Miss Teatime, “you have succeeded in becoming—wittingly or unwittingly—an accessory to murder.”


The face of Mr Rothermere contorted and twitched, as if he had been asked a terribly difficult question.


Miss Teatime tossed him a crumb of reassurance. “Accessory after the fact,” she said. She considered further. “Unless, of course, it is decided that you merely conspired to pervert the course of justice.”


“Now look, Lucy, this is nothing to joke about.”


“I am not joking, Mortimer. You have been extremely foolish. The fact must be faced that these people have manipulated you into a position only fractionally less dangerous than that in which you have helped to place the unfortunate Mrs Harton.”


“You might give me credit for having been reasonably circumspect. I really don’t see how I can be connected with whatever Julia is suspected of doing. No address, no phone number, and Rothermere I haven’t used for ages.”


“You said that you had introduced yourself to her by letter.”


“I got her to give me that back.” He looked suddenly pleased with himself.


“But you were seen in the woman’s company in a restaurant, then at an hotel...”


“Motel,” Mr Rothermere corrected, as if to imply that so outlandish an indulgence did not count.


“Very well—motel. But you will allow me that the third stage of your odyssey was an hotel—the place in Norfolk.”


“True.”


“Very well, then. You have been fairly liberally exposed. Then there is the matter of your motor car. It is not exactly unnoticeable. And it doubtless bears a number. You do not seem to realise, Mortimer, that if a murder has been committed, the ensuing investigation will not be confined to a couple of offhand questions by a constable on a bicycle. There will be unleashed a multitude of inquisitors, photographers, finger-print seekers...”


“Lucy, I do get the drift of your argument. I’m sorry, but I didn’t come all the way up here to be harrowed. A little help was what I had in mind, if that is not too presumptuous.”


She smiled. “That is better. You are sometimes too self-confident for your own good, Mortimer. Now let me see what you have in that intriguing package.”


Mr Rothermere handed over his envelope.


From it, Miss Teatime drew a metal frame within which was a photograph covered by glass.


“Careful—the back is loose,” warned Mr Rothermere. “Look inside.”


She turned the frame over and lifted out the backing of heavy card. Beneath was a pad of tissue paper. This, too, she removed, exposing the back of the photograph itself.


On this, there were four things to be seen.


The first was a row of nine numerals, set down with a leaky ballpoint pen in the laboured style of someone unaccustomed to writing.


Immediately beneath it was a number of only four figures.


Then came a metal disc, rather more than an inch in diameter, held in place by two strips of transparent adhesive tape.


Finally, near the bottom, a further inscription in the leaky ballpoint. The letters R.I.P., followed, in brackets, by three words. Ressicled injenius protene.


“What, do you suppose,” Miss Teatime asked, “is ‘ressicled’?”


“God knows.”


“He does not mean testicled, does he?”


“I doubt it,” said Mr Rothermere.


She studied the three words a little longer.


“P-r-o-t-e-n-e...that can only be protein.”


“Testicles are extremely rich in protein,” offered Mr Rothermere, helpfully.


“This middle word, I take to be either ‘ingenious’ or ‘ingenuous’, but the difficulty is not simply one of spelling. Neither makes sense in relation to protein.”


“None of it makes sense in relation to anything. You are on the wrong track, Lucy. What you have there is quite clearly a code. If only you weren’t quite so remote out here—there’s a chap at the Foreign Office I have lunch with occasionally...”


“Mortimer, I had the impression that it was me from whom you had hoped to obtain help.”


He struck his forehead, nodded emphatically, held up his hands in an attitude of contrition.


Miss Teatime reversed the photograph and looked at the young man wearing motor-cycling leathers who was half-turned from the seat in his machine to stare challengingly and with contempt at the camera.


“This is Mr Tring?”


“That is Mr Tring.”


She turned the picture over once again. “And what is the significance of all this?”


Mr Rothermere’s deflation of some moments previously was by now almost entirely corrected. He waved a hand and made little rumbles of pleasure and said ah, he believed that something extraordinary, something quite extraordinary, was to be deduced from what Lucy was holding.


“And why do you believe that?”


He grinned sapiently. “Look, you have read the story of Aladdin in the Thousand and One (incidentally, I’ve a very nice edition of the Burton translation: you must borrow it some time). Abanazar, you remember, is so excited about this useless old lamp that Aladdin has the good sense not to let him have it. My employers—quite predictably—don’t read books. They have allowed themselves to show excitement over Tring’s possession of something they have described to me variously as a medallion, a plate, a metal disc. That”—he pointed—“obviously is what they are after. And they are not going to get it until I know what its genie can do.”


Miss Teatime sighed and smiled. “How pleasant it is in these barbarous times to hear a well turned literary allusion. Tell me, though, how did you come by this?”


“Oh, quite fortuitously.”


“You mean you stole it.”


“No, no. I stole the photograph. The medallion happened to be taped to the reverse side—as you can see.”


Miss Teatime indicated the first row of numerals. “At least, there should be no mystery about this. It is a telephone number, surely, prefixed by the 01 code for London.”


Mr Rothermere nodded. “As you say, no mystery. But a little surprise, I think. I do happen to know that it’s the number of the head office of Parish-Biggs, a company of food manufacturers second only to my employers in size and rapacity.”


The brow of Miss Teatime rose delicately. “And what have you made of this second group of figures?”


“Nothing. I have not had time to think about it. Another telephone number, presumably.”


“There are only four digits, so the probability is that it is a local number. Were you not tempted to dial it?”


“Lucy, I have been extremely busy. In any case, what was I supposed to say when somebody answered?”


Miss Teatime did not pursue the matter, but turned her attention instead to the medallion.


She peeled back the strips of tape and examined first one side of the disc, then the other. There were several deep, irregular indentations in both surfaces, but parts of an inscription had survived. The circumference of the disc was also badly damaged, one section having been sliced away completely.


After fetching a sheet of writing paper and a magnifying glass from the bureau, Miss Teatime re-lit her cigar and began a systematic interpretation of such lettering on the medallion as was still discernible. She was watched, somewhat morosely, by Mr Rothermere, who tilted the residue of his whisky slowly from side to side of his glass in time with the hymn that reached them faintly from the choristers of Saint Lawrence’s.


At the end of five minutes or so, Miss Teatime handed him the paper.


She had set down, in bright blue ink:

WINSTON C or G—— ש —DWELL CL—E

Mr Rothermere stared at it for some seconds. He looked up. “Very illuminating.”


“Do you not know what this thing is?” Miss Teatime asked, holding the disc lightly between finger and thumb.


“No idea.”


“You are a poor sort of detective, Mortimer.”


“I am a tired sort of detective.”


Miss Teatime put a hand on his arm. “It is not kind of me to tease you after all your journeyings. Especially as you have yet another return trip to make this evening.”


“Oh, God!” He had started up in his chair and was wincing, as if in pain.


“I am sorry, Mortimer, but your staying here is out of the question. Stop somewhere on the road if you wish, but you must be clear of Flaxborough as soon as possible. Leave these with me”—she set to one side the photograph, frame and medallion—“and I shall see what they may be made to yield in the way of helpful information.”


Mr Rothermere was tenderly exploring something behind his back.


Miss Teatime looked concerned. “Anything wrong?”


A resolute head-shake. “Just my little Spanish souvenir.” He straightened and finished his drink.


“Sunburn?” inquired Miss Teatime.


Mr Rothermere’s “Shrapnel, actually” was almost, but not quite, too quiet to be heard.




Chapter Sixteen

Julia Harton’s return to Flaxborough was awaited that Sunday evening by two people in particular whom the Norfolk police had considered proper to advise of it. One was her husband. The other was Inspector Purbright.


The arrangement, made with the approval of Mr Clay, whose manner and calling impressed the Norfolk officers as being hallmarks of civic respectability, was that his daughter should accompany him directly to the Headmaster’s Lodging where every facility would be provided for an official interrogation.


David Harton sounded on the telephone to be greatly relieved, as indeed he was, for Bobby-May had arrived just before four o’clock, insistent upon practising return volleys against the north gable of the Harton home and seemed to find utterly unintelligible his argument that a sudden call by the police, with or without his wife, would expose them to great embarrassment.


Harton went into the garden to tell her the news.


Even after nearly two hours of leaping, scurrying, swinging and intercepting, Bobby-May was as cool, and drew breath as calmly, as a mannequin.


“Oh. So Awful Julia is on the way home, is she?” Bobby-May held her racquet in the manner of a frying-pan, a tennis ball, egg-like, balanced almost motionless in the centre of the strings.


Her home. Not here, fortunately.”


Suddenly, she sent the ball sailing upward and caught it effortlessly in three extended fingers of her left hand. “I said you were fussing over nothing.”


“That inspector could still drop in. Or one of his myrmidons. Bobo, you really will have to go.”


She shrugged lightly, then thrust a hand behind his back. He felt the tennis ball being rolled up and down the line of his spine. “I’ll have to shower first,” said Bobby-May. “Have to. I don’t want to pong in church.”


“God, all right, but be as quick as you can, there’s a darling.”


She looked at him with sulky speculation. “Aren’t you going to rub me down?”


“I do have some phone calls to make. Then I’ll see. But for God’s sake let’s get the decks cleared, shall we?”


