Plaster Sinners

Chapter One

Detective Sergeant Sidney Love had that happy degree of appreciation of works of art that is unlikely ever to become soured by scholarship. Nor was he acquisitive by nature, if the single exception be made of a complete set of “Giants of Steam” that was his legacy from an uncle who had smoked himself to death in the cigarette card era. As an aesthete, he was an all-rounder; honest and unpretentious: a sunset man, not soppy over gnomes, but ever ready to be pleased by a waterfall. Of cottages, too, he highly approved.

It was upon a cottage—or upon a representation of one—that Sergeant Love was gazing at ten minutes to nine one Thursday morning in the Volunteers’ Hall, Flaxborough.

At half-past ten there was to begin one of the town’s regular sales by auction of valuable antiques, that being the trade term for broken furniture, thrown-out pictures, cracked crockery, out-worn domestic machinery and discarded odds and ends of domestic adornment.

Most of the dealers had taken their view and had gone outside to drink from flasks of coffee in the cabs of their pick-up trucks or leaning on their estate Wagons. The more observant had noticed Love’s presence in the hall. It added to the interest of the occasion a possibility that one or more of the lots were on the police’s stolen list.

But the sergeant was not in search of stolen property. He was off duty until lunch-time and had been turning over in his mind the adventurous idea of actually taking part in the bidding. A model of a cottage, a bas-relief plaster cast, painted and framed, strongly commended itself to Love as a suitable tribute to his young lady, whose “Ooo, dinky!” he had learned over a courtship of several years to value as the highest encouragement of his intentions in that direction.

He looked about him and considered.

All the goods on offer in the well-heated but dreary building were arranged in moveable rows at the further end, with big articles such as wardrobes towering darkly against the yellow-painted brick wall. In front of the wardrobes were stacked tables and cupboards and commodes; gramophones that would still wind up and clocks that would not; a bread mixing bowl and a magic lantern and a set of records to teach Spanish; a bundle of golf clubs and a public house mirror advertising stout; a game suitable for all the family called Trippo; four refrigerators; a gas cooker with a herb-drying attachment; a meat safe; half an Encyclopaedia Britannica; a urinal and a knitting basket. There were other remarkable things of which Love took no notice.

The cottage upon which he had set his desire was at great remove from all these. It was not even dignified by a lot number of its own, having been tossed into one of a number of trays and shallow boxes in which miscellaneous bric-a-brac was offered for sale in small and unrelated batches. The cottage was accompanied by a pair of mauled golf balls, a tumbler formerly belonging to the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, a small meat mincer lacking means of being clamped anywhere, two decanter stoppers and a soap dish feverishly embellished with roses (Love’s practical turn of generosity had already chosen his landlady as recipient-elect of this).

Prospective buyers had been free to walk about the saleroom since eight o’clock. Many had come and left again after laying claim to one of the chairs set in rows throughout the hall. A coat or a shopping basket or even a catalogue was recognized as sufficient tally. At this particular moment, though, the place was almost empty. Apart from the assistant auctioneer, his clerk, two porters and a dealer, all of whom were gathered near the auctioneer’s pulpit-like desk, no one was present but Sergeant Love and a man almost immediately behind him, a man in dark, unobtrusive clothing, who was as deeply preoccupied with a pair of cast-iron door knobs as was Love with his cottage.

This man, had Love been observing the elementary rules of his profession and keeping one eye on anyone within coshing distance, would have been noted by him as being a little shorter than himself, with a sallow complexion and black hair that he was constantly smoothing back until it gathered in a ragged hank at the nape of his neck. The sergeant would have noticed also that he had a small mouth permanently held a little open by protruding teeth. This, together with an air of readiness to listen and a faint but enduring smile, gave the man an expression of simple, almost childlike amiability.

“Like a character out of Wind in the Willows,” Love might have described him to Detective Inspector Purbright, and the inspector would have understood what he meant. Purbright would not, however, have dreamed of offering the comparison either to Flaxborough’s patrician chief constable, or in any circumstances where it might arouse the fatuous derision of such hard-hats of literary criticism as officers Harper, Brevitt and Braine.

Not that Purbright was ever called upon to do so, for Love remained unaware of his companion’s existence, let alone the details of his appearance, up to the very moment when the door knob struck the back of his head just above the collar line and endowed him with almost immediate unconsciousness.

The sergeant fell silently, loosely and vertically into folds. From his new position on the floor he could be seen by none of the group near the auction stand. When next one of them happened to glance in that direction, he noticed that the tall, very clean-faced young gentleman (a policeman, was he?—yes, so he was, although terribly young surely?) had gone, presumably by one of the emergency exits, and that there now was no one else in that part of the hall but a man of middle years who appeared to find breathing somewhat difficult.

As soon as the casual observer—it was, in fact, the auctioneer’s clerk, Lewcock—had turned away once more, the man bobbed down and resumed the task from which physical exhaustion allied with a sense of self-preservation had prompted him to rise for air and a look round.

Sergeant Love had settled into an inert heap that was proving difficult to shift. His assailant abandoned trying to turn him over by heaving on one arm. He set to work on a leg. This was even less promising of result. Next he tried to get both hands under one shoulder whilst crouching astride the sergeant. By now he was breathing very heavily indeed and he soon had to surface once more, without having achieved anything.

Very cautiously, he rose and glanced towards the group by the auction stand. The porters were drinking mugs of coffee, their backs turned. The dealer had moved further away and was in conversation with some new arrivals at the main door. Other people came in. Lewcock was writing in a ledger at the dictation of the assistant auctioneer.

The man took half a dozen slow, deep breaths, then knelt beside the policeman to make a final effort to retrieve the object which Love, in his last moment of consciousness, had clutched and buried beneath his sixteen stones of body.

The man insinuated the fingers of his right hand between the floor and Love’s chest. He pushed. He felt, or thought he felt, the edge of a hard, square article. But already he had lost his chance.

The sergeant sighed, groaned, stirred. The man, who had been watching Love’s closed eyes, was alarmed to see the lids tremblingly begin to part. He tugged his hand free and half ran, half crept towards the escape door he had noted earlier.

His departure was unremarked.

Not so the elevation of his victim, whose attempt to hold himself steady toppled a Benares tray and several smaller articles of percussion. Everyone in the hall turned and stared.

Harrap, the assistant auctioneer, a young man of solemn but scarcely commanding appearance, tried to look outraged. He made what he hoped were authoritative gestures with his pen, indicating Love to the two porters, as if to order his arrest. One of the porters began to move reluctantly in Love’s direction. Then he recognized the sergeant and stopped.

“It’s a policeman,” he said to Harrap.

Harrap peered, scowlingly. “That makes it all the worse.” He raised his voice. “I say...over there...what do you think you’re doing?”

Love swayed and explored the back of his head with one hand.

Others in the hall, seeing his paleness, hurried forward. First to reach him was a middle-aged woman.

“Sergeant, whatever have you been doing?” She grasped his arm and urged him towards a kitchen chair, which she tested first with a dubious little shake.

Love stared at her face for several seconds after sitting down, then smiled suddenly. “I don’t suppose it was you who hit me, was it, Miss Teatime?” The smile died. The sergeant looked very sorry for himself.

Miss Lucilla Teatime, dealer in objets d’art and proprietress of the House of Yesteryear, in Northgate, Flaxborough, gave a frown of concern. She knew that it must have taken a considerable blow to render Mr Love amenable to being led to chairs.

“I think,” she said to the clerk, Lewcock, who had just arrived with others, “that you should send at once for an ambulance. Sergeant Love has suffered an accident. He could be quite poorly.”

Lewcock had never before seen a policeman with a paper-white face. He made for the telephone without question or argument.

Love sat meekly in the chair, which was too low for him, and gazed at what still he held incongruously cradled in his big hands.

Miss Teatime saw it too and decided it was time to make a little conversation before onlookers put an unflattering interpretation upon what had been going on.

“What a charming little model, sergeant. The ideal cottage for your retirement—is that how you see it?” (At least the fools shouldn’t get the idea now that she had pinched it.)

Love’s regard for what he held grew fond, but he did not say anything.

“I very much hope that article was not removed from one of the trays of sale exhibits.” The voice of Harrap; his errand not mercy but supervision.

Miss Teatime looked on with interest. Was it feasible to commit shoplifting in a saleroom? If so, it certainly would be the first case figuring a police officer as defendant.

The porter who had spoken earlier was consulting a bundle of papers. “It’s with thirty-four.” He took the plaster cast from Love and restored it to the company of the glass, the golf balls, decanter stoppers, meat mincer and soap dish.

“Anything else missing?” asked Harrap.

The porter gave him a scowl.

An ambulance arrived in less than five minutes. Love, much embarrassed and growing increasingly resistant as his head cleared, found himself escorted from the hall like a common drunk by two uniformed attendants with bespectacled, rather motherly faces, who smelled of tobacco and disinfectant and kept using wrong names.

Before suffering the final indignity of being thrust into the ambulance, Love managed to twist around and address the dozen or so people who had gathered to watch. He complained that he, an officer of the law, had been attacked, had been knocked out, in fact; that his assailant was still at large; that he—the said assailant—had shown himself by his behaviour to be a cunning and violent character; and that members of the public would do better to report matters to Fen Street police headquarters and help hunt the criminal than to stand idly by and see an officer prevented from doing his duty.

The speech was worthy of Sidney Carton, let alone Sidney Love, whose public utterances until then had been restricted to a comic monologue, “ ’Ere, ’old me ’elmet, says I”, at a charity concert, and the reading of a flood-warning in the market place after the river bank burst in 1972, immobilizing the police loudspeaker van. But whatever effect his words might have had was cancelled by the sight of the two ambulance men slamming shut the rear doors of their vehicle and securing them with a set of levers and bolts that seemed better suited to a bank or a cold store. That, everyone knew, was Authority; so the poor young chap inside must either be drunk or have gone funny.

The spectators went back into the saleroom, to which also returned, in his own good time, the man who had hit the sergeant. He took a seat at the side of the hall, not far from the front.

Harrap, back in his place, spoke quietly to Lewcock. “Did you see anybody hit that policeman?”

“I didn’t see anybody anywhere near him.”

“Nor did I,” said Harrap, meaningfully.

“I don’t think he was on duty,” said Lewcock. “Not that one can tell.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, he’s a detective, isn’t he? Plain clothes man.”

Harrap sniffed. “It’s as well Mr Durham hasn’t arrived yet. He’d not take kindly to policemen coming in here and playing ducks and drakes with the lots, in or out of uniform.”

By the time the ambulance arrived at Flaxborough General Hospital, its unwilling passenger had developed a full-scale headache and was feeling sick. He offered no objection to being transferred, with kindly efficiency, to a wheelchair and having a blanket put about his shoulders. “Sharp’s the word, Roger, old son,” one of his escort informed him. “We’ll have you between sheets in no time, Jack,” declared the other.

Love felt that a joke of some sort was being offered him. He smiled and chuckled to show that he bore these friendly, if misinformed, men no blame for, the ridiculous mistake of which he had been made victim. Or he tried to. The actual result was a sudden lopsidedness of face and a sound suggestive of the death rattle of a sheep.

He was taken up seven floors in a lift and wheeled along a corridor. Droopy men in dressing-gowns stared at him impassively as he was whisked by. His escort seemed now to have embarked upon some kind of race. Eventually the chair was given a sickening half-turn and halted. “Everything all right, Frank?” he was asked.

They were in a small annexe. Love’s chair had been parked in front of a table so that its occupant was squarely presented to a woman in a white coat seated at the opposite side of the table. Before her lay a ledger, some piles of forms and two card-index boxes.

“Name?” The woman’s tone, though kindly, was automatic. Her pen was ready over a clean page of the ledger. Love had the feeling that whatever she now set down would commit him to a process that could never be revoked or modified.

“I am a police officer and I wish to report at once to my station,” declared Love. His voice sounded terribly loud in his own ears, and truculent, too. “Sorry,” he added,“but some person attacked me.”

The woman smiled patiently. She was wearing small steel-rimmed glasses. Her hair, which was ash-blonde, hung to the same length all the way round her head. Like a dust cover, thought Love.

“I’ll have to ring my inspector,” he said.

“Name?” the woman asked again, in exactly the same tone.

“Purbright is his name. Mine’s Love. Detective Sergeant Sidney...”—he paused—“...Montgomery Love.”

The hospital porter who had piloted Love from the ground floor leaned and spoke in his ear. “It’s all right, Harry, they’ve put a call through from reception downstairs. To the police station. They know you’re here.”

The woman asked the sergeant his address and he told her. “Religion?”

“Congregational,” Love said. “Well, more or less.”

He supposed it was his indecisiveness that made the woman frown, but the real reason was the narrowness of the ledger column.

“C of E—that’ll do, won’t it?” she suggested.

“It isn’t the same.”

She put down Cong.

Love asked the porter anxiously: “Are they telling my people that somebody had a go at me? I mean, I don’t want them thinking that it was just an accident. There should be someone there at that saleroom.”

“Has he given a urine specimen?” The woman had switched into that special third person form of address whereby hospital patients are given a sense of suspended existence.

“He’ll be on Nine B,” she said finally,“if they decide on admission. He’d better go along to X-Ray for the moment.” And she handed the porter a card.

“You’ll be there in two ticks, Jack,” confided the porter in Love’s ear. The wheelchair lurched out into mid-corridor and began to gather speed.

