IP12 - Whatever's Been Going on at Mumblseby?

Chapter One

One of Flaxborough’s best known and respected senior citizens passed away peacefully this week in the person of Mr Richard Daspard Loughbury. His death took place on Monday at Flaxborough General Hospital after a short illness at Mr Loughbury’s country home, the Manor House, Mumblesby.

“Christ! Guess who’s kicked the bucket.”

Mr Loughbury, for many years a solicitor in regular practice in the town, was a noted bowls votary, a Freemason, and at one time a member of Flaxborough Town Council, to whose deliberations he brought wisdom and legal acumen, not unmixed with that brand of humour for which he will be long remembered by local “cognoscentes” of the “bon mot”. He was predeceased by his wife five years ago.

“I said guess who’s kicked the bucket.”

Thus Mr Brian Lewcock, auctioneer’s clerk and not much respected junior citizen, addressed from behind Flaxborough’s weekly newspaper the wife who, despite his occasional urging of her to that course, showed no inclination to predecease him.

“All right. Who, then?” Sandra Lewcock came to the end of a row of breakfast-time knitting and with the disengaged needle leaned down to scratch her foot.

“Old Loughbury. Rich Dick.”

“Oh, him.” Sandra looked down between her knees to see where her ball of wool had gone. She gave the yarn a tug and the ball came running from under the small sideboard like an errant animal. She halted it with a stockinged foot. As she brought the needles into their duel again, she frowned. “Is that right? Was he rich? Really rich, I mean?” Her tone suggested doubt, not interest. Sandra’s was a thin voice, with a petulant lilt.

“He was bloody loaded,” said Mr Lewcock.

Sandra gazed up at the window, without slackening the pace of the knitting. “How do you know?”

“Well ... he was. He must have been. You should see some of the stuff he bought.”

“Stuff?”

“At the auctions. Very pricey.”

Sandra’s scowl deepened. “Auctions? I never saw Mr Loughbury at an auction.”

“No, well you wouldn’t, would you,” said Mr Lewcock, his clenched teeth making him sound like a not-very-good ventriloquist.

“It was you that said he went to auctions. I don’t know what you’re on about.”

“I never said he went. I said he bought. There is a difference. I’d have thought so, anyway.”

“Difference? What do you mean, difference?”

The Flaxborough Citizen was slowly lowered in order to give Sandra the full benefit of her husband’s long sigh of exasperation. “Mr Loughbury,” he said, with so much ironic emphasis that his voice tripped into falsetto, “never went to a sale. He knew what was coming up. He had bids put in for him. On his behalf. By other people. Right?”

And he looked fixedly at her thighs. This always made her nervous.

“Who by, for instance?”

“The old man, sometimes.” Lewcock meant the head of the firm of auctioneers for which he worked, old Mr “Noddy” Durham. “Mostly, he sent Clapper, though.”

“Clapper?”

“Clapper Buxton. His clerk.”

Sandra seemed to be thinking. “Did you ever do it?”

“Do what?”

“Bid for him. For Mr Loughbury.”

“I might have.”

“You never said.”

“So?” Lewcock put more contempt into his stare. Sandra felt her thighs ballooning with unwanted fat.

He looked away at last. He said “My God!” softly and went back behind the Flaxborough Citizen to suck his teeth.

Mr Loughbury was a life-long member of the Church of England, and a moving spirit in the Liberal persuasion until he transferred allegiance to the Conservative cause in 1957. He was elected to the chairmanship of the Flaxborough and District Unionist Association in 1970, an office which he held with distinction until illness compelled his recent resignation. Rose-growing was his favourite hobby. During the last war, Mr Loughbury achieved the rank of Captain in the Boys’ Training Corps and also served as a Special Constable.

“How delightfully inconsequential are our writers of obituaries,” remarked Miss Lucilla Edith Cavell Teatime, proprietress of The House of Yesteryear, in Northgate. “It would come as no surprise in the midst of so many verbal violets to be told that the late Mr Loughbury was a keen amateur housebreaker.”

Her companion smiled. Rather younger than Miss Teatime, he was a man with a full, well-nourished face, tending to beard-shadow around the chops but otherwise meticulously groomed. His voice, though kindly, possessed that curious timbre conferred by privileged education which puts the less privileged in mind of plums. “I trust you are jesting, Lucy,” he said.

“Of course I am, Edgar.” Miss Teatime sighed, and reached towards a small black packet on a shelf of the Welsh dresser beside her chair. “Unfortunately.”

Edgar—his name was Harrington, and to favoured clients Miss Teatime confided that his mother had been a Lady-in-Waiting at Windsor—left his seat at once and handed down the packet and a booklet of matches that lay beside it. He was a compact, but not small, man, probably in his early forties. His bearing and easy movements suggested fitness of an unaggressive kind, derived more likely (thought Miss Teatime) from a regimen of vicarage tennis and spare-time archaeology than from press-ups and squash.

Mr Harrington was the manager of Miss Teatime’s subsidiary enterprise, Gallery Ganby, in the village of Mumblesby, whither he had been drawn some six months previously, partly in response to the invitation of an old friend, but chiefly by reason of his own immediate desire to leave London.

“It would be pleasant upon this summers day,” said Miss Teatime, taking a small cigar from the packet that Edgar had placed by her coffee cup, “to shut up shop and to pay our respects at the house of mourning.”

“Is there a widow?”

“None is mentioned.”

“Then to whom can we pay our respects?”

Miss Teatime lit her cigar, then blew out the match as if disposing of the question. “There is always someone to receive condolences in the households of the well-heeled. It is part of the tidiness that wealth seems to induce.”

An “old boy” of Flaxborough Grammar School, Mr Loughbury pursued his education in Dublin, to which the family moved upon his father’s taking up a medical appointment in that city, and later attended Oxford University to study law. He was regarded as an expert on antiques, of which he built up a notable collection. A multitude of other interests included study of the history of fireworks and, in the practical field, work for the Distressed Ladies Relief Association.

“Would you have said that Richard Loughbury was an expert on antiques, Mr Purbright?”

The chief constable of Flaxborough, Mr Harcourt Chubb, spoke over his shoulder without looking round at his detective inspector. Mr Chubb commonly read the paper while standing, supported lightly against the fireplace and facing away from the main area of the office, as if to emphasize the triviality of such an occupation in the context of chief constabledom.

“He certainly seems to have been an expert on their acquisition, sir. We have his house on the special list.”

“I remember Mrs Chubb asking him to value something that had been in her family for quite a while; it was a snake—cobra, something of that kind—stuffed, of course—on a stand—and it had pegs fixed in it to hold ladies’ gloves. He didn’t strike me as being particularly knowledgeable.”

There was silence while the chief constable read to the end of the piece. Then, still without turning round, he raised his eyes from the paper and spoke with studied indifference to the ceiling cornice.

“There was some sort of a common law wife, I understand.”

“So I believe, sir.”

Mr Chubb waited a few more moments, said “Mmm,” and faced the room. He folded the Flaxborough Citizen neatly and held it out for Purbright to take. “I suppose,” he said, “that this makes her a common law widow.”

The funeral will take place tomorrow (Saturday) at Flaxborough Crematorium, following a service at Mumblesby Parish Church, conducted by the Vicar, the Rev. D. Kiverton, MA. Arrangements have been entrusted to Messrs K. Bradlaw and Son Ltd, undertakers, of Bride Street, Flaxborough.

“Oh, bloody hell!”

The sheafs of poly-tropulene gladioli trembled in their urns and brass tinkled in the tall case of coffin handle samples opposite the door. A stained glass hatch opened in the wall behind the long mahogany counter to disclose the almost exactly spherical head of a young man, steamy-faced, prematurely bald, with protuberant, anxious eyes and a 1930s film-star moustache.

“Now what’s wrong, father?” the young man asked. There was reproof in his tone: in his hand, which trembled, a chisel.

“Youd think they could get the sodding initial right for once. They’ve only to look at the advert.”

“The paper’s always getting things wrong. You know that. It’s not worth working up your blood pressure.”

Mr Bradlaw senior, correct initials N. A., tapped the offending column with his foot rule so angrily that the page ruptured. “And just look at that. Entrusted. ‘Arrangements have been entrusted...’ That’s what it says. Entrusted.” He looked up. “Of course, you know what they’re getting at?”

The undertaker’s general construction bore close resemblance to that of his son. They were both portly, of about the same height, and distinctly round-headed, with only a little pouch of a chin to mark the boundary between face and neck. Each had high colour, but to the son’s there was more shine. The father’s baldness, too, lacked lustre; the scalp now looked a size too big and it was pallid and deeply wrinkled as if it had been folded away for a long time in some dark cupboard.

“They’re not getting at anything, father. You’re too damn sensitive for your own good.”

Mr Bradlaws eyes bulged and their lids went into a rapid blink. “Just you watch the language, boy,” he admonished. His voice became husky. “You don’t have to spare my feelings, Melville. I suppose it’s nice to be ‘entrusted’ with things. I ought to be grateful. Old Nab the Lag. Alias K.”

“Father, for heaven’s sake! That was twenty years ago.”

Mr Bradlaw conveyed his opinion of time’s healing powers in a short, humourless laugh. He then looked at his watch and reached beneath the counter for the wing collar and black silk tie that he had discarded in order to read the inaccuracies and innuendos of the Flaxborough Citizen in greater comfort, reassumed them with a single lasso-like movement, and made for the door leading to the street.

At the door, he turned.

“Did you ring Alf Blossom about the extra Daimler?”

“It’s in the yard now. Oh, by the way...”

Melville’s face disappeared from the hatch. After a few moments, he came through the door from the workshop. He was holding a tangle of broad white ribbon.

“Nobody thought to say anything. Good job I noticed.” Nab Bradlaw snatched the ribbon. He said, “Jesus!” so tightly that it sounded like Cheeses, then: “What in hell does he think we’re running—a bloody honeymoon hotel?”

His son held out his hand. “I’ll get Betty to roll it up, then it can be put in the Daimler when it gets back from the Crem.”

For answer, Bradlaw stuffed Mr Blossom’s tribute to Hymen into a sample cremation casket. “Have it dyed first thing Monday. The bearers’ hats could do with jigging up a bit.”

Melville looked shocked. “You can’t pinch it. That stuff costs the earth.”

“Well, it’ll teach Alf Blossom not to entrust me with his jaunting gear another time, won’t it, boy? The trouble with Alf’s garage is that the boss has a one-track mind. That’s no way to run a decent business.”

“I don’t see that hiring wedding cars gives him a one-track mind, as you put it.”

Mr Bradlaw Senior lowered his head and regarded Melville with melancholy admonition. “Don’t you, boy? Don’t you really?” He sighed, and went out into Bride Street.

Chapter Two

The village of Mumblesby, or, to give it its full name, Mumblesby Overmarsh with Ganby, had been a ruined hamlet a quarter of a century before. Its church had begun to moulder through disuse; half the houses were empty; the watermill by the choked stream had been broken-wheeled and roofless. A few agricultural labourers, obedient to the calls of Farmers Benjamin Croll, Arthur Pritty, and the Gash Brothers, had still lived in tied cottages with their sad-faced wives and a flock of timid, staring, fleet-footed children, but they had seen the arrival of the first of the great machines, like green and yellow dinosaurs, that soon would replace them in the fields. The vicar of that time, an incredibly ancient man, was walled up with his dog, housekeeper and bottles of linctus in the grey, moss-streaked parsonage, unseen by his parishioners except once a week when the housekeeper changed his bedclothes: then, for a little while, the old man could be glimpsed sitting at the window of a downstairs room, wrapped in a sheet as if hopeful of a place in the next hearse that might chance along. There had been no traffic, though, past the parsonage in those days, either to the overgrown churchyard or, in the opposite direction, along the broad footpath to the Red Lion Inn, which the farmers could reach more conveniently in their Daimlers, Jaguars and Mercedes by the main road.

Today, Mumblesby was a village rescued and transformed. The church boasted a congregation once more, albeit a small one; the inn, a merry company (it had been re-named the Barleybird). Most of the cottages had been rebuilt and enlarged, some quite extravagantly. The millhouse was a restaurant. The primitive little school on the corner of Church Lane had become Gallery Ganby, where one could scarcely swing a chequebook without knocking down a spinning wheel or a warming pan. As for Mumblesby Manor, in 1960 as derelict as the squirearchy whose horses, dogs and women it once had housed, Rich Dick Loughburys money and the fancifulness of his builder—a Mr Ned Snell, cousin of the deputy town clerk of Flaxborough—had restored the fabric and embellished it with enough bows and bottle-glass to make it look like a Hollywood set for Pride and Prejudice.

The transfiguration of Mumblesby was, not unnaturally, the topic of conversation between Miss Lucy Teatime and her business associate, Mr Edgar Harrington, when their motor car drew into the village market place and halted facing the house of the deceased solicitor. They did not alight immediately, but sat at ease, gazing at the pristine brickwork, the flawless white paint, the elegant little skirt of railing before the front door.

“It is a saddening thought,” said Miss Teatime, “that most of these changes have come about in what I suppose I am in the habit of calling ‘my time’.”

“Since you came here from London, you mean?”

“Do you know, Edgar, it is all of fourteen years.” She turned to him, her eyes suddenly wide.

“I don’t believe it.”

“True, alas. I emigrated, as one might say, in 1967.”

Mr Harrington seemed to be doing a sum, but all he said was: “Harrods.”

The far-away look in Miss Teatimes eyes faltered, but only for a second. “I, too, have known bereavement,” she murmured.

“Uncle Macnamara?” suggested Mr Harrington, with every indication of concern. She made no reply. “But he is, ah, with us again now, surely?” he persisted, gently.

“Perhaps we should make our presence known at the house of mourning,” suggested Miss Teatime, removing the key from the ignition. At once, her companion left the car and was opening her door before she could put the key in her handbag.

She gave a little smile of gratification. “What a nice mover you are, Edgar.”

Mr Harrington lightly supported her elbow until she stood on the broad-paved market place. The support was a courtesy but in no degree a requirement. Miss Teatime, in her own, slightly old-world way, was a nice mover too, even if she entertained private doubts of her capacity these days to outdistance a determined store detective.

They walked to the front door. Miss Teatime glanced at a squat, not very clean black Ford van parked a few yards away. “Oh, dear—tradesmen,” she said, and looked for a bell push.

There was none. Choice lay between a laurel-wreath knocker in forged iron and, suspended from a little gallows at the side of the door, a brass stable bell. Edgar briskly wielded the knocker.

It was the owner of the van who opened the door.

“Yes?” whispered Mr Bradlaw. He was in full kit. In the breast pocket of the cutaway coat were his folded rule and, tucked beside it, a pair of thin black cotton gloves.

Miss Teatime leaned confidentially towards him. “Callers,” she breathed. “Old acquaintance. Pay respect.” A wisp of handkerchief hovered a moment by the corner of her mouth. Mr Bradlaw quite liked the suggestion of fragrance that reached him. He did not know that it was called Liaison plus tard.

After brief consideration, the undertaker made a movement with his head indicative of inner rooms. “You know Mr Loughbury’s, er...” (he was whispering still) “his...you know the lady, do you?”

Miss Teatime allowed a watery smile to break through her grief. “I believe that to understand is to know,” she said. “Don’t you?”

Before Mr Bradlaw could think of a reply adequate to such profundity, he realized that the lady and gentleman had both stepped past him into the house.

“Who’s that?” A woman’s voice, not far off, cheery and with a certain roughness. Youngish. Decidedly local accent.

Mr Bradlaw felt the back of his head with full palm, as if deciding whether it was ripe enough. He looked at Miss Teatime. “You’d better go through,” he whispered.

