by Colin Watson
Chapter Three
“Do you happen to know,” Inspector Purbright asked Detective Sergeant Sidney Love, “of anyone in this town who goes in fear of assassination?”
Love’s pink, choir-boy countenance set in thought. He seemed to find the question perfectly reasonable. Purbright watched him close, one by one, the fingers and thumb of his right hand; then, more hesitantly, three fingers of his left.
“Somebody’s been writing round,” Purbright said. He indicated the small collection on the desk. “One to old Amblesby, one to the paper, and one to the chief constable.”
Love picked up the sheets, read one slowly and examined the others. “They’re all the same.”
“Quite.”
“Sort of circular.”
“Sort of.” Purbright knew better than to hustle his sergeant. Love’s mental processes were more like plant growth than chemical reaction. They flowered in their own good time.
“Well written,” Love observed after further consideration.
“That shortens your list, does it?” Purbright was recalling the silently fingered catalogue of eight.
“Does away with it altogether. None of them could have put this together. Not on their own.”
“The paper’s a bit out of the ordinary.”
“Classy,” Love agreed, fingering it.
“You could try Dawson’s and see if they stock it and if they remember who’s bought any.”
Love nodded. He was re-reading parts of the letter to himself. Over certain phrases his eye lingered while his lips silently formed the words, savouring them. Purbright waited.
“I reckon a woman wrote it,” Love announced at last. He looked suddenly pleased with himself.
“Do you think so?” Purbright’s raised brows hinted, without irony, that he was ready to learn and to commend.
“Well, look...” Eagerness brightened the sergeant’s face by several candlepower. “I mean, things like loyal and faithful companion—see?—and loved hand. And here...heart may be touched. Well, I mean it must be a woman, mustn’t it.”
“I suppose the phraseology is on the romantic side.”
“It’s downright sloshy.”
“You may be right, Sid.”
Nourished by this praise, Love took another, deeper plunge into deductive reasoning.
“This woman... There’s more than just one trying to do her in. Here, you see—They think I do not understand—that’s what she says. They. So there must be two of them.”
“At least.”
“Aye, well... Oh, I don’t know, though—two’s the usual, surely?”
There was a pause. Purbright felt a little mean at having disrupted the sergeant’s happy theorizing.
“There’s one thing I can’t understand at all,” he said, magnanimously. “Why does she say she can’t sign the letter? Presumably she would have been immediately identifiable from the photograph that was supposed to be enclosed.”
Love confessed that this point was very queer indeed—as was the absence of the photograph.
“She might have forgotten to put it into one of the letters, but it didn’t come with any of them. And look here...”—Purbright pointed to the corner of each page—”There are pin marks on all three.”
“She must have changed her mind,” said Love.
“Possibly.”
“Unless...”
Purbright looked at him with polite expectancy.
“Unless,” said the sergeant, “somebody tampered with her mail.”
“Ah,” Purbright said. He put the letters aside with the air of having received a judgment upon them that would not soon or lightly be upset.
There were more pressing problems to be solved, certainly, than what had seemed from the outset to be an isolated spurt of barmy correspondence from some local victim of persecution mania.
As soon as Love had departed to make his inquiries at the shop of Mr Oliver Dawson, bookseller and stationer, the inspector sent to the canteen for a mug of tea and turned his thoughts to charity.
Or, more precisely, to charities.
Of these, there were in Flaxborough forty-three known species. A further dozen undocumented examples were thought to exist, but evidence of their survival was unreliable. The biggest group—eighteen—was classifiable as canine. It included the O.D.C. (Our Dumb Companions), the Barkers’ League, the Dogs At Sea Society, the Canine Law Alliance and the Four Foot Haven. There were seven societies devoted specifically to the welfare of other domestic animals. A further six were dedicated to the protection of wild ones. Of the remaining twelve organizations, four could be said to have cornered the ministry of comforts to the human aged, and three to have swept the board of orphans.The objects of the rest were of astonishing diversity and ranged from the reclamation of fallen gentlewomen to the Christianization of Mongolia.
It might be thought that the common motive of benevolence would have ensured the mutual neutrality if not the co-operation of all these bodies. Inspector Purbright suffered no such delusion. He knew from long experience that the world of organized charity was one of contested frontiers, of entrenchments and forays. As far back as he could remember, the arrangement of a flag day or the timing of a fête had been as bitterly disputed as any filched military advantage. Membership of the various committees—a much sought after social cachet—had always carried the risk of assault, moral if not physical, by the unsuccessful contenders. Plots and counter-plots went on all the time. The town council, practically every member of which had his or her own charitable axe to grind, was bullied this way and that on behalf of all causes in turn. Letters winged every other week into the columns of the Flaxborough Citizen bearing insinuations as nearly libellous as their authors (advised, quite often, by the editor, Mr Lintz, who well knew the circulatory stimulus of correspondence just on the safe side of scurrility) dared render them.
Viewed dispassionately—or uncharitably, perhaps one should say—it was a lively sport that diverted into relatively harmless channels energy that might otherwise have fuelled crime and commotion. As a policeman, a professional upholder of the Queen’s peace, Inspector Purbright could not but approve. It was his earnest opinion, for instance, that had Alderman Mrs Thompson lacked the vocation of preserving the lives of pigeons that roosted behind the balustrade of the public library, she would long since have done for Mr Thompson and possibly a fair sprinkling of their neighbours as well. There were others he could call to mind whose equally unthinkable propensities had been sublimated into what the Flaxborough Citizen liked to term “tireless devotion to the well-being of the old folk of the town”.
The public took it all in pretty good part. It was true that there had been casualties. These had mounted steadily with the increase in the number of street collections (practically every Saturday of the year was now a flag day in some cause or other). But not one victim cared to acknowledge that the reason for his injury had been an unseemly dash into traffic to avoid the solicitations of yet another flag seller. For the most part the citizens of Flaxborough responded to calls on their charity with no less enthusiasm—and no more—than that with which they would have paid a bridge toll. Indeed, many of them vaguely supposed these demands to be ordained by authority—not the government, perhaps, but some kind of important consortium (of bishops, was it?) that also ran religion and cemeteries and Armistice Day and double summer time.
No, it was probably the recipients of the charity, or of what was left after expenses, for whom one really ought to feel sympathy, Purbright reflected. All those saved dogs, helpless in their havens, being patted by Mrs Henrietta Palgrove. The poor old horses in the Mill Lane meadow, too decrepit and narrowly penned to escape their weekly ‘cheering up’ by a mass muster of the Flaxborough Equine Rescue Brigade (or FERB). The orphans up at Old Hall...well, no; perhaps not the orphans, he decided. They were well able to stand up for themselves, even against such an inveterate curl-rumpler as Alderman Steven Winge, who had been bitten four times since Christmas
. Purbright felt sorriest of all for the pensioners, the Darbys and Joans, the defenceless old men and women who, week after week, were jollied out of their peaceful cottages and trundled away to ‘treats’—usually at places like Brockleston-on-Sea, where they sat on hard benches at long board tables, there to be personally plied with tiny cakes and screamed solicitudes by ladies whom none had ever seen without hats, and by gentlemen who looked as if they had smiled steadily, remorselessly, awake and asleep, since birth...
Purbright gave a little shake of the head and resolutely hitched his chair nearer the desk. He opened a file marked “Charities: Incidents and Complaints” and began to read, not for the first time, the letters and reports it contained.
There was no doubt about it: Flaxborough’s charity war had hotted up alarmingly of late. Hostilities were beginning to bear the marks of professional generalship.