Chapter Two

The message from the general hospital was to the effect that a Constable Lovell had been admitted with suspected appendicitis.

Detective Inspector Purbright, accustomed to the ever-increasing uncertainty of communications, was only momentarily disconcerted by the errors in rank and name. What did puzzle him, though, was the tentative diagnosis. Love’s appendix had been removed long ago. He decided to visit the invalid in person.

Love had had his X-ray and was lying, gloomily resigned, upon a trolley in the corridor of the casualty ward.

“I haven’t to move my head for a bit,” he explained to Purbright.

The inspector had been searching for him for some minutes. He peered down now at the blanket enshrouded sergeant with a hesitant smile, as upon a well-meant but useless birthday present.

“What does the doctor say?”

“The radiologist,” Love amended, “says there’s nothing broken. I think they want to keep me in overnight, though. You can’t play about with concussion,” he added.

“Indeed, you cannot, Sid.” Purbright, having made the fairly easy deductive transfer from appendicitis to a knock on the head, realized with a touch of shame that he was prepared to humour his unfortunate sergeant and to discount his replies as probable delirium.

Love frowned with unwonted severity and raised himself a little upon one elbow. “The trouble is, I can’t even give a description.”

“You can’t?” The inspector made a don’t-worry face, then looked about him. A man in a white coat was issuing from a nearby door. Purbright waylaid him. They held brief conversation.

Purbright returned to Love. “Apparently somebody took a crack at you.” He sounded surprised and slightly apologetic.

They tell me you’re quite lucid, actually,” Purbright added. “It’s thanks to the thickness of the bone structure. So now we can get on with things.” He gave Love’s trolley a business-like tap, as if it were a shop counter.

The sergeant shrugged beneath his blanket. There was a pause. Purbright supposed him to be sorting out the medical compliments.

“What on earth were you doing at an antique sale, Sid?” tried Purbright for a start.

Another shrug. “There was something I might have put a bid in for,” said Love with a certain airiness. “A cottage for my young lady.”

“A cottage?” The inspector’s doubts returned.

“Yes. In miniature. Very cleverly done. And a soap dish sort of made out of roses. There are,” explained the sergeant with the assurance of the novitiate, “some rather nice things to be snapped up at these sales—if you keep your eyes open.”

“It’s rather a pity you didn’t do just that when...” the inspector was beginning, meanly, when a pair of white-clad orderlies presented themselves at head and foot of Love’s trolley and launched it into one of those speed trials that seemed to be the accepted means of transporting the sick.

By the time it was possible to continue the interview, the sergeant had been weighed, measured, induced to pass urine, encased in a pair of hospital-issue pyjamas of the kind more usually associated with chain-gang wear, and put into a bed. In this interval, Purbright had made a couple of telephone calls. He told the sergeant that three men from Fen Street were on their way to the saleroom and that Mr Hector Durham, the auctioneer, had agreed to postpone the sale a while if that should seem helpful.

“I’ll go straight over, Sid. Now are you certain you saw nothing at all of the gentleman who put you in here?”

Love said he had given the question much thought but was convinced that no part of the attacker had come within his range of vision. “I’ll bet he wore soft shoes, though,” he added. “The floor in that hall is wood; you can hear the slightest footstep or scuffle.”

“But you didn’t.”

Love stared in silence at the ceiling for a moment, then looked at the inspector: “I tell you what I did hear though. When I was being hit—you know, just a fraction of a second before whatever it was arrived on the back of my neck—there was a sound that I’d have thought queer if only I’d had time to think about it.”

A nurse entered. She hung a chart-board on the bottom bedrail and, almost in the same movement, stuck a thermometer in Love’s mouth. She hooked a couple of plump, very white fingers around his wrist. For the next half-minute she gazed alternately at her watch and at Purbright’s face. The watch, Purbright felt, was an easy winner.

The girl read the thermometer with grave concentration. Love, watchful for intimations of mortality, jumped when she gave it two violent shakes and bolstered it in a little tube at the back of the locker.

“This noise, Sid,” prompted Purbright when the nurse had departed.

Love stopped wondering if the taste of the disinfectant on the thermometer meant that he had suffered brain damage.

“All I can remember,” he said, “is a sound like somebody trying to open a door. But it came from there, right there.” He pointed to the back of his head.

“When you say door...” Purbright frowned, and with a gesture invited Love to elucidate.

The sergeant said merely: “Yes, well...” and looked sulky.

Purbright tried other lines of questioning. “You’re sure, are you, Sid, that you saw no one in or near the Volunteers’ Hall who might have a grudge against you?”

“Against me?”

“A misconceived grudge, naturally.”

“I didn’t see anybody I knew—apart from Mr Harrap and one or two of the saleroom people,” Love said. “There were plenty outside who looked pretty villainous, mind you.”

Purbright recognized that one of Love’s infrequent jokes was on the way.

“You know—dealers,” explained the sergeant.

The inspector drew a rough sketch in his notebook. “If that’s the saleroom, with the auctioneer’s stand there, whereabouts were you?”

Love put a cross. He thought a moment. “The stuff I was looking at was lot number thirty-four,” he said. “You’ll find the place from that, if the sale hasn’t started.”

The sale had not started, but more than a hundred people had taken their seats.

Purbright sought out the auctioneer.

Mr Hector Durham, the senior—indeed, the sole surviving original partner in Walker, Durham and Tait, was known as Old Noddy by reason of the sympathetic reflex movement that had begun simply as an encouragement of bidders but now was involuntary and permanent.

Oh, yes, nodded Mr Durham, the inspector was welcome to make what investigations he liked. Would he mind, though, if the first lot were put up at eleven o’clock? There were more wardrobes than usual this week and wardrobes did drag a bit.

“Sorry to hear about young Love,” said Mr Durham, his big, kindly head going up and down like a beam engine. “Was he trying to arrest somebody or what? Nobody here saw what happened.”

The inspector was directed to what Old Noddy understood to be the area in which the sergeant had been attacked.

“I’m going for my breakfast now,” said Mr Durham, “but Mr Harrap will look after you.”

The inspector crossed the hall. Nearly all the front six rows of seats were occupied, three-quarters of them by women. Most of them seemed to know one another. There was quite a festive air. A policeman in uniform, Constable Hooley, marked the scene of the assault as surely as a lighthouse amidst a shoal of rocks. The inspector told him that he might take his helmet off if he liked. Hooley did so but he continued to hold it, like a chalice, perhaps for fear that setting it down would invite its being swept into the sale.

Purbright stopped and surveyed lot thirty-four. He saw Love’s cottage. It was inscribed in one corner: “At the End of Life’s Lane”. He turned it over. Nothing. Plaster, was it? He scratched at one of the roses round the cottage door. The red flaked off, leaving chalky whiteness.

“Quite artistic, isn’t it?”

Purbright turned. Lewcock, Mr Durham’s clerk, was behind him. The probability was that Harrap had sent him to see that nothing was messed about with; Mr Harrap’s distrust of humanity did not exclude police inspectors.

He replaced the cottage and looked over the other items in the tray. Lewcock offered no further opinions but kept close.

Purbright examined the floor. He saw the table that Love had pulled down with him. It had since been replaced. Purbright strolled past it. He looked to his left. A door, marked Emergency Exit. It opened easily enough. Beyond it was a narrow lane. No one was in the lane.

Purbright returned to lot thirty-four. Nearby were six or seven similar collections of miscellaneous articles. He began methodically to search through those that were within reasonable reaching distance of where Love had stood.

Lewcock and PC Hooley watched. They noted with due solemnity that he did his poking around with a pencil. “Prints,” breathed Mr Hooley to his companion.

Suddenly Purbright paused. He draped a handkerchief over something in one of the trays and carefully withdrew it. The others saw first the shape, then the object, as the inspector shook back the folds of the handkerchief. He held a heavy, cast-iron door-knob, connected by a square spindle to its smaller fellow.

The assembly rattled when shaken. But there was no doubt that it would have served tolerably well as a club.

“I’m afraid,” said Purbright to Lewcock, “that I’m going to have to take charge of this for a while. Mr Durham will understand when you explain. Now then—a box, perhaps? Nothing elaborate...”

When PC Hooley had departed for Fen Street with the parcelled evidence and some simple but careful instructions, Purbright moved into the main body of the hall and found himself a seat.

The early part of the sale, the “warming up” in the language of auctioneers, was being conducted by the ascetic Mr Harrap. He took bids with great condescension. Some starters he refused to countenance, treating them either as feeble jokes or as the interjections of lunatics.

Two pounds fifty was offered for a tin box containing a soup tureen, a pair of spanners and assorted curtain rings. “Doesn’t anyone realize,” asked Mr Harrap with censorious surprise, “what a collectable item today is the Victorian curtain ring?”

No one did, it seemed, for the two-fifty went untopped. Mr Harrap eyed the next item anxiously. It was a child’s toy baking set, circa 1949, almost complete, in original box, very collectable. Ten pence was offered. Mr Harrap declined to hear.

Lot thirty-four was reached after about half an hour.

The tray was brought for display to the audience. The porter held it as if it contained a selection of rare gems. He swung it slowly before him, so that everyone might have a view.

Purbright could see the plaster representation of the cottage in the centre of the other things. It was propped up slightly. Probably by one of the decanter stoppers. The mauled golf balls had settled into a corner of the tray.

“There is in this lot,” explained Mr Harrap, “an item that is much sought after these days. I do not have to tell you what it is.” The porter did not need telling, either. He reverently shifted the meat mincer to a more prominent position.

“Do I hear five pounds?” inquired Mr Harrap. His expression implied that it might have been fifty but he was playing safe. Someone laughed. The auctioneer looked shocked.

There was a long silence.

“Four pounds.”

The bidder was a sturdy, compact woman with a much-lined face and an air of authority. In her seventies, perhaps, she still conveyed an impression of indifference to wear and tear. Her rather dingy woollen coat was belted determinedly. She wore an outsize hat, not unlike a lifeboatman’s in style.

Mr Harrap’s almost deferential acknowledgment of this woman’s bid established that she was familiar to him. He gazed into the outfield.

“I have accepted a call of four pounds as opener, ladies and gentlemen. A very modest opener. Again, do I hear five?”

Most of the audience sat hunch-shouldered, keeping hands low and still, in case of misinterpretation. No one in particular could be seen talking, yet there was a great deal of noise from general conversation. It was substantially a crowd of spectators. The actual participants, the bidders, formed a tiny minority scattered among the rest like spies sending secret messages. Only the quicksilver eye of the auctioneer divined their purpose from the flutter of a catalogue, the lift of an eyebrow.

Regular salegoers had had very poor expectations of lot thirty-four. A first bid of four pounds for such poor trash came as quite a surprise. It was not like the shabby but astute Mrs Moldham-Clegg to set the pace so high. Had stolen glasses from the London, Midland and Scottish Railway suddenly acquired rarity value?

Purbright had been to such a sale only once before in his life. His sole concern at this one was to see if anybody present qualified—in the light of the inspector’s special knowledge of Flaxborough grievances—as the opportunist who had felled Sid Love in that temporarily deserted corner of the saleroom.

He gazed about him for several minutes but failed to spot a likely candidate.

Meanwhile, the bidding for lot thirty-four had risen, quite unaccountably, to ten pounds and promised to go even further.

Mrs Moldham-Clegg led a small field of some half dozen contenders. She put in each bid with stern assurance as if it were an instruction for the goods to be knocked down to her at once and delivered to the tradesmen’s entrance.

But her few rivals were perverse and kept jacking up their offers.

Miss Teatime showed no sign of interest for several minutes, during which she seemed to be giving full attention to a quiet conversation with her neighbour. Then, suddenly, up went her face and a sweet but distinct, “Twenty pounds.”

Purbright directed at her a frown of disbelief.

She smiled at him and made a little inclination of the head in recognition and greeting.

Purbright repented of the frown. He nodded and smiled back.

“Twenty-one,” declared Mr Harrap, triumphantly. He pointed with his gavel in Purbright’s direction.

Auction novice though he was, the inspector knew he was in a situation governed by a rule exactly similar to that applicable to drowning: don’t struggle. He resisted the huge temptation to shake his head and cry denial. Silent, motionless and dreadfully apprehensive, he waited for rescue.

It came after what seemed a very long time. “And fifty,” barked Mrs Moldham-Clegg. Purbright sent her a grateful glance but otherwise stirred no muscle.

Bidding rose to thirty pounds. Mr Harrap looked as nearly jovial as it was constitutionally possible for him to look. When Miss Teatime took it to thirty-five, he was so tipsy with success that he essayed a witticism about “the lady’s age” but mercifully spoiled it by fumbling the words.

At forty pounds, Harrap had sobered up again. His face showed something approaching bewilderment, and he paused for a while to confer with his clerk.

The sale went on. Miss Teatime did not bid again, but Harrap was now receiving signs from two directions other than that of Mrs Moldham-Clegg. Forty pounds. Forty-five. Fifty. All chatter in the hall ceased. What seemed a mad contest for a tray of junk held captive a silent audience.

Purbright tried to see who the other two bidders were. Neither made any gesture visible from where the inspector sat, so he had to look at the faces of other people who were watching them, and work out a solution geometrically by a system of crossed bearings.

One, he decided, was Mr Clapper Buxton, a Flaxborough solicitor’s confidential clerk.