As they walked together into the house, Bobby-May was frowning, head down. “Do you know...” she began, then relapsed into silence. She dragged her racquet along the wallpaper in the hall, leaving a long indented line.


“Do I know what?” Harton, for the moment less apprehensive of awkward encounters, slipped a hand into the waistband of her tennis briefs and partially untucked the yellow, cotton T-shirt. The skin beneath was cool and absolutely dry.


“Nothing,” she said, suddenly. “Nothing, nothing, nothing.” The long, white legs were racing away from him, halfway up the staircase already. At the first turn she halted and set down her racquet and ball. Then, quite casually, she crossed arms, bent forward, and peeled the T-shirt over her head.


Harton remained at the foot of the stairs, gazing up, bewildered. A movement distracted him; the ball had rolled off the top step and was descending, one stair at a time at first, then in ever bigger bounds until it sailed past him towards the front door.


He looked again at Bobby-May. She stood erect, legs close together and was making experimental movements with hips and shoulders whilst peering down, with chin tucked in tightly, to observe their effect on her naked breasts. “Digger,” she remarked conversationally after a while, “used to call them my headlamps.” She gave a couple of little hops on her heels. The breasts bounced and quivered. “He was horribly common.”


She grinned, as if at a highly satisfactory memory, then swung about and quickly climbed the rest of the stairs.


Harton seemed inclined to follow her, but after standing irresolute for a moment he walked instead through the kitchen to a small office-like room, the door of which he shut behind him. He sat by the telephone and dialled a number.


“Charles? David Harton. Yes. Look, you asked me to keep you in the picture developmentwise. I thought you’d like to know they’ve traced my wife. Yes, it is sooner than expected. She rang them, apparently—yes, the police. Saw something in the paper. Not to worry, though, Charles. I think everything’s tied up. We’ll just have to play it as it comes, won’t we? Oh, and Charles—I’ve a shrewd notion that friend Rothermere might try and be a bit awkward. Stroppy, you know? A slight attack of ethics, by the look of it... Odd? But how right you are, Charles. Decidedly odd bird. Not that he can do anything now. Not without jumping right in the shit himself. Right, then, Charles, I’ll be in touch if need be. Sorry, ye old what? Ye old hostelry—oh, I get you. Yes, great, great. Chow, Charles.” He put down the phone. “Sarcastic bleeder.”


Before he had time to leave the office, there was an incoming call. It was from Inspector Purbright, who thought that Mr Harton would like to know that his wife had arrived in Flaxborough and seemed to be well. She was at present conferring with her solicitor at the home of her father, where she had expressed the desire to stay for the time being.


“You say she’s well, inspector. She is all right, isn’t she?” Relief and anxiety contested for control of Harton’s voice.


“Perfectly, sir. Don’t worry, we’ll look after her.”


“Tell her not to worry about a thing. I’m coming over right away.”


“I don’t think that would be a very good idea, sir, if you don’t mind. Not just now.”


“But why? Look, you can’t forbid a woman to talk to her own husband, whatever you think she might have done.”


“It is not I who am forbidding anything, Mr Harton. Your wife says she does not wish to see you. She is very firm on the point.”


“Oh,” said Harton, very quietly. “I see.” And again, softly and with much sadness, “I see.”


Gently, he replaced the telephone, paused, stood, strode purposefully from the room, rubbing his hands.


“Darl!” he called, from halfway up the stairs. “It’s all right. Awful Julia and her policemen won’t be coming after all.”


He entered the bathroom and threw half the contents of the airing cupboard on the floor in his search for a large and suitably bright-coloured towel.


“Ready for the bunny!” he called.


The energetic splashing ceased and the sound of a rain of water droplets on plastic curtaining gradually died. There appeared in the doorway a wetly gleaming, bright pink Bobby-May, eyes averted, one hand cupped protectively round a breast, the other splayed over her groin, a starfish stranded across a weedy crevice.


He held the towel up like a cloak. She turned and waited submissively to be enwrapped. He put his arms about her and tightened them. Her warmth passed through the thick, rough cotton almost instantly. So, surprisingly, did the delineation of quite subtle details of her body—little wrist bones, a gentle corrugation of muscle above and below the cleft of the navel, the rubberiness of ribs, the unsuspected angularity of kneecaps, and that curious discrepancy in hardness that Harton had noticed before between one nipple and the other.


For a while, he moved his hands, open-palmed, as if exploring a parcel, then began taking hold of the towel here and there and scrubbing the skin beneath.


Bobby-May made a murmuring noise indicative of pleasure. Harton rubbed harder. The line of his mouth tightened, but it was still upturned at the corners. He breathed deeply, regularly, in the manner of an athlete.


The girl twisted this way and that within the towel cloak, as if to guide Harton’s ministrations to especially demanding parts of her body. He had begun to vary the scrubbing with a sort of kneading technique, hooking his fingers round the flesh and levering the rigid thumbs into it with a firmness that gradually increased to a degree not far short of ferocity.


Bobby-May was leaning now at an angle against the bathroom wall. She, too, was breathing deeply, but much more quickly than Harton. Every now and again, she stiffened into immobility for a second, then relaxed, gasping. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth was a round hole in which the tongue made spasmodic appearance like some nervous pink bird.


Harton’s movements became less well co-ordinated and more brutal. He thrust a hand beneath the towel and clutched the girl’s thigh in an attempt to pull her off balance. She began to slide to the wet floor. Still she did not look at him although fingers rendered vice-like by countless hours of racquet-wielding had seized the invading hand and were conveying it to her mouth. The sudden bite made Harton cry out. His voice in pain was high and petulant, like a boy’s.


Only then, in response to the cry, did Bobby-May open her eyes. The corners of her mouth dimpled in a slow, sweet smile.


“You’ll thank me for that, Davy, when I come to you as a bride.”


“You vicious little cow! You needn’t think you can play games like that with me!” Boring one knee into her stomach, he forced her the rest of the way to the floor and tried to kneel astride her while he groped clumsily amidst the twisted towelling, seeking to pull it apart.


Bobby-May gave sign of neither distress nor alarm. She simply giggled.


“Cow! Bloody cow!” Harton punched wildly into the bundle he straddled. By ill luck, his fist connected with the point of the girl’s elbow. Pain streaked up his arm like a white-hot arrow.


The giggles were renewed.


Anger and nausea confused and soon incapacitated him, but for several minutes after Bobby-May had squirmed free and leaped, laughing like a tiddly schoolgirl, beyond his reach, he continued to belabour her with repetitive obscenities.


At last he got up from the floor, having seen that threads of blood were oozing from two punctures in the back of his right hand.


He stared at the wounds, put them under the tap, and sought a bottle of disinfectant and plasters in the cabinet above the wash-basin.


Bobby-May reappeared at the door. She was dressed.


“I’m off now, Davy. Mums will be waiting to go to church.”


Harton was still examining his hand. He spoke without looking away from it. “You murderous sodding bitch... I’ve probably got blood poisoning.”


Bobby-May’s eyes widened and glistened. “I’ll make up for everything when we’re married. It will be worth waiting for, Davy. It will, truly.”


“Christ, this is haemorrhaging. You bit into a sodding artery. Do you realise that?”


“ ’Bye, lamb.”


He raised his head abruptly. His face was dark with fury.


Bobby-May met his wild glare with mild and patient regard. “Poor Davy, you’re all upset. It’s probably the worry about Awful Julia.”


She came to him in four little running steps.


“Poor, silly Davy! Here—Bobo make better.”


Reluctantly, eyes half closed with apprehension, he let her take the hand and dry it with butterfly-light strokes of fresh cotton wool. She peeled one of the plaster strips and smoothed it over the skin. Harton started and drew a sharp intake of breath. She stood on the tips of her tennis shoes and without releasing his hand kissed him gently on the mouth. Finally, she drew the hand beneath her T-shirt and held it cupped for several seconds over first one breast, then the other.


“Better now? Advantage Davy!” She was down the stairs and opening the front door before Harton could think of anything else to say.

The boys of Flaxborough Grammar School would have been much intrigued by the nature of the gathering that Sunday evening in their headmaster’s big, dingy Edwardian sittingroom. In addition to Mr Clay himself, looking even more vigilant and authoritative than usual, there were present his married, and therefore fearfully old, daughter; a solicitor with a long neck, lots of hair in his nose, and huge black spectacles that he was always taking off and putting on again; and not one, but two, policemen in plain clothes—a detective inspector and a sergeant who clawed down into a notebook everything that the others said.


Julia, on Purbright’s insistence, had taken a small meal, despite her own declared disinclination to eat; and Mr Justin Scorpe had downed a couple of glasses of Mr Clay’s sherry in order to help put at ease, if not the company as a whole, at least Mr Scorpe.


The inspector sat at a big oval mahogany table in the middle of the room, with Love on his left. Facing them was Julia Harton. Mr Scorpe, his long, craggy head supported on three long, bony fingers in an attitude of meditation, sat on a chair upholstered in red velvet, a little apart from his client but within leaning distance of conference with her. He looked grave and immensely wise.


Mr Clay, very upright and prim-mouthed, was seated in the background: a silent supervisor, whose presence was evidenced by the glint of glasses in the shadows.


