The Naked Nuns

“Amis, I suppose.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I wonder,” said Mr Chubb a little later, “how the man consistently kept his employer ignorant of these dealings. There must have been letters sometimes, and they would have been addressed to Hatch.”

“At his club, sir. Where Amis was a conscientious early starter, whose job it was to open the mail, anyway. Telegrams might have been more tricky; my guess is that he told Oxonia to curb their agents’ exuberance after he’d received that wire from Philadelphia that gave our Miss Ryland nightmares about white slaving.”

Purbright gathered his papers and put them in a case. This and the tape recorder he carried to the door. He looked, the chief constable regretfully reflected, rather more like a traveller checking out of an hotel room than an inspector of police.

The constable on duty in the corridor jerked out of some gloomy reverie and saluted. Purbright made a face at him and told him to go and get himself a meal.

On their way to the car park, the chief constable stopped and looked back. Purbright turned, too. Among the windows of the single-storey building they had just left, there had been nailed a square of hardboard, like an eye-patch.

“You haven’t told me, you know,” said Mr Chubb, “why you were so confident that an outsider couldn’t have shot that poor fellow. The gangster person, for instance. Or even Crispin—yes, I know he’s a councillor, but he gets up to some pretty queer tricks, they tell me.”

Purbright pointed. “Hatch’s gun was kept in that room, the one next to the office. It would have to be brought out and hidden—behind the pile of planks there, for instance—before too many customers were milling around the club. I can’t see how either Tudor or Crispin could have done that. And whoever subsequently rammed the gun barrel through the window and pulled the trigger must have known for an absolute certainty who was inside that washroom. It must have been someone who had been with Hatch up to that moment, and actually seen him go in to have a wash.”

“That does seem very logical, Mr Purbright,” agreed the chief constable, “but what was to prevent a person lurking in the grounds—a scoundrel such as what’s-his-name, Tudor—from taking a shot at his victim, his ‘contract’—was that the word?—as soon as poor Hatch came in and put the light on?”

“Frosted glass, sir,” said Purbright.

They resumed their way to their separate cars. Mr Chubb drove away in his at once. The inspector’s took some time to start. It usually did.