The other appeared to be a man Purbright had noted a little earlier as a stranger to the town, a man with protruding teeth and an air of wanting to be helpful.

The hundred-pound mark was reached and passed. There had set in a rhythm of bid and counter-bid that was raising the price more quickly. Only one voice was to be heard, though. Mrs Moldham-Clegg’s. It was now perceptibly grittier and edged with a sort of patrician contempt. Mr Harrap gave it heed, then turned his eye without delay to collect the silent instructions first of Mr Clapper, then of the stranger.

Both seemed prepared to give stony assent for ever, or for as long as Mrs Moldham-Clegg cared to defy them.

“Two hundred and fifty pounds.”

Purbright saw the squaring of the woman’s back, the rug she gave at the big lifeboatman’s hat. Generations of Flaxborough shopkeepers had quailed before such intimations of prerogative.

Harrap looked in Clapper’s direction and raised his brow. “And sixty?” Then, at once, to the stranger: “May I say seventy, sir?”

Taking elaborate care to make no movement that might be construed as a bid, Purbright eased himself along to the end of the row. He heard the command of Mrs Moldham-Clegg: “Two hundred and eighty pounds.” He waited a moment, then cautiously crossed the aisle and stood in the lee of the side wall.

The offers continued to rise. Harrap looked pale; he was beginning to wonder if he were being made the victim of some conspiratorial leg-pull.

Purbright moved slowly up the hall, keeping close to the wall.

“Twenty-three, sir?”

The inspector was level with the front row of seats. He gained the shelter of the auctioneer’s stand, and, stooping, edged towards the clerk’s table.

Lewcock saw him. He leaned sideways in his chair, presenting an ear. Purbright whispered good morning into it.

“Morning, inspector.” A breathed greeting, as in church.

“What,” whispered Purbright, “is he selling-the Mona Lisa?”

“I reckon,” Lewcock confided, “that either they’re barmy or they’ve got the wrong lot.”

“It’s there to be seen, though. They can’t all be mistaken.”

Lewcock shrugged. “Barmy, then. It’s rubbish. I’ve looked at it.”

Above them waved the auctioneer’s arm, conjuring more bids with dream-like ease.

“Give him a message, will you, Mr Lewcock,” murmured the inspector.

“Not during bidding, I can’t.”

“That’s up to you, but I think it’s only fair he should know that the goods he is now offering for sale will not be immediately available.”

“What do you mean?”

Purbright was writing in his notebook. “They are, as you might say, impounded. Temporarily, one hopes.” He half-turned to check what he had written with the contents of the tray still held dutifully by the porter. “Here is Mr Harrap’s official receipt.”

Lewcock regarded the torn-off leaf in bewilderment.

“I think you had better tell him at once,” the inspector said. “Confidentially, though. Don’t give any impression of alarm.”

Across the clerk’s face spread the sunshine of a guess that something was up. “Ah—not to stop the fish biting,” he remarked, with a maddeningly knowing lift of one eyebrow.

Purbight gave him as much of a smile as he could summon: a thin, neuralgic wince.

Lewcock rose. He touched Harrap’s sleeve. The auctioneer looked anxious and angry, but he bent to listen. What he heard seemed to intensify both the anxiety and the anger. He addressed Purbright in a whisper that could be heard all over the hall.

“These items are the property of private clients. You cannot interfere with a correctly conducted sale. I am in the middle of taking bids, inspector. You must excuse me.”

And he gazed out over the heads of the, by now, much intrigued audience.

“Oh, God!” breathed Purbright to himself. “Tell him,” he said to Lewcock, “that nobody’s stopping his sale, but that I can and will if he’s going to be awkward. A policeman has been hurt here this morning. And now there is this very odd bidding. Somebody has to explain it. I am not being unreasonable.”

The intermediary went aloft again. This time Harrap paused before delivering a reply and then it was for the hearing of Lewcock alone.

“He says,” Lewcock reported to the inspector, “that you can do as you like as long as you take responsibility, but can he finish taking bids first. It’s the commission, of course,” Lewcock confided. “He wants the old man to feel inferior.”

“I shall want the names of bidders,” Purbright said. “Every person who has put in a bid for this lot number, I mean. Also the name of the owner. Can you do that for me?”

The clerk nodded. “I can jot them down now, actually. Well, all but one.” He sat straight and peered into the hall. “Oh...”

Purbright saw the frown of puzzlement. He knew, before Lewcock spoke, what had happened.

The stranger who had seemed so keen to acquire lot thirty-four against the opposition of Mrs Moldham-Clegg and Mr Buxton was no longer in his seat.

So far as Purbright could make out in a quick, sweeping scrutiny, the man had departed altogether.

“Don’t let anyone shift that stuff. I’ll be back for the names in half a minute.”

Careless now of obtrusiveness, Purbright strode to the back of the hall. There he was assured by PC Phillips and Detective Harper that no one had left the hall by the main doors. Perhaps one of the three emergency exits...? Helpful.

“Ask people,” he told them. “Particularly near the doors. Man in dark clothing, probably a quiet stepper. Receding chin. Rather friendly face, actually.”

Mr Harrap, all too aware that his brief and fantastic transposition into a Sotheby’s-like world was about to come to an end, was announcing for a second time that the bidding stood at three hundred and seventy pounds and was with the lady on his right. He watched without interest Purbright’s return to the clerk’s table.

“At three hundred and seventy pounds...” Mr Harrap rolled the words around his mouth with valedictory relish. “For the third time...” The gavel was held high.

Four more seconds went by. Mr Harrap stared invitingly but quite without avail at Mr Clapper Buxton, who appeared suddenly to have gone into a state of deep inner contemplation.

The gavel descended and was held out to indicate the victor. Mr Harrap gave Mrs Moldham-Clegg a respectful, tight-mouthed smile. She did not look at him, but instead crooked one finger to summon the porter while she reached down with her other hand for a huge square shopping-bag of plaited leather.

The auctioneer coughed apologetically and leaned out of his stand to make a counter-gesture to the porter.

Mrs Moldham-Clegg paused, looked up sharply at Harrap.

Again he tried out a smile. “With respect to lot thirty-four...”

“Well?” She regarded him with chilly discouragement.

“The items cannot be released immediately, I’m afraid. There are certain formalities.” He added in a whisper, “Police routine, nothing more.”

If Purbright was dismayed by the ineptness of Mr Harrap as a soother of customers, he was even less prepared for Mrs Moldham-Clegg’s reaction.

Allowing her head to roll back, she opened her mouth, turned up her eyes, assumed the colour of wallpaper paste, and half-slid, half-rolled in a dead faint to the floor.

Chapter Three

The silver-haired chief constable of Flaxborough, Mr Harcourt Chubb, was sufficiently old-fashioned to hold fainting to be a natural prerogative of womankind. It was “rather nice”, he considered, for sensitivity to be so highly developed. Dogs were much the same: the better the pedigree, the greater the propensity to have fits.

Even Mr Chubb, though, was incredulous on hearing of the collapse of Mrs Moldham-Clegg.

“Tough as boots, I would have thought, Mr Purbright. A bit of a thruster in her time.”

“How old is she now, sir?”

Mr Chubb gave the question unhurried thought. He was standing by the window in his cool, white-painted office at the Fen Street police headquarters, calmly but systematically examining, leaf by leaf, a very healthy-looking potted geranium.

“Seventy-eight, I should say,” he said at last. A little later, and with a trace of a smile that Purbright suspected was meant to be roguish for his benefit, “I expect you wonder how I know that?”

“Sir?”

Mr Chubb flicked an alien insect from one of the leaves of his plant. “Nicky Moldham had her coming-of-age party in the same year that my father returned from India. In 1921. We were at Strawbridge then, as you know.”

The inspector knew no such thing. One of Mr Chubb’s devices for implanting in his subordinates a healthy sense of inadequacy was to drop into the conversation from time to time an apparently innocent presumption of the other person’s familiarity with some matter of which he could have known nothing.

“Strawbridge,” Purbright echoed without hint of hesitancy. “Of course. It must have been quite a party for it to be so memorable.”

Mr Chubb regarded him carefully. “So my parents told me in somewhat later years. It was remembered by their generation as one of the last of the big occasions at the Hall.”

“The Moldhams seem to be considered a rather unlucky family, sir.”

“Indeed? Yes, well, I suppose they have had their troubles.”

“If they were financial troubles, it seems a little strange that one of them can now afford to pay nearly four hundred pounds for a few worthless bits and pieces at a sale.”

“Worthless?” Mr Chubb repeated, reflectively. “On the face of it, yes. But sentiment will exact a very high price, you know.”

Purbright recognized that Mr Chubb was in that frame of mind which would prove obstructive, perhaps even dictatorial, in the face of novelty or radicalism. Loyalties—the more difficult to identify because they were ancient and private loyalties—had been stirred and were now at work behind those courteous, ascetic features.

“I shall not put Mrs Moldham-Clegg to the bother of coming into town again, of course, sir.”

The chief constable nodded and wrinkled his nose. “Quite.”

“I shall give her time to recover, then have a word with her at home.”

Mr Chubb blew gently through pouted lips while he stared out of the window into the middle distance. The inspector watched and waited for him to try something in the nature of discouragement. At the moment when he saw Mr Chubb about to speak, he broke the silence himself instead.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I have been forgetting the matter you’re most concerned about. The hospital people told me a little while ago that Sergeant Love is making a good recovery from that attack.”

“Ah... Oh, splendid,” declared Mr Chubb. He looked, the inspector thought, slightly winded, but he soon recovered from the reminder that inspectors of police, even in Flaxborough, are expected to put crime before social obligation to the County.

“There must be no effort spared to find that fellow,” he said sternly. “I don’t want you to feel inhibited in your investigations, you know, Mr Purbright. People like the Moldhams are very understanding if they’re approached properly.”

He nodded pleasantly and walked to the door like a host.

“Mind you,” Mr Chubb murmured as Purbright passed him into the corridor, “Nicky is getting on a bit. Wouldn’t be nice to press her too hard.”

“Nicky?”

“Short for Veronica. Mrs Moldham-Clegg.”

“I see, sir.”

“And please see that my best wishes for his recovery go to Sergeant Love, won’t you.”

Purbright made his way to the CID room. It compared with Mr Chubb’s office not as a poor relation with a rich, but rather as a railway waiting-room might offer contrast with an abbot’s private study. It had recently been painted what Mr Chubb’s wife termed “a cheerful, sunny colour” and the more rickety chairs had been replaced with plastic indestructibles, but the long, heavy wooden table, pocked with cigarette burns, still occupied most of its area and, together with a massive, black-leaded cast-iron fireplace that never contained a fire, kept faith with the days of the lock-up and the drunkards’ cart. It was the kind of room in which men are disinclined to take off their overcoats. Beneath the fume of the cheerful new paint there lingered the smells of tea-soaked biscuits and of metal polish.

“Those prints. They’ve got a result.”

A sheet of paper was handed to Purbright by PC Braine, whose fat, purse-like face and short sight gave him a quite extraordinary resemblance to a spectacled toad. Purbright thanked him and sat down. Braine went over to where Detective Pook stood drinking a mug of tea. “Villain from the Smoke, apparently,” said Braine. Pook stared irritably into the steam from his drink. “Fancy that.”

Detective Harper was in the room. Also PC Wilkinson and Patrolman Brevitt. All looked as if they were on their way to somewhere else.

A little self-consciously, the inspector donned a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses, recently acquired. He felt like the tutor of an adult education class.

Voices were raised outside. The door opened. Harper, who was standing facing it from the other side of the room, made noises of boisterous surprise.

The arrival was Sergeant Love. He grinned apologetically.

Purbright looked pleased to see him.

“An appropriately-timed revival, Sid. I have just learned the name of your suspected assailant.”

Love took a seat opposite the inspector and assumed an attentive expression.

“He is a London gentleman,” Purbright began, “whose name when last sentenced was Dean Francis O’Dwyer. He is otherwise variously known as Charles Chubb,” (there were appreciative whinneys for this piece of lèse-majesté) “Victor Henry Scoggins, Victor Charles Priest and ‘Slopey’ Cavendish.”

“Which one hit you, sergeant?” interjected Wilkinson, who was inclined to regard any assembly of more than three of his colleagues as an occasion for waggishness.

Love’s face glowed with the pleasure of notoriety as he tenderly touched the back of his neck. “All of them, by the feel of it.” It was, as he told his young lady afterwards, his bonest mot for months.

For a moment Purbright regarded him anxiously. Then he resumed his summary of Mr O’Dwyer’s record.

“Last known address was in Finchley, North London. Age forty-seven. Married. Also several partners, believed bigamously acquired but never the subject of proceedings. Sent to borstal in 1948 for breaking and entering, theft and causing actual bodily harm. Convictions as an adult include four of violence, three of breaking and entering and eight of theft. His attempted larceny of a chalice was treated as sacrilege, for which he received two years.”

“It sounds,” commented Detective Constable Harper, infected by Wilkinson’s levity, “as if the sergeant was laid out by a real professional.”

Purbright had been reading ahead quickly and silently. He shook his head. “Habitual, perhaps, but not terribly successful, it seems. Slick but careless. Small takings, usually recovered. Not worth all that prison, one might have thought.”

“What about the violence, though, sir?” asked the patrolman, Brevitt.