Purbright began by putting to Julia a string of formal questions concerning age, occupation, relationships, recent movements. He was gentle in manner and seemed regretful at offering such banal fare. Then he asked: “Were you acquainted, Mrs Harton, with a young man called Robert Digby Tring?”


“No, I wasn’t.”


“I should like us to be quite clear on this point, Mrs Harton. Robert Tring was a man in his early twenties who worked in your husband’s factory. People mostly called him Digger. He was a motor-cycling enthusiast. You never met him?”


“Never. Not knowingly, anyway.”


“So you can think of no circumstances in which you might have been photographed in the company of Robert Tring?”


“You mean specifically in his company, or as two people in a crowd?”


“Specifically,” said Purbright. “Just the pair of you.”


“As I said, I’ve never met the man.”


The inspector nodded, as if satisfied.


“Are you,” he asked, “interested in motor-cycles, Mrs Harton?”


She looked perplexed. “Certainly not. Should I be?”


Purbright’s smile seemed to imply agreement that the notion was an odd one, but he asked nevertheless: “Do you possess, or have you ever worn, the sort of clothing which motor-cyclists usually adopt?”


Julia felt a small tremor—not quite of fright, perhaps, but certainly of sharp apprehension. She tried to consider how she could most safely frame a reply, but as the moments passed it became more and more difficult to think. In the end, she had to content herself with a bald negative.


“You’re happy, are you, with that answer, Mrs Harton? You did seem to be having some doubts.” Purbright’s concern sounded kindly enough. It did not, however, pass the guard of pensive Mr Scorpe.


“My client,” he declared, “is perfectly entitled to give the framing of her answers due consideration, inspector, however long that takes.”


“Oh, perfectly entitled, Mr Scorpe,” the inspector agreed. “I was only anxious that subsequent questions of mine, touching the same matters, should not sound wilfully obtuse.”


“I don’t think I quite take your point,” rumbled Mr Scorpe, sweeping off his great spectacles and peering at them, suspiciously.


“For example”—Purbright leaned down and took from the floor by his feet a loosely wrapped parcel—“I was going to ask Mrs Harton how these articles came to be in a cupboard in her kitchen.” He disclosed the jacket, breeches and boots.


“You do see my difficulty, Mr Scorpe? In view of her last reply?”


The solicitor said nothing. He looked at Julia.


She stared sullenly at the clothing, said she had never seen it before, and asked why she should take the inspector’s word for its having been found in her kitchen.


“Do you travel much, Mrs Harton?” Purbright asked.


“No more than other people, I suppose.”


“Are you a bad traveller? Does it upset you?”


“No. Why?”


“About three weeks ago, did you buy two tubes of ‘Karmz’ anti-sickness pills at Parkinsons, in East Street?”


“I did not.”


“Have you ever bought such tablets?”


“Never.”


Purbright glanced aside to see how Sergeant Love’s shorthand was coping, then took an envelope from the folder before him.


“Mrs Harton, I am about to show you a photograph and to ask you some questions concerning it. If you wish your solicitor or your father to see the photograph, you must say so. At this stage, I am prepared to respect your wishes.”


Julia watched him turn the envelope over in his hand, untuck the flap and extract a print. She was pale and looked, for the first time in the interview, deeply anxious.


Purbright passed the photograph across the table, face down. Julia picked it up with a little difficulty. She made no attempt to shield it from Mr Scorpe, who was now looking at her across the top of his spectacles as if, by that means, he might render their relationship totally impervious to embarrassment.


After staring at the picture for some seconds in what Love unhesitatingly decided to be horror, Julia addressed Purbright.


“Who the hell is this supposed to be?”


The inspector leaned forward to see what she was indicating with a tremulous forefinger.


“That, to the best of my knowledge, is Robert Tring.”


Julia half opened her mouth. She shook her head, looked about her with an expression of utter bewilderment, then scowled furiously at the photograph.


“Hey, this is some kind of very sick joke. Where the hell did you get it, anyway? It’s a fake, a trick. Honestly, it really is. It’s a filthy bloody fake!”


Mr Clay did not for an instant shift his gaze, which was fixed upon a point about three feet above his daughter’s head. He was in urgent communication with his colleague, GOD, M.A. Let not this reach the ears of the boys, and especially not those of McCorquadale and Le Brun J.


The inspector gently took back the print.


“The boots you are wearing—I beg your pardon—appear to be wearing, in the photograph have been compared very carefully with those I showed you just now,” he said. “And there are enough points of resemblance to convince me that they are the same. Do you want to say anything about that?”


Julia stared stonily down at the table. Then she glanced at the solicitor, at her father and back to Purbright.


“Would it be all right,” she asked, “if I had a word with Mr Scorpe in private?”


“Of course.”


The lawyer rose to his feet and followed Julia out of the room. He walked with a forward stoop and parted the tails of his long, old-fashioned black coat in order to scratch his bottom.


When they returned a few minutes later, Julia looked subdued but less distressed.


She nodded towards the parcel that still lay where Purbright had put it on the table. “I want to tell you about those,” she said.


“They aren’t mine, but I have seen them before. And I was wearing some of them when a photograph was taken of me. Not the photograph you showed me. I know nothing about that. It started as a sort of a joke to annoy my husband. No, not a joke. It was part of a plan, actually. Our marriage has been pretty dreadful for a long time. I wanted—I still want—a divorce. Then when this agency wrote to me I got in touch with them and...”


“Agency?” the inspector interrupted.


“It calls itself ‘Happy Endings’.”


Sergeant Love looked up, delight dawning on his face, but at once stooped again to note-taking, warned off by a nicker in Purbright’s eye.


“Go on, Mrs Harton.”


“Well, the idea was for them to negotiate a reasonable settlement with my husband on my behalf. I posed for a picture as a sort of good faith guarantee—so that I shouldn’t go back on the divorce once proceedings had been started.”


“If this photograph is not the one for which you posed, can you explain how the man Tring came to be on it?”


Mr Scorpe intervened. “My client has said already, inspector, that she considers the photograph to have been faked.”


“That is so, Mr Scorpe; but she has since had a private consultation with you. I simply wondered if she might now like to modify the earlier reply.”


Julia shook her head vigorously.


“Very well,” said Purbright. “In that case, I should like to ask you how the photograph came to be in a drawer at your home—one of the drawers of the dressing table in your bedroom—in which I am told you are in the habit of keeping personal property, and to which you possess the key.”


“Do you,” inquired Mr Scorpe majestically, “mean to tell us, inspector, that the police searched Mrs Harton’s house when she was not present and had not given permission?”


“As she had been reported missing, it does not seem altogether inconsistent to suppose that neither her presence nor her permission was available at that time, sir. Our task was to find Mrs Harton. We looked in the first instance for anything suggestive of her whereabouts. The search was made in Mr Harton’s presence and with his approval.”


Purbright, cross with himself at having been provoked into pomposity, returned his attention to Julia.


“Any idea how the picture came to be in that drawer?”


“I haven’t, no.”


“You’ve read the message written across it?”


“Yes.”


“And does that not mean anything to you?”


“Apart from its being a threat of some kind; no, it doesn’t.”


Purbright removed the lid from a shallow cardboard box. “These things also were in the drawer we’ve been talking about, Mrs Harton. I don’t want you to think that I’m trying to place a sinister interpretation on any of them, but a couple I really do find puzzling. The photograph for one, of course. Then there are these—the two empty ‘Karmz’ tubes. I thought you said you had never bought such things.”


She stared in apparent perplexity. “They must be my husband’s. They certainly aren’t mine.”


“If I were to tell you that Mr Harton denies any knowledge of such pills and claims never to have seen those containers before, what would you say?”


“I’d say he was a damned liar, what else?” Julia had flushed angrily and was leaning forward in her chair.


“Can you suggest how the empty tubes got into that drawer?”


Mr Scorpe was gesturing in preparation for protest, but Julia spoke first.


“Certainly I can. David put them there. Don’t ask me why. Some vicious little scheme of his own, I suppose.”


“And the photograph?” prompted the inspector, quietly.


“Sure. Yes. Why not? And the bloody photograph!”


“And this?”


Purbright slid across the table towards her a small slip of paper. It was a sales receipt for £37 in respect of “Ladys m/c jkt, 36" blk' and dated the previous March. The slip was headed with the name of a Manchester firm of sports outfitters.


“Yes,” shouted Julia. “This, too, if it was there that you found it. And for God’s sake don’t ask me if I’ve ever seen it before. I couldn’t bloody bear it.”


There was a long silence, during which nobody seemed to think it would be a good idea to look at anyone else. Then quietly, confidentially almost, Purbright addressed Julia.


“I imagine you could do with a rest, Mrs Harton, so I don’t propose to ask your help any more tonight. There is, however, one question that I must put to you before I go.”


Julia nodded weary assent, and the inspector continued:


“Will you tell me, as precisely as possible, where you were on Saturday of last week—Saturday, the sixth of September—between eleven o’clock and midnight.”


She considered, but not for long.


“I was in bed, inspector. In bed at home. And in the company—most reluctantly—of my husband. Is that precise enough for you?”


Purbright bowed his head.


“Eminently.”




Chapter Seventeen

In her capacity as secretary and treasurer of the Flaxborough and Eastern Counties Charities Alliance, Miss Teatime was careful to keep in her office in Saint Anne’s Gate not only a street and trade directory but a reasonably up-to-date copy of the voters’ list.