The coffin was the first thing they saw. Set upon draped trestles in the centre of the big, light room, it dominated everything else. Not for the first time, Miss Teatime wondered at the sheer bulk of what Mr Bradlaw called, almost affectionately, one of his “overcoats”. One expected something about the length and girth of its occupant with just a bit added on so as not to look mean. In the event, the thing was overpowering—not so much a box as a blockhouse. Why so deep! All that wood incongruously new-looking, unnaturally glossy...rather like toffee...

“Have you come to see him?”

The question was put flatly but with a hint of shyness. A girl with slight physique and rather dingy clothes was standing by an open cabinet at the far side of the room.

“I’m sorry?” Mr Harrington assumed an expression of anxiety to please, tempered by hardness of hearing. Miss Teatime took over. “I rather think that will not be necessary, my dear,” she said.

The girl shrugged. She had thin, but not weak shoulders. The arms, too, were thin, more so than the wrists promised; they, like the ankles disclosed by ragged grey flannel slacks, had been hardened and thickened by work.

She came nearer. An open, fresh-complexioned face; straight, light hair, randomly brushed; narrow nose and pale lips; eyes grey, interested, bold and wary at the same time. Narrow also the lively neck. Age somewhere between thirty-five and forty. Miss Teatime saw a girl; Edgar Harrington a woman.

“You can have a look if you want,” the girl offered again. “Nab won’t mind. I mean, if you’re relations...” Bradlaw, who had followed them in, stepped past them busily. Suddenly there was a screwdriver in his hand.

Miss Teatime shook her head. She touched his arm. “Oh, no, it is most kind of you, but...”—she groped for the prescribed formula—“...but we would rather remember him as he was.”

The girl glanced quickly from one to another. She gave her nose a rabbit-twitch of puzzlement. “Hell, he’s not gone off, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Miss Teatime held out her hand. The girl seized it forthrightly. Her smile prevailed over nervousness; it was diffident, boyish. She heard out the introductions and said: “I’m Mrs Loughbury. Zoe. Well, Zoe Claypole, actually. But Dick had a sort of special licence thing going.” She made a mock-posh face at Bradlaw. “The neighbours, don’t you know.”

Mr Bradlaw took his leave after rehearsing the rest of the day’s programme in solemn undertone. Zoe watched the departure of his van. It made a lot of noise and a lot of smoke and seemed to be difficult to steer.

“He’s very kind, you know,” the girl said, half to herself. “More than need go with the job.”

She turned from the window. “Right, now we can have a drink. I don’t dare get it out while Nab’s here. They reckon he’ll even sup embalming fluid.”

Zoe crossed to a walnut corner cupboard from which she drew out and flourished a pair of bottles. “There’s all sorts. Just say what you fancy.” She scrutinized one bottle narrowly against the light. “Christ, looks like a urine sample.” Then, brightening “How about a sherry? There’s a nice one here that’s not a bit sour. Poor Dickie thought it was terrible, but he stuck to whisky mostly.” She rummaged more deeply. “Hey, here’s some of that lovely yucky green stuff. A boyfriend of mine used to give it to me mixed with Guinness. Jeez...”

“Whisky, I think,” said Miss Teatime, “would be very acceptable.” She glanced at Mr Harrington, who said quickly: “Yes, yes indeed.”

Zoe said “Half a tick” and fetched three tumblers from another room. She half-filled two of them, pouring the whisky with bold dispatch, like disinfectant. Into the third glass, more lovingly, she slurped sweet sherry.

Miss Teatime raised her tumbler. “To the dear departed.” Her companion made a reverent murmur.

“Cheers,” said Zoe, then, as if on an afterthought, went again to the cupboard and topped up her sherry with crème de menthe. She winked fondly at the coffin lid and took a sip. She closed her eyes. “Bloody sight better than with Guinness.”

Miss Teatime looked about her. “You have a very beautiful home, Mrs Loughbury.” Edgar pursed his lips and nodded.

Zoe sighed. “I’m very lucky, really.”

Not half, reflected Mr Harrington, eyeing a group of enamelled and silver-gilt snuffboxes. He also noted the pair of Meissen figures that set off a rosewood table (Florentine?—he thought it probable) and the miniature, aglow in its collar of elaborate gilt, depicting one of the children of Louis XVI. Concerning most of the pictures, he was less confident, but one—whose gaiety of colour and exquisite geometries proclaimed Klee—struck him as almost certainly an original.

Zoe saw him looking. She pouted at it disparagingly.

“Like it, do you?”

He said nothing, but peered closer. It was, it had to be.

“Reckon I could do better myself,” said Zoe. “The trouble with getting presents from people is that you’ve got to keep them where they can be seen.”

Miss Teatime joined Edgar in regarding the picture. “It was a gift, was it?” she inquired indifferently over her shoulder.

“Not to me.” Zoe seemed to find that notion amusing. “To Dickie. Instead of a fee, I expect. He was soft about bills. Poor duck.”

“Ah, like doctors.”

“Pardon me?”

“Doctors,” explained Miss Teatime, “once were known to accept payment in kind. Before the National Health Service. I had not realized that solicitors might find themselves similarly placed.”

Zoe said, “Oh yes, Mr Loughbury quite often got presents. That could have been a reason.”

“I rather like it, you know,” said Miss Teatime. It sounded like a concession.

“You don’t!”

“Yes, I do. In a way.”

“Perhaps,” put in Mr Harrington, “Mrs Loughbury would consider selling it. If she does not care for it, I mean. I cannot pretend that I do, either, but if you would permit me...”His hand, wallet-seeking, insinuated itself beneath the lapel of his jacket.

Miss Teatime regarded him smilingly for a moment, then: “Stop it, Edgar; you look like Napoleon. That picture’s market value is something in the region of eighteen thousand pounds and well you know it.” She turned to Zoe. “I’m sorry, my dear, I have not had him long and he is not yet house-trained.”

The girl was staring incredulously at the painting. “Eighteen thousand,” she echoed.

“Thereabouts. The gentleman who painted it was very famous. He was called Mr Klee.” Edgar was now the young person’s guide to great art.

Zoe nudged him. “You were trying to take me to the cleaners, old mate.” Her forefinger jabbed sharply into the expensive suiting in the region of Edgar’s diaphragm. “Weren’t you?” Her expression had lost none of its amiability.

Edgar winced. He appeared to contract. “I was joking.”

For a second, Zoes regard wandered to the coffin. “Dickie was a bit of a joker,” she said, gently. “But about money—never.”

They talked of the future. Zoe said she had no plans to move to a smaller house, or to move from the village at all.

Her late husband had enjoyed good social connections, of which she, Zoe, was anxious to take advantage now that she had the opportunity (Dickie had always tended to be overconsiderate, bless him, with the result that she had been somewhat isolated from Mumblesby society). There were lots of things she wanted to help with: the church garden pageant, the Conservative gala, the Gentry and Yeomanry Association, and, of course, the Hunt—that especially.

The solicitor’s choice of whisky proved to be very much to Miss Teatime’s taste. Mr Harrington, all further jests forsworn, was also now paying its virtues due attention.

The past was touched upon.

“Were you brought up in these parts, Mrs Loughbury?” Miss Teatime inquired.

“Zoe.”

“Very well. Zoe.”

“No, not around here. Flax. My old man kept a pub, as a matter of fact.”

Mr Harrington looked pleased to hear it. So did Miss Teatime, who asked which one and insisted that she be addressed henceforth as Lucy.

“Oh, a real grotty old dump. Saracen’s Head.”

“Off Church Street?”

“That’s it.”

“A delightful inn,” exclaimed Miss Teatime. “How can you call it grotty? I remember your father from my first days in Flaxborough. Fred—am I right? He and some other gentlemen in the bar taught me the game of dominoes.” She turned to Edgar. “What a small world, is it not?”

Zoe was no less moved by the coincidence. “Christ! It was you, was it? Dad often talked about this old bird with a five-pound-note voice who pretended she didn’t know a blank from a six-spot and then took ten whiskies in one session off the poor old sod.” ¹ Admiration shone in her eye.

¹ related in Lonelyheart 4122

“Is your father still alive?”

“He passed away last February.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Mum’s still on the go. They were going to put her into that Twilight Close place but she wasn’t having any. Dick was very good. He got the new landlord at the Saracens to let Mum stay on in a flat of her own.”

“It must be—must have been—advantageous to have so persuasive a husband, Zoe.”

The relict smiled reflectively. “There were no flies on Dickie.” She looked up. “Oh, I beg your pardon, Lucy; p’haps that sounds like talking disrespectfully of the dead, you being a friend of his but it is true. I mean, not sharp, nothing like that, but...” She plucked the air.

“Shrewd,” supplied Miss Teatime.

“Yep.” And Zoe’s raised fingers snapped. “That’s it. A real gentleman, but always on the ball.”

Miss Teatime said they would have to be going. It had been most kind of Zoe to allow them to mark in a personal way the sad conclusion of a long acquaintanceship.

Zoe collected their glasses. She saw them to the door.

“Glad to have met you.” She stood on the step and waved cheerily as they entered the car.

Miss Teatime, who was driving, waved back. Mr Harrington held a limp hand at shoulder level for a second. Then they were out of the Market Place and on the Flaxborough road.

“I like Zoe,” stated Miss Teatime, firmly.

Mr Harrington made a murmur of qualified agreement. “There is,” he said, “something rather refreshing about the articulate working-class girl, rara avis as she is. A mixture of eagerness and naïvete.”

Miss Teatime smiled at the road ahead. “You supposed, did you not, that Zoe was eager to get rid of that painting, and naïve enough to part with it to the first person to turn up with a cheque-book and a Marlborough accent.”

“I should not have put it quite in those words.”

“No, perhaps I express myself vulgarly, but you really must make greater effort to remember that you are no longer on the Bucks and Berks circuit, Edgar.”

“I am scarcely likely to forget it,” said Edgar, bitterly.

“Ah, but you do, dear boy; you do. You are progressing nicely in general, but certain differences you have not fully grasped. The most important is that the rich in London, though unprincipled, are at pains to conceal the fact, which makes them vulnerable; whereas a certain cachet attaches to knavery in these parts, even at the higher levels of society.”

“I still think that Zoe—is that what she was called, Zoe?—would have parted with that Klee if you had not chopped my legs off so obligingly.”

Miss Teatime gave a little laugh. “Oh, Edgar, your feelings are hurt!” She took one hand from the wheel and patted his thigh. “Now if you promise not to sulk I shall tell you something that I saw this morning and you did not. It was lying on that music stool beside the walnut cabinet.”

“It being...?” Mr Harrington was looking monumentally unconcerned.

“A Brownlow trade and auction guide. Now, then, by whom would you rather have had your legs chopped off—me or Zoe?”

Chapter Three

“Your name, please, sir?” The request came from a young man with carefully combed hair and stylish eyeglasses who held a pencil in one hand and in the other a small notebook with entries in disproportionately large writing.

“Purbright. Detective Inspector W. W for Walter.”

Behind the young man’s glasses, a sudden alertness, excitement, hope. He clawed down the name and got the spelling wrong. Purbright, stooping a little, patiently gave it again, letter by letter. He always had considered name-taking at funerals a rotten job.

The reporter, too recent a recruit to Flaxborough journalism to have suspected guile in the decision to “let” him undertake so important an assignment, wondered if this tall, kindly man with something still of corn colour in his greying hair would confide in him the nature of his inquiries. Hanky-panky with the will? An insurance fraud? Arrest imminent, perhaps. An autopsy? Oh, God, let there be an exhumation...

“Representing,” Purbright added clearly and slowly, “the chief constable, Mr Harcourt Chubb.”

“Oh,” the young man looked disappointed. He turned a page.

“Two B’s in Chubb,” Purbright said. Bowing his head, he passed through the low doorway from the porch into the darkness of the church.

Next in line was Mr Ernest Hideaway, the estate agent and town councillor, a hearty, bald-headed man with lips so prominent and restless with incipient jests they conferred upon him an unfortunate resemblance to a foraging cod. “You know me, boy,” he said to the reporter (who didn’t) and with a wink he was gone, followed by Mrs Hideaway, who whispered imperiously as she passed: “And don’t forget the OBE this time.”

“Who was that, please?” the young man inquired piteously of a tall, wooden-visaged gentleman wearing huge black spectacles. But the doyen of Flaxborough solicitors heard him not, nor halted his stately progress through the porch. “Mr Justin Scorpe,” he boomed in transit. “Representing the Law Society.”

The young man scribbled it down, adding “OBE” and “Mrs”—an endowment that would do nothing the following Friday to help discount a long cherished public suspicion of scandalous liaison between widower Scorpe and Mrs Bertha Hideaway.

Within the parish church of St Dennis the Martyr, between forty and fifty people had assembled already. A dozen or so were Mumblesby residents; most of the others had come out from Flaxborough. Their association with Richard Loughbury had been, in the main, professional rather than personal, and they wore now the air not so much of mourners as of shareholders, meeting for the declaration of an already known final dividend.

Purbright for a while loitered unobtrusively at the back of the church. He recognized most of those who had been shown to seats. Clay, headmaster of Flaxborough Grammar School, the pink, tight skin of his face reflecting the altar candlelight; old Noddy Durham, the auctioneer, head going like a woodpecker’s; Ferguson, police surgeon; Clapper Buxton, Loughbury’s confidential clerk; a woman called Mrs Ackroyd, who did the secretarial work and funeral-attending for the chairmen of several Flaxborough Town Council Committees.

Mr Bradlaw’s ushers had separated the Flaxborough and Mumblesby contingents so that the smaller—the locals—sat on the right of the central aisle behind the two empty pews reserved for members of the family. No communication of any kind passed from one side to the other, once Mr Hideaway’s salutations had been repulsed by cold stares. The general feeling in both camps now seemed to be one of mild, resigned boredom, in keeping with the sounds that were being gently toothpasted forth by an invisible organist.

After about ten minutes, the ushers filed out of the church preparatory to doubling as bearers. Purbright moved nearer the assembly and took a corner seat in the shelter of a pillar. Soon a shuffling sound reached him from behind. Also a cold draught.

“I am the resurrection and the life...”

Ponderously and reluctantly, the members of the congregation clambered to their feet. They sounded like a score of Counts of Monte Cristo emerging from the Chateau d’If.

As soon as the procession drew level with him, the inspector tilted his bowed head so as to see who was going by.

The Vicar of Mumblesby—or so Purbright assumed him to be, for he was a recent incumbent—looked surprisingly athletic as he made his slow stride in skirt and cassock. He intoned the words of the service loudly and musically, and looked directly upward every now and again as if to make sure that God was paying attention.

Purbright let the coffin slide past his line of sight and awaited, not without a degree of vulgar curiosity, a first view of Richard Loughbury’s widow.

He was disappointed.

The coffin was followed by three mourners only, all men.

They wore short, firm-shouldered black overcoats and from the right hand of each hung a black, new-looking hat. The hats looked disproportionately big.

One man, older than the others, walked slightly in the lead. His face wore a sternness that Purbright fancied expressive of annoyance rather than grief. A brother of the dead man? Purbright believed he had heard mention of one. The others, perhaps, were his sons, nephews of “Rich Dick”. The inspector looked for family resemblance. The younger men, though, kept their gaze resolutely on their own slow-pacing feet.

Where, then, was the late solicitor’s consort: the wife, common-law or otherwise, of his bosom?

Purbright was not alone in being exercised by this question. Outside the church, a worried undertaker was interrogating the driver of the hearse.

“But, Christ, you must have seen her. She was at the house.”

“Not when I came away, she wasn’t.”

Mr Bradlaw, pop-eyed with agitation, thrust stubby fingers through imaginary hair. “I’ve known some cockups in my time, but we’ve never mislaid a bloody widow before.”