“Four cases are listed, as I said. And quite gratuitious violence, by all accounts. So whatever we may think of Mr O’Dwyer as a master criminal, he obviously is a dangerous fellow with an unpredictable temper.”

The inspector played a moment with his new glasses.

“I shall ask London to collect him for questioning if he does surface there, of course. There is a chance, though, that he has not yet left Flaxborough.”

There were glances of surprise. Pook took his cue. “The inspector’s talking about a car we’re checking on,” he explained. “It was parked overnight on the Northway Estate and nobody round there knows who it belongs to, but what we do know is that PC Phillips saw somebody get into a very similar car outside the saleroom yesterday, that somebody being the character we’re after. Right, sir?”

The inspector confirmed that such, indeed, was the case.

“The general instruction at the moment,” he said, “is that every officer on duty should be watchful for this man, whatever his name, and prepared for him to be violent, despite his appearance, which I can vouch for being amiable to a point of simple-mindedness. Mr Braine—run off some copies of the official description, will you, and see to their distribution.”

Beckoning Love to accompany him, Purbright left the room and crossed to where a spiral of steep, narrow and noisy iron stairs led to his own office.

“Feeling better now, Sid?”

The sergeant said yes, oh yes, fine. As if to bear witness to his restored physique, the staircase swayed and rattled like a skein of iron plates.

“I didn’t say anything about it downstairs,” Purbright said quietly when Love had finished his climb and stood beside him, “but my belief is that Mr O’Dwyer is very seriously concerned indeed to lay hands on something that was on that tray of rubbish. He stayed with the bidding into the three hundreds.”

Disbelief creased Love’s face. “Three hundred? Pounds?”

“It went to nearly four, actually.”

“Who got it, then?”

Purbright pushed open his office door and stood aside for Love to enter. “I did.”

The tray was on a small deal table close to the desk. The sergeant stared at the cottage so lately coveted by himself, then at Purbright.

“You could say that it is an exhibit in custody,” the inspector explained. “The owner, strictly speaking, is Mrs Moldham-Clegg. Her’s was the top bid.”

“Must be barmy,” declared Love, then, defensively and a little sadly: “I thought I’d go to a couple of quid perhaps. No more.”

“We can’t keep these long. Unless something in this lot can be proved stolen or to have associations of some kind with an actual crime, we shall have to pack it all off to Moldham Hall and tug our forelocks in contrition.”

Love was holding the meat mincer and scraping with a thumb nail the black impacted kitchen grease on its handle. “There was a case once of gold being melted down and cast in some shape that wouldn’t be noticed.”

Purbright picked up the china dish and cover. The dish had inside it a perforated false bottom on which a tablet of soap could drain. He lifted it.

“Drugs?” Irrepressible Love.

“A nice thought, Sid, but I scarcely think so. I must ask around and see if soap dishes are attracting fancy prices. What do you make of the glass stoppers?”

The sergeant considered. “They look as if they’re out of vinegar bottles.” A pause. “Big vinegar bottles.”

The inspector gave the LMS refreshment room tumbler fond but brief regard and prepared to examine carefully the plaster model of the cottage “At the End of Life’s Lane”.

The frame was a simple, mass-produced plastic affair, clipped to the plaster plaque at four places. It was corded for hanging.

The plaque itself was solid—or it seemed so—and the back had the slightly bubbled surface characteristic of a plaster that has set rapidly and freely exposed to air. Purbright could see no marks of identification.

With the handle of a small penknife, he tapped gently over the whole area of the picture’s back, after unclipping and removing the frame. There came the same dull response at every point. If a hollow place existed, it would need to be small and deep-set.

“Micro-film?” Love threw in, heroically.

Purbright turned the plaque over. The cottage was delineated in relief. A mould, probably of rubber, must have been used. The colouring was conventional; neatly executed but nothing more.

“Have you seen this sort of thing before, Sid?”

The sergeant thought he had. At least, he had seen a kit in a shop but had not realized its connection with real art. “Kastaplak” it had been called.

For two or three minutes more, Purbright made close inspection of the plaque. He squeezed it between fingers and thumb, shook it and tapped it close to his ear, made several discreet incisions with the smallest blade of his knife and even pared away one corner that would be concealed by the replacement of the frame.

“We’ll let Forensic play with it for a day,” Purbright said at last. “Perhaps they will find what makes it worth ­400.”

Later, he was conveying the same intention in rather different phraseology to Mr Richard Loughbury, solicitor, of Church Close, Flaxborough.

“Rich Dick” Loughbury was the senior, and only generally visible, member of Loughbury, Lovelace and Partners. He occupied a room of such generous size and gracious proportions as to take up the entire first floor of the Georgian terrace house that once had accommodated a succession of clergymen, their large families and retinues of curates. The firm’s offices, in a workaday sense, were on the ground floor. Into them were crammed three desks, two typewriters, a duplicating machine, some dozens of black japanned deed boxes, a sink, kettle, cups and saucers, a wooden filing cupboard, two women wearing woollen jumpers, a box of coal, and Mr Clapper Buxton, Loughbury’s confidential clerk. The two partners, neither of whom was called Lovelace, had rooms on the second floor where they were believed to do conveyancing.

Purbright had summarized for Loughbury’s benefit the events of the previous day. “You do act, I understand, for the Moldham family?”

“I am Colonel Moldham’s man of business.” Loughbury pronounced it busy-ness: the word, like the phrase, bespoke the old-time lawyer (or else, Purbright reflected, somebody anxious to sound like one).

“And Mrs Moldham-Clegg...?”

“Is the colonel’s aunt. She is widowed and lives now at the Hall.” The replies came smoothly and without hesitation in a pleasant voice that had been trained carefully, perhaps self-consciously, on the base of a fairly expensive education. Rich Dick’s was not a big firm even by Flaxborough standards, but Purbright could well understand why it had come to be entrusted with the affairs of most of the county families and big land-owning interests.

“The reason for my coming to you,” the inspector said, “is a hope that we can clear up a little mystery connected with yesterday’s sale without having to bother the lady so soon after her collapse.”

“Collapse?” Mr Loughbury, whose large, square, pink face, with its laundered-looking white moustache and eyebrows, proclaimed his own robust health, clearly assumed a similarly sensible constitution on the part of his clients.

“Oh, yes, she did faint,” Purbright insisted.

“Indeed. And the little mystery?”

“We should like to know why Mrs Moldham-Clegg bid close on four hundred pounds for a very ordinary household picture on plaster-of-Paris, together with three or four odds and ends, the total value of which cannot be more than a few shillings.”

Mr Loughbury smiled. His teeth looked as good as the moustache. “We live in an age of inexplicable prices, inspector. Especially where so-called art is concerned. And who are we men to tell the ladies they are extravagant?”

As Purbright was to observe to Mr Chubb later, jocularity on the part of a solicitor is one of the surest signs of evasiveness. He decided to tighten his questioning at the risk of Mr Loughbury’s displeasure.

“I should have described her buy as something more than extravagance, sir. It smacks of either extreme eccentricity or of special knowledge. And Mrs Moldham-Clegg is, by all accounts, a very level-headed lady.”

“What do you mean by special knowledge, inspector?” The voice was good-humoured as ever, the white brows a little lowered in friendly concern.

“I mean awareness of something valuable in lot thirty-four, something that would escape notice in the ordinary way. Something concealed, even.”

“Ah, the painted-over Van Dyke.” Mr Loughbury laughed, but not derisively. “No, no, I do see what you mean, Purbright—but Mrs Moldham-Clegg? Hardly a hunter of masterpieces.”

“She is your client, sir...”

A finger rose in polite correction. “The family, inspector—the family is my client.”

“Very well, sir; from your knowledge of the family, including Mrs Moldham-Clegg, can you suggest what significance she saw in those seemingly worthless objects that persuaded her to part with nearly ­400?”

“Do you intend to put that question to her?”

“As part of my general inquiries? Yes, if necessary.”

“But inquiries into what, inspector? Buying at auction is not a felonious act, surely.”

“I have not suggested that it is.”

The solicitor remained silent for some seconds, as though slightly discomfited and regretful that the policeman had introduced a note of asperity into his last reply. Then he brightened.

“May I make this suggestion, inspector—that I have a word myself with the good lady. It happens that I am going over to Moldham tomorrow morning to discuss some estate matters with the colonel. I’m sure that Mrs Moldham-Clegg will be as frank with me as the circumstances warrant—perhaps even a little more so, who knows?” A glint of good-fellowship in the clear, pale blue eyes, and a reassuring tightening of jaw that puckered the smooth chin.

Mr Loughbury watched the very faint, sad smile the inspector had assumed and mistook it for a sign of assent. He rose and held forth his hand.

Purbright took the hand, which was large, warm, smooth and confident.

He had said nothing about the presence at the sale of Loughbury’s confidential clerk, George Robert Buxton.

Chapter Four

Inspector Purbright did not doubt that Mrs Moldham-Clegg’s man of business would telephone her long before he, Purbright, could call upon her in person. That could not be helped. He set off towards Moldham village at such speed as was still possible in his ageing official car.

The Hall was in open country a little west of the village, which the shrinkage of the agricultural population during the past twenty years had reduced to a handful of houses now refashioned to the taste of commuting businessmen and shopkeepers from Flaxborough who had acquired them. There was no store in the village, no post office, no inn. The tiny church, fussily restored by a Victorian architect with the money of farmers whose personal piety embraced a desire to see the virtue of humility inculcated in their labourers, was open for services only half a dozen times a year, when the dank and dim little stone box held all too easily a congregation garnered by bus from ten square miles of indifferent countryside.

As Purbright drove by, he saw sheep grazing in the churchyard. One, framed against the black hollow of the porch, held itself very erect and gave Purbright a direct stare of disapproval and challenge. He thought of Mrs Moldham-Clegg.

The Hall’s surrounding parkland had a common boundary with the church, to which a private path still led. The inspector could just discern the glimmer of the white wicket gate between two yew trees. The house was invisible from the road until he reached the entrance to a drive flanked with chestnuts and sycamores, at the end of which and looking much smaller than such an approach promised, was a square, two-storeyed building in dark, rusticated stone. It could have been a moorland farmhouse, save for its battlemented parapet—an addition conceived by a nineteenth century Moldham whom a hunting accident had led to a brief but influential incursion into the works of Sir Walter Scott.

A pair of tall wrought-iron gates stood across the drive. Mainly rusty now, they bore vestiges of black and gold paint. Purbright decided that to leave the car outside them and walk to the Hall would be easier than involvement with bolts and catches of dubious efficacy. He also decided that a painted notice, Private—tradesmen next entrance, was not intended to apply to him.

He took his time to walk the length of the avenue, savouring the scents of cow parsley and meadowsweet and the underlying spiciness of mouldering leaves. Greenery had made broad inroads across the gravel, so that his steps were carpeted almost to silence. Thus he was only a few yards short of the corner of the house when an old man busy at a window in the side wall heard him and peered round over his shoulder.

“Ah,” said the old man. He had short, grizzled thatch on his nearly flat head, a little more around his chin. He wore blue knitted mittens, with the back of which he wiped from time to time a nose of considerable size and bulbosity.

Purbright Ah’d a return greeting. The old man resumed his task, but not dismissively. After a while he said that it looked like being a nice day.

Purbright watched him running a knife around the edge of a window pane and catching the snake of surplus putty in his other hand. On a sheet of newspaper spread beside him were shards of glass.

“Terrible price, now, glass,” offered the inspector.

There came from the old man a husky blowing noise, signifying unqualified agreement.

Purbright waited a while. Then, with immense casualness: “Not in a place you’d expect it to get broken.”

The old man licked his little finger and carefully smoothed away a blemish in the new putty.

“Didn’t,” he said.

“Didn’t get broken?”

“They niwer brok it. I brok it. They cut it.”

The old man spoke without a halt in the slow, patient perfecting of the setting of the new pane. Purbright looked at the pile of glass on the ground. He saw one piece whose edge conformed to the arc of a circle.

“You mean,” he said, “that you had to smash the glass because there was a hole in it?”

“Ah.”

“I see.”

“It was the burglars as cut it.”

With which slow, matter-of-fact statement of the obvious, the old man returned his knife to a tool-bag, an open leather pouch, and squatted back to survey his work.

“When was that, then?” Purbright asked.

“What, the burglars?”

“Aye.”

“In the night, they reckon.”

“Anyone told the police?” The inspector sounded as if the question was of but the slightest interest.

“Bound to ’ave. Well, he’s a magistrate, an’t ’ee?”

“The colonel? Yes, I believe so.”

The old man thought a moment. A slow grin. “That buglar’d larf all right if ’ee come up in front of Mester.”

Purbright smiled back, bade him goodbye and hastened to the corner. This suddenness of departure was in response to a reflection that the term “Mester” was unlikely to have been used by an odd jobs man summoned from elsewhere. And if the old man was one of whatever permanent staff the family could still afford, his usefulness as an informant would not survive his being seen in close company with a policeman.

The front door was slightly ajar. It was a big panelled door and had been painted dark green a long time ago. Now the paint was just dark. It was lustreless and had split away in the corners of the panels. Against this shabbiness, the shine of the heavy, ring-shaped brass knocker testified to regular polishing. Purbright raised and let it fall twice. The house sounded empty.

After a while he heard an unhurried approaching footfall, but not from within. He turned.

“Yes?”