She therefore anticipated little trouble in building into a full name and address the fragmentary inscription she had copied from the disc bequeathed by Mr Rothermere:

WINSTON C or G—— —3 —DWELL CL—E

The last word was easiest of all to guess for a lady whose current vocation had made her familiar with the foibles of the socially aspiring. It was—it had to be—CLOSE, a designation two points up on Gardens, at least three points superior to Avenue, and a whole astral plane above a mere Road. As for —DWELL, that clearly had started as CADWELL, for the only other Closes in Flaxborough were Church, Windsor, Harley and Twilight.


There were three householders in Cadwell Close whose name began with G: Godstone, at 2; Grant, at 17; and Gill, at 20. The only two Cs were Copley and Corrigan. They lived at 13 and 18 respectively. That 13 fitted. Copley, clearly, was the winner. Copley, Anthea Katherine, sole occupant.


Miss Teatime put away the directory and voters’ list and took from the shelf a long slim book, bound in a home-made cover patterned in forget-me-knots. This contained some hundreds of names, entered in alphabetical order in her own neat script. The names were of potential subscribers to charity. Miss Teatime called the catalogue her “soft touch list”.


She turned the pages to C. Campbell... Carstairs... Clasket... ah, there it was, Copley. She had thought it would be. And the entry had a little star against it, which was her private mark to indicate pelf above the average.


Miss Teatime refreshed her memory by studying the case notes opposite Mrs Copley’s name. Widowed 1963; brewery shares; married daughter Australia; three poodles: Winston, Edward and Vera Lynn; frightened of black men and Chinese; addicted to peppermint creams; telephone number 3829.


Telephone... Miss Teatime took another look at the second, the shorter, number on the back of Robert Tring’s picture, confident that it would tally with Mrs Copley’s. But it did not. It was 2271. Quite different. Damn.


She dialled 2271 there and then.


It rang for nearly half a minute without response. She was about to replace the receiver when the ringing tone ceased. No one answered. She spoke. An experimental “Hello?” There was rustling at the other end.


“Yes?” A man’s voice, slightly breathless. Not friendly.


“Who is that, please?”


“Double two seven one.”


“I mean, who is it?”


“I’ve given the number. What do you want? Who is that, anyway?”


A cagey gentleman, clearly. Miss Teatime considered rapidly. The call would produce nothing on this Hello-Hello level. A key of some kind was needed. Tring? R.I.P.? Mrs Copley? Cultox? There was no knowing. And a wrong guess could do a lot of harm, if only by putting somebody on guard.


“That is Kelsey’s isn’t it? The shoe shop?” She had decided to disengage.


“No, it isn’t.” A click and that was that.


Miss Teatime found that the call had disturbed her a little, so she poured herself a modest medicinal dose of whisky and thought about the man who had taken so long to answer the phone. He had not said much, yet even that brief and unpromising exchange had left her with the impression that he was someone she knew.


But who?


She selected another notebook. It listed the names and telephone numbers of people in the town and locality whose professions or connections rendered them of potential use to a charitable organisation. They included chairmen of committees, bank managers, veterinary surgeons, magistrates, welfare officials and inspectors of police, income tax and slaughter-houses.


The finely tapered forefinger moved swiftly from name to name, page to page, wavering for an instant now and again, or fleetingly shifting to check a number.


About two-thirds of the way through the list, the finger hesitated, moved back one line, and halted. She made a murmur of recognition, then frowned. Phone numbers again had failed to tally. That which appeared against the name indicated by her finger was 3944.


Of course, there was a way of making sure.


Once more, she dialled 2271. The answer came not instantly but much more quickly than before. An abrupt, suspicious “Yes?”


At once she rang off and dialled 3944.


Ten, twenty, thirty seconds went by. The number was still ringing out. Three quarters of a minute...


“Good morning...” A pause for recovery of breath. “Four Foot Haven, Heston Lane. May I help you?”


Silently, delicately, Miss Teatime replaced her receiver. She smiled. It was very nice, once in a way, to have a wild guess confirmed. Perhaps luck would stay with her long enough to make a visit to Mrs Copley worth while.


Miss Teatime’s little sports car, the cost of which modest self-indulgence she managed to implant neatly amidst the managerial expenses of a charity devoted to the relief of greengrocers’ horses, was standing in Saint Anne’s Place, not many yards from her office, and close to the railings of the park. She drove out into Southgate and soon was passing the semi-villas of Gordon Road and Beatrice Avenue, where, neighbours still recalled, poor Mr Hopjoy had met his terrible end in 1962, 2 and hence into the leafy cul-de-sac of Cadwell Close.

2 Reported in Hopjoy Was Here

Number 13 was a bungalow in heavily ornate stucco, the colour of dried lavender. The front door was flanked by big bay windows. Each revealed a spread of overlapping drapes of white muslin, gathered by silk cords and tassels, which gave an impression that the house was in full sail.


Miss Teatime’s ring was answered instantly by a paroxysm of barking. Winston, Edward and Vera Lynn, no doubt. No, she reminded herself; probably not Winston.


She heard a human voice, female, raised in shrill but affectionate remonstration. The barking continued unabated.


The door opened three inches or so to reveal a pair of woolly muzzles and part of the anxiously frowning face of a woman of about sixty.


Miss Teatime delivered a brisk “Good morning, Mrs Copley,” then immediately bestowed upon the poodles a smile of almost maternal admiration and an ecstatic “Aaahh!”


A friend forthwith, Mrs Copley opened the door fully and waited patiently for her visitor to recover the power of speech.


“I do not suppose you will remember me, Mrs Copley, but we have met, I believe, on sundry occasions. Teatime is my name and I am secretary of our little family of helpful societies here in Flaxborough.”


“Oh, of course. Do please come in.”


Miss Teatime’s taking a first step past the threshold was the signal for the dogs to enter a new phase of frenzy. Barking even louder than before, they darted about in short runs, each of which culminated in a clawing leap at Miss Teatime’s elegant legs.


“Aaahh! Bless them!” exclaimed Miss Teatime, a professional to her fingertips.


Mrs Copley was talking. Miss Teatime watched the words being formed. She thought they were I’d better put the boys in the kitchen so she nodded in rueful acceptance. Mrs Copley opened a door. The dogs shot through, nearly knocking her over. Mrs Copley followed them. Smiling back at Miss Teatime, she held aloft a can and an opener. WOOF (WITH TURKEY). Her lips were moving again. They know, don’t they? They do know. Miss Teatime beamed and wagged her head in acknowledgment.


Later, in the cool, slightly musty, quietude of Mrs Copley’s sitting-room, her visitor raised a matter of delicacy. Had not the Boys numbered three at one time? Or was her memory at fault?


Mrs Copley said no, alas, she was not mistaken: there had indeed been three. But Winston now was in the Haven.


“I am so sorry,” said Miss Teatime. Softly, “You had to have him put to sleep?”


“He was our fourth Winston,” remarked Mrs Copley, as if the name in itself held the seeds of dissolution. Then she recalled herself. “Oh, no; he wasn’t put to sleep. He had a coronary, poor boy.”


“Good gracious,” exclaimed Miss Teatime.


“Oh, it’s not unusual, apparently,” said Mrs Copley. “Mr Leaper at the Haven said it happens a lot with the best breeds. They’re so highly strung, you see. I mean, take Winston. He was a fine, big boy, but never still for an instant. Never. In fact”—she laughed—“he was such a great roustabout—quite different from Edward and Vera Lynn in there—that he never was given his real name at all. Not Winston. No, we called him Rip. And not because of Rip Van Winkle, either! Oh, he was a terror, was Rip. Everybody misses him.”


Mrs Copley remained silent a moment in fond recall. Then she frowned.


“Everybody but my sister-in-law,” she amended.


“Your sister-in-law?”


“Ethel. She lives in Brocklestone and has migraines and ever since George passed over she’s insisted on coming to stay with me for a week in the summer. It’s kind of her, I suppose, but of course that is the time when Brocklestone gets so crowded with trippers. Anyway, Ethel was very queer and unreasonable about poor old Rip, so I used to board him at the Haven whenever she came. And that’s how it happened.”


“Oh, yes?”


“Rip’s coronary. It was while he was in the Haven. Last month. Mr Leaper was terribly upset. Terribly.”


“He must have been,” said Miss Teatime.


“He came over personally to tell me. I thought that was rather nice of him. You know, I could hardly believe it at first. Well, only a few days before he’d been so lively that I’d had to help hold him while they tied his identity label on his collar. That was just until he got to his proper kennel, of course—Rip always had the same one.”


“Tell me,” said Miss Teatime, “were you able to see poor Winston—Rip, that is—before they...” She left the sentence reverently incomplete.


For the first time in the interview, Mrs Copley gave sign of distress. No, she said, that had not been possible. She had asked, naturally, but only to be told that poor Rip was...was already...


“Laid to rest?” prompted her visitor.


A sniff of grief. “Cremated,” said Mrs Copley.


After a while she recovered sufficiently to suggest refreshments and a general reunion with survivors Edward and Vera Lynn.


Miss Teatime regretfully declined. There had been reaching her for some minutes the sounds of gnawing at wood.