“P’raps she went a different way round. P’raps she’s in the church now.”

Bradlaw regarded the driver with a mixture of pity and ferocity and scuttled back into the porch, where he sat and attempted to compose himself with the aid of a slug of gin, conjured from the tail of his coat. He was still hunched disconsolately on the stone bench when he heard footsteps hastening across gravel and some distressful deep breathing. In the doorway appeared a short, plump woman, bespectacled and red-faced, grey hair straggling from beneath a Sunday-best hat. She seized Bradlaw’s arm and brought her face close. Bradlaw tried to conceal his recent indulgence by breathing sideways out of the corner of his mouth, then saw that she was too upset to notice.

“You’ll never,” she gasped, “guess what they’ve done, Mr Bradlaw. Never.” She straightened up and made sure her hat was still on. Then she glared at the door beyond which the intoning of the vicar could be heard. “You’ll have to tell them to stop. If you don’t, I shall.”

Bradlaw, getting to his feet, saw her reach for the latch. He hastened to her side.

“You can’t just burst in there, Mrs Claypole. The service has started.”

“It’s disgraceful!” she said. “Him not in the ground yet, and them doing that to her in her own house.”

Bradlaw put his hands on her shoulders and tried to calm and reroute her at the same time. “If only you’ll tell me what’s happened,” he pleaded.

“Happened!” repeated Mrs Claypole, explosive with indignation. “You’d better ask them in there what’s happened!”

The woman was immovable. Worse, Bradlaw realized that she had managed to unlatch the door and wedge it partly open with her hip. He got one eye to the aperture and peered towards the congregation. There were pale blurs in the gloom. Turned, what’s-going-on faces. Oh, God, and here was one of them coming out...

Inspector Purbright, whose unwise election to sit further from the front than anyone else made him the clearest possible candidate for dealing with trouble at the back, shut the door quietly but firmly behind him and besought the lady to tell him her troubles.

“It’s my Zoe,” declared Mrs Claypole. “They’ve locked her up, those devils have. In her own house.”

Mr Bradlaw remarked tetchily that she might have said so before. “Mrs Claypole,” he explained to Purbright, “is the mother of the lady who looked after Mr Loughbury.” His tone lowered a fraction. “I was rather expecting her—this lady’s daughter, I mean—to be in the church. That was the arrangement.”

Mrs Claypole took a great gulp of air. “Expecting her to be in church!” She turned to Purbright and regarded him narrowly. “You’re a policeman, aren’t you?”

“I am, yes.”

She pointed at the door. “That ought to be stopped at once.”

For a moment, Purbright appeared to be giving the proposal serious consideration. Bradlaw gaped and lost some colour; the vision of a squad of constables commandeering one of his “occasions” (as he called them) had been a recurrent waking nightmare ever since the Carobleat cremation scandal in the fifties. ²

² related in Coffin Scarcely Used

But the inspector counselled instead that the most sensible, and doubtless the kindest, course would be to secure the release of the detainee.

After a token show of further truculence, Mrs Claypole allowed him to lead her to the churchyard gate and along the path to the Manor House.

Mr Bradlaw glanced aloft in pious commiseration, and took another quick swig of gin.

Purbright and Mrs Claypole made entry to the Manor House through a conservatory at the side, where Mrs Claypole disinterred a key from a pot of compost. They passed through a big double kitchen and along a cork-tiled corridor hung with framed illustrations from ancient cookery books.

On reaching the hall, Mrs Claypole made at once for the stairs. Purbright glanced about him as he followed. He saw lots of white doors with sharply defined panelling. The ceiling was set about with mouldings meticulously restored. Everywhere, whites and ivories: they invested the central well with a cool pearl-like glow.

“All right, love!” bellowed Mrs Claypole, halfway up the staircase. “We’re coming!”

At the top, she led Purbright to a passageway off the main corridor and on a slightly lower level. She indicated a door, then called out again at undiminished volume, “Are you there, love?”

The cry produced an echoing resonance. Bathroom, thought Purbright. A woman’s voice within said something he didn’t catch.

“Right then!” Mrs Claypole straightened up and stepped to the left of the door. She looked at Purbright with an expression of confidence and encouragement. He realized that he stood to be favoured with the role of shoulder-charging rescuer.

“I think,” he suggested, “that a key would be best, if we can find one.”

Mrs Claypole bent to the door and yelled: “Is there a key, duckie?”

This time the reply was audible. “Oh, mum, of course there’s a bloody key. How would I be locked in if there wasn’t?”

“I shall look around, if I may,” Purbright said. “Keys often are interchangeable.”

Mrs Claypole nodded. She was looking much more cheerful. Better for her than funerals, Purbright thought. He wandered off, looking at keyholes.

No other doors were locked, it seemed. Few, though, were without keys. Purbright began collecting them, after first lightly pencilling matching numbers on keys and door posts.

Several rooms were empty or occupied only by pieces of furniture obviously intended for deployment elsewhere. Some of Loughbury’s acquisitions in the antique market, assumed Purbright. Most were clearly of fine workmanship and authentic styling. They included a richly carved wooden chair with a very long back, a grandfather clock, the face of which was full of suns and moons, and a curious little lidded table with what looked like tea caddies suspended beneath.

Three bedrooms were furnished for use, expensively but not unconventionally. The largest, containing a double bed, unmade, and a dressing table covered with bottles and part-packets of chocolate and sweets, smelled of scent.

Scent. Purbright sniffed. Scent and...not kippers surely? He extracted the key from the door and made his pencil marks. Amblesby, the old Flaxborough coroner, he mused, used to nibble kippers in bed. But they hardly qualified, even by Mrs Claypole’s homely standards, as funeral meats. Smoked salmon, now...

He swung about, suddenly alarmed, and saw it almost at once. A thin feather of smoke, curling from the edge of a door in the opposite wall of the bedroom.

Purbright strode past the bed, reached for the door’s polished brass handle, then paused. He touched the metal. It was cool. So was the door itself. Guardedly, he opened it a few inches.

There was a fair amount of smoke in the room beyond but it was by no means impenetrable. Purbright saw no sign of flame. The room was much smaller than the bedroom; he supposed it to be a dressing room. Clothing certainly it contained—a pile of dresses and underwear in the further corner, smouldering steadily. He pulled the door shut.

Purbright hurried back to a second bathroom which he had noted a few minutes earlier. He set the bath taps running and soaked the largest towel he could see.

When he returned to the dressing room, the first flames were emerging sulkily from the clothing. He cast the wet towel over the pile, and gathered as much as he could in a tight mass within it, then ran to the bath.

After two more trips, nothing remained in the dressing room but a scattering of blackened scraps of cloth and some fragments melted upon the casing of a small electric heater. Over this somebody must have draped the clothes in ignorance of its being switched on.

The smell of burning accompanied Purbright when, at last, he presented himself at the side of Mrs Claypole and prepared to work through his key collection. She broke off the conversation she had been holding with her daughter, stared at Purbright and sniffed accusingly. “There’s something on fire.”

He introduced the first key, and wriggled it about with great concentration, his eye level with it. “On fire? No, no, nothing’s on fire. Look, hold these, do you mind?” He selected a second key from the bundle and handed her the rest. “Bit of cloth smouldering. Out now. Nothing to get worried about.” He squinted along the barrel of the next key.

“Cloth?” echoed Mrs Claypole. “What cloth? Smouldering? Where?”

“Out now,” muttered Purbright. Without looking at her, he held up his hand for another key.

It fitted and, with some resistance, turned.

For the first time since getting involved in the business, Purbright found himself wondering what would confront him when the door opened. He heard, as if it were an old recording, the never-believed claim of Detective Constable Harper: And there she was, Sarge, absolutely starkers!

“I think you’ll find you can get in now, Mrs Claypole.” He turned and stood gazing back along the passage.

Zoe was greeted by her mother as if she had just been winched down from the top of the Empire State Building.

“Oh, mum, shut up for Christ’s sake.” She pulled straight her modest black frock (DC Harper would have been much disappointed) and grimaced at the bathroom mirror.

“Who was it, then?” inquired her mother. “Who locked that door, Zoe? Who was it locked that door, that’s what I want to know.”

Zoe spotted Purbright’s modestly withdrawn figure; he had moved to the corner of the main corridor. She pointed and made a Who’s-that? face.

“You know who it is,” whispered her mother. “You saw him that day our Douglas was up in court. He was the one with those papers.”

“Oh, shit, not a policeman?”

“Listen, my girl, you’d be in a bad way if it wasn’t for him, whether he’s a policeman or not. As a matter of fact”—a note of self-congratulation—“he’s an inspector.” Mrs Claypole turned and raised her voice to normal: “Excuse me, er... Mr...”

Purbright walked back. He made a small bow to Zoe. “Are you all right, Mrs Loughbury?” There had been no equivocation in his choice of phrase. Zoe smiled her gratitude.

The mother produced a smile also, but it was a proprietory one. “Mrs Claypole-Loughbury, actually,” she explained to Purbright, and looked as if she were going to say some more.

The younger woman took her arm brusquely. “Come on, mum; I’ve been perched on the edge of that bloody bath so long that I’ve got a crease in my arse.”

They moved off towards the stairs.

Purbright spoke, levelly but earnestly, about his discovery in the dressing room. Zoe agreed that, now that he’d mentioned it, there certainly was a bloody pong in the air. Mrs Claypole, at full throttle of alarm once more, repeatedly demanded who had been so wicked as to set fire to the house.

Purbright showed them the ruined but now harmless tangle of charred clothes in the bath. The sight moved Mrs Claypole to new transports of indignation. Then he led them to the bedroom and its annexe.

“The heater is off now, of course,” he said, “but I don’t doubt that it was the cause of the trouble. It—and a certain degree of carelessness, I’m afraid.” He really did sound regretful; there was nothing admonitory in his tone.

Mrs Claypole exercised no such restraint. “Zoe, you little idiot! What on earth were you thinking about? All those lovely things. And the whole house could have gone up. Then what would you have done?”

“Gone up with it, I suppose.” The retort lacked spike; Zoe had only half-listened to her mother. She stood regarding the heater, its bronze enamel streaked and crusted with black, rather as if her mind were elsewhere.

Purbright put no questions. But while Mrs Claypole peered, clucking, at evidence of near-disaster, he watched the younger woman.

After a few moments, she looked up. The inspector followed her gaze.

He saw, set high into the wall, what appeared to be a stoutly constructed bird cage.

Almost at once, her regard moved, met his own, then fell. “You must be thinking I’m a pretty stupid cluck.”

Purbright shrugged. “We all do silly things at times. When we’re under stress, especially.” He looked at his watch. “You’d better get back to the church. I’ll just hang on here a minute to make sure everything’s safe.” He glanced from mother to daughter. “Provided you don’t have any objection, of course.”

Mrs Claypole said: “It’s very kind of you, inspector.” She shuddered at the heater. “Even the thought of fire scares me to death. Just the thought.” She pulled Zoe’s arm through her own. “Come on, then: I don’t know what they’ll be thinking in church.”

“Getting out for a drink, I should think. What else?” Zoe allowed Mrs Claypole to lead her from the room. But in the instant of passing through the door she glanced once again at the cage on the wall.

Chapter Four

As soon as Zoe and her mother arrived at the church, Mr Bradlaw took them into his personal custody and conducted them slowly and with dignity up the central aisle. The Rev. Alan Kiverton, noticing the new procession, stopped praying. He took delivery of the two ladies and shepherded them to the front pew where he proceeded to signify by gestures regretful but mandatory that the three gentlemen already installed should yield their places.

Mr Stan Loughbury, wholesale ironmonger, and his two sons remained motionless. They stared stonily ahead. The rest of the congregation, sensing a more than ordinary case of bloodymindedness, craned and rustled.

Five seconds went by. Mr Kiverton, in truth, dismayed but committed now to relegation, summoned facial expressions in pairs: anger and conciliation, blame and forgiveness, exasperation and patience—rather like a machine designed to consume its own smoke.

All this Anglican diplomacy had no effect. The situation, it seemed to the now thoroughly intrigued onlookers, was one of siege.

Then, so suddenly that no one afterwards could quite recall the course of events, the two younger recalcitrants were rising painfully to their feet. At a list suggestive of a strong side wind, they quit the pew. Behind them, gripping an ear of each, was Zoe.

Mr Loughbury, senior, seemed to be considering a reprisal of some kind; then he, too, abandoned the pew. Zoe immediately pushed her mother into one of the vacated places and sat down herself, as bland of feature as a nun.

Mr Kiverton remained standing where he was just long enough to feel assured that the Loughburys would not regroup for a counter attack, then went back to the altar steps and got a hymn started with his confident, declamatory tenor.

During the singing, the displaced mourners briefly conferred and then marched out in line, angrily brushing black hats on black sleeves. Mr Bradlaw, who hated the slightest disruption of his arrangements, gloomily watched their departure in the direction of the car park and the Barleybird Inn.

He spoke to his son.

“That’s that, then. Now there’s no family at all. None of the other lot came, you know.”

“Did you find out why?”

“Oh, I knew why, son. Didn’t have to ask.”

“Because of her, was it?”

“Course it was.”

“I don’t see that it matters. His wife was dead. He could please himself.”

Mr Bradlaw snorted mirthlessly at this display of simple-mindedness. “Oh, dear, oh, dear.”

His son flushed. “Well, why not? What have his relations to get worked up about?”

A deep sigh. Words squeezed painfully past Mr Bradlaws exasperation. “Money, boy...mon-ey!”

The departure of Richard Loughbury’s brother and nephews was noticed by Inspector Purbright as he looked out of one of the windows of the Manor House, but he did not interpret it in terms of family disagreement. It was, he supposed, simply a sign that the service was at an end. The cortege would soon be leaving for the crematorium at Flaxborough. There was not much time left in which he could convincingly claim to be taking precautions against fire breaking out again.

He already had searched thoroughly the bathroom in which Zoe had been locked. Its window, an old-fashioned guillotine, was painted shut at the bottom and he doubted if the woman could have reached to slip a key out of the narrow gap near the ceiling. Of course, she might have hidden it beneath her own clothing.

Or was her mothers suggestion the true one? That someone in the corridor had turned the key while Zoe was washing, pocketed it and quietly rejoined the others down-stairs as they were leaving for the church?

Purbright realized that either supposition could be justified. Here was a man’s mistress who might well be deemed an upstart and an interloper by his family and friends. Rather than facing out their hostility at the funeral, she was not to be blamed for dodging the occasion by a small subterfuge.

Conversely, a relative who felt strongly opposed to her preseace certainly could have contrived to forestall it by the same means.

In neither case, Purbright reminded himself, had there been infringement of the law, other than of a pretty footling kind.

So why was he now wasting time wandering from room to room in Mumblesby Manor when he could be on his way to what was left of Saturday afternoon in his own garden in Flaxborough?

It was the thought of the pile of smouldering clothes in the dressing room that disturbed him. Explanations came to mind readily enough, simple and perfectly reasonable explanations. Heaters did get switched on thoughtlessly, even accidentally. And, wrong as it was for clothes to get tossed over them, that did happen—especially when people were worried or in haste.

For the fifth time, Purbright entered the small room where the fire had been. It contained little. Beneath the window was an openwork cane chest, half filled with bed linen. A matching cane chair stood between it and the electric heater. Next to the door leading into the passage was a glazed earthenware jar, two feet tall, from which protruded two very old golf clubs and a shooting stick. The only other portable object was a japanned deed box, much battered and bearing splashes of anciently spilled paint, its lid secured by a small and considerably newer-looking padlock. This box stood just behind the communicating door from the bedroom, as though it had been placed there as a stop.