Colonel Brace Pendamon Moldham, a tall, stringy, brownish man in a rugged-down tweed hat the colour of lichens, was standing on the gravel a few yards away. The twelve-bore couched from armpit to forearm looked as if it had grown there. He had an exactly rectangular black moustache, high cheekbones and soft brown eyes that hardly ever moved.

Purbright wished him good morning and announced his identity.

Colonel Moldham acknowledged the former with the slightest of nods but appeared totally unimpressed by the latter.

“I should like to speak to Mrs Moldham-Clegg for a moment or two, if that would be convenient.”

“About what, pray?” The tone was not hostile, but sounded a note of formal discouragement as if to give notice that one’s present suppliers were satisfactory, thank you, and one did not buy at the door in any case.

Purbright said: “I am making inquiries concerning an attack upon one of my officers yesterday morning, sir. It took place in an auction room and I have reason to believe that there may be some connection between the assault and certain articles that were subsequently sold-by pure coincidence, no doubt-to Mrs Moldham-Clegg.”

The colonel regarded Purbright in silence and without altering his stance. Five seconds went by. The inspector began to think that this was some kind of freezing tactic. He spoke again.

“Does Mrs Moldham-Clegg happen to be at home, sir? This matter need not take up much of her time.”

Colonel Moldham leaned forward and turned his head by a fraction. “Purbright, did you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

A nod of endorsement. “Yes, well, Purbright, I’m not at all sure, you know, that aunt can see you. She’s been a bit off colour.” A pause, then, stockily: “You see?”

Purbright smiled pleasantly. “That precisely is why I have come, sir. I wish to be able to release her property without putting her to the trouble of travelling to town to answer questions.”

“Release her property,” the colonel repeated half to himself, as though doubting the commission of so audacious an act as distraint, however temporary, upon anything belonging to a member of the Moldham family. He frowned, then smiled with half his mouth. “I don’t quite follow, Purbright.”

At that moment the old man who had been mending the window appeared from round the corner. Colonel Moldham at once stepped forward and pushed open the door. “Perhaps we had better go inside.”

The inspector found himself in a dark hall, from which two arched corridors ran left and right. The stone floor was bare except for the strip of well-worn matting that crossed from one corridor to the other. The walls were in part plaster, in part big wooden panels deeply buried in greenish-grey paint. He saw a chest, similarly painted, and a grandfather clock in a black timber case; its dark, cracked face and faded numerals offered little in the matter of time-telling, but the pendulum swung still and the “glunk” of its escapement echoed irregularly through the damp air like the beat of an old and much battered heart.

The hall smelled of mould, of burning pine cones and of dog.

A door was being held open by the colonel. Purbright entered the light, airy room beyond and was dazed for a moment by reflections of incoming sunshine in the white painted panels of tall, deep window embrasures and in the glassy surface of an oval table that looked nearly half as big as the room itself.

Until he realized that the colonel was addressing someone other than himself, he did not see Mrs Moldham-Clegg. She was seated in one of the two tapestry-covered wing chairs near the fireplace, her head bent forward in concentration.

“This gentleman is a police” (he pronounced it “pleess”) “inspector, aunt. He says he would like to ask you some questions. Do you wish him to ask you some questions?”

Purbright made a small bow in her direction and bade her good morning. He found interesting the colonel’s manner of introduction: the Moldhams clearly considered co-operation with the law to be like paying bills, a matter of patronage.

There came from the direction of the chair a faint “pop”. Mrs Moldham-Clegg was shelling peas.

Three pops later, she spoke.

“If the gentleman is a policeman why does he not wear a uniform?”

“It’s all right, aunt. I know Mr Purbright. He is a detective inspector from Flaxborough.”

Another soft pea-pod explosion and the sound of the peas cascading briefly against the side of a colander. “Purbright?” murmured Mrs Moldham-Clegg, as if tasting the name. “You wouldn’t be... No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”

“No, no; not from Dorset, if that’s what you’re thinking of,” said the colonel, brusquely. “He wishes to ask you something.” Turning to the inspector, “Now then, what was it you wished to ask, Mr Purbright?”

Purbright resisted the temptation to reply For a chair; his host seemed to assume in others his own perpetual preference for standing.

“I trust you are feeling better now, ma’am.”

She glanced up suspiciously. “Yes, thank you.”

He went on: “I’m sorry that yesterday’s sale provided such unwelcome excitement, but...”

“I fainted, Mr Purbright, by reason of the heat in the auction room. For no other cause.”

“Of course. But it must have been annoying after all those bids to have your purchase taken into custody, as it were.”

“Very annoying, naturally. Quite frankly, it struck one as a most high-handed piece of behaviour.”

Mrs Moldham-Clegg took another pea pod from a basket on the floor beside her. She scowled across at her nephew.

“Bruce, Mr Purbright is looming. Kindly bring him a chair or something. I cannot see when people loom.”

The colonel looked about him as if he did not know what a chair was. Purbright withdrew a little and also glanced around. For a fraction of a second he allowed his attention to be claimed by something on the further side of the room.

Beside the keyhole in the red-brown lid of a small rosewood bureau was a splintered eruption of veneer.

Colonel Moldham, who had shed the gun at last, pulled forward a Victorian carving chair. “This do?” He himself remained standing, gauntly watchful, close to the window and to his propped-up gun.

“I should tell you at the outset, perhaps,” Purbright resumed from his more lowly position, “that a serious assault was made upon a detective sergeant at the back of the hall just before the sale began. We believe that there may be some connection between the attacker and the articles for which you, ma’am, successfully bid.”

“That,” declared Mrs Moldham-Clegg, “is perfectly ridiculous.”

“Not perfectly, I’m afraid. For one thing, the sergeant was examining that particular lot when he was attacked. For another, we believe his assailant was one of the bidders when the same articles were put up for auction.”

The old woman gouged open another pod and thumbed forth its peas. “I really do not understand what you hope to gain from these fanciful connections you have seen fit to make. I am sorry, naturally, for this officer who has been hurt. But I am not responsible. Why should I be deprived of my property? Are there not enough thieves for you to track down that you harass decent people who have paid for what they possess—or, indeed” (and here Mrs Moldham-Clegg gave a creamy, mirthless laugh) “what the police will not allow them to possess?”

“Oh, come now, aunt,” the colonel began, then thought better of intervening.

Purbright met the old woman’s eye steadily.

“There is no shortage of thieves, Mrs Moldham-Clegg, nor of thefts. That is why we are intrigued by any instance of a price that is mysteriously low—or high.”

“Are you implying, Mr Inspector, that I am some sort of trafficker in stolen goods?”

“Not at all. I’ve no doubt that you are a bona fide purchaser. It is the purchase that I find puzzling. I do respectfully suggest”—and here Purbright turned as if to invite the arbitration of the colonel—“that much trouble would be saved if you would offer a simple explanation of why you considered it worth offering ­370 for lot number thirty-four.”

Mrs Moldham-Clegg paid tight-faced attention to the next pod.

It was her nephew who spoke, after thoughtfully stroking his cheek.

“I’m not sure, you know, that you’re on good ground legally, Purbright. I mean, this business of your right to deprive somebody of what has been bought in good faith.”

“Not necessarily permanently, sir,” amended Purbright.

“Yes, well, even so...”

“Your solicitor does know about our inquiries, incidentally, colonel. I’m confident he will advise you concerning the legality of our...”

The inspector’s brief hesitation over a choice of word allowed Mrs Moldham-Clegg bitterly to supply her own.

“Seizure...”

There was a pause, not an easy one. Neither the colonel nor his aunt followed up the reference to Loughbury. His surmise had been right, Purbright reflected: Rich Dick had wasted no time.

“Can I not persuade you, ma’am, to answer my question?”

Mrs Moldham-Clegg sighed, set her features in a smile of cold patience and rocked a little from side to side as she said: “My dear man, I really cannot understand why you go on so. I’m sorry, but I prefer to regard the matter as a strictly private transaction, and that is the end of it. Now would you like me to have Alice bring you a cup of coffee?”

“Yes,” said Purbright, “I should like that very much.”

For a moment Mrs Moldham-Clegg sat motionless, staring at him. The inspector gazed back with an expression of genial innocence. She swallowed and looked past him at the colonel.

“Brace—would you mind?” Her voice was restrained, cross.

The colonel shrugged and ambled off. Purbright watched him walk past the rosewood bureau.

“What a pity,” he said, when the colonel had gone, “that such a nice piece of furniture should get damaged.”

Mrs Moldham-Clegg had resumed her pea-podding. “Do you often come into the country, Mr Purbright?” she inquired evenly.

“Not as often as I would wish, ma’am. The only occasions nowadays, I’m afraid, are afforded by crime of some kind. House-breakings, mainly.”

“Your work must be very interesting.” Mrs Moldham-Clegg’s tone succeeded in making the job of a detective inspector sound like the management of a massage parlour.

“It consists substantially of exercising patience.”

She nodded. “A primary virtue. We were taught a lot of it when I was a girl.” The word came out as gairl.

The cup of coffee arrived after about five more minutes. It was borne on a round, painted metal tray, not by a domestic but by Colonel Moldham himself, looking lamentably unused to the task. He set the tray down at one end of the big oval table and stared at it for a while, as if making a count.

Mrs Moldham-Clegg gestured the inspector to help himself.

“Mrs Anstead was busy with something or other,” the colonel informed his aunt. He went back to his place by the window and lapsed into an unfocused stare.

Purbright stirred the coffee. Irregular reddish-brown patches on the surface proclaimed its having been made from a concentrate. Cup and saucer were of fine quality china, heavily decorated with cornflowers. On a second saucer were two Bath Oliver biscuits. They were damp. The coffee tasted of salted peanuts.

“If you would like to smoke,” said Mrs Moldham-Clegg, “please do so, but you must not mind if we cannot provide any of the paraphernalia.” She looked across to the colonel. “Although I suppose there could be an ashtray in the coachhouse: was Herriot a smoking person? I really can’t remember.”

The inspector assured her that he himself had long since ceased to smoke, then addressed himself to Colonel Moldham.

“I was remarking just now, sir, what a shame it is that so fine a little bureau should get damaged.”

“Bureau? Oh, that. Yes. Looks rather bad, but one doesn’t think at the time.”

“Think what, sir?”

The old woman spoke. “There’s a little man in town does these things. He’s really very good.”

“Ah, you had to force the lock yourself, did you, sir? That must have been quite a heart-breaking decision.”

The colonel shrugged. He looked bored. “When one mislays the only key, one hasn’t much choice. Not with a fellow waiting at the door for one’s cheque.”

Purbright grimaced sympathetically, sipped his coffee, then subjected the bureau to a speculative stare.

“Do you not think your glazier might repair it?”

“Glazier?” The colonel looked puzzled.

“The gentleman mending a window round the side of the house. I noticed he had a bag of very professional-looking tools.”

The colonel and Mrs Moldham-Clegg looked at each other. She frowned at her nephew. “Benton, does he mean?”

“He’s my gardener,” said the colonel. “Odd jobs, that sort of thing. Very useful chap. Not exactly a furniture restorer, though, one would have thought.” “Hardly,” agreed the aunt. The exchange was obviously for Purbright’s benefit but neither looked away from the other while it went on.

Purbright put down his cup.

“How did that window get broken, colonel?”

“My dear fellow...” Colonel Moldham’s lean face once again stretched into the lop-sided contours of false amusement, like that of a man with a slight stroke. “How does a window get broken? Children... Careless servants...”

Mrs Moldham-Clegg had finished shelling peas. She smoothed level those in the colander and put it on the table. She, too, was smiling wryly.

“If you would care for more coffee, Mr Purbright...?”

Purbright rose, shook his head, and made a small bow. He walked straight to the bureau and knelt before it. Around its lock an area of about the size of a playing card was ruptured and splintered. Marks suggested that a chisel or broad screwdriver had been used to lever open the lid. The surrounding surface appeared to have been wiped.

Getting to his feet, the inspector strolled back towards the colonel.

“I’m sorry, sir, but nothing is going to persuade me that the owner of an attractive and, no doubt, valuable article such as that is would perpetrate so crude an assault upon it, however pressing the occasion.”

It was as though Purbright had not spoken. The colonel, blank-faced, addressed his aunt: “I have to go over to Gosby with that saddle I promised Mallory. Tell Benson to see to the melon house door, will you? He knows about it.”

The old woman quitted her chair. Purbright saw now that she was wearing trousers. They were of crumpled cavalry twill. In the loose grey cardigan that covered a blouse and a purple silk scarf knotted at her throat was a brooch, an enamelled miniature of a spray of roses, set in heavy gold.

“It was good of you to call, Mr Inspector,” she said, not looking at him but busying herself with collecting colander and spent pods.

The door was being held open by the colonel.

“Give you a lift, Purbright?”

“That’s very good of you, sir.” The inspector passed by him into the half-light of the hall. “I do happen to have my own transport.”

“Splendid,” murmured the colonel, flatly. He remained standing on the porch step, legs a little apart, gun cradled once more within his arm, staring mildly at no part in particular of the Moldham family acres.

Chapter Five

When Purbright reached the corner of the house, he looked round it to see if Benton, the odd-jobs man, were still about, but there was no sign of him. The inspector followed with his eye the gravel path, a broad spur from the main drive, which continued past where Benton had been mending the window. It led to the back of the house. There, presumably, would be found the coachhouse to which Mrs Moldham-Clegg had referred.