It did not strike Mrs Copley until much later that the lady from the Charities Alliance had forgotten to give the reason for her call.

Miss Teatime drove back into town the way she had come. Her next destination was Four Foot Haven, boarding kennels and lost pets’ pound, off Heston Lane.


The fair was over. The rides and sideshows had been dismantled during the weekend, and the last of the great steam engines was panting and snorting its way over the town bridge into Northgate. Its canopy, borne aloft on six gleaming twists of brass, could be seen swaying above the mass of cars and lorries which it held to a crawl in the glutted Market Place.


Once across the bridge, Miss Teatime turned left into Burton Place and entered Heston Lane at the opposite corner.


The Four Foot Haven consisted of a small huddle of sheds and Nissen huts within a perimeter fence. It was reached by way of a narrow track between fields at the back of the big Edwardian villas on the north side of Heston Lane.


Miss Teatime’s car drew up on a patch of cinder by the most imposing of the sheds. It had WARDEN on the door, which was a little open.


She stood for a moment, gazing across the open fields. The nearest buildings were those of Twilight Close, toy-like amongst neat shrubs and hedges. To the left was something bigger, newer-looking, more stark: the brick and asbestos gable of the main bay of Northern Nutritionals.


Miss Teatime considered. No, too far. A nice idea, but really too far.


She moved to the other side of her car and looked in other directions. Ah, that was more promising. A shed she had not noticed before, set apart from the rest, thirty or forty yards from the fence gate. She began walking towards it.


“Hey!”


Miss Teatime halted and looked back.


In the now open doorway of the Warden’s hut stood a tall, angular, loosely strung-together sort of man, lank-haired and pale, whose most immediately noticeable feature was a nose like an inflamed spike.


“You can’t go over there,” the man shouted. “That’s private property.”


“My dear Mr Leaper, if I were to restrict my movements to public property, I should spend the rest of my life in police stations, town halls and lavatories. Is that what you wish for me?”


The Warden wiped his spike on his sleeve and said he hadn’t noticed it was her, but over there was private all the same.


Leonard Leaper, even at the relatively early age of 35, had a lot of former about him. He was a former newspaper reporter, a former minister of religion, a former gas fitter, a former valet. Having failed from his earliest years to develop any sense of relationship between ambition and capability, he had from time to time offered himself as candidate for jobs ranging from cinema projectionist to licentiate in dental surgery, and had actually landed some of them. His self-confidence was vast, but it was based upon nothing but peasant-like simplicity of mind and the central indestructible conviction that he would one day be king of England.


Miss Teatime had decided to risk one quick audacious bid to trap this heir unapparent into an indiscretion from which he could not retreat.


She drew close, glanced about her secretively, and confided: “Mr Leaper, a couple of R.I.P. commissions are arriving today. Do I take it that there will be”—she indicated with a nod the solitary shed—“accommodation ready?”


The Warden’s small but protuberant eyes regarded her with what she feared was blank incomprehension. Several seconds passed. Then, just when she was about to try and laugh off what she had said (and what a grim exercise, she reflected, that would be), Leonard Leaper spoke: .


“Here,” he said, “was that you on the phone this morning?”


She thought quickly. Was she to go a little further in? Or to start laughing? Audacity won.


“Yes, I’m sorry I was not able to speak freely. People kept coming in.”


Mr Leaper’s manner eased slightly. It became leavened with a sort of gawky bravado. He looked Miss Teatime up and down. “Fancy you being in it as well, and you on all them committees and everything.”


Miss Teatime bore this slander with fortitude. She tried to look roguish.


“Mind you,” said the Warden, “you’re unlucky. Pro tem, anyway.”


“Unlucky?”


“Well, it’s stopped for now because of that slip-up and then Digger’s accident and everything. Nar-poo—finish.”


“Oh. Indeed. Because of the slip-up. Yes, of course.” Miss Teatime nodded wisely while she devised another piece of bait. Leaper clearly was susceptible to what he believed to be criminal’s argot.


“In my opinion, Mr Leaper,” she said, leaning even closer towards him, “it was Digger’s intention to blow the whistle.”


Surprise, dismay, alarm, invested Leaper’s countenance in rapid succession.


“Stone me!”


He made a brief twitchy survey of the scenery, then ushered Miss Teatime into his hut.


It smelled of sacking and strong tea, but was reasonably clean. She sat, uninvited, in the old-fashioned swing chair that was the only furniture it contained other than a deal table and a couple of shelves.


Leaper propped himself up against the wall. “Stone me!” he said again (What a curiously biblical plea, thought Miss Teatime) and then, “Digger, eh? If anybody’d asked me, I’d have said it was that bint of his who was poison.”


“Mrs Harton?” ventured Miss Teatime.


“Nar!” exclaimed the Warden, contemptuously. “Digger’s bint. His fancy piece. That kennel maid that used to be here.”


“You did not trust the kennel maid?”


“She was creepy. She said she wanted to be a vet so as she could open up veins, and all the time she was playing at ball like some little kid.”


Miss Teatime did not need entirely to rely on pretence in order to appear keenly interested.


“You know, you really are a most perceptive observer, Mr Leaper,” she told him. “Digger’s breach of trust—his double-cross, rather—is beginning to be understandable. But, of course, you already have worked that out for yourself.”


Leaper nodded carelessly. He was doing something to his thumb-nail with a jack knife.


“What was the girl’s name again? I can never remember it for long.” Miss Teatime hoped that this bit of crude skating. would not bring her to grief.


The thick ice of Leaper’s self-esteem held.


Without looking up, he said: “Lintz. Bobby-May Lintz.” His lip curled. “Bobby-May! I ask you! Her old man’s editor of the local rag.” Ex-journalist Leaper would never have referred to the Flaxborough Citizen in such derogatory terms had he not once applied for, and been summarily denied, the post of its assistant editor.


“It was a piece of terribly bad luck that someone should send in an animal that happened to be called Rip,” said Miss Teatime, reflectively.


“You can say that again,” muttered the Warden. “Stone me!”


“Ah, well, Mr Leaper”—she rose—“in the circumstances we had better call the job off.”


He shut his jack knife with some difficulty and peered anxiously at his thumb. “Yeah. Pro tem.”


Miss Teatime was about to reach for the door, which had been standing slightly ajar, when it began to move inward of its own accord.


Two men were standing outside. One, though young, was white-haired. He looked cheerful. His companion, a pace behind, did not.


“We did knock,” said the nearer man. “You seemed busy, though. Not to worry.” He smiled.


Leaper looked quickly from one to the other and then at Miss Teatime, as if asking her to account for them. She gave a small shake of the head.


The white-haired man appeared to understand their dilemma. “Allow me,” he said, “to introduce ourselves. We are executive representatives of Happy Endings Incorporated. I wonder if you now have a few moments to spare, madam and sir?”




Chapter Eighteen

The white-haired man glanced quickly about the hut interior and pronounced it “fascinatingly rural”. It would not be sufficiently commodious, however, to allow them to hold the kind of conference he had in mind. Perhaps Miss Teatime could suggest somewhere else?


“I’m Charles, by the way,” he added, “and this”—he indicated his companion, loitering diffidently in the doorway—“is Simon.”


“Of the Cultox Corporation?” inquired Miss Teatime, pleasantly.


“Of Cultox, as you say. Security division.”


The Warden was glowering. “What was all that about happy endings and everything?”


“A little pleasantry, Mr Leaper. I fancy Miss Teatime will understand.”


She said: “You seem to know my name, Mr Charles. Yours is not familiar to me. However, names are of no concern to our little four-footed friends, so why should they matter to us?”


“What a beautiful philosophy,” Charles declared. Simon nodded gravely in the background. His clasped hands made slow and continuous movements, like a stomach digesting.


Miss Teatime said that she would like nothing better than to entertain the two visitors in her own home. Unfortunately, she lived within ecclesiastical precincts and had to be more than normally circumspect. They would be welcome, however, in her office in Saint Anne’s Gate.


Charles said that would be marvellous and looked as if he meant it. Looking pleased, Miss Teatime reflected, seemed to be a speciality of his: she already had ticketed him in her own mind as the Happy One.


“You must allow me to give you a lift in my car—or have you transport of your own?”


“No, we came from the town by taxi.”


“It will be something of a squeeze,” warned Miss Teatime.


Charles said no, not a bit of it, for he alone would take advantage of her kind offer. Leaper could not possibly leave his post, and Simon would be glad to keep him company. Simon liked talking about dogs. He had two of his own.


Probably Dobermann Pinschers, thought Miss Teatime. She smiled and said: “Aaahh!”


Charles declared the sports car to be marvellously fast looking. He contrasted in vivid terms the motorist’s frustrations in traffic-choked London with his unhindered and rapid progress in “these splendid little provincial places”.


The fair wagon’s unwilling retinue having finally piled to a halt at the northern end of the town bridge, they took twenty-five minutes to reach Miss Teatime’s office.


Charles paid close and admiring attention to the shabby staircase, the big draughty landing and the doors that had last received a coat of paint in the year of George V’s Jubilee. “If these old walls could only talk,” he said. “Ah, yes,” replied Miss Teatime, adding silently: But thank Christ they can’t.


Before shutting and locking the door behind them, she hung a card outside that promised her return in one hour. Then she placed gloves and bag on the desk, and waved her guest to a chair beside it.