All these things Purbright gave long, thoughtful scrutiny without disturbing them. Then he went over to the one object in the room for which he felt totally unable to account and began to examine it in detail.

He saw that bird cage was not, after all, a fitting description. A cage, yes—about eight inches square and standing an inch and half out from the wall—but the bars were nearly a quarter of an inch thick, and made, he thought, of stainless steel. Behind this grille was glass, of what thickness Purbright could not judge, and behind the glass a recess had been cut into the wall to the depth of a brick.

The arrangement was of the kind within which a jeweller might display a single piece of such value as to require special precautions against theft or damage. What Purbright saw in the recess, though, was not jewellery. It was a lump of wood.

Roughly rectangular and four or five inches long, it looked as if it had been split away from a bigger whole.

A card was propped against it. Purbright read the five words typed on the card.

Fragment of the True Cross.

The odd thing (if all this were not odd enough) was that he could see no way in which the exhibit might be withdrawn. All the bars were set solidly in cement. None was hinged. There was no sign of an opening at the back of the recess; in any case, even if one existed, it could be reached only by climbing some fifteen feet up an outside wall.

The “Fragment” clearly had been intended to remain a permanent and inaccessible exhibit. Purbright shrugged and turned away; he was aware that the zeal of collectors was liable to outstrip rationality.

Cars were being started in the Market Place. The mourners, or some of them, would soon be on their way to Flaxborough for the short ceremony at the Crematorium. Others might be calling back at the house. Purbright had no wish to be trapped into giving account of himself.

Before leaving, he pulled the heater’s plug from the wall socket. Then he took hold of the cane chair with the intention of moving it to a safer distance from the heater.

It was surprisingly heavy.

A number of underclothes had been heaped untidily in the chair. Purbright pulled one or two aside. He felt something hard. He removed more of the clothing and saw a squat, red-painted cylinder. It was a bottle of propane gas.

Cautiously, Purbright eased the valve open a fraction. There was an immediate lively hiss. He screwed the valve shut and carried the propane downstairs. He found the kitchen again and placed the bottle on a big, wooden-topped table.

Near the window was a telephone. He rang Flaxborough Police Station.

Detective Sergeant Sidney Love sounded sympathetic. Funerals he considered only marginally less tedious than weddings, but at least they generally were over more quickly. To be delayed at one—and one, moreover, that was entirely someone else’s pidgin—struck him as the worst kind of luck. Yes, of course he would tell Mrs Purbright; and yes, he would go round to Market Street and ask if he might have a copy of the Citizen’s list of mourners.

“What do you know about bottled gas, Sid? In particular, the difference between butane and propane?”

“Isn’t butane the one for house heaters? I think propane’s the high-pressure one. Welding, that sort of thing.”

“I take it, then, that it would be pretty foolish to put a propane bottle on the fire.”

Love thought, but was not sure, that he had been presented with a rhetorical question, so he returned an all-purpose answer in the form of a throaty puffing sound—a “pwhu-urr!”

“Oh, and Sid...”

“Yes?”

“When old Loughbury last submitted a list of the property in his house at Mumblesby, do you remember if it included a religious relic of some kind?”

“There was a chalice that he’d got marked up at a couple of thousand.”

“Not a chalice,” Purbright said. “A relic. Something supposedly holy.”

“A bone?” Love suggested, dubiously.

“A bit of wood, actually.” The inspector knew when he had hit a dead end.

“Don’t recall any wood,” said the sergeant.

“Never mind.”

It was nearly an hour before Purbright heard a car draw up before the house and a key turn in the front door. He went at once into the hall.

Zoe, entering first, looked surprised. She was followed by her mother. Mrs Claypole glanced at Purbright’s feet. He wondered if he were suspected of having had them up on the furniture.

Zoe began to pull off her gloves. No one had spoken.

“I must apologize,” Purbright said, “if I’ve overstayed my welcome but—”

“That’s all right. Any time,” Zoe interrupted him. She stuffed her gloves into the pocket of her coat. “My God, I’m dying for a cuppa.”

Mrs Claypole said she would make one after she’d been upstairs. She began, ponderously, to climb them.

“I was saying I’m sorry to be still here, but there is a matter I think I ought to talk to you about,” Purbright said to Zoe.

“You’d better come in the lounge, then.” She opened a door. “Is Mum to bring you a cup?”

He said that was kind of her. Zoe waved the inspector to a deep armchair. He stood by it, regarding her, waiting for her to sit.

When she moved to a chair, it was to kneel in it, one arm hanging over the back. The attitude put Purbright in mind of a schoolgirl too big for her age.

“I should like you to tell me,” he began, “what ideas you have concerning this bathroom business.” He saw a sudden upturn of the eyes in exasperation. “I am not asking without a very good reason.”

“Oh, dear, trust my blessed mother to find a policeman without even looking. I should think you were the only one in ten miles.”

“That’s quite possible.” He sounded rueful.

She smiled, then frowned, looking away. “Ideas? No, not specially. Bloody stupid trick. I suppose someone thought it was funny.”

“An odd occasion, I should have thought, for practical jokes, Mrs Loughbury? A funeral.”

“Queer village.” She said it without emphasis, almost dismissively.

“Is it, indeed?”

That won no response. He asked her: “How many people—other than Mr Bradlaw and his staff—were in the house when you were getting ready to go to church?”

“Not very many.” Zoe saw that a pencil and a piece of folded paper had got into the inspectors hand. She stared at them blankly.

“The names—do you remember them?”

“Does it matter? Don’t tell me they’ve made locking doors a crime.”

“Not in general, no. The people in the house, though—do you recall who they were?”

Memory cracked the impassivity of her face with a smile. “There was old Jehovah and his two witnesses. Dickies brother from Chalmsbury. He always called him that. Old Jehovah. Stan, actually. Miserable old prick. I can’t remember what the sons are called. They never came over until today and that was too bloody soon.”

“Zoe! Just you watch your language!” Mrs Claypole, tractoring a laden tea tray into the room, paused to glare. “Whatever would your hubby have thought?” And her eyes switched to Purbright, as if in hope of his being privy to the opinions of the late solicitor.

“He wants to know who was here this morning,” Zoe said to her mother.

Mrs Claypole busied herself with pouring milk into three cups. Her “Oh?” was restrained.

“I told him Stan and the wet dreams. Who else was there? Mr Croll. He was here, wasn’t he, Mum?”

“Croll?” Purbright repeated.

“The farmer,” said Zoe. “Ben. The one whose wife done herself in.”

Again a frown of deep disapproval from Mrs Claypole. “Zoe, there was no call for that.” Purbright was beginning to wonder at what age her mother would deem Zoe brought up.

“Ah, yes,” he said.

“Then there was Winnie Gash and Spen. They were both here.”

“They’re farmers, too,” Mrs Claypole explained to Purbright. “Brothers, Winston and Spencer. They have a big place. Ever so big.” She turned to her daughter. “Isn’t it a big place, Zoe? The Gashes?”

“Are those gentlemen married?” Purbright inquired of Zoe.

“Oh, yes; both married.”

So there had been present the two brothers and their wives—was that right?

Both women shook their heads. No, no—not the wives. It was nearly harvest time. There would be too much to do.

The husbands then. Anyone else?

“There was Mr Palgrove and his wife. Len—that’s Mr Palgrove—he’s got the restaurant but it doesn’t open until the evening,” Zoe explained. “So they popped in for a sherry.”

Purbright’s brow rose very slightly as he made a note on his piece of paper.

Mrs Claypole noticed.

“There was refreshments,” she said, archly, “as I’m sure my daughters late hubby would have wished.”

“Mr and Mrs Leonard Palgrove,” Purbright confirmed. “Anyone else?”

“Some more of his family were supposed to be coming,” said Zoe, “but they never turned up. They was all told.”

Mrs Claypole smirked disapprovingly.

“Of course, the Flaxborough lot stayed pretty much together and went straight in the church,” Zoe said. “The lawyers and councillors and that. Well, there wasn’t room here for a full do. It was just friends from round about.”

“Mr Cork-Bradden,” supplied Mrs Claypole, with a touch of pride.

“Yes, that’s right. Him and her ladyship.” Zoe watched Purbright’s pencil. “Hyphen,” she said. “I suppose you could say he’s the squire. Sort of. He goes hunting and all that, anyway. Churchwarden. Cons Committee. And well heeled.”

“Does he,” the inspector asked, “have an E on his Cork?”

They did not know, but thought not.

Two more names came up. Mrs Whybrow, summarized somewhat scantly by Zoe as “the horsey old cow Dickie used to screw tenants for”, and Mr Raymond Bishop, who lodged with her in Church Lane.

“So apart from yourselves and Mr Bradlaw’s people, there were nine men present in the house and three women.” The inspector had done his arithmetic and put his paper away. Zoe considered, with the aid of her fingers, then nodded.

Purbright sat a little further back in his chair, looking directly at Zoe.

“What I should be interested to know now,” he said, “is which, among these people, might have wished you harm?”

There was a long silence.

“Me?”

Forgetful of elegance in her perplexity, Zoe had allowed one hand to wander and attend to an itch at the top of her thigh. Mrs Claypole slapped it away, crossly, without taking her eyes off the inspector.

“What do you mean, harm? Nobody’s done any harm. To Zoe, you mean?”

Again Purbright addressed Zoe directly. “Somebody locked you in that bathroom. I should like to know who it was.”

She relaxed, visibly. “Oh, that. How should I know? Somebody trying to be funny, that’s all.”

“You really have no idea who might have done it?”

She shrugged. “Some twit. I really wouldn’t know.”

Purbright turned to Mrs Claypole. Her face blank, she stirred the contents of the teapot mechanically for some moments, then said: “Not unless it was one of that precious pair from Chalmsbury—them or their father.”

Neither woman seemed to think this line worth pursuing. Zoe had finished her first cup of tea and was now eagerly watching her mother pour a second. Purbright had drunk little of his; it was very strong.

He asked if there were any appliances in the house run on bottled gas. Yes, the cooker; had he not seen the big cylinders outside the back door? He had, but was thinking of something smaller, something portable, perhaps. A tubby sort of cylinder had been left, Zoe thought, in a corner of one of the rooms upstairs. The men had used it for a blow-torch when the outside painting was being done.

“Have you recently had occasion to move that gas bottle, Mrs Loughbury?”

The question seemed to make no sense to her. Purbright rephrased it.

“Have you any idea how it came to be in a chair close to the heater in the room where the clothing caught fire today?”

This time, there were two incredulous stares. The older woman found voice first.

“Do you mean to say it would have gone off? All that gas?”

“Not necessarily. But if the fire had taken hold, the risk of an explosion would have been considerable.”

Mrs Claypole looked at her daughter, then back to Purbright. “What, and her locked in...” Falteringly, her hand reached across for Zoe’s.

Chapter Five

One of the harmless fictions whereby Mr Harcourt Chubb lightened his duties as chief constable of Flaxborough might be expressed in parody of Genesis: Before Monday was nothing made that was made. In other words, the purpose and function of the Sabbath was to shut off all that had gone before and to confer upon the ensuing week an absolute innocence of association.

Hence it was that when Inspector Purbright attended upon him in the cool and spacious room he occupied from time to time in the Fen Street police headquarters and announced his misgivings concerning the previous Saturday’s events at Mumblesby, Mr Chubb gazed awhile at his cuff, then at the ceiling, and said:

“Considering that you were very kindly deputizing for me at poor Loughbury’s funeral, I hardly think it fair for you to be burdened with an investigation of these rather questionable matters, Mr Purbright. This lady who purports to be the widow—I take it that she has not made a formal complaint?”

“No, sir. I am still trying to make sense of her attitude. If someone had turned a key on me in similar circumstances I fancy I should show a little more resentment.”

“Yes, but you know it is not always true that women jump to conclusions. They sometimes take a calmer and more cautious view than you might think—a wiser view, indeed, than some men.”

“Mrs Loughbury is not a well educated woman, but she is intelligent. Her wisdom I should be inclined to doubt, sir. Shrewd she is, certainly.”

The chief constable spread his hands. “Well, there you are, then, Mr Purbright. A shrewd and intelligent lady is not going to come to much harm. If she really feels threatened—and I confess I can see no reason why she should—she no doubt will let you know, having once been introduced.”

Purbright’s relations with Mr Chubb, within a framework of extreme formality, were curiously confidential and allowed of a frankness that no one listening to their exchanges could have guessed. The secret lay in a code, acknowledged by neither, but developed over the years into a subtle instrument of mutual understanding.

On this Monday morning, for instance, the chief constable was left in no doubt that his detective inspector, convinced of an attempt having been made on the life of Rich Dick’s concubine, intended to make himself as much of a nuisance as the law and Mr Chubb allowed until the truth of the matter emerged. Purbright, on the other hand, was no less certainly appraised of Mr Chubb’s strong reluctance to see the reputation of a late fellow club-member endangered for the sake of a girl who once had lived in a public house and now laid claim to some very nice property which she probably didn’t appreciate.

Purbright climbed the ancient iron circular staircase to the floor on which was his own office. There, Sergeant Love, looking smug, joined him.

“I picked up the dope from that reporter,” announced Love. He put a sheet of typescript on the desk.

“Dope?” Purbright pretended not to understand. He had tried for years to cure Love’s weakness for what the sergeant fancied to be Fleet Street terminology. But then, as he always did, he felt mean and straight away said: “Ah dope—yes, I see,” and picked up the list of names.

They included most, but not all, of those he had collected already himself.

“There was a bit of a do in the church, from what this chap was telling me,” said Love. He related the story of Zoe’s ejection of the Chalmsbury branch. Love’s accounts were robbed of dramatic point, somehow, by his customary obliging, pleased-with-life expression. He would have described a public execution or a jam-making demonstration with equal cheerfulness.

Purbright told the sergeant about the fire, the locked door, the gas cylinder.

“Seems there’s a rabbit away somewhere,” Love commented, good-naturedly. “Oh, and I was right about propane. It is the one that’s bottled at higher pressure. They probably were using it to work a blowtorch.”

“Why is it, do you suppose, Sid, that the young woman took it all so calmly? It was the mother who got worked up, not Zoe.”

“Mothers do. Mine does.”

Purbright frowned at him. He had never before considered the possibility of the sergeant’s having a mother. It was enough to bear with the chronic youthfulness of his appearance without having to envisage a woman who would not be restrained from combing his hair and making sure he had a handkerchief.

“Do you know anything about Mumblesby?”

The sergeant considered. “They reckon it’s a bit upperten-ish, nowadays.”

“Well off, are they?”

“So they reckon. A lot of them ride horses round there. And it’s supposed to cost eight pounds a head to eat at that café.”

“Does it really?”

“We once had some trouble with a bloke who used to be the personal...” Love faltered. “What do they call somebody who mucks about with feet?”

“Chiropodist?”

“That’s it. He used to be the Duke of Edinburgh’s personal chiropodist.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Oh nothing much. He was creating in the street. Threatening somebody.”

Purbright waited, but Love seemed to have emptied his store of wonders.

“So it’s a village of fairly high tone,” said the inspector, without guile.

“You could say so.”

Purbright nodded. “In which case, we cannot send our coarser-grained ambassadors. It will have to be you, Sid. Go tomorrow. Now, listen. We can’t waste a lot of time on this, but I do seriously believe that that over-confident young woman is in danger. A little well-directed eavesdropping is more likely to produce ideas of why, and from whom, than a month of heavy interrogating.”

Purbright took out his record of names provided by Zoe and her mother, and set it beside the Citizen’s reporters typescript. “Here’s the nearest we have to a check-list, although we can’t be sure that no one else entered the house that morning.”

Love picked up both pieces of paper and carefully folded one inside the other. “Will do,” he said, crisply.