Purbright decided to have a look. Herriott—whoever he was—had been mentioned in a way that suggested he had lived in the building. Was it still in occupation by somebody—Benton, perhaps? Or the Mrs Anstead who had been too busy to make coffee?

Somewhere not far away, dogs were barking sporadically. He halted. The colonel’s voice reached him, raised in command. Then silence, followed by the sound of a car being started against its will. Purbright glanced about for cover, then remembered the overgrown gravel and the latched and rusty gates; the colonel was not likely to use that way as an exit. He remained where he was. Gradually the noise of the car diminished to a distant grumble. An old and large car, he decided, not very well maintained.

The coachhouse was revealed as soon as Purbright drew level with the back of the house. It formed the further side of a walled and flagstoned court and consisted of three arched carriage bays and an upper storey. This was reached by an outside staircase on the gable end. There were two small windows in the upper wall, both curtained.

One bay, in the rear of which Purbright could discern a bench, tools and an oil drum, obviously served as a garage. In another was a stack of shallow wooden boxes, some piles of neatly folded sacks, an old motor-driven mower and a number of gardening tools hanging from nails. There was movement, also. Into the light emerged Benton. He was unravelling what looked like a screwed up piece of cloth. Purbright heard a door open, not far away. He drew close to the wall.

“Benton, you’ll not forget the melon house, will you?”

The old man neither looked up nor spoke. His only acknowledgement of Mrs Moldham-Clegg’s instruction was a non-committal flap of the hand.

The door slammed shut.

Benton continued slowly to cross the court towards the inspector, whom he gave no sign of having seen. He was so preoccupied that twice he nearly lost his footing on the slimy mosses that covered some of the flagstones.

When he did look up and see Purbright, by then only two or three feet in front of him, he observed merely: “Ah, y’aint gone yit, then.” He spread and held aloft what he had been holding, and added: “Dunno what you think but I reckon ’ee winged the bugger.”

“What bugger?” responded Purbright, cosily. He was careful not to appear impressed by the blood that had soaked into Mr Benton’s exhibit.

“That burglar, o’ course. I thought I heard ’im loose off two barrels.”

“Wake you up, did it?”

Benton chuckled wheezily. “Wok me up, d’y’ say? Y’can’t wok up a chap as dunt sleep, mate.”

“No, I suppose you can’t.”

“If I git two hours a night, it’s plenty. Plenty, that is. Sleepin’s nowt but bein’ dead on account.”

“Ah,” said Purbright, in a way that the old man seemed to accept as marking the approval of a fellow-insomniac, for he opened a door in the courtyard wall and companionably ushered the inspector through.

“Old Knickers wuz on about the melanus. ’Ear ’er, did you?”

Purbright translated “melanus” easily enough: they had emerged beside a lean-to glasshouse containing vine-like plants. The epithet for Mrs Moldham-Clegg surprised him, though. Mr Benton he had supposed to be something in the old retainer line and not given to such brashly disrespectful references. “ ’Knickers’?”

“Har. Veronica. Nicky, she gits from family ’n ’er county friends.” The old man looked up, craftily. “You ’adn’t nivver ’eerd ’er called Knickers, then?”

“No, I don’t think I have.”

“Har.” For several seconds, Mr Benton gazed into the distance nostalgically, before meeting Purbright’s eye again with his own, which he then slowly closed.

“What would you say, mester, if somebody wuz to tell you that there wunce wuz a time when Nicky Moldham wuz a thruster an’ a cum-onner? A lot o’ yeers, mind. When they still ’ad munny. Aye, b’God, that ’un liked ’er stick, nivver you fret.”

Allowing his eyes to grow large, Purbright nodded, lips compressed, in token both of his belief and his discretion. He hoped, though, that Benton had not forgotten about the burglary.

“Mind you don’t get any of that blood on your jacket,” he said as a reminder.

Benton shook his head. “Dry,” he said. “Must ’a bin there all night a’most.”

“You heard the shots fairly early on, then,” remarked the inspector.

Round about one o’clock, Benton reckoned. And who had fired the shotgun?—why, Squire, of course, who else?—but a bloody terrible shot was the colonel: his having drawn blood with only two barrels was nothing short of a miracle.

“It would have been dark,” the inspector pointed out, in fairness to the absent marksman.

“Dark? Niwer dark in the country, onny in towns.”

“True.”

Purbright waited for Benton to open the melon house door. The old man bent to examine a place where it was sticking against the frame.

“I suppose,” Purbright said, “that you didn’t actually see the bloke get shot, did you?”

Mr Benton blew noisily to signify denial. “Heerd ’im pelt off, though. Up the old carridge road as you cum in on. Heerd ’is motor start, an’ all.”

“From the road?”

“No—down in the yard.”

“He’d driven right up to the house, then?”

“Yis. Must’ve done, cheeky bugger.”

“Ah,” said the inspector. A pause. “Funny thing, that he didn’t hang on to that piece of cloth if he was trying to stop the bleeding. Where did you find it?”

“In the yard. Just by the garridge there.”

“May I see?”

Benton handed him the cloth. It was a piece of thin towelling, grubby as well as bloodstained. Purbright examined it closely. Near one corner, initials had been chain-stitched in red cotton. FSSC. Flaxborough Social Services Committee.

The inspector sighed. “I really ought to have told you before, Mr Benton, that I am a policeman.”

“Har, thought so,” said the old man, with neither surprise nor rancour. He nodded in the direction of the house. “Anythin’ took?”

“They seem a bit uncertain at the moment. It would be as well if you didn’t bother them with questions for a while.”

“You’ll be wantin’ that.” The old man pointed to the towel, then sorted out a plastic bag from several on a shelf. Purbright thanked him.

Again Benton’s head jerked towards the house. “Not much woth burglarizing in there, y’know. Not nowadays. Tim wuz when there wuz jools.”

“Really?”

“Oh, ar. Knickers had jools up to ’er goin’ to London. Green ’uns in a little string. Woth god knows how much, they reckoned.”

“Went to London, did she? When was that?”

The old man pondered. “Forty yeer...no, more—she’d be in ’er early thutties, would Veronica. She went off to live with relations of ’er mam’s. Titled lot, they wuz. Had the Queen’s cousin to dinner wunce. Then back she cum ’ome when ’er mam died in nineteen ’n fifty.”

“Wasn’t she married by then, though?”

Benton took a chisel and began to pare thin shavings from the edge of the door. “Yip, but she didn’t bring ’im. O’ course, ’ee wuzn’t quality. Chap called Clegg. Dead now. She might ’a got some of ’is munny, but they don’t reckon ’ee ’ad all that much.”

The inspector was beginning to feel his role to be that of gossip rather than interrogator. He changed the subject.

“Tell me, Mr Benton, have you ever seen a picture of a cottage over at the house? Quite a small picture—modelled—made to stand out in the frame, if you see what I mean.”

The old man shook his head. The only pictures he’d ever noticed were old dark things in those great gold frames. Why—was that what the burglar had pinched?

No, said the inspector, it was just a thought. And, at once, he had another thought: would Mr Benton mind fishing out the bits of broken window from where he had put them?

“Har, fingerprints,” responded the old man with knowledgeable relish. He at once abandoned carpentry, selected another plastic bag from his store and trotted off towards a bin.

Sergeant William Malley, a ponderous man of indestructible good humour, was well equipped for his duties as coroner’s officer. He was kindly in manner and intent, and would rather leave a few holes in forensic orthodoxy than add officiousness to the ordeals of the bereaved. At the same time, he was shrewd and diligent to a degree that might have been thought surprising in one so fat and seemingly promotion-proof (Malley had been a sergeant for twenty-three years). These qualities, together with a certain inborn and quite inoffensive curiosity, had brought so many people within his circles of acquaintance that the sergeant served at Fen Street as a live Who’s Who for Flaxborough and district.

Purbright was hopeful that he might have something Debrettish to offer as well.

“Bill, what do you know about the Moldham family?”

Malley rubbed the side of his nose with the stem of a squat, toxic-looking pipe.

“Pretty clunch lot,” he said, after deliberation.

“Yes, I got the impression they’d not give much away. And they seem to have equally reticent friends.”

Malley smiled understandingly.

“There was a break-in at the Hall during the night,” said Purbright. “They’ve a hole in a window, damage to furniture, a bloodstained rag and a gardener who heard a couple of shots—but nobody knows anything—except the gardener—he loves talking.”

The sergeant nodded. “Old Benton. Aye, he’ll talk, all right. You’ll get nothing out of the others, though.”

“I gather the colonel isn’t married.”

“No, him and his aunt are the only ones left, apart from cousins and things. Old Moldy, the colonel’s father, died some time in the sixties, and his mother about thirty years ago. You remember old Moldy, though, don’t you?”

The inspector did. The old squire had succumbed to a splendidly characteristic apoplexy on discovering that his more timid son had been paying secretly the bills which his father (“They have my custom, don’t they—what more do they want?”) for years had been throwing into the ancestral fireplace.

“Who was Clegg?” Purbright asked, after a while.

“Veronica’s husband, you mean?”

“Yes. Not top drawer, I understand.”

“Well, not by the Moldham stud book, I suppose, but probably as good as anything else she could get at short notice. He was a stockbroker or an accountant or something.”

“They parted, though.” Purbright again drew on Benton’s saga.

Malley shook his head. “No, not really. Nothing drastic. She came home when her brother was left on his own, and Clegg carried on living in London. He used to stay at the Hall sometimes but he wasn’t keen on the country.”

“Now deceased?”

“So I believe.”

The telephone on Purbright’s desk rang. PC Braine begged to inform him that the car believed to have been abandoned by Sergeant Love’s assailant was now in the yard, and that the inspector’s instructions were awaited.

“I’ll be down in a moment.”

The inspector returned his attention to the coroner’s officer. “Who’s Herriott?” he asked.

“You’re still talking about Moldham, are you?”

“Aye.”

Malley viewed with half-closed eye the paper clip he was using as a pipe-cleaner. The wire was still emerging from each trip up the stem with a heavy black viscous coating. “Herriott,” he said, “was the general dogsbody, though they called him the chauffeur. He took over when Whippy Arnold left.”

“Which was?”

Up went the sergeant’s shoulders. He evidently did not consider Moldham Hall a particularly rewarding topic. “Oh, twenty years, maybe. A long time. Nearer thirty, perhaps.”

“Dead now, is he? Herriott?”

“Must be.” Malley had transposed his pipe to belly level and was reaming out the bowl with a huge clasp knife. Purbright tried not to look.

“Funny we should mention Whippy, though,” said the sergeant, suddenly glancing up. “They cremated the old bugger not two weeks ago.”

When Purbright arrived in the yard he found Detectives Pook and Wilkinson sitting in the front seats of a toffee-coloured Austin 1100 and intently studying a magazine. They did not notice the inspector until he leaned down and tapped the windscreen. Pook immediately thrust the magazine into his colleague’s lap and opened the door on his own side. He got out with athletic haste, as if bearing dispatches from a battle.

Purbright looked past him to see Wilkinson twist round and slip the magazine among some newspapers on the back seat.

“Whole lot of good prints,” announced Pook. He spread a hand in eager indication of steering wheel and facia. “All done. All in the can, sir.”

“Good,” said Purbright, without making it sound like praise. “What about blood?”

Pook looked bewildered. Wilkinson, who had come round to stand beside him, said: “Nobody asked about blood, sir.”

Purbright did not wish Wilkinson, a mild and reasonably conscientious man, to share a reprimand with Pook, who was not only heavily armoured with self-esteem, but would doubtless find his own portion of blame as easy to pass on as a pornographic magazine, so he said merely: “Never mind, let’s see if we can find any now.”

They could, and did. There were smears of blood on the side of the driver’s seat, on handbrake and gear lever and on the off-side door panel. A chastened Pook took swabbings.

Purbright viewed earlier discoveries. They included three one-litre cans of oil, two hammers, a roll of broad adhesive tape, a jemmy and several tyre levers, as well as a box of tools of fairly catholic usefulness, a butcher’s knife and what appeared to be a shearing device with huge leverage. Bolt cutters, Pook said.

“An engagingly candid man,” remarked Purbright. “He could scarcely have advertised his trade more effectively if he’d put a board up.”

“There was no sign of a weapon anywhere,” Wilkinson said.

Purbright shook his head. “He may not be very clever, but he’s not so stupid that he can’t improvise—as poor Love knows to his cost.”

Wilkinson thought a moment. “But why should he have hit the sergeant, sir? He’d only to wait for him to go away and he could have pinched that thing he was looking at—and no bother.”

The inspector shrugged. “O’Dwyer’s a Londoner: he probably knows very little about auctions. Anyway, he’s a bit of a thruster. Anybody pugnacious and impatient watching Mr Love evaluate a work of art might think that knocking him out was the simplest way of getting a look at it himself.”

“Thruster, sir?” Wilkinson echoed, hungry for upper-rank mots justes.

“Hunting expression,” said Purbright, and left it at that. There seemed no point in admitting that he had first heard it himself only that day.

Chapter Six

The next morning was Saturday, the day on which the chief constable traditionally escorted his wife around the shops. It was partly duty, but Mr Chubb did not mind that. He quite enjoyed shopping, even in the huge bin-walks which had superseded so many of Flaxborough’s small family concerns, in each of which, it now seemed to him, the same fresh-faced, bald, bobbing man in a white apron once had offered slivers of cheese for approval, or held up entire flitches of bacon which he would proceed to guillotine with the most cheerful prodigality at a nod from the customer, or weighed half a pound of Oval Osbornes or Bath Olivers (whole ones, no bits) from a tin that had had to be opened by riffing a blade round its sealed lid, And the next, please...