“You drink whisky, of course, Mr Charles.” It was less an invitation than a confident statement.


“What a lovely surprise. Yes, I do, on the odd occasion. And it’s Charles, incidentally, not Mister Charles.”


“Ah, yes; the instant intimacy of the boardroom and the sports interview. But my upbringing in a rectory was rather old-fashioned, Mr Charles. I have never been persuaded that ease of social intercourse was to be secured by the bandying of Christian names by complete strangers.”


“Stranger? Oh, come, that’s rather hard on me, isn’t it?”


Charles half stood to receive his glass. His jocular manner had subsided somewhat.


“Formality of address,” said Miss Teatime, putting a small jug of water within his reach, “is no bad thing until each person knows exactly what the other is after and at what price.”


“I stand rebuked, Miss Teatime. I shall fight my inclination to call you Lucy. Cheers.” He took a sip of his whisky.


“Your good health, Mr Charles.” She drank; then placed between them a box of small cigars, one of which she examined critically before lighting it and inhaling the first drag with as fastidious an air of appreciation as if she held a bunch of newly picked primroses.


She said: “Your Mr Simon—the one who looks like an unfrocked priest—will not attempt to hurt that unfortunate Mr Leaper, I trust.”


“Hurt him? Good heavens, no. Why should he?”


She made a dismissive gesture with her cigar. “A twinge of anxiety on my part. Please disregard it. Is the whisky to your satisfaction? It is something they call a straight malt, and most wholesome, I understand.”


Charles was beginning to look strained. He drank a little more, rocked his head from side to side, pouted thoughtfully, and finally drew breath and began: “Miss Teatime, you are a woman of the world...”


The sudden cascade of her laughter cut him short. “Oh, dear, Mr Charles, I thought you would never say it!”


He frowned, visibly annoyed at last.


“I am so sorry,” she said. “Never mind, the time for propositions seems to have arrived. Please unburden yourself. I promise to listen.”


Charles said coolly: “When I described you as a woman of the world, I was not paying you an idle compliment. We do know something of your history, Miss Teatime. We are aware, for instance, that you are an old London acquaintance of our man Rothermere. Nothing more natural than his paying you a call while he was up here. Simon noticed, of course. Simon tends to mooch about a lot when he’s away from home. What did rather surprise us, though, was finding you this morning. You’re a bit of an R.I.P. researcher, I gather.”


“I am interested in all good works, Mr Charles, within the modest territorial limits of this pleasant little town. And when I observe one that attracts the keen attention of Europe’s third biggest food corporation, I think I may be forgiven for being curious.”


A smile spread slowly over Charles’s face. “You don’t know what it means, do you? R.I.P. You’d like to trick me into telling you.” There was something challenging, goading almost, in his amusement.


“The prevalent disease of abbreviation,” replied Miss Teatime with dignity, “has been propagated by those same agencies of public befuddlement that are so diligently demolishing syntax, proliferating pseudo-scientific jargon, and evolving ever more intimidating gobbledegook for use by gangsters posing as captains of commerce. There is not anything discreditable in failing to translate one of their wretched cyphers.”


“No,” said Charles, simply, “there isn’t. But you mustn’t be so censorious. I am only trying to help.”


Miss Teatime reached for the telephone. “Will you kindly excuse me a moment; there is a matter on which I should like to set my mind at rest.”


She dialled.


“Ah, Mr Leaper... Yes, indeed it is. I hope you are getting along amicably with Mr Simon... Oh, has he?... Yes, I see... Now tell me, Mr Leaper—I am speaking of this little secret of ours—what exactly did Digger say the code letters R.I.P. stood for?” She smiled. “No, not Rest in Peace—I did realise that much... Imperial?... Ah, imperilled, yes... Of course, but how clever!” She listened a while longer, and nodded. “You are absolutely right—not a word to the Fuzz, naturally... And chow to you, Mr Leaper.”


She put down the phone and met Charles’s inquiring stare.


“So far as he is concerned,” she explained, “R.I.P. means ‘Rescue Imperilled Pets’. His late companions must have persuaded him to believe that he was helping them to abduct and preserve stray animals that otherwise would have been destroyed.”


“You think, do you, that he was deceived in believing that?”


“I know he was.”


“Why?”


“Because, whatever else the initials R.I.P. may represent, they most certainly have no reference to rescuing anything. The P stands not for Pets but for Protein. As you, Mr Charles, are well aware.”


“And what about the R and the I?”


“I shall work them out in time. I love puzzles.”


Charles took some moments off for thought. When he spoke again, it was with the air of having made an important decision.


“I am going to be more frank with you,” he said, “than your knowledge warrants. Partly because you have the intelligence to fill the gaps for yourself quite quickly. Partly because I don’t want you to suppose Cultox has anything to hide. What has happened here in Flaxborough boils down to this—a bit of disloyalty—a bit of trouble-making. Nothing more, believe me. So here’s your lecture.


“P for Protein, you say. And you’re right. P for Protein it is. And protein is an essential ingredient of animal feeding stuff. You do realise, I suppose, the absolutely fantastic scale of production of pet food in this country?”


“We are a kindly people, Mr Charles.”


He inclined his head. “And Cultox is glad of it. The supply problem exists, certainly, but the market is very profitable. Sufficiently profitable, it might be argued, to justify unorthodox methods. Which brings us, Miss Teatime”—Charles regarded his glass, turning it this way and that—“to the rather unpleasant core of this otherwise enjoyable dialogue of ours...”


He paused.


Oh, dear,” she said.


“Which is,” said Charles at once, “the idea you’ve got into your head that there has been a conspiracy to include the flesh of domestic animals in the output of our Flaxborough plant.”


Miss Teatime stared at him. “I have suggested nothing so dreadful.”


“Only because you are clever enough to make everything sound suspicious without actually laying down an accusation.”


“You do me an injustice.”


“In that case, allow me to make amends by satisfying your curiosity.” He leaned back in his chair. “What would you like to know first?”


She considered. “Very well. Let us start, as a test of good faith, with R.I.P., shall we?”


“Re-cycled Indigenous Protein.”


The answer had come pat, like a delivery from a coin machine. Miss Teatime’s “Good gracious me!” followed only after several seconds of incredulous silence.


“Neatly put?” prompted Charles.


“Clever,” she conceded. “In a jargony sort of way.”


“But shocking?”


“Certainly. In context, quite abominable. Who thought it up? Not that chairman of yours, surely? The longest word Sir Malcolm ever mastered was money.”


“I hate to have to admit this, but it isn’t a Cultox phrase at all. It was invented by Parish-Biggs.” He looked up. “You’ve heard of them, I presume?”


Millers, seaweed processors, prefabricators of discotheques, publishers, manufacturers of soft drinks, tape cassettes, disinfectants and art prints. Miss Teatime had heard of Parish-Biggs.


“PB are diversifying into pet foods,” said Charles. “They’ve taken over LIK from Californian Cement, and now they’re after WOOF, but they naturally would like to reduce share prices first. A really damaging scandal could shave perhaps a million off Doggigrub’s market value.”


In response to Miss Teatime’s glance of inquiry, Charles handed her his glass. She poured, very steadily. He was silent while he watched the slow rise of the almost colourless spirit—it was the palest greeny-gold—then went on with his story.


“About a year ago, PB were recruiting a new batch of technical staff when they came across a young woman graduate whose home was in Flaxborough. They decided she was good material for their espionage division, gave her a few months’ training, and told her to plant herself in that dogs’ home place as a part-time helper—what do they call it?—kennel maid. Bobby Lintz was her name. Short for Roberta presumably. Her father’s a journalist.”


“He is the editor of the Flaxborough Citizen.”


“There’s glory for you,” said Charles, it seemed almost automatically. The remark interested Miss Teatime. It indicated, she thought, a degree of reversion to type, brought on by stress. Here was a man more sophisticated, more sardonic, than he cared to be thought. Was he, and not silent Simon, the dangerous one?


“Anyway,” he said, “she soon enlisted a helper. Apparently she has a very persuasive way with the opposite sex, if you see what I mean...”


The coyness jarred. It was a quickly calculated attempt to make up for the flip retort of the moment before. “In our regional vernacular,” she informed him earnestly, “Miss Lintz has been described as a bit warm in the arse.”


He grinned and went on. “Her recruit, as you’ll have guessed already, was a tearaway called Tring, and the reason she picked him, of course, was the fact that he was working at Doggigrub. He was also able to borrow a small truck from one of his brothers, and that was important, too.


“Before long, these two conned the Warden of the dog’s home into joining what the poor fellow thought was some sort of Scarlet Pimpernel operation. That must have been easy enough: Leaper’s none too bright a lad, by the look of him.


“They began dog-lifting. All were strays that nobody had claimed in the first week. The girl picked them and Leaper took them to a shed on its own. Then Tring collected a batch every now and again, after dark, and turned them loose forty or fifty miles away.”


“If I may interrupt for a moment...”


“But of course.”


“I appreciate this wealth of confidential information, but I am a perverse creature, Mr Charles. I keep wondering how it came into your possession in the first place.”


He smiled. “Perfectly simple. One of the conspirators turned Queen’s evidence. Or Cultox’s evidence, if you prefer. We were being kept in the picture right up to last week.”


