One Man's Meat

It was attended by Purbright and his detective sergeant and by Bill Malley, the coroner’s officer.

Malley set things off by squinting into the bowl of his short, black pipe and commenting that it was just as well that cases of that kind had never come to light in The Old Man’s Time. “Hated women, did poor old Albert. Lawyers do, mostly. Wonder why.”

“Mrs Harton will be relieved,” said the chief constable to Purbright.

“She will indeed, sir. She was in a singularly unpleasant position at one time.”

“Partly through her own fault, Mr Purbright.”

The inspector conceded that Julia Harton had behaved foolishly. “But not more so,” he added, “than a great number of people who allow themselves to be impressed by the claims of advertisers.” She had been lucky, of course; the seemingly damning evidence of the photograph of her with an unscarred Tring might never have been proved a fake had not Grandma Tring mentioned Digger’s “poor little good eye”.

“Have we had any success in tracing this so-called Rothermere person?” asked Mr Chubb.

“No, sir. Harton persists in denying that he ever had anything to do with him.”

“Which makes Harton as big a liar as his dad used to be,” put in Malley.

The chief constable looked pained at this slighting reference to a member of the medical profession, albeit one who had deserted to California, a place where, he understood, doctors had “offices” and handled money between operations.

“There’s no point, I suppose,” said Mr Chubb to Purbright, “in taking the Harton business further? Not that I have any sympathy for the fellow, you understand; he did try his damnedest to make his wife seem a criminal. But so did she, you say?”

“Oh, yes, sir. She’s been perfectly frank about it. Always with the provision, though, that she wanted no more than to frighten him into giving her reasonable divorce terms.”

“Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander—something of that about it, by the look of things,” said Mr Chubb, looking not at Purbright, whose appreciation of homely aphorisms he had reason not to trust, but at Sergeant Love. Love obliged with a great nodding of concurrence.

“Did the girl’s father have no idea of what had been going on?” asked the chief constable.

“None whatever, sir,” Purbright replied. “Harton was a regular visitor to the house, but only as a fellow tennis enthusiast, so far as the parents were aware. Not that her intention to be the second Mrs Harton would have met with their disapproval. They have a highly developed sense of class.”

“It was she who set her cap at him, was it—not the other way round?”

“She took the initiative, certainly: she is that kind of girl. We don’t know, but the probability is that she also made all the running at the start of her affair with Tring. The difference between their social backgrounds might well have slowed him up in the first place.”

“Not for long,” put in Malley. “Not the Trings. She’ll have been put to the bull inside a week, take it from me.”

“I wouldn’t argue that point,” said the inspector, “but what is quite clear now is the girl’s readiness to discard a lover who had become socially embarrassing. That Hell’s Angel gear was a good enough disguise for the odd jaunt—and doubtless exciting sexually, as you’ll appreciate, sir—but it wasn’t going to get her far with the Tennis Club set.”

“That girl was educated at a convent,” said Mr Chubb, as if deploring the modern unreliability of brand names.

“For which,” Purbright informed him, “her great uncle made specific provision in his will. Did you know that, sir?”

“Old Marcus Gwill?”

“Yes. Apparently he considered his nephew’s family unlikely ever to acquire polish from George Lintz.”

Sergeant Love had been following the conversation with cheerful, sparrow-like attention. “Do you suppose,” he now put in, “that he left them his fancy whisky with the same idea?

Purbright said he doubted if any man—Gwill least of all—would carry altruism so far as that. It would have been to no avail, anyway: the half-dozen whole bottles and three or four quarterns of Glenmurren had stood neglected at the back of a shelf in Gladys Lintz’s larder until the moment when they caught the eye of Bobby-May, on the forage for some palatable solvent of “Karmz” tablets.

“You make it sound,” said Malley, “as if she admits all this—doping the fellow, I mean.”

“It surprised me, as well,” said Purbright. “But in fact her case isn’t all that bad. She’s obviously thought it out with some care. And they’ve managed to get Plant-Huntleigh for the defence.”

The chief constable regarded his inspector anxiously. “I don’t wish to seem to be questioning your methods, Mr Purbright, but confidences between prisoners and investigating officers always worry me a little. Confessions are not dependable, you know. Very unwise to rely on them.”

“How very true,” declared Purbright. “Had it not been for your clear recall of Gwill’s taste in spirits, I doubt if we could have moved Miss Lintz from the strong position of blank denial that she adopted at first.”

“And what does she say now?”

“She will rely, I think, on one of the oldest and most respectable defences in the world. The defence of her honour.”

The chief constable, Love and the coroner’s officer all stared, but only Malley offered comment. “Bloody hell,” he said, then gave a resolute suck at his empty pipe.

“She claims,” Purbright resumed, “that her great anxiety was that if ever she were to allow herself to be alone with Tring, he would be unable to restrain what she called the physical side of his nature.”

The implications were too much for Love, who rather vulgarly exclaimed: “What, in a rocket!”

“I, too, was sceptical,” said Purbright, addressing Mr Chubb, “but she quoted as precedent his having boasted a capability of being intimate (again, her expression, sir) with a motor-cycle passenger whilst actually riding the machine. This did tend to haunt the latter days of their relationship, according to her, and she took precautions accordingly. Hence the tablets, which a married acquaintance had assured her would have a temporarily emasculating effect upon any intending seducer.”

The chief constable considered, thin lips compressed, mild eyes directed at a point in mid-distance beyond the dusty window pane. “Just credible, perhaps,” he conceded. “But a pretty weird tale, Mr Purbright. I shall be very interested to see if she gets away with it.”

Malley addressed Purbright. “What did you make of that commercial traveller fellow who popped up at the last minute? Bollinger.”

“The mystery witness,” supplied Love, zestfully.

The inspector answered only after a pause. “I didn’t believe him.”

Mr Chubb looked alarmed. “Would you mind explaining that, Mr Purbright? As I understood the matter, this man Bollinger’s testimony was the first and only piece of direct evidence that Tring and the girl went into that thing together.”

“Oh, I believe that, sir. They were together. The girl doesn’t deny it. Whether Bollinger watched them as he says”—Purbright shrugged lightly—“is something else.”

“You do not suggest, I hope, that we are putting up a witness who will be discredited by the defence?”

“Oh, no. I’m sure he knows what he is doing. That is what I found disconcerting, as a matter of fact. There is a carefully concealed professionalism about the man. He made only one mistake, and that was a fairly trivial one. He had Tring addressing the girl as Bobby.”

“A perfectly natural abbreviation of Roberta.”

“Quite so, sir. But it so happens that her close friends invariably call her neither Roberta nor Bobby, but Bobo.”

The chief constable winced and murmured “Good Lord”. A moment later, he added: “Very easy to mis-hear with all that fairground row going on.”

“Very, sir. But what Bollinger claims to have done is overhear. And that I should have thought absolutely impossible in the circumstances.”

Mr Chubb consulted his watch. “Well, gentlemen, if there is nothing else you wish to ask me...” He allowed a count of five, then began to assemble hat, gloves and stick. “Time and Tide,” he said, with a smirk of wry amiability, “to say nothing of the Corporation Traffic Committee, wait for no man.”

The others prepared to depart.