“Whatever next will they find to obstruct this yard?” remarked Mr Chubb of the toffee-coloured Austin. He could, with a little trouble, have manoeuvred his own Rover into its reserved space, but this was Saturday: he was entitled, surely, to some respite from coping with awkwardness on this one day. He switched off his engine and got out.

Inspector Purbright, who had been talking to the nodding auctioneer, old Hector Durham, and felt slightly less than steady in consequence, was entering the yard from Field Street. He crossed to the Rover in time to assist Mrs Chubb to alight. She gave him a motherly beam before turning to extricate from the back of the car a big straw shopping bag, which she handed to her husband.

The chief constable waved the bag towards the toffee-coloured car. “That does not belong to one of our people, does it, Mr Purbright?”

“No, sir. It was abandoned in Cherrytree Avenue by the man I think was responsible for the attack on Sergeant Love.”

The chief constable stared at the Austin with sharper attention. “Stolen, I suppose. Have you checked with the licence people?”

“The car isn’t stolen, as a matter of fact, sir. It is registered in the name of Chubb.”

“Chubb?”

“Charles Chubb.” Purbright’s voice was very level. “It is one of the aliases used by the man whose fingerprints were on the door knob.”

“Indeed.” The chief constable was silent a moment. “I think that it would be politic, Mr Purbright, if some alternative could be found. As a point of reference, so to speak.”

Purbright agreed. There was Scoggins, or Priest, or Cavendish. His own favourite was Dean Francis O’Dwyer, which happened also to be the choice of the North London police who had had most to do with the man.

“Sounds like a Dublin clergyman,” said Mrs Chubb, preparing to disengage. She put a hand on her husband’s sleeve. “I shall just call at Wilson’s for your All-Bran and then go on to the Karri-Ko. All right?” She gave the inspector a big don’t-keep-him-too-long smile and departed.

The chief constable folded the shopping bag in two and put it under his arm.

“I have been talking to Mr Durham,” the inspector said. “He told me something rather surprising. Lot thirty-four at Thursday’s sale—which included the plaster cast picture that seems so highly thought of—was entered by the local authority. It appears to be council property, sir.”

“Our council, you mean? Flaxborough?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very odd. Councils do not normally traffic in plaster pictures, do they? Not,” Mr Chubb added, acidly, “that I would put anything past them nowadays.”

“Mr Durham said he understood the welfare department was responsible. Unfortunately, there’s no one available there on a Saturday.”

The chief constable pouted gravely and shifted the folded shopping bag to his other arm. He said nothing.

“Oh, by the way, sir, the North London police are sending an officer to pay us a visit.” Purbright sounded as if he expected Mr Chubb to be very pleased. He added: “The notification is on your desk. We didn’t think you would consider it a matter to justify a call to your home on a Saturday.”

“That was very considerate of you, Mr Purbright, but I cannot remember inviting a London force or any other to send a representative to Flaxborough.”

“No, sir; it is on their initiative. They feel that their special knowledge of O’Dwyer may be useful to us. I also got the impression during a short telephone conversation with the superintendent that he feels responsible. O’Dwyer is supposed to report there every day. They have had a call out for him since Thursday. He sounds a pretty troublesome person, sir.”

“I should have thought that we are quite capable of dealing with troublesome people without the assistance of officers from London. In any case, why should it be assumed that the fellow is still in this neighbourhood?”

Mr Chubb’s displeasure was of the quiet, subcutaneous kind. Its only outward manifestation was a little irregular tic at the corner of his mouth.

Purbright indicated the Austin. “His car, sir. He had no reason, so far as we know, to return to London without it. And without his housebreaking tools, incidentally.”

Mr Chubb raised his brows.

Purbright went on: “The London superintendent also said that O’Dwyer is remarkably home-loving, considering his record. His current wife has actually reported him missing.”

The tic became more obvious. Purbright tried putting a note of concern in his voice.

“They sound quite anxious, sir.”

The chief constable stared coldly for several seconds at a patch of oil that was spreading from beneath the car of the errant O’Dwyer. “Indeed.” He adjusted his yellow washleather gloves without losing grip of the shopping bag under his arm. “Perhaps you’ll have someone see to the mess that car is making, will you, Mr Purbright?” And he set off for the Karri-Ko supermarket.

An hour later, the inspector made his way to the station in time to meet the noon train from King’s Cross. He was not sure what protocol demanded on such occasions, but supposed that parity of rank would come into it somewhere. Anyway, it would hardly predispose Detective Inspector Eric Bradley to view Flaxborough favourably if the first native he encountered were to be PC Braine.

A few minutes after Purbright’s departure, Mr Richard Loughbury loomed expansively at the reception counter and asked to see him, “or does he not come in on Saturdays?”

“We all come in,” retorted PC Braine, sourly.

“In that case...”

“But he’s gone out again.”

Mr Loughbury, who really had nothing else to do, made an extravagant lever movement with his left arm in order to bring his watch to the consultation position. He appeared to see in its face an impending event of immense significance.

“Perhaps I had better have a word with his deputy. If the inspector then wishes to ask me anything, he can always make an appointment.”

“Please yourself,” said the accommodating Mr Braine. “Sergeant Love’s in, if you want to see him.”

Rich Dick followed the route prescribed by Brain and found himself in a corridor with glossy, primrose-painted walls. The three electric bulbs that lit it were set in suspended shades of white glass like coolie hats; nothing of the kind had been seen in the offices of Loughbury, Lovelace and Partners since the 1930s. In the distance were animated voices and the clink of thick pottery. Now and again there crossed the end of the corridor an unjacketed policeman, bearing a mug of tea, who would spare Loughbury a sidelong, mistrustful glance.

Love arrived almost at once. He ushered the solicitor into a small, square, bare-walled room with two wooden chairs and a plain table. Mr Loughbury, whose avoidance on principle of anything as unremunerative as court work had left him unacquainted with the shabby austerity of police stations, was not sure whether to be sympathetic or offended.

Love spoke first. “I’ll get you some tea if you like. It’s mugs as a rule, but they keep a cup specially for visitors.”

Mr Loughbury raised his big pink hand. “A very brief call, sergeant. My object is simply to leave an item of information—of explanation, rather—for the benefit of your superior officer.”

Love frowned, as if the identity of that person were going to take some working out.

“The inspector came to see me yesterday with a little problem,” Loughbury said. “It concerned an auction sale.” Suddenly, the calm, excellently-maintained face came nearer and expressed anxiety. “But of course—the auction sale, so far as you are concerned, sergeant—the most unfortunate auction sale, am I not right? And how are the injuries? A complete recovery, I trust?”

Love blushed and said, oh, that? Well he was expected to live. His modesty earned him one of the chin-up smiles that Mr Loughbury distributed in lieu of tips.

“There was an item offered at that sale,” the solicitor continued, “which attracted bids far beyond its obvious value. Mr Purbright, naturally enough, was intrigued—indeed, I might almost say suspicious—and when the subject arose in conversation at my office, he clearly hoped that I might throw some light on the incident. I represent, you see”—and Mr Loughbury leaned a little forward—“the lady who finally purchased the item.”

“It was a cottage,” the sergeant said.

“Ah...it was, yes; one might say so—a representation of a cottage. A poor enough thing, goodness knows, but prized by someone. By someone, you may be sure. And thereby”—Mr Loughbury raised a finger—“hangs a tale.”

Love looked at the finger.

“You see,” continued Mr Loughbury, “what the inspector did not know is that my man, the excellent Mr Buxton, was also present at that sale and, moreover, actually putting in bids for the said picture, plaque, cottage, or whatever. Now, why should Mr Buxton have been doing that?”

Love shook his head. Rich Dick regarded him with roguish satisfaction.

“To raise the price, sergeant. And to raise it generously. Those were his instructions. What do you think of that? I don’t know what your Mr Purbright would say, but I fear conspiracy is a word that might occur to him. Conspiracy. Yes, sergeant?”

Mr Loughbury’s humorous rhetoric having run its course, he waited a moment for Love to recover, then solemnly shook his head.

“No, no, no—I am having a little joke, of course. The facts are these. They are quite simple.

“The person to whom the trinkets comprising lot thirty-four belonged was an old gentleman, lately deceased, who for many years worked loyally and well for the Moldham family. It came to Mrs Moldham-Clegg’s knowledge that the old servant had died and that those few rather pathetic possessions were to be sold up.

“Now, then, what did this excellent woman decide?—and remember, sergeant, that she is well in excess of three score and ten herself—what, I say, was her plan? Why, to seize the opportunity of making that proud old man’s dependants a gift which neither he nor they would have dreamed of accepting in a direct form. You see what I mean, do you not?”

Love said he thought he did, but the solicitor was taking no chances. “Mrs Moldham-Clegg and Buxton were bidding against each other by arrangement,” he explained. “Then, when the price reached the figure the lady had suggested, our Mr Buxton stood down.”

“Neat,” commented the sergeant.

Mr Loughbury looked pleased. “I venture to think,” he said, “that your excellent inspector will appreciate the element of noblesse oblige. It is all too rarely encountered in these days of self-interest.”

Love said he would mention it.

“I trust you will also convey to Mr Purbright my apologies for keeping this little matter to myself until I could take instructions from my client. We are not, alas, our own masters where confidentiality is at stake.”

“The lady gave you the go-ahead, then, did she?” Love asked.

“Mrs Moldham-Clegg signified that she had no objection, provided the information goes no further,” Mr Loughbury said carefully.

Love took out his notebook. “Can I have the party’s name, sir?” he inquired.

“The party?”

“The old deceased gentleman whose relatives are to get the money.”

Mr Loughbury’s lips puffed forth in a tea-cooling way. “Ooooh, I don’t know... Do you suppose it matters, sergeant?”

“Yes.”

There was nothing officious or impatient about the “yes”. Love’s expression of youthful helpfulness was undimmed. Yet Mr Loughbury could not avoid feeling a little less than easy.

“Arnold was his name, actually. Frederick Arnold.”

Love’s tongue-tip came out to supervise his committal of the name to paper.

“Address, sir?”

“Arnold’s, you mean?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He was an inmate—is that the word, inmate?—or resident, perhaps we should say—anyway, he lived in the council’s old people’s home.”

“Twilight Close,” said the sergeant. He wrote it down. “A senior citizen.” He looked blandly at the solicitor.

Mr Loughbury summoned back something of his expansive manner. “Now, here’s an interesting fact, sergeant. Did you know that old Arnold was a coachman at one time? He drove the Moldhams’ family carriage for years. Hence his nickname of ‘Whippy’. You did not know that, perhaps?”

Love said it was news to him. Could Mr Loughbury tell him the names of any of the beneficiaries from the sale of Mr Arnold’s goods.

“I’m sorry, but I really have no idea. It is scarcely my province.”

“Suppose there aren’t any,” suggested Love.

Mr Loughbury made an airy gesture of non-involvement.

The sergeant also looked unconcerned. “It’s just that I was wondering what would happen to all the money, but I suppose that that’s Mrs Moldham-Clegg’s problem.”

“Exactly,” agreed Rich Dick.

“Is there anything else you wanted the inspector to know, sir?”

“No, no. The matter probably is of no moment, but I did not wish Inspector Purbright to gain the impression that I had been less forthcoming than was reasonable.”

Love nodded amiably. However, he remained thoughtful for several moments. Just as the solicitor was about to announce his departure, Love said: “I wonder what the mincer was for.”

Mr Loughbury stared. “The what?”

“The mincer. The meat mincer. It was among his things. That and a soap dish and a couple of glass stoppers.”

“Ah, sergeant, who knows what memories dwell within the seemingly commonplace trivia cherished by the elderly? Perhaps Mr Arnold preserved the mincer to remind him of domesticity in earlier days.”

“Of his wife, do you mean?” Love, who was still holding a pencil, looked as if he expected an answer, and intended to record it.

Rich Dick chuckled indulgently and said that he must be getting along.

Chapter Seven

The so-called London train—it was in fact a two-coach section that had been nipped off the main body fifty miles to the west—rolled obsequiously into Flaxborough Town seven minutes late. A handful of passengers alighted and began to file across the footbridge to the ticket office and station exit. Purbright stood by the bookstall and prepared to guess which arrival was the visiting detective inspector.

His deductive powers were not needed. The third figure to appear at the turn of the steps from the bridge bore round his middle a sash-like sheet of paper bearing the word BRADLEY in big pencilled letters.

Purbright watched the man’s unhurried descent. He was not much less than six feet in height, but a general broadness of construction made him look more stocky than he was: an impression strengthened by his wearing a short, dark grey overcoat, into the collar of which he seemed desirous of withdrawing as much of his neck and chin as possible. The face, though of high colour and already stubble-shadowed in the couple of hours since his morning shave, was gentle and reflective. He had a moustache, or, to be more accurate, a small area of upper lip left more or less unmown. One hand was in his overcoat pocket. The other carried a leather suitcase large enough, Purbright reflected, for a fortnight’s holiday. Slung from his shoulder was a bolstered tape recorder.