“Until the demise of Mr Tring?”


“You could say that, yes.”


“Tring was not your informer, though?”


“Oh, no.”


Miss Teatime nodded. “Very well. Please go on. The story is most fascinating.”


Charles took several slow sips of whisky, then continued.


“The early part of the exercise had one main object—to build Leaper into a convinced and therefore credible witness to the fact that animals were being regularly carted away. He didn’t know where; all he did know was that they went, and that they’d been marked off as ‘R.I.P.’ His own interpretation of that, you’ve already found out for yourself. It only adds to the picture of Leaper as the perfect dupe, ignorant of the wicked goings-on at the pet food factory across the fields.” He looked at her expectantly. “You see what a clever build-up it was, don’t you?”


“I do, indeed.”


“The final stage of the plan was this. A dog was to be picked for the take-away treatment that wasn’t a stray—one that was identifiable and had an owner who’d likely create hell when it disappeared. Something easily recognisable—a bit of the beast’s collar, or, better still, one of those metal name-and-address discs—was to be hacked about by Tring to make it look as if it had gone through machinery and then sent anonymously to the dog’s owner—supposedly by a conscience-stricken employee at the Doggigrub factory.”


“How thankful you must be,” said Miss Teatime, “that so fiendish a plot was thwarted before it could come to fruition.”


Charles rubbed his chin. “Yes...”


“You sound doubtful.”


“We are a little anxious still.”


“I do not see why. The villain of the piece is no longer on the stage.”


He shook his head. “The villain of the piece, as you put it is, and always was, off-stage, Miss Teatime. Parish-Biggs.”


“But how can they hope to gain their object now? Of their two agents, one is deceased and the other defected. I cannot grasp the reason for your continuing concern.”


Charles regarded her narrowly. “I think you can,” he said. “I think you extracted enough information from Leaper this morning to have a pretty good idea of what we’re worrying about.”


Miss Teatime’s gaze remained one of blank anxiety to understand.


Charles’s patience broke.


“Bloody hell, you know damned well that the thing went off by accident while the girl was away on holiday. The idiot Leaper took it upon himself—God knows why—to pass over to Tring a dog that had actually been brought in by its owner. As a boarder, or whatever they call it. Tring promptly deported it to Yorkshire or somewhere, like the others, but he saw that this one had got an identity disc attached to its collar. He took it off, assuming that here was the job they’d been waiting for—the Big-Bother-for-Cultox job.” Charles made a gesture of exasperation. “Now do you see why we’re worried?”


“Tring is dead,” said Miss Teatime, stubbornly.


“Certainly, he’s bloody dead!” shouted Charles. “And where does that leave us? I’ll tell you. Waiting for a bomb to go off under the reputation of a multi-million pound product. And that bomb could be anywhere in England.”


Miss Teatime was frowning. “Bomb?”


“Look... when the girl got back, she tried to find out from both Leaper and Tring what had been going on. Leaper told her there had been a mistake but that he’d put it right with the woman concerned. He wouldn’t say any more. It seems he never liked the Lintz girl much.”


“Did she tell you this?”


“Yes, she did. Indirectly. I’ve never actually met her.”


“You mean, do you, that she told Harton?”


Charles nodded. “The point is that we were left not knowing who that woman was in case she needed to be offered compensation for her loss. And what made it all a thousand times worse was a sudden awkwardness on Tring’s part. Whether he’d become suspicious or not I don’t know but when the girl tried to get the truth out of him he just treated it as a huge joke. He told her he’d already got rid of the identity disc. He’d put it in a very safe place, he said. In a can of WOOF on its way to the sealing machine.”


“Did she believe him?”


“No.”


“But you do?”


Charles shrugged unhappily. “The idea has a certain horrid fascination. The packaging manager says that can could be now in any shop between Carlisle and Southampton.”


“Your bomb metaphor would seem to be all too apt, Mr Charles. I hope you will not consider it uncharitable of me to add to your troubles by making another of my idle inquiries.”


Frowning, he looked at his watch. “Actually, I don’t have all that much time, and there are a couple of things I wanted to ask you...”


“All I wish to know,” broke in Miss Teatime, firmly, “is the identity of the person who gave poor Mr Tring his come-uppance.” She paused, then added: “In your opinion, that is.”


Again, the raised shoulders. “Odd question. Some sort of fairground accident, as far as I know. Unless you mean this talk about a woman being involved?” He waited, but she said nothing. “All right—she’s the wife of our local managing director. Embarrassing?—sure—but what else do you want me to say?”


She regarded him steadily. “I do have some acquaintance with Julia Harton. She may have her quirks, endearing and otherwise, but homicide most certainly is not among them.”


“I wouldn’t know. The police don’t appear to share your view.”


“You will be wise, Mr Charles, not to underestimate the intelligence of our local constabulary. They are accustomed to dealing with far more devious individuals than the brash yokels who rank as criminals in the metropolis.”


“That remains to be seen.” He made as if to rise to his feet, but Miss Teatime held up her hand. She looked stern.


“Why did you follow me this morning?” she asked. “Why, for that matter, did your colleague make it his business to spy upon an old friend of mine when he came to call? If you wish to enjoin silence upon me, pray do so forthwith and we shall know where we stand. I do know something about pressure, Mr Charles. I can just as readily recognise it when it is dressed as sweet reasonableness.”


He gave an awkward, cheek-puffing laugh. “Pressure? You’re really being very silly, you know. Respectable business organisations don’t go round applying pressure on people. What do you think we are—the Mafia or something?”


Miss Teatime nodded. “Very well.” She selected a fresh cigar and regarded it thoughtfully. “If you and your friend are as innocent in matters of persuasion as you contend, I must tell you how it is done. Listen carefully, Mr Charles. Unless”—she struck a match—“you dismantle at once whatever fabricated evidence has been assembled to suggest Julia Harton’s guilt of killing Robert Tring...” Unhurriedly, she lit her cigar and inhaled. “...I shall personally ensure that there will be instituted without further delay precisely that series of scandalous events that Tring’s removal was designed to forestall.”


Quite suddenly, her visitor underwent a striking change. The jollity drained completely away; the rosiness of his complexion was empurpled by the eruption of a fine vein pattern; the mouth hardened and was very pale.


“Namely?” The voice was different, too. Thin, cold.


“Namely,” pursued Miss Teatime, “the discovery in a tin of your firm’s dog food of a very un-nutritious metal disc; its reporting to the local health authority by the outraged purchaser; and the subsequent tracing of the owner of a dog that disappeared in August while being boarded at the Four Foot Haven; and finally... Ah, now what to end up with? A public inquiry? It could scarcely be avoided.”


She smiled sweetly, leaning back in her chair. “And how is that for pressure, Mr Charles?”


“Stop calling me that, woman! My name is Blore, for Christ’s sake. Colonel Blore.”


“Ah, a military man. Splendid. You doubtless will take a straightforward tactical view of my proposal. After you have consulted general headquarters, of course. May I then expect your reply by tomorrow?”


He stood. “I probably shall ring you in the morning.” He bent to look at the telephone dial, then wrote the number on a piece of paper.


Without further comment, he strode to the door and opened it.


“Oh, Colonel Blore...”


He halted, but did not turn.


“One small addendum. The Eastern Counties Charities Alliance confidently expects a token contribution from the Cultox Corporation. One thousand, I think, would be a nice gesture. Made out to cash.”


Blore made no move.


She added: “The cheque would not be presented, naturally, until after Mrs Harton had been cleared of suspicion and delivery made to you of that little disc you are so anxious to possess.”


The door closed very quietly.


“No one is all bad,” reflected Miss Teatime.




Chapter Nineteen

Into Flaxborough Police Headquarters two days later walked a Mr Simon Bollinger, wholesale trading representative, of Wimbledon, London. He asked if he might see the officer in charge of inquiries into a fairground accident the previous Saturday—no, not that Saturday, the Saturday before—yes, September 6th, that would be it.


Because Inspector Purbright had gone out in hopes that a talk to the nephew of the former owner of the Flaxborough Citizen might settle a certain nagging curiosity concerning the disposal of the contents of his uncle’s cellar, Sergeant Love was sent for.


Not even the open-countenanced friendliness of the very youthful-looking sergeant could put Mr Bollinger entirely at his ease. He confessed at the outset that he wasn’t at all sure whether he had done right to come.


The sergeant thought, oh dear, it was one of those interviews, was it, and he said Mr Bollinger wasn’t to worry: that’s what the police were paid to do and would he like a cup of tea?


“About this accident...” said Mr Bollinger, having shaken his head to the tea suggestion.


“Yes, sir?”


“I read when I was home at the weekend that you wanted to ask a lady called Mrs Julia Harton some questions about it.”


“We did, that’s right.”


“Does that mean you think she was with the young man who was killed?”


Love thought, who’s asking the blessed questions, me or him, and he said, well that was a possibility but inquiries were still being made.


“Yes, well, you see when I read that piece in the paper I knew at once that somebody had got things wrong and the more I thought about it the more I was worried in case an innocent person might get blamed.”


“Blamed for what, sir?”


“For the accident. If that’s what it was, I mean. Things don’t get put in that way in papers as a rule if it’s just an accident, do they? And my wife said when she saw it, hello, there’s something funny there. Of course, she knew I’d been doing calls in the area, so naturally it caught her eye.”


“Yes, I suppose it would.”


Simon’s nervousness seemed on the increase. He leaned forward. “My name wouldn’t get mentioned in court, would it, if I were just to leave you with a bit of information and then go away? I don’t want to be a witness, or anything.”


Love said that everything would depend on the nature of the information. If it was important as evidence, Mr Bollinger might be asked to give testimony at the inquest.


“The point is,” Simon said, unhappily, “my wife is going to think—well, God knows what she will think if she gets to know what I was doing that night.”


The sergeant sought to adopt an expression at once sympathetic and encouraging. He succeeded only in looking brazenly curious.


“You see, I’d picked up this girl—well, not picked up, I don’t mean anything like that, but she was just someone to talk to, and we were having a look round the fair.”


“And what girl would that have been?” Love inquired.


The question seemed to surprise Mr Bollinger, who shrugged and said he’d no idea—just a girl in the fair; he hadn’t even asked her name. They’d had a cup of coffee together and shared a ride, that’s all. “It was on the Moon Shot thing,” added Mr Bollinger. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here now. It was when we were on it that the accident happened.”


“You saw the accident, sir?”


“No, I can’t say I did. I was too concerned with trying not to be sick and hoping it would soon stop. But when it did stop I could see there was some excitement going on, and then there was something else that I noticed very particularly.”


Simon paused. He frowned. “I’m not telling this very well, am I? The trouble is, I didn’t say anything to the wife, and now if she gets to know, she’ll think I’m all kinds of a fool, taking rides on roundabouts in the middle of the night, but when you’re away from home, it’s different—you get fed up with four walls.”


The sergeant, who was beginning to find the disapproving presence of Mrs Bollinger rather hard to bear, was about to try and get the account back on its rails when Purbright came in.


Love made introductions and gave the inspector a précis of what the caller had said so far. It sounded woefully little.


Purbright smiled upon Mr Bollinger in a most friendly fashion and said: “Now, sir—what was it that you noticed very particularly when you had finished flying round our Market Place?”


“I’ll have to go back a bit first, actually,” said Simon, speaking with increased care, as if prizes for answers had gone up in value with the arrival of an inquisitor of higher rank. “This coffee I told the sergeant about—we were drinking it, this girl and me, in a little bar that was still open...”


“The Venetian,” gourmet Love murmured for Purbright’s benefit.


“...and opposite us at the same table was a fellow and a girl wearing those motorbike get-ups—you know, leather jackets and crash helmets. And I noticed them specially because of their names. It was the queer coincidence, I suppose. You see, he kept calling her Bobby, and she called him Robert. You see what I mean? It was like the same name for both of them.”


Purbright nodded. “Yes, sir, I can see that that would be memorable.”


“All of us at that table got up at the same time and went out into the fair. I’d promised the girl I was with to go on one of the rides, and that Moon thing was nearest, so we went up the steps and I paid and when it stopped we got into a car, or rocket, or whatever it’s called, and I saw the other two—the ones in leather jackets we’d sat opposite—I saw these two get into the car behind. They both got in, I’m absolutely certain about that, and they shut the door after them, and the attendant checked it as he had the others.


“Anyway, when the ride was finished—and it wasn’t any too soon for me, I can tell you...”


Purbright raised one hand slightly. “Excuse me, sir, but I should like to know if you could see anything of what was happening in the car behind you. There was quite a lot of light, I understand. Did you happen to look back?”


“I’m afraid I didn’t. As I told the sergeant here, I just sat tight and waited for it to come down. Then we got out and the girl went off on her own. Just said goodnight and left—no, when I come to think of it, she didn’t even say goodnight. That’s neither here nor there, though. What matters is what I noticed about the other pair, the two behind us.”


“Robert and Bobby.”


“That’s right. I was watching when their door opened. The girl came out straight away. She jumped down and was off into the crowd before you could say knife. I thought, funny, and I waited for him to come out, but he didn’t and I looked right inside and he wasn’t there.”


“Are you quite sure, Mr Bollinger, that you couldn’t have missed him? That you didn’t have your view interrupted by all the people who were milling about?”


“No, not a chance. I didn’t have my eyes off that car for a second from when its door started to open.”


Purbright looked satisfied. He went on: “I should be obliged if you would attempt to give me a description of this girl you say was called Bobby.”


Simon stared earnestly at the opposite wall. “Good-looking—decidedly good-looking—very dark hair. Not a tall girl but strong—she gave that impression—strong. Very feminine, though, nothing mannish about her. The hair was curly, by the way—I don’t think I told you that. Eyes brown. Oh, and she was well-spoken. That I thought a bit queer—I mean, her boy friend was a right cowboy, yet she sounded like she’d been to college.”


Purbright allowed a little silence to round off Simon’s recital. Then he said: “You’ve been most helpful, sir. If you’ll allow us to trespass on your time a little longer, Sergeant Love will put what you have said into the form of a statement for your signature.”


Mr Bollinger’s look of apprehension was upon him once more. “Oh, I don’t think I ought to put anything...”


“What is the name of your firm, sir?” the inspector suddenly asked.


The question had not been expected. Simon thought quickly and produced the name of one of the more innocuous Cultox subsidiaries.


“Fleming and Colt,” he said.


“Of where, sir?”


“Ipswich.”


Sergeant Love’s eager knowledgeability could not be confined. “The Fairy Bluebell cake mix people,” he informed the inspector, proudly.


Purbright regarded the sallow features of Fairy Bluebell’s representative among mortals. “You’re familiar with Flaxborough, are you, sir?”


No, he could not say that he was. This was his first visit under a new appointment.


“A lengthy visit, though, sir. You were here on the 6th; today is the 17th.”


“It’s standard practice to use Flaxborough as a base for the Eastern England area. I move about a lot. Even back home to London sometimes.”


“Ah, yes—the discussion with your wife about the accident. By the way, you’ll give the sergeant your Wimbledon address and telephone number, won’t you. Also your car number might conceivably be useful; a small point, but we may as well have it, sir.”


“Car? What car?”


The inspector looked concerned. “But you do have a car for your job, surely, sir. Mobility must be very important.”


“I travel by train and taxi.”


Purbright nodded. “Much more comfortable. You’re very wise.” He turned to go.


At the door, he said: “On second thoughts, Mr Love, I don’t see that we need burden Sergeant Malley with this gentleman’s statement at the moment. The inquest will have to be adjourned again, anyway.”


Bollinger glanced anxiously from one to the other. “That doesn’t mean I’ve come all this way for nothing, does it? It’s that woman I’m concerned about, the one the papers said you were after. From what I’ve told you, it must be quite obvious she had nothing to do with this business.”


There was a pause. Bollinger looked uncomfortable. “I only wanted to help prevent a mistake being made.”


“Mr Bollinger, are you acquainted with Mrs Julia Harton?”


“No, of course not. Why should I be?”


The inspector smiled. “No, it would be a long shot, wouldn’t it, Wimbledon to Flaxborough? Don’t worry, sir; we shall make full use of what you’ve told us. Thank you for coming forward.”


When he had gone, Mr Bollinger ventured the opinion that Mr Purbright seemed rather a decent chap, and Love said yes, but he was sometimes a bit too soft for his own good, whereupon the security man from Cultox reflected that if the sergeant believed that, he still had much to learn about his superior officer.




Chapter Twenty

The arrest took place very quietly the afternoon of Friday, September 19th, at the defendant’s home. Neighbours were given no inkling of drama. Three people arrived by motor-car, gained admittance in a polite but casual manner, and departed, augmented by one, a few minutes later in a style no less friendly and informal. Anyone fortuitously on the watch would have concluded that here was a party embarking on a holiday weekend, for strapped to the suitcase carried from the house by one of the callers was a tennis racquet.


The brief proceedings at the special court convened in the magistrates’ retiring room were similarly undramatic. Councillor Mrs Bella Purdy, JP, who had been requisitioned for the occasion from the counter of her husband’s flower and garden furniture shop in Hooper Rise, listened with enormous gravity to the charge, to Purbright’s evidence of arrest, and to his application for a remand in custody for medical reports. “That will be granted,” announced Mrs Purdy, doing her best to sound as if the decision had been worked out by herself.


When the accused, whose habit of staring at Purbright with a sort of hungry devotion surprised the magistrate considerably, had been gently marshalled away, Mrs Purdy pronounced the affair “very sad”. She was privately hopeful that the inspector would divulge what lay behind the sensational-sounding charge, but he merely thanked her courteously for her attendance and returned her to the care of the patrolman who had been waiting to take her back to the shop.


There, Mr Purdy became the first member of the general public to learn that pretty Bobby-May Lintz, of Queen’s Road, had been put away and would soon be tried on the charge that she “did unlawfully endanger life by the administration of a drug or drugs; and that further she did unlawfully cause the death of Robert Digby Tring by the administration of the said drug or drugs in a moving vehicle, namely, part of an apparatus known as ‘Moon Shot’, in a public place, namely, Market Place, Flaxborough, contrary to the Queen’s Peace.”


After the hearing, the chief constable held in his office what Sergeant Love would have termed a de-briefing session, but what Mr Chubb, less familiar with the terminology of dynamism, described simply as “clearing up a few points about this very regrettable business”.

Загрузка...