The expression made Purbright suddenly nervous. “Of course, this isn’t a door-to-door job, Sid.”

Away went the papers into Loves hip pocket; on to his face, an oh-very-droll smirk.

“Above all, don’t go marching up to the Manor House as soon as you arrive. Neither she nor anyone else must get the idea that we’re interested specifically in her. You’ll be too near home to pretend you’re not a policeman, but so long as you choose a genuine and convincing errand, you’ll be all right.”

The natural roseate glow of Love’s complexion intensified. “I could talk to the servants, if you like—you know, get their confidence.”

Purbright stared, then swallowed. “Yes, do that, Sid. Talk to the servants by all means.”

The House of Yesteryear in Northgate, Flaxborough, once had been a corn chandler’s. A smell of grain bins lingered still, not unpleasantly, in the two adjoining showrooms where Miss Teatime’s stock-in-trade was set out.

When Inspector Purbright entered, he saw Miss Teatime at the further end, in conversation with a man and woman. They were interested, it seemed, in quite the largest item in the shop: a quarter-acre or so of dried spinach, flecked with fragments of orange peel, massively framed and entitled BEFORE SEBASTOPOL. Hearing the opening of the door, she turned her head and smiled acknowledgment. Purbright hoped the couple would not take too long to realize that the picture was not a portable exhibit but virtually a fourth wall. He started to pass the time by looking at what he presumed was a butter churn.

Miss Teatime did not keep him long.

“My dear inspector, how encouraging to find that the appurtenances of quieter times can lure you from the battle against crime, even for a little while.”

“I thought you might put me in the way of a nice second-hand treadmill, actually.” He gave the hand she offered him a squeeze of genuine affability.

Miss Teatime said she could do him some gyves. She indicated an abstract in rust. Its only identifiable feature was the appended ticket marked £32.

“Do you know,” she said with sudden earnestness, “that it is extremely difficult to come by decent examples of manacles. They are extremely collectable, of course; eighteenth century especially. What people will pay highly for are the attested models.”

“Autographed?”

“Inspector, you are not being serious. When I tell you that the handcuffs used on Crippen, certificated by Dew, would fetch at least twenty thousand pounds at auction, you will realize I am not joking.”

Purbright said he would see what he could do for her. In the meantime, it was her expertise in quite another field that he hoped he might tap.

She would be delighted. Where did his interest lie?

“Sacred relics.”

The small, still rather pretty, nose wrinkled. “Oh, dear—not ikons?”

“No, not ikons.”

“You are wise. Most of them are quite spurious, you know. A friend of mine in Lon...no, that is to say, someone in the trade, of whom I have been warned, is reputed to mass-produce the things in glass beads and poster paint.”

“Good heavens,” said Purbright. Then, “No, I am thinking of a much more fundamental area. Fragments of the True Cross, no less.”

Miss Teatime arched her finely delineated brows. “Not, I am happy to say, inspector, an English-based industry. One would employ a Byzantine agent, I should say. Would you like me to make inquiries for you?”

Purbright said he thought not. “Let me put my problem in this way,” he said. “Suppose I had come across a collector—a well-informed and intelligent collector—who had acquired an article represented to be a piece of the Golgotha cross, and he had gone to considerable trouble and expense not only to safeguard it but actually to display the thing, what should I think about him?”

Miss Teatime regarded the inspector for several seconds. “The question, of course, is rhetorical?”

“I should appreciate an answer, nevertheless.”

“Very well. The man clearly is potty.”

“As it happens,” Purbright said, “he is dead.”

Miss Teatime smiled to herself, and rearranged a selection of Georgian toothpicks. “Now we are getting somewhere,” she remarked, softly.

“Have you made the acquaintance of the young woman who lives in the Manor House at Mumblesby?” Purbright asked.

Miss Teatime said she had met Mrs Loughbury on the day before her husband’s funeral. “My colleague, Mr Harrington, manages our little gallery in the village. We felt it would be appropriate to call and pay our respects.”

“I believe she calls herself Mrs Claypole-Loughbury.”

“Ah, does she? A singularly perspicacious young woman. With that name, and that address, she could get tick anywhere in London.”

“If she proves to be the beneficiary of Richard Loughbury, I doubt if she will need it.”

Miss Teatime sighed.

“Have you,” Purbright asked her, “seen anything of the contents of the house? I did wonder, in view of your professional interests.”

“I have not made an inventory, if that is what you mean.”

“Perish the thought.”

“But within the limits of courtesy and grief, I did manage to spy out some very nice stuff—the value of which, I hasten to add, the young woman seems fully to realize.” Miss Teatime paused. “I did not notice any holy relics.”

“No, you wouldn’t—unless you went upstairs.”

She regarded him sharply. “In a bedroom?”

“Yes...well, a dressing room, I suppose one would call it.”

“That is interesting. As you will know better than I, the owner of valuable objects will often cherish the notion that his prize possession is safer for being physically close, particularly at night. An extreme example is the person who hides things under the mattress.”

Purbright said he had heard of the practice.

Miss Teatime laughed. “I must sound like a burglar alarm salesman. No, the point is that if—as one would naturally suppose—Mr Loughbury had bought this so-called relic in order to amuse his friends, he would have displayed it prominently in his drawing room. His keeping it upstairs suggests he really did put a very high price on the thing. I did not know the gentleman; had he a streak of simple-mindedness?”

“On the contrary, he was generally considered to be devious.”

She shook her head. “In that case, Mr Purbright, it would appear that he was an eccentric as well. I can assure you that traffickers in saints’ kneecaps are no longer in the big money.”

They moved further into the shop. Purbright paused to examine a silver lemon-squeezer. It was tagged £130. He replaced it without remark, watched by Miss Teatime.

“You are thinking to yourself that the price is exorbitant.”

He pouted. “Steep-ish.”

“Provenance is all,” she said. “That was Oscar Wilde’s private lemon-squeezer. It was kept in the kitchens of the Café Royal until just after the First World War.”

“My Mr Love—whom I think you know...”—Miss Teatime said yes, of course she knew the sergeant—“...has a personal tankard reserved for him in the Roebuck Tap. I think it makes him feel like Francois Villon.”

Miss Teatime released as near a giggle as her customary niceness of behaviour allowed.

They passed on. Miss Teatime pointed to a small rectangular tin with a picture upon it of a man in the uniform of the Grenadier Guards, benevolently distributing Huntley & Palmers biscuits to a medley of half-size black, brown and yellow men, all somehow enveloped in a Union Jack.

“Provenance again,” she said. “On the face of it, just a biscuit tin: one of several hundred distributed to the school children of Flaxborough on Empire Day, 1907.” She handed it to Purbright. “But look underneath.”

He saw initials childishly scratched through the varnish. Miss Teatime’s delicate, pink forefinger delineated the letters. “T...E...L...you see? L for Lawrence, of course.”

“Of Arabia?” Purbright reverently turned the tin about until he could see the price ticket.

“The very same. Few people, I imagine,” said Miss Teatime, taking the tin back and replacing it, “can be aware that Lawrence of Arabia attended Spindle Lane Infants’ School, here in Flaxborough.” She glanced at Purbright s face, then away again. “For a short time,” she added.

Purbright picked up what appeared to be a pair of scissors with a small blue glass jar pendent from one blade. Miss Teatime told him that she would not identify the article because she had no wish to strain his credence, but its use was indelicate and the price correspondingly low at twenty-eight pounds.

He said he did not know how she managed to live.

They strolled towards an outcrop of pine furniture that appeared to have been assembled by mad axemen and priced by mad accountants.

A sidelong glance at her face told Purbright that Miss Teatime, looking pensive now, was nearing the moment when she would, with no sign either of concern or condescension, present him with some piece of relevant and perhaps even vital information. They looked at the pine for a few moments, then at a small but choice collection of road-repair lanterns.

“Reverting,” said Miss Teatime, “to the general subject of provenance...”

“Yes?”

“And to the more particular subject of Mr Loughbury’s belongings...”

Purbright waited in silence.

“...my own brief observation and limited inquiries have produced some rather interesting results. I regret that relics do not enter into the matter, but a number of genuinely valuable objects certainly do.

“I am speaking of various paintings, one or two small pieces of sculpture, some silver, candlesticks, snuffboxes and so on—all of which are to be seen in the big drawing room at the house. You may well have noticed them yourself.”

Purbright said that he had, but without paying particular attention to them.

“Of course,” resumed Miss Teatime, “when I said that I made no inventory of what I saw, it was not to suggest that I ignored it. Once Mr Harrington and I had withdrawn from the house of mourning, we compared observations and noted down a number of articles—for professional reference.

“Over the weekend, with the aid of various colleagues in the trade, we did a little research.”

“Into provenance?” prompted Purbright.

Miss Teatime beamed, then became solemn again.

“Now, the odd thing is this. In the case of nearly all the choicest articles, the last traceable owner was not merely someone in the same general area—that might not seem unreasonable—but an actual inhabitant of the same little village.”

“And that does seem unreasonable?”

“When things of this nature change hands, Mr Purbright, one does not expect the sale to be a casual deal between neighbours. Experts are involved usually, and even if auction procedure is not employed the details are recorded. Mr Loughbury was a solicitor: he, of all people, might be expected to have been meticulous in such matters.”

“Is it your suggestion that the man’s title to these things is questionable?”

“I certainly do not suggest that he pinched them. Not in a policeman’s sense of the word.”

“In whose, then?”

Both smiled.

“Let me give you an illustration, inspector. There is hanging now in Mumblesby Manor House a picture called Staircase with Valves by Paul Klee. It is worth a great deal of money. Art dealers who make it their business to know the whereabouts of such things believe it to be in the possession still of the gentleman who was left it in a relatives will about twenty years ago—a Mr Robin Cork-Bradden.”

“Of Mumblesby.”

“Precisely.”

“Is there no record—within the trade, as I think you would put it—of the transfer of the picture to Mr Loughbury?”

“None—and Mr Harrington has extremely reliable sources of information. If money passed, the transaction was kept extraordinarily secret.”

“Could not the painting have been a gift?” Purbright asked.

She smiled. “Upwards of fifteen thousand pounds’ worth of gift?” A little later: “One or two other items from Mr Cork-Bradden’s collection appear also to have found their way to the Manor House without anyone’s noticing. Some quite outstandingly fine Bristol glass, for instance. I do hope that the bereaved lady will not wash it up with the tea things.”

“You could offer to relieve her of the responsibility.”

“Not, I fear, at present market prices.”

“Did Mr Loughbury acquire things from any other close neighbours?”

“So it would seem. The candlesticks, for instance—a most unusual pair in silver gilt, French, early seventeenth century—belonged to a Mr Bishop. He lives in that lovely Georgian house in Church Lane. Mr Harrington remembers seeing the candlesticks there when he first came to the village.”

The tinkling of a little bell and the sound of the street door being pushed open signalled fresh custom. Miss Teatime prepared to receive (“serve” was scarcely the word in the context of fin de siècle lemon-squeezers) the new arrival.

Purbright thanked her and they moved together towards the door. On the way, he indicated with a nod the initialled biscuit tin.

“Rather a backward boy,” he remarked.

“Backward?”

“Yes, Lawrence of Arabia. Still attending infants’ school in 1907. He would have been nineteen.”

There was only the briefest of pauses. Miss Teatime laughed.

“No, no, inspector—evening classes. In navigation, I think it was.”

Chapter Six

Although Decective Sergeant Sidney Love had an auntie living in a remote country area near Strawbridge, whom he fondly visited from time to time, he was an urban dweller by upbringing and by preference, and retained many of the townsman’s ideas about rural life.

Upon his arrival in Mumblesby at eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning, he made his way immediately towards the village inn, confident that beyond a door marked BAR PARLOUR, or even SNUG, there awaited him in bucolic carouse as many of the local peasantry as could be spared from the harvest field, stables and kitchen.

The Barleybird, formerly the Red Lion, had been built in the eighteenth century as a coaching inn, but there came no coaches now, nor even buses. Behind the tall windows in the high, handsome stone frontage were rooms mostly empty. A barrier had been set across the arched entrance to the yard, for latter-day customers in motor-cars, while lacking nothing of the elan of the coachman atop the old Lincoln Flyer, were a good deal less skilful at negotiating the passage. There was, in any case, plenty of parking space on two sides of the Market Place, where no market had been held since Victorian times.

Love found the present-day entrance to the Barleybird was a porched door at the side of the building. It led to a lobby, carpeted in deep green and smelling of lavatory deodorant. On his left was a little office with a sliding glass window. No one was in the office. Two doors marked PRIVATE were on his right, a pair of glass doors immediately in front of him. No intimation so far of Snug, nor yet Bar Parlour. Love looked through the glass. He saw a big undivided room with a bar running its whole length. The woman behind the bar looked up from rinsing a glass. She had a black dress and yellowish hair.

It was clear that Love had chosen the wrong day to meet Mumblesby’s retainers and body servants. The only other customer in the bar was a woman of sixty or so, with white, wiry hair that contrasted strikingly with the deeply tanned, leathery skin of her narrow, alert face. She was wearing a shabby tweed jacket and a pair of voluminous, chocolate-coloured slacks. A silk Paisley scarf was tied close to her throat. As she sat cross-legged on a tall bar-side chair, she held a cigarette between long, bony fingers and thumb and examined it with fierce concentration.

The sergeant said, “Good morning,” in a commendatory and very cheerful way, as if he had come to sell something.

The woman behind the bar had finished rinsing the glass and was now screwing a towel into it. She trained a sad eye upon Love and gave her head a little upward toss which opened her mouth at the same time.

“A pint of your best bitter,” declared Love, who knew about robust country ways.

The woman looked about her, searched for a moment beneath the bar counter, and retreated through a door at her back. When she re-appeared, she was carrying a pint glass, which she held to the light and rubbed round the rim with a middle finger before filling it with beer, which she did by twice pouring the contents of a half-pint glass into it.

“Oh, Sadie, for heaven’s sake!”

It was the white-haired woman. She had been watching the performance with a thin, mocking smile. Now she turned to Love.

“The dear, dear girl always but always goes through this...” she flapped a hand weakly—“...this thing with beer. But you mustn’t take any notice. Sadie’s really rather a darling.”

The sergeant guessed at once that here was Gentry, if not actual Aristocracy. He gave the woman a grin, then offered another, much smaller, to Sadie, who had gone back to screwing her towel into glasses.

“Connie Whybrow,” announced the woman, without the italics this time. Her face was assertively uptilted, friendly.

Lucky me, Love told himself. A listed person at first shot.

“Pleased to meet you.” He did not volunteer his identity. She would ask him, though. Funny thing, the upper ten were not polite.

She looked him up and down and glanced at his pint. “Insurance, Mr...?”

He shook his head promptly and cheerily. “The name’s Love, actually.”

“Good God!”

“Sidney Love,” he added, hastily. He had expected a little upper-class banter, but Mrs Whybrow’s habit of heavy syllabic emphasis was most disconcerting.

“Love...Sidney Love...Sidney Love...” Musingly she repeated the words. “But how absolutely too sweet.” She reached suddenly and captured his forearm which she gently pulled to and fro whilst addressing the barmaid:

“Sadie, did you hear? Did you hear the gentleman’s name? Now you must open a bottle of champagne or give us all drinks on the house or just simply cavort or something.”

Sadie responded by moving to the other end of the bar, where she began to refill the roasted peanut dispenser.

“But you should be in insurance,” Mrs Whybrow asserted. “I mean, round here you’d just take people’s money for ever. I mean nobody ever dies, so you wouldn’t have to pay out, would you?”

Love said he supposed not.

Mrs Whybrow, who had released his arm once, now seized it again.

“Never mind,” she said. “With such an absolutely marvellous name, I’m sure you must do something quite wildly exciting, and I think the village ought to be thrilled about it.”

Love swallowed. “I’m a policeman, as a matter of fact, Mrs Whybrow.”

As he told Purbright afterwards, the words had come out of their own accord, like a cry for help. “You blew your cover, Sid,” Purbright was to tell him, but only in fun.

The strong bony hand tightened its grip. “A policeman!” The voice, dry with smoking and gin, had become suddenly hard as a mans. But then it trilled away huskily once more: an echo from some Claridge’s party in the thirties.

“Oh, but that’s much too good to be true. I’m sorry, but I simply don’t believe you, Mr Cupid. You don’t look in the least like a policeman.”

Which happened to be true. Love tried to scowl. He muttered “Detective sergeant” and took a gulp of his drink.

“Do tell me,” said Mrs Whybrow, with furtive leer, “what you’ve come to investigate. Is it something terribly...” The adjective eluding her, she flapped the hand that seemed to serve as a subsidiary vocabulary.

Love used the opportunity to move and sit down just beyond danger of further arrest.

“Routine,” he said airily. “Stolen property. Missing persons. We get these lists. I mean, there’s no one here actually suspected.” Exposure to Mrs Whybrow’s verbal idiosyncrasy clearly carried the risk of infection.

“My dear sweet, I cannot bring myself to believe that. This village is absolutely swarming with suspicious characters. They come in, you know.”

“Foreigners?” Love knew country-dwellers liked quaint terms.

“Oh, no—English,” insisted Mrs Whybrow, who had been born and bred in South London. “That makes it worse...or am I being old-fashioned and tiresome?”

“Not a bit, madam,” Love assured her. The “madam” brought a cracked whoop of delight from Mrs Whybrow. She chain-lit another cigarette and ground the discarded stub into an ashtray as if into the face of an enemy.

Love wondered if this would be a good moment to begin the establishment of confidence. He glanced at the small quantity of colourless liquid in Mrs Whybrow’s glass. It looked like something pretty expensive. Better not rush things.

“Sad about Mr Loughbury,” he said.

Mrs Whybrow stared at him. “What do you mean, sad?” One eye was screwed shut to escape the thin blue fume from the cigarette; the other glared in disbelief.

Love shrugged and blew out his cheeks a little.

“Sa...a...ad?” bleated Mrs Whybrow with terrible irony.

Again Love gave a little lift to his shoulders. “Not nice. Dying...” He pouted and regarded one shoe in a melancholy fashion.

At that moment, Love heard someone enter the room and walk heavily to the bar. Mrs Whybrow grinned past him at the new arrival.

“Morning, Win.”

Love heard a grunt, then the rattle of coins on wood. Guardedly, he turned his head.

The man he saw, shortsightedly raking amongst the money he had unloaded on the bar top from the pocket of his huge clay-coloured windcheater, was of a size that had to be assessed by instalments. His feet, each a furrow broad, were encased in Wellingtons that would have kennelled a brace of bull terriers. His thighs might have defied comparison with articles of husbandry smaller than long-back porkers, save that they were so proportionately diminished by the belly overhanging them that they actually looked frail. That central, commanding belly-mass detracted, too, from the man’s chest, but it was a big chest for all that, a barn of a chest. One arm hung inert by his side, the gammon-sized hand a few inches from the floor. With the other he shovelled coins forward in negligent prodigality.

The barmaid drifted down-bar. Without consultation, she drew two shots of Haig into a glass and put it before the big man. He left her to take what money she wanted and straightaway swallowed some of the whisky.

Love marvelled at the man’s headpiece. It was round, narrowing at the top, where thin, unnoticeable hair was stranded. In the long ears was more hair, stiffer this, and gingery. The eyes, watchful and evasive by turns, were so pale by contrast with the puce cheeks, nose and neck, as to suggest their having been blanched by the protection of his close, gold-rimmed glasses, in the manner of salad legumes in a forcing frame.

“Winnie, you must meet my nice friend,” declared Mrs Whybrow over Love’s head. Love moved his chair through ninety degrees and donned a conciliatory expression. The big man gave no sign of having heard anything.

Undeterred, Mrs Whybrow conducted introductions.

“This is Mr Sidney Love—I wanted to call him Cupid, of course, but that would be against the law or something so we’d better not—anyway, Love’s rather sweet, don’t you think—and this“ (Love got his hand ready) “is Mr Winston Gash, who farms an absolutely fabulous number of acres, or whatever people do farm, and is dreadfully rich.”

Love declared himself pleased to make Mr Gash’s acquaintance.

Mr Gash vouchsafed the slightest of nods and turned from the rashly offered hand to address the lady behind the bar.

“Now then, dimple-tits.”

Sadie gave sign of neither offence nor pleasure.

“Mr Love and I were just talking,” Mrs Whybrow said to the farmer’s vast back, “about poor Mr Loughbury’s upping and dying so ridiculously suddenly.”

Sounds emerged from the further side of the farmers bulk. “O-ar?”

“Of course, Mr Loughbury rode, you know,” Mrs Whybrow told Love, as if warning him to take the matter seriously.

Mr Gash’s back heaved. He said something to Sadie which caused her to look away sourly.

“He rode,” Mrs Whybrow repeated, “with the Hambourne, actually.”

“Going to let me have a feel, then?” Mr Gash inquired of Sadie, then, without turning round: “Want a gin, do you, Connie?”

Mrs Whybrow’s glass was on the counter, empty, almost before Love was aware of the movement. She signalled him to join in taking advantage of the benefaction while it was going.

Love dispatched the rest of his beer as quickly as he could but without enjoyment, and set the glass beside Mrs Whybrow’s. Mr Gash, who still had not varied his position of leaning slightly inward, four-square to the bar, fingered his own glass forward, then Mrs Whybrow’s. Sadie refilled both and selected some coins from the farmers bar-top exchequer. Finally she picked up Love’s pint glass and looked at him in mute inquiry. He shrugged. Sadie filled it with beer. Love paid.

After a short silence, the voice of Farmer Gash was heard once more.

“Git any last night, then?”

His habit of speaking without the slightest change of posture made it difficult to determine who was being addressed. Love thought it was most probably Sadie. He was also thinking that, unpromising as the conversation was, it was not likely to reach a more useful level unless he did some prompting.

“I suppose,” he said, rather loudly, “that there’s a lot of sympathy in the village for Mrs Loughbury?”

There was a very long pause, then, “Wotsy say?” Mr Gash inquired of no one in particular.

Mrs Whybrow donned a pained smile. “I take it you mean Miss Claypole. The sort of housekeeper or whatever.”

“I mean the lady in occupation of the Manor House,” Love said, policemanishly. He added: “Known as Mrs Zoe Claypole-Loughbury.”

Mr Gash’s shoulders jerked; a short word, deplorably recognizable, emerged from behind them.

“Strictly entre nous,” Mrs Whybrow said to Love, “we are not madly approving of our Zoe.”

“Why is that, madam?” The sergeants face was a picture of innocent curiosity. Mrs Whybrow regarded it for several moments as if in doubt of its reality.

“Why? My dear boy, what do you mean, why! God knows I’m not a snob, but the woman’s a parvenu. Have you met her? A peasant, I promise you. She really is.”

A sudden recollection sharpened Mrs Whybrow’s manner. She leaned closer. “You said you were looking for stolen property...”

“Just routine inquiries,” said Love, hastily.

Someone was entering the bar at the far end. Mrs Whybrow lowered her voice; it became a growl. “No names, no pack-drill, dear boy, but some wickedly costly stuff has found its way into the same house as La Claypole. All very odd.”

The new arrival had been joined by two others. All were men. They remained close to the door, talking; one held the door a little open, as for a companion slightly delayed.

“It really is dreadful of me, to be talking to you like this,” whispered Mrs Whybrow, with a new and considerable eagerness, “but it does so happen that two of the gentlemen who’ve just come in...”

“Gin, Connie?”

With a speed and agility of which Love would not dream him capable, Winston Gash had turned about and was lowering over Mrs Whybrow like a building about to collapse. She grinned at him and handed over her glass.

Two of the new arrivals were now approaching. The larger, Love recognized. It was Spencer Gash, farming brother of Winston. The others addressed him as Spen.

With Spencer’s companion, a man of about her own age but lacking her appearance of healthy preservation, Mrs Whybrow seemed to be on terms too familiar to call for greeting. Love surmised that here was Mr Raymond Bishop, Mrs Whybrow’s lodger in Church Lane.

Mrs Whybrow nudged the sergeant and spoke low. “Mr Bishop is, as they say, my paying guest—except that he doesn’t pay—no, no, no, that’s just my little joke—he really is the most fearfully nice old chap, and I don’t care, quite frankly, if he pays or not. If there were any justice in this world, dear Raymond would be a Companion of Honour or something, but the whole thing’s most awfully sad... Oh, God, Winnie, but how fiendishly kind of you...”

Winston Gash had thrust upon her a brimming glass. Some spirit slopped down her thigh, leaving a dark trail on the brown trouser leg. Love immediately handed her his spare, unblown-upon, handkerchief, kept for good causes. “What a sweetie you are!” declared Mrs Whybrow, and he blushed. “Peed yoursen?” inquired Mr Gash.

Mrs Whybrow applied Love’s handkerchief energetically to the gin streaks. “One thing you must be careful of,” she said between rubs. “However familiarly Mr. Bishop may address you, please do not call him Ray. It would upset him absolutely dreadfully.”

Love said he would remember.

Mrs Whybrow nodded and put Love’s handkerchief in her handbag.

“When you’ve been something terrifically important like a surgeon or whatever,” she said, “it simply isn’t bearable to be talked to as if you’re a plumber or a bank clerk...I mean, Mr Bishop used to be...” She stopped, shook her head very decidedly, and tapped the ash from her cigarette on to Love’s knee. “No, you mustn’t ask me—it’s too terribly top secret.”

She looked up, brightening, at the person under discussion, and said, as sweetly as to a child: “Isn’t it, darling? Simply too secret for words?”

Whatever things Mr Bishop had been in the past, tall must have been one of them. Now he stooped, as if he had congealed into that attitude over long years of condescension. The stoop robbed him, as it were, of his neck, and made of his rounded shoulders, head, brow, macaw-like nose and receding chin, one continuous curve, a huge comma. Tucked into the corner of the comma was an affable, rather dreamy smile.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr Bishop,” said Love, reading the smile as readiness to be friendly.

Bishop turned to Mrs Whybrow and weakly jabbed a finger in Love’s direction.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s Mr Love, darling.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Mr Bishop smiled on, but the finger movement now was dismissive.

“I am not being ridiculous, sweetheart. Mr Love and I are good friends.” She grabbed the sergeant’s hand and grinned at him, showing all her teeth.

“I don’t want anything in the newspapers. The chap understands, does he? Nothing in the papers, tell him.”

Love, as he was to explain to Purbright, had come to the conclusion by now that the Barleybird Inn was the resort not of talkative menials but of that particular section of the upper class that delights in the discomfiture of police officers. He stared at Bishop with cherubic concern and asked firmly: “What is it that you wish to be kept out of newspapers, sir?”

The ensuing silence told the sergeant that he had won a wider audience than he had intended.

The gravelly voice of Mrs Whybrow was first to be heard again.

“But Raymond, darling, the gentleman isn’t a reporter or anything dreadful like that. As far as anything’s ever clear to poor little me, I gather he’s come to the village to look for lost property. He’s a sort of detective.”

“Special Branch, is he?” Mr Bishop appeared to find this possibility very much to his taste, but still not attractive enough to entitle Love to direct address.

“I am not from the Special Branch, sir, but if you wish to confide in one of their officers, I feel sure that arrangements could be made.”

Someone had handed Mr Bishop a drink. He paid it prompt and concentrated attention, leaning forward to the glass while his elbow jutted out like a boxer’s guard. When he had finished, he handed the empty glass to Mrs Whybrow, who put it on the bar. She seemed used to doing him these small services.

“Tell him not to bother me about it, Booboo, will you? If the Special Branch require my services, they’ll be in touch, I doubt not.”

Another drink was coming Mr Bishop’s way, borne by Spencer Gash. Love reflected that there was a fair old turnover of larrup in Mumblesby on a weekday morning. He covertly surveyed Spen and other new arrivals.

Farmer Spencer was not so bulky a man as his brother, but had a powerful build, set off by hacking jacket and fawn cavalry twill trousers of better quality than the occasion would have seemed to warrant. His head was narrow, his nose long and lean, and the moustache traversing the full line of his upper lip had been shaved in a meticulously straight line. He wore a formal shirt and tie and a fox head tiepin in gold enamel. His voice was high, a little adenoidal. The drink he ordered for himself was a strong bottled lager with brandy chaser. Mr Gash Mark II addressed no word of impropriety to the woman behind the bar, but his look lingered long after each unexceptionable remark. The look, Sadie once had told a friend, was like hot gravy spilling slowly down the front of her dress.

By now, Mrs Whybrow was ready with more introductions.

One was to a man in his sixties. Curly grey hair, much receded, a face taking on fleshiness despite a determinedly energetic expression, good suit, immediate attentiveness. Love knew him. At one time head of a Flaxborough canning firm, he was the latter-day proprietor of the Old Mill Restaurant.

“Leonard, dearest boy, you must meet my amorous policeman—Love—amorous—No? Oh, dear, perhaps rather not...anyway, Mr Love, this luscious gentleman is Mr Palgrove and he and his charming wife serve the most wonderful food.”

“How do you do, Mr Palgrove,” said Love.

A large hand, white but with black hairs at the wrist, shot forward. “Len,” commanded its owner.

Love offered a weak smile of recognition, but it was not enough. His own hand was seized and held hostage while Mr Palgrove peered closely into his face.

“It’s Sidney, isn’t it? Lovely to see you again.”

Palgrove turned away, looking for other important engagements.

Mr Bishop giggled.

From the direction of Winston Gash: “Hey—when diddy last gittis legower?”

Mrs Whybrow smirked. “I rather think he means you,” she confided to Love.

The sergeant was frowning. “Who does?”

“Winnie—the big gentleman facing the bar.”

“Why should he mean me?”

“It’s a question he puts to everybody, actually. He really is quite sweet. You mustn’t mind. Being asked that is a sort of compliment round here.”

“Hey. That copper. Babbychops. Ar reckon ’e’s nivver addis legovver.”

“I don’t think that’s supposed to be a compliment,” Love observed to Mrs Whybrow.

“Never mind, here’s an absolutely perfect gentleman for you. He’ll be able to talk about stolen property for absolutely hours. Who better poor darling? Robin—come and have colloquy, or whatever one has on these occasions, with this fearfully understanding policeman.”

Whatever the expectations of Mrs Whybrow, who, at this stage, temporarily quit the bar, Mr Robin Cork-Bradden made it plain to Sergeant Love that he knew of nothing of value ever having been stolen from his premises or wrested from his possession by force or guile. He then courteously excused himself.

By the time Mrs Whybrow returned, she seemed to have forgotten the sergeant. The hoots and brays of her conversation rose from within a group that had formed near the fireplace. No one else showed sign of wanting to adopt her late protégé. He certainly was in no danger of being bought more beer. That did not distress him. The only beverage of which he could be said to be fond was raisin wine.

Love sat on in his isolation, listening to what he could make out of the conversation. Mr Bishop was telling Mr Cork-Bradden about protocol at Marlborough House. Mr Palgrove enthused to Farmer Spencer Gash on the subject of his “old girl”—not, it seemed, his wife, but an Aston Martin motor car. Spence rejoindered whenever he was able with references to his own favoured means of transport, which he called “the Murk”. Horses were being discussed by two younger men with pale eyes and hair cut in a very straight line at the nape; their lady companions wore headscarves and very dirty, narrow-legged trousers, and flicked the ash off their cigarettes every time they said “Oh, God, yes,” which was fairly often. Another farmer—short, fat and with a salami-like complexion—had docked with Winston Gash at the bar and both now were exploring the subject of “gittin’ legs ower” with sidelong references to every woman in the company in turn.

Love decided reluctantly that the Barleybird had not been a good idea. He began making his way, as unobtrusively as he could, towards the swing doors.

Some twenty people now were present. None took the slightest notice of his departure, save Mrs Whybrow, who, on catching sight of him, shut her eyes tight and displayed her front teeth as if she had been kneed in the groin: it was her version of a farewell smile. Before slipping through the doors, he looked back, meaning to nod a goodbye to the woman behind the bar. He couldn’t see her.

In the lobby, he heard a quick step behind him.

“Mister...” He turned.

Sadie, rather out of breath, had entered the lobby by another door.

“I just slipped out for a second. That lot won’t tell you anything. Were you asking about Detty?”

“Betty?”

“No, Detty. Bernadette. Mrs Croll.”

Perplexity lent Love a slightly comic expression. The woman looked disappointed, embarrassed.

“I’m sorry, I thought...” She turned.

“No, don’t go. Why did you think I was asking questions about Mrs Croll?”

The woman paused, her hand on the door knob. Swaying slightly, she stared at her own hand as it caressed and leaned upon the knob by turns.

Her voice was an anxious murmur. “They aren’t on about my little old boy again, are they? About taking him away?”

Voices. Somebody was coming down the stairs. Quickly, Sadie tugged open the door and was gone.

Chapter Seven

Detective Sergeant Love having decided that half a day in Mumblesby was enough to manage in one go, he presented himself in Purbright’s office soon after lunch.

“I expect,” he said, “that you’ll want a debriefing session.”

He saw Purbright’s stare of innocent bewilderment.

“You’ll want to know how I got on in Mumblesby.”

“Ah.” The inspector looked relieved. “Yes, Sid, of course.”

Love had made some notes, which he now assembled on his knee. He looked up.

“They’re a very queer bunch.”

“So I believe,” said Purbright. He had been making some notes himself. They were pinned to the list of mourners at Richard Loughbury’s funeral.

“There’s an old cove who calls his landlady Booboo,” said Love. He added: “That’s for starters.”

Purbright glanced down his names. “Would that, by any chance, be Mr Bishop?”

Love nodded, then considered. “I’m not sure now that he is a chiropodist. His landlady mentioned surgeons. I think the Royal Family bit is right, though.”

The inspector glanced up, one eyebrow raised. With undiminished blandness, Love added: “It didn’t shake him when I offered to put him in touch with the Special Branch.”

“Where did this conversation take place, Sid?”

“In that pub they call the Barleybird. People talk in pubs. And they’re not suspicious—not as they would be at home.”

“Not even when invited to assignations with the Special Branch?”

Love said: “The trouble is, it’s hard to get people like that to talk about what you want them to talk about—if you see what I mean.”

“I do, indeed.”

“That Mrs Whybrow would go on all day and night, but only when it’s something that she’s interested in. I’ll say this for her, she’s not easily shocked.”

Purbright said he hoped Love had not been indelicate in his approach.

“Oh, no, it’s the farmers. They don’t seem to care what they say in front of women.”

“That,” said the inspector, “is because they don’t keep stock any more. The purely arable farmer is no longer in the habit of restraining his language for the sake of the milk yield. Cows used to have a civilizing influence on farmers.”

The sergeant glanced through his notes quickly once more in search of such instances of modest success as they contained.

“Point one,” he announced. “There’s not much grief in Mumblesby over Rich Dick’s death. Well, not among the drinking set, anyway. They seemed quite offhand about it.”

Purbright waited.

“Point two. They don’t think much of his widow, if that’s what she is. Mrs Whybrow called her”—and the sergeant made close reference to his note—“La Claypole. Almost as if she was foreign.”

“Any other comments?”

“One of the farmers—Mr Winston Gash—used a very offensive word, but I don’t think that means much, coming from him. Incidentally, I noticed something interesting about Gash. I’ll tell you what it was in a minute. Point three first, though.”

Love put a rick against one of his items.

“Stolen property,” he went on, “is what I gave out that I was looking into.”

The inspector recognized in this extreme case of ruptured syntax a sign that Love was preparing a revelation.

“Nobody gave actual instances, mind,” said Love, “but Mrs Whybrow said that there’s no end of stuff at old Loughbury’s place that doesn’t belong there. And she was hinting like mad that two of those who’d been done were the Cork-Bradden character and an old friend of ours.” He paused. “Guess who.”

“I really have no idea, Sid. Tell me.”

“Pally Palgrove,” announced Love, with a touch of pride. “He keeps that café—the eight pounds a head one.”

“I should not have supposed,” said Purbright, “that Mr Palgrove was either wealthy enough or of sufficiently good taste to amass much worth stealing.”

“He married into money second time round—or so Bill Malley says.”

Purbright conceded the point; Sergeant Malley, the Coroners Officer, was the nearest thing to an infallible oracle that Flaxborough possessed.

“She was Cynthia Barraclough, wife of that hotel manager out at Brocklestone.”

“Ah, yes,” murmured Purbright, comfortably. It was pleasant when names dropped into place, like cards in a promising game of patience.

“Used to be a Wilson,” Love added. “It’ll be her money and what she got after the divorce that set them up. And she’ll have learned the catering side at her first husbands place.”

“The Neptune.”

“That’s right.”

Love recalled something. “I was going to tell you what I noticed about Gash—the big one, Winston. He’d been ignoring me and pretty well everyone else, but as soon as Mrs Whybrow started talking about people in the village who’d lost things, there he was—standing over her. To buy her a drink, or so he said. But she kept off the subject from then on.”

“Do you think he was threatening her?”

“In a way, yes. She’s not the sort of lady who’d change the subject just to be obliging.”

“Was she frightened?”

“Oh, no.” Love appeared to find the notion amusing.

Purbright had in his hand a pencil with which he gently tapped his lower lip from time to time. Now he held the pencil before him, like an artist sizing up proportions, and regarded its sharpened end dreamily.

“Tell me, Sid—before the general subject of stolen property was dropped, was there any mention by anybody of holy relics?”

“What you were on about before, you mean?”

Purbright saw that the question was a non-starter. (Love’s only brush with the occult had been his purchase, while on holiday in Cornwall with his young lady, of a Lucky Pixie Charm, which he had worn under his vest until his unlucky contraction of dermatitis a fortnight later.) He shook his head and said, never mind.

“Point five,” declared the sergeant.

And he told of his encounter with Sadie in the Barleybird lobby.

Purbright heard him out with reviving interest.

“Bernadette Croll,” the inspector said, dreamily. “Good lord.” Then, “Why on earth should the woman have supposed you were interested in Mrs Croll?”

“I didn’t get a chance to ask her.”

“Was she mentioned by anyone else you saw this morning?”

Love shook his head. “Only by Sadie. It’s Sadie Howell, by the way. Miss.”

“I expect Croll still farms at Mumblesby, does he?”

“Ben? Yes, he’s still there.”

“Not remarried?”

“No.”

“No, I suppose Bernadette would take some following.”

Love looked pleased, then prim. “She had a terrible reputation.”

“Not at the inquest, she didn’t. The talk was all of religious mania, not nympho.”

“You weren’t here,” Love said, a little defensively. “You were on holiday. Superintendent Larch came over from Chalmsbury.”

“Yes,” said Purbright. “He did, and I was. But I did read the depositions afterwards.”

“Mr Larch,” said Love, “wasn’t very keen on standing in for other people.”

“Understandable,” said Purbright.

“I remember him trying to push Bill Malley around.”

“Now, Sid, the superintendent was always a most conscientious officer.”

“Bill let him get on with it,” said the sergeant, carelessly.

“Of course. So?”

Love shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Anyway, he’s retired now.”

There was a long pause. Purbright looked thoughtful.

“Who took that inquest? The regular coroner, wasn’t it?”

“Mr Cannon. Yes, it was.”

“Open verdict?”

“Yes.”

“The Croll family...weren’t they represented by Mr Loughbury?”

“I think they were. Yes, I remember him sitting in court with Ben Croll. And when you say family, that’s it—just Ben; there aren’t any others.”

“Your friend the bar lady—Miss Howell: she wasn’t called as a witness, was she?”

Love said no.

“Then I wonder why she should think of her child in connection with Mrs Croll. I don’t remember anything about a boy giving evidence.”

“There wasn’t a kid at the inquest. Mr Larch did some interviewing beforehand, though.” Love added: “He was an expert at not believing.”

“Perhaps Bill will know. I’ll have a word with him later.”

Love waited, retriever-like. Not for the first time, the inspector was visited with the ridiculous temptation to pat his head.

• • •

Mrs Zoe Claypole-Loughbury had been spending the morning much more constructively than might have been expected of so recent a widow.

At ten o’clock she telephoned, and was shortly afterwards attended by, Mr Clapper Buxton, confidential clerk of Loughbury, Lovelace and Partners. In the interval before his arrival, she made two further telephone calls. The first was to Mr Harrington, manager of Gallery Ganby, to whom she wished to entrust the compilation of an inventory and valuation. Mr Harrington said he would be delighted to comply with her wishes; might he call that evening and discuss preliminary arrangements? Zoe said, sure, he could please himself, so long as he made a proper job of it and didn’t muck about too long. Then she rang the Flaxborough Citizen to say she wanted to insert a Thanks notice, worth quite a few quid, and would they send somebody over pronto so that the words were got right.

Mr George Robert Buxton, encouraged by the hour to dream of biscuits and coffee, and ladies in negligées, came straight in on finding the front door unlatched.

Clapper would not have been everyone’s idea of a lawyer’s clerk. Rather on the bouncy side, and self-indulgent in respect of dress, which usually included a bow-tie and fancy socks, he dealt with the clients in so confident a manner, and with so little sign of deference, that many at first supposed him to be the mysterious Lovelace or, at any rate, one of the Partners. He never corrected these little misunderstandings; indeed, as time went on, he himself came to be persuaded that the corporate wisdom and authority of the firm, after gradual transmigration from persons of greater title but lesser worth, now resided fully within his own breast.

“Are you there, dear lady?” inquired Mr Buxton loudly from just inside the front door.

Receiving no reply, he proceeded at once from room to room on the ground floor until he discovered Zoe in the kitchen. She was eating the first of three slices of fried bread and reading a newspaper.

“Ah, so this is where we are, dear lady.”

Zoe put down the paper, but not the bread, and elbowed some sundries to the back of the table. “Cup of tea?”

Clapper glanced at where the negligée should have been and saw a kind of goalkeeper’s jersey. Of biscuits, the table was innocent. “Tea?” he repeated, dubiously. She did not respond. Or coffee. He raised his hand in token of high-minded abstinence, then busied himself with the catch of his briefcase.

“Sit down,” invited Zoe, through a mouthful of fried bread. “Here—shove your stuff on the table.”

From outside came the buzz and clatter of a motor. Mrs Claypole could be seen through the window, mowing the lawn. At the turns, she had to circle at a run to keep up with the machine. She looked hot and somewhat distressed.

Zoe watched Mr Buxton withdraw a sheaf of papers from his case and lay it carefully before him.

“That’s the old spondooliks, is it?”

“I think,” he said, “you can take it that we have here the final testamentary disposition of your, of the late Mr Loughbury.”

“His will, you mean?”

Clapper sucked in a little air. “Will? Yes—oh, yes, will. You could call it that.”

Zoe reached over and tugged free one of the pages. She felt the stiff thickness of the parchment and squinted at its elaborate engrossment.

“Good grief,” she said, softly.

Clapper looked pleased. “It will be subject to probate, of course, but I do not anticipate any great difficulty.”

“I should think not,” said Zoe. “It would be a poor do if a solicitor couldn’t make his own will.”

From Clapper came “Ha ha.” It sounded as if he were reading it.

“As the late Mr Loughbury will perhaps have told you,” Mr Buxton said, “you are virtually the sole beneficiary. Certain bequests have been made in other directions, naturally, but they amount to very little proportionately.”

“You mean I more or less cop the lot,” Zoe deciphered.

Clapper said nothing, but scratched his nose and looked again at Zoe’s unpromising woollen garment. From a point level with his nose, his finger then descended, slowly tracing one of the deep runnels in the clerks long, gaunt face. He was debating whether he ought to chance his arm with a risqué remark.

Zoe took his silence to mean yes. She nodded, ran her tongue between teeth and cheeks in pursuit of fried bread fragments, and picked up a second slice. “Well, that’s all right, then. Oh, by the way...”

“Mmmm?” purred Mr Buxton, with a smile that hinted at a dissolute other self. He had never interviewed a lady client at breakfast before.

“I’ve fixed up with this bloke to do a proper pricing job on Dick’s bits and pieces.” She saw his smile fade. “His collection. The pictures and that.”

After the smile, a frown. “Bloke?” Clapper repeated, not at all seductively. “What bloke?”

She told him, while she poured herself another cup of tea.

“I’m not at all sure,” said Mr Buxton, “that the Partners would have advised you to do that.” His sudden adoption of a disapproving attitude had the curious effect of stiffening even more the crop of thick greyish-yellow hair that grew, brush-like, atop the long, flat-ended head.

“That’s all right. They’re not going to be asked.”

“I’m not sure that Mr Richard would have cared for the idea, either. Some of his collection involved transactions of a fairly delicate nature.” A moment went by. “Or so I understand,” Clapper added carefully.

Zoe looked round the table for tomato sauce. She spread some on the last slice of bread.

“You mean he got them by a fiddle?” she inquired, equably.

“I mean nothing of the kind.” Clapper was sitting so erect that his chair creaked. The point I wished to make is that the Partners have their own arrangement in respect of valuation business.”

Zoe licked some sauce from her forefinger, which she then poked into Mr Buxtons chest. “You thought you’d get a back-hander from the assessors, right?”

He stood. He was very angry. He grasped the briefcase, open, in his left hand, his intention to sweep the documents into it with his right. He had not noticed that the teapot had been set down by Zoe on top of the will. He now waited magisterially for her to remove it. She didn’t.

After a while, she said: “Not that I was thinking of selling any of the boodle. You need it in a house like this one.” She looked about her. “There’ll be a lot more entertaining to do from now on.”

Tight-lipped, Clapper moved the teapot himself. He picked up the documents and was about to put them in his case.

“Right,” said Zoe, wiping her mouth with one hand and suddenly tugging the will away from him with the other, “let’s see what the fairies have left, shall we?”

Chapter Eight

Sergeant William Malley, coroner’s Officer, kept his inquests upon three shelves on the dry south wall of the room he occupied in the basement of Flaxborough police headquarters. They were in excellent condition, even the earliest of them, daring back to just after the war, when the coroner had been old Amblesby with his clicky teeth and his free weighs on the morgue scales.

The written records—the depositions, medical reports, coroners notes—were kept in strong, flat cardboard boxes. In these, too, were interred photographs and the more manageable exhibits, together with references to the whereabouts of items too cumbersome or too unsavoury to remain in a small office.

“Small” had special meaning in the context of Sergeant Malley, who would have looked cramped in a bull ring. He did not so much occupy his office as wear it. It was like an outer uniform, rather tight round the shoulders and with nothing to spare at the waist, but long and familiar use had enabled him to adjust so happily to its limitations that he now could even entertain a fellow occupant without undue distress.

“Croll, Croll, Croll...” Half-turned in his chair and breathing hard, Malley reviewed his collection on the third shelf. “Ah...” He hooked a finger round the back of a box and brought it down.

Purbright, seated at the opposite side of Malley’s desk, watched him slide off a pair of elastic bands and unlid the box. He put the bands in the lid and placed both in a filing tray. For so large a man, the sergeant had small, neat, capable hands; they always moved slowly and to the purpose.

Malley produced a photograph from the box. He did not, as many a colleague might have done, flip it to Purbright like a playing card, but set it gently before him. Malley’s knowledge of those with whose end he had had to deal was wide, sometimes comical, often squalid, but his manner towards them was unfailingly respectful.

The inspector gazed at the picture of Bernadette Croll (1939-80), housewife, of Home Farm, Mumblesby. It was a police photograph in black and white, taken in the mortuary of Flaxborough General Hospital before the autopsy. Meticulously in focus, the body was lighted as if shadow was against the law. The torso and limbs had the curious appearance of having been modelled not in flesh but in rather dirty lard. Even the smallest blemish, the least significant bruise, looked black and sinister.

“No children, were there?” Purbright asked. He did not look up. Malley said no, no kids.

She was not a fat woman, not plump, even. There was a suggestion of flaccidity about the thighs and belly, but the small breasts and narrow shoulders could have been those of someone much younger.

“Benjamin Croll—what do you know about him, Bill?”

“Not a lot. Farmer. Rich. Middling miserable. In his sixties now.” Malley gave a small snort of amusement. “I doubt if he’s still up to chucking blokes out of the bedroom window.”

Purbright remembered, grinned. “Christ, aye! Of course, that was Ben, wasn’t it. And the phoney MI5 man.”

“Long time ago.” ³ Malley made it sound like a gentle reproof. He began filling his pipe.

³ related in Hopjoy Was Here

The face in the photograph was like that of an old child. The expression might have been described as one of utter indifference, save that the angle of the head (it was slightly, but disconcertingly awry) was somehow suggestive of the anxiety and effort of someone hard of hearing.

“It’s easy to see her neck was broken,” Malley said. He pointed with his pipe stem.

Purbright saw also the patch of almost black bruising over the upper area of the side of the woman’s face, from brow to cheekbone. The eye was within it, dead yet returning the camera flash. The half-open lids had a beaten sulkiness about them.

There were other photographs, taken inside the church. One showed the area beneath the tower where Bernadette Croll’s body had been found. A chalk outline had been drawn on the floor.

Malley noticed the inspector looking at the outline. “That’s more or less a guess,” he said. “The body had been moved by the time Harton got out there.”

Purbright looked at two more pictures. One, taken from the ground, was of the tower interior. A cross had been marked against a narrow balustraded gallery about two-thirds of the way up to the floor of the ringing chamber. The second picture was simply the reverse view: the floor of the tower, seen from the gallery.

“Do X-rays mean anything to you?” Malley asked.

“I’m no radiologist.”

The sergeant held to the light a rectangle of black film. Silvery lines and patches appeared, the pale map of a skull. Purbright wondered at the smallness, the insubstantiality of the image.

Malley pointed to something. Purbright thought he could detect the faintest of irregularities, but wasn’t sure.

“According to Heinemann,” Malley said, “that’s a fracture.” He pointed lower down. “And that’s the neck dislocation.”

“Which one killed her?”

“The skull fracture, Heinemann said. There was a lot of brain haemorrhaging. Anyway, here’s the PM report, if you want to read it.” He drew out of the box a closely typed foolscap sheet.

Purbright glanced at it, put it aside. “Let’s look at some of the statements. I wasn’t here at the time.”

Malley sorted out another sheet of typescript and handed it across the desk. “Best start at the beginning,” he said.

“Discovery of body. And who better to make it than a man with a name like that?”

Robin Hugh Lestrange Bradden Cork-Bradden had testified:

I reside at Church House, Mumblesby. I am a retired army officer and I hold a number of company directorships. For the past eight years I have been Vicar’s Warden at the parish church of St Dennis the Martyr. In that capacity, I have the custody of one of the two church keys and it is my responsibility to lock the church at the end of the day arid to open it again each morning.

At about nine-thirty in the evening of Thursday August the twenty-first, 1980, I locked the south door after making sure the church was empty. This is my customary precaution. All the doors other than the south door are kept locked permanently. I had no need that evening to switch on the church lights, as there was still adequate daylight.

Shortly before ten o’clock the next morning, Friday, I went again to the church, this time in company with Mr Raymond Bishop, whom I had happened to meet on my way. I unlocked the south door and looked inside. I was surprised to see what I took to be a bundle of cassocks lying on the floor. On closer examination, I found it to be the body of Mrs Croll. Mr Bishop went for help. I could see Mrs Croll was dead. (In reply to the Coroner) I had no doubts at all. As a soldier, I know death when I see it.

Questioned by Superintendent Larch, Mr Cork-Bradden said the body was lying near an old iron-bound box known as the church chest. He agreed that the position of the body was consistent with Mrs Croll’s having fallen from the gallery in the tower, access to which was by a staircase in the tower wall. The door to the staircase was never locked. Witness agreed that his evening search of the church, though not perfunctory, would be unlikely to disclose anyone deliberately hiding.

In answer to Mr Richard Loughbury, representing the Croll family, witness said he had conversed on a few occasions with deceased. She had seemed to hold deeply religious views. The subject obsessed her. The conversations, some of which had been at witness’s home, had not been of his seeking. They had not embarrassed him; he had felt sorry for her and had tried to be helpful.

“It seems to me,” said Purbright to Malley, “that Mr Croll’s legal representative was less coy on the subject of Mrs Croll’s mental state than one might have expected. You notice that Loughbury quite openly led Cork-Bradden into suggesting the woman was missing a few marbles.”

“Perhaps she was.”

“Perhaps—but relatives never admit these things. They’re felt to reflect discredit on the family. Let’s have a look at the husbands evidence, anyway.”

Benjamin Croll, farmer, of Home Farm, Mumblesby, said that he had been shown a body in the mortuary of Flaxborough General Hospital and recognized it as that of his wife, Bernadette Croll. He had last seen his wife alive at half-past eleven, on the previous Friday morning—dinner time. She had eaten her meal and left the house, saying she would be back to get him his tea, but she had not returned by bedtime, and he heard no more until the police telephoned him the following morning.

In reply to the Coroner, witness said he had not been worried; his wife had stayed out all night on previous occasions. Answering Mr Loughbury, witness further stated that his wife had lately become very religious and had told him that she stayed out at night to keep God company. He agreed that it would be consistent with his wife’s attitude of mind if she had concealed herself in the parish church in order to pray on her own until morning.

Witness Croll, questioned by Superintendent Larch, said his wife had twice before threatened to take her own life but because she was so religious he did not think she meant it.

“There you are, then,” said Malley. “Ben certainly thought his missus was round the twist. He could scarcely have put it more plainly.”

“Did you ever have anything to do with her, Bill?”

“Took a statement from her once. Must be nearly twenty years ago, though.”

Purbright smiled. “You are going to say you remember nothing about her.”

Malley wheezed protestingly. “If I’m supposed to remember everybody who ever came into this office...”

“Bill, a long time ago it may be, but don’t tell me you’ve forgotten somebody of whom you said at the time—and I quote—‘That girl’s had more ferret than I’ve had hot dinners’. “

“Aye, well...” The sergeant looked down and rubbed the bowl of his pipe with his thumb. “Perhaps we take too much notice of what people say.”

“Wasn’t it true, then?”

“You know what villages are.”

“I’m not sure that I do. Not Mumblesby, anyway. Now come on, was the woman promiscuous or was she not?”

“She isn’t now, that’s for certain.” Malley saw the beginning of a frown of exasperation. He said quickly and with a note of grumpiness: “Of course she was. She was on the batter. You know bloody well.”

Purbright disliked harrying the sergeant, whose occasional obstructiveness came of a purely quixotic desire to protect those who could not help themselves. He wanted to explain the reason for his line of questioning, but he was not yet sure himself what it was.

He asked: “When was she supposed to have taken to religion?”

Malley stared gloomily at the mortuary photograph and shook his head. “No idea. First I heard of that was at the inquest.” He looked up at Purbright. “She left Ben a couple of times—you know that?”

“I did not.”

“Aye. Once with a car salesman from Grantham. The other was that art teacher at Flaxborough evening classes. They reckoned there were others, but I wouldn’t know.”

“How recent was the last affair that you did know about?”

Malley considered. “That would be the art bloke...oh, about six months before she was killed. A year, maybe.”

The inspector was silent for some moments.

“Something you said just now, Bill...”

“Aye?”

“You said the first you heard about Bernadette’s religious conversion, or mania, or whatever it was, was during the inquest. Did you mean that literally? Actually during the inquest?”

“Yes, why?”

The inspector looked at some pages of the record. “It seems to have come out in response to questions—mainly questions put by Loughbury to the husband and to Cork-Bradden.”

“That’s right.”

“So it wasn’t mentioned by any of these people at any time while you were taking their depositions before the inquest?”

“Not a dickey-bird.”

“Odd,” said Purbright.

“In what way?”

“Simply that here is a woman, considered by two people at least, one of them her own husband, to be a religious nut, who is found dead in a church, of all places. That isn’t the sort of coincidence that requires a lawyer to spot. Why didn’t somebody say straight out: Oh, yes, just the sort of thing she would do?”

“I suppose they were all taking the charitable view.”

Purbright stared. “Oh, Bill, come on...”

He said no more until he had read the testimony of the final witness, a young constable who contrived to include so many measurements in his report that the actual distance of the woman’s fall was crowded out and needed to be established by further calculation. Purbright made it forty-two feet.

The constable also had searched the gallery and there discovered a handbag, subsequently identified as the property of deceased. The bag had contained, according to Superintendent Larch’s remark to the coroner, who had recorded it, “nothing suggestive of why Mrs Croll was in the church or how she came to fall from the gallery”.

Purbright looked up. “Right about that, was he, Bill—the handbag contents?”

Reluctantly, Malley confirmed the correctness of interloper Larch’s judgment. The bag had held a purse, and money, a chequebook, cosmetics, handkerchief, car keys, cigarettes and lighter.

A receipt for these things and for the clothing his wife had been wearing at the time bore the signature of Benjamin Croll. Also listed were two rings, a silver chain necklace and one earring.

“One earring?”

“Yes,” said Malley. The other had never been found. It presumably had rolled into a crevice or down one of the gratings.”

The sergeant packed into the box all the documents but the medical report. Purbright motioned him to take that also: he seemed to have lost much of his interest. Malley packed everything in and secured the lid with the two rubber bands.

Suddenly Purbright said: “I want to know about a young boy named Howell. His mother’s a barmaid at the Mumblesby pub.”

Malley took his time putting the box back in its place on the shelf. He was smiling, as at the memory of some once familiar but harmless nuisance.

“What have they been telling you about young Oggy Howell, then?”

“His mother seems to think there’s a connection between Mrs Croll’s death and what she sees as a threat to take the boy away from her.”

Malley stroked one of his chins. “You realize the kid’s not very bright?”

“I know nothing about him.”

“I don’t mean he’s batty. Nothing like that. But I think he spends a lot of the time in a little world of his own. His mother brought him in here and I tried talking to him, but he could never have been put up as a witness. Larch more or less booted them both out.”

“Why?”

The sergeant puffed his cheeks. “Well, you know Larch. He’s not very tolerant of what we call one parent families nowadays. They’re all fallen women to the superintendent.”

“So you’ve no record of what was said.”

Malley shook his head.

“Did any of it make sense?”

“Not a lot. I don’t doubt the kid was there and peeking into the church through one of the windows.”

“At what time would that be?”

“Between eleven and midnight, his mother said. It was just before twelve o’clock that he came in. She was having supper. He had some with her and tried to tell her about something he’d seen.”

“How old is Oggy?”

Malley pouted. “About ten.”

“A late little bird.”

The sergeant said he did not doubt it.

“All right. Now tell me what Oggy said he saw.”

“You really want me to?”

Purbright waited. Malley was busy once more with his pipe ritual. It was not often, the inspector realized, that he had seen him actually smoking it.

“For what it’s worth,” Malley said at last, “the kid’s story was that there was a lady in the church who was going to do the washing...”

“She was what?”

Malley sighed. “I warned you.”

“Sorry. Go on. The lady was about to do the washing.”

“Right. And she was reading off a card how to do it. But then a big bird came and blew the candle out.”

“Blew the candle out,” Purbright repeated, woodenly.

“Yes.”

“A big bird.”

“That’s right.”

There was a long silence. Purbright sighed.

“I have no intention,” he said, “of reopening one of Mr Larch’s inquests. I certainly don’t want to cross-examine imaginative little boys who don’t get enough sleep. But I should love to know what that one really saw.”

“I don’t think there’s much mystery about the bird,” Malley said. “It can only have been poor Bernadette.”

“On her way down?”

“Aye. He’ll have been so scared that hed need to make up an explanation that he could cope with.”

“And the washing?” Purbright challenged. “The card the lady was reading?”

“Oggy’s mother tried to be helpful there,” said the sergeant. “She said she keeps a card of instructions pinned to a shelf above the washing machine at home so the kid associates reading with washing.”

“And where does that lead us?”

Malley shrugged.

“Did Miss Howell offer any suggestions?” the inspector asked.

For the first time in the conversation, Malley looked less than perfectly calm.

“Mothers,” he said, “always come up with something to justify their children. Sadie Howell tried to get Larch to believe that if Oggy said he’d seen a lady reading by candlelight, then that’s exactly what he had seen and that if it was Mrs Croll in the church, then it must have been Mrs Croll that he’d watched reading.”

Purbright considered briefly, then shook his head.

“I don’t see why we should quarrel with that. What the woman was doing before she climbed to the gallery and felt isn’t necessarily significant.”

“That’s all very well said Malley, “but Sadie tried to sell us the big bird story as well. She got it into her head that Mrs Croll hadn’t gone up the tower at all but had been attacked there where she was standing.”

“Attacked?”

“By somebody who rushed at her. Swooped like a bird, in fact.”

The inspector stared. “What on earth gave her that idea?”

Malley struck a match and regarded the flame thoughtfully. “There’s something we have to remember. Miss Howell had more than ordinary cause to stand by Oggy’s story once he’d started going round telling it to people.” The match had nearly burned out; he dropped it into a little jar on his desk and struck another. “She was scared that if ever there was a question about him not being all there he might be taken away from her.”

“But there’d have to be an application on behalf of the local authority to get him into care.

With great concentration, Malley sucked fire into the pipe bowl, then barbecued the end of his forefinger. “After the inquest, Sadie wrote a letter to the chief constable apologizing for wasting police time. She said the boy had made it all up and was sorry.”

“That could have been the truth of the matter, Bill.”

“Superintendent Larch thought so.”

“And you didn’t?” Purbright was watching Malley’s face.

“Me? I’m just the coroner’s tea boy. I don’t tell the CID what to do.”

“I should think not,” Purbright agreed, amiably. He stretched, looked at his watch.

There had to be endured a little more pipe-play on the part of the Wise Old Peasant, then Malley (he had a tucked-in, adenoidal way of speaking on these occasions) sniffed, regarded his hands and remarked to the ball of his left thumb: “Of course, it suited Mr Larch not to listen to Oggy’s tale.”

“Oh?”

The right thumb was addressed. “Midnight, locked church, lights off at the main switch—as they were still in the morning.” Mailey looked up. “Well, there was nothing to explain. Everything straightforward.”

“Much more satisfactory, I should have thought,” said Purbright, “than having to explain midnight laundry and big birds and candles.”

“And candlegrease,” added Malley, with such studied concern that he dropped his pipe.