As soon as Bradley reached the platform, Purbright stepped forward in greeting. Bradley carefully set down his case and shook Purbright’s hand with a Stanley-Livingstone zeal that might have been considered fulsome save that the accompanying gaze of appraisal warmed quickly to friendliness. Then he took off his sash, folded it and put it in his pocket.

“It was very kind of you to come and meet me.”

Bradley made the observation sound like a considered statement.

They walked out into the station square. It was flooded with hot sunshine. Three taxi drivers leaned talking to one another in the lea of their cars; with cap-shaded eyes they marked the emergence of the few passengers and followed them to reunions with waiting friends. Only one arrival appeared to want a taxi. A driver reluctantly peeled himself off the side of his cab and got in.

Purbright led Bradley to his own car. He hoisted the case into the boot; it was as heavy as it looked.

“I’ve brought one or two books,” Bradley explained. “A couple of cassettes, as well.” He declined, despite the heat, to add his overcoat to the luggage.

“We must see if we can make this a little holiday for you—at least in part,” said Purbright.

“I have been much looking forward to something of the kind. The opportunity presents itself dismally seldom.”

“Do you know anything of this eastern side of England?”

“I once was confined to camp at a place somewhere near Skegness.”

“I was confined to one somewhere near Vienna.”

“Ah, it was very important in those days to know one’s place. Promiscuity in any military sense was most unwise. You did not, incidentally, get to the opera by any chance?”

“Not on that occasion, no.”

“I am fond of opera, but the English in general seem to regard it as pretty offensive.”

“Have you ever come across something called amateur operatics?”

“Ah, now there’s an exotic aberration for you.”

“It is still practised in Flaxborough.”

By the time the car drew up in the yard of the Roebuck Hotel, the heady exchange of unprofessional pleasantries, verging as it did upon the fatuous, had given both men a slightly intoxicated feeling.

“We might as well book you in and then have a drink in the bar,” Purbright suggested. “Your meeting my chief constable is unlikely until tomorrow or Monday.”

“Good,” said Bradley.

The receptionist, a tall girl with big, pink-framed spectacles and a loose-knit jumper that draped her bra like a net over whelk shells, watched very attentively the forming of Bradley’s slow, small, neat signature. She turned the book round again, examined the signature right way up, and handed him his key.

Purbright noticed the number.

“Ah, you’ve got the room that Dr Meadows’s murderer occupied.” ¹

Bradley glanced at the key, then slipped it in his pocket. He shook his head. “Spoiling me.”

¹ Reported in The Flaxborough Crab

Mr Maddox, the manager, was in personal charge of the bar. He was not by nature a cheerful man and he somehow invested his present role with clerical dignity rather than anything in the hospitality line.

Purbright introduced his new friend. Mr Maddox’s solemnity deepened.

“Ah, inspector...” He took a good look, then turned to Purbright again. “A colleague of yours, sir?” He leaned nearer. “A police colleague?” The voice was lowered to a quite intimidating level of what Mr Loughbury would have called confidentiality.

Purbright also leaned forward. “Food and drugs division,” he whispered.

They found seats near a window that overlooked the street. For several minutes Bradley took small, reflective sips of beer while he gazed at the conflict, perpetual in East Street between motorists and pedestrians—or, to be more accurate, between people who had managed to park their cars and those who had not.

It must have reminded him, at least, of another motorist on whose account Mr Bradley now found himself in Flaxborough.

“No sight yet, I presume, of our friend O’Dwyer,” he said.

Purbright shook his head. “He certainly hasn’t been to ask for his car back.”

Bradley pondered a little longer before saying: “You know, that is distinctly out of character.”

“In the circumstances, I’d have thought it very sensible.”

“Ah, but Frankie is not sensible. He is a woefully inept criminal. Would there were more like him.”

“On his record, he should be fairly easily catchable,” said Purbright.

Bradley said, “Hm,” and looked at his beer. “In London,” he said, “the most heinous malefactors are the brewers.” He shrugged back to the subject in hand. “No, we really are worried about Frankie. Domestically, he is very much a creature of habit. He always rings home after a job to put Edna’s mind at rest. I find that quite touching.”

“Edna being...?”

“His common-law wife. A large, industrious woman with yellow ringlets. I went to see her last night. She was very upset. She feels strongly that Frankie is dead.”

“Is that your opinion, too?” Purbright was frowning.

“Not opinion, exactly. Shall we say that I shouldn’t be surprised?”

“What I find especially perplexing at the moment,” said Purbright, “is the man’s presence so far from his own territory. Why should a London burglar—that is his main vocation, I understand?—yes, well, why should he take it into his head to cross half England and turn up at a small town auction sale?”

Bradley smiled slowly. “Yes, it is rather bizarre. But I think I have part of an answer.” He brought out a handful of folded pieces of paper and envelopes from an inner pocket and began to sort through them. “Have you,” he asked “heard of a Mr Anderson?”

“Any particular Anderson? It is not a very uncommon name.”

Bradley selected one of his pieces of paper, unfolded it and placed it carefully on the table beside his beer. “This one signs himself simply ‘Mr Anderson’. There is a certain regality in that, I think; a presumption of universal recognition. Particularly as he sees no necessity to give an address.”

Purbright picked up the paper. It was dark blue, lined, and the writing had been done with a leaky ball-point.

Dear Chas, it began. Purbright looked up. “Chas?”

“One of our man’s spare names,” Bradley explained. “Chas—Charlie—Charles Chubb. The envelope was correctly addressed to his place in Goldhawk Road, anyway.”

Purbright grinned. “You realize, of course, that my chief constable...”

“Heavens, yes. What a felicitous coincidence for him.”

Purbright resumed his reading.

Dear Chas, I have to tell you that my old friend and yours of course Mr Arnold passed on a couple of weeks back it was very peaceful they tell me although I was not with him at the end worse luck. That is not the only thing I had got to tell you though because there is this promise I made to Mr Arnold when I first come aboard here. It is about his gear. He said you know about it and of course I never asked him what was not my business but he said if anything was to happen to him sudden I was to see you got it. Well I have kept an eye on what they were doing to poor Mr Arnolds gear and everything is going to be sold that I do know. So you want to be at the auction room at what they call the Volunteers Hall here in Flax on Thursday July 21th before half past ten am. I have not said anything to them here as they dont take notice of anybody least of all the poor residents thats a good one residents we are just prisoners in irons. Yours very faithfully—Mr Anderson.

Bradley rose and took their glasses to the bar, where the manager had been furtively examining his spirit measures. Mr Maddox smiled winningly at his guest and asked what was his pleasure—two similar, would it be?

“I shouldn’t have been offended, you know,” Bradley told him, “had you used the phrase ‘same again’. It has been legitimized by custom.”

Mr Maddox threw back his head and dosed his eyes as if in the throes of huge amusement. “Oh, very good, sir!” He selected two fresh glasses, held them to the light and filled them meticulously to the brim. “There we are, sir. Two similar.”

When Bradley returned, Purbright had read the letter through again.

“Where did you get this?” he asked.

“From Edna. With his usual carelessness, Frankie had left it behind. Not that it would appear incriminating in any other context, although I suppose it could be construed an enticement to steal. Anyway, Edna was too worried to withhold what she regards as a species of death warrant.”

“From another world?”

Bradley gave a little shrug. “You must not underestimate,” he said, “the Londoner’s native simplicity. The commercial traveller who returns from Luton is treated like Marco Polo.”

“I’m pretty sure I know the source of the letter—the place, if not the writer, and he should be fairly easily identifiable.”

“Some kind of an institution, I should have thought,” said Bradley. “One notices the jaundiced tone. A hospital, perhaps?”

Purbright shook his head. “Twilight Close.”

“Good heavens,” said Bradley, very quietly. He drank some beer.

Purbright looked pensive. “Anderson...I’m wondering if it could be the same Anderson we were always trying to knock off in the old days for taking bets. ² It would be helpful if it were; he was an observant old villain.”

² Reported in Hopjoy Was Here

“Had your friend been to sea, by any chance?”

“Ah, of course...” Purbright skimmed quickly back through the letter. “Yes—‘when I first come aboard’—that certainly sounds like old Crutchy. The age would be about right, too. Late seventies by now.”

“This is quite a district for soubriquets, I notice. Would it be too much to hope that Mr Anderson is a one-legged sailorman?”

“By no means. That is exactly what he is. Or was. Welfare authorities consider wooden legs antipathetic to a well-run establishment. They have probably fitted Crutchy with a plastic imitation one.”

“In simulated flesh tones,” Bradley added, grimly.

The bar was beginning to be crowded: not with farmers, corn chandlers and auctioneers who in former years would have shoved and bellowed in contentious good humour about the fireplace, serious only when they counted change, their faces like red lanterns swinging in the smoke cloud; but with younger men very conscious of new moustaches but never looking at the paper money they pulled from tight hip pockets to buy lager and lime which they bore to wives left perched on guard over plastic carriers containing three-minute-meals for a week.

“I hope you will take lunch as my guest,” Bradley said. “Then we can give thought to the possible whereabouts of O’Dwyer’s body.”

“You must not be pessimistic.”

“About lunch?”

“No, that would be understandable. About O’Dwyer, I mean.”

Rather to their surprise, the two inspectors found in the dining-room that they were to be waited upon by the manager himself, who somehow had arrived before them.

“Not on duty, I trust, gentlemen?” whispered the ubiquitous Mr Maddox in a rasp that could have been heard in the street.

Bradley placed one finger against the side of his nose and swivelled his eyes. “Does that door lock?” he asked, softly. Mr Maddox regarded the sole means of communication with the kitchen. He looked very alarmed and said nothing else.

They ordered something called Beef Wellington, on the strength of Purbright’s attractive theory that it was cooked in a boot. A bottle of Burgundy was also called for.

“Do you mind if I telephone my wife?” Purbright asked. “She is not expecting me to lunch, but I do not like to indulge in these sybaritic interludes without letting her know. I expect she would also appreciate notice before the shops shut that you are joining us for a meal tomorrow.”

When he returned, he described to Bradley in some detail the sequence of events since Love’s encounter with their present quarry.

Bradley listened attentively, chin on chest, while he gazed at the patterns in the linen tablecloth between them, as if they represented for him an impromptu map of Flaxborough.

“Cherrytree Avenue—do you attach any significance to it in relation to whatever O’Dwyer came here to do, or to find?” he asked when Purbright had told his story.

“I know of no one living there who would qualify as a burglar’s confederate. They mostly are people who either were born here or have lived in the town for a good many years. It is the kind of neighbourhood that used to be called respectable.”

“Nothing suggestive at all?” Bradley asked. He had moved a pepper pot to the side of the table and looked anxious to participate in something tactically demonstrative.

“Only,” said Purbright, picking up the salt, “that Cherrytree Avenue is very near the old people’s home in which Mr Anderson considers himself to be incarcerated.” He set the salt next to the pepper.

“And where, in relation to that area, is the stately home you suspect O’Dwyer of breaking into?” Bradley had the mustard pot in his hand.

“This”—Purbright traced the perimeter of their table—“being Flaxborough?”

“Yes.”

“In that case, it would be somewhere near the next table but one, I’m afraid. Moldham lies a few miles along the main road that goes more or less north east to the coast.”

“That would be in the opposite direction to the London road?”

“It would.”

Bradley nodded and replaced the mustard. “So when Frankie had finished breaking into Moldham Hall, he might have considered it convenient to take Twilight Close into his homeward itinerary.”

“At two-ish in the morning?”

“He was not a man to stand on ceremony.”

“No,” said Purbright, “it seems not.”

Mr Maddox, looking stern and steamy, arrived at their table. He frowned at Cherrytree Avenue and Twilight Close and tweaked them back instantly to their proper positions. Then he stood aside in awful supervision of the seventeen-year-old youth, his face scarlet beneath a chef’s hat, who served Purbright with Bradley’s order of egg mayonnaise and Bradley with his guest’s smoked eel.

“All right, sir?” inquired Mr Maddox of each in turn while he side-eyed the youth with a wolfish smile. They said yes, fine, and began to eat what they had been given.

When they were alone again, Bradley said: “Do you think I should remonstrate with that man on the subject of the boy’s hat? The poor lad is painfully embarrassed, as well as he might be.”

Purbright counselled him to temper compassion with tact. “Maddox will undoubtedly suppose the boy to have slipped you a note of complaint if you say anything.”

Until the next appearance of the manager and his hostage, bearing the main course on a trolley, they talked about the late Mr Arnold.

“It looks,” said Purbright, “as though Arnold was O’Dwyer’s confederate, if he had one.”

“Confederate in what, though?”

“Theft of some kind, on the face of it. We may know more about that when the forensic people have finished with the picture from the auction sale.”

“What do you know of Arnold?” asked Bradley.

“Not a great deal. I hadn’t even heard his name until yesterday, when my coroner’s officer mentioned it. He died about a fortnight ago.”

“In that old people’s home?”

“So it seems.” Purbright was silent a moment, then added: “If you are going to ask if Arnold ever had anything to do with the Moldhams, the answer is that he was employed there at one time.”

“It would be tempting to postulate the man’s having purloined the family jewels and lain low until it was safe to turn them to account,” said Bradley.

Purbright smiled. “Tempting, indeed. It would be too much in the tradition of the thirties’ detective story, though.”

Bradley spread his hands. His normally sleepy eyes suddenly brightened. “My dear friend, what is this but a thirties’ detective story? Why else do you think I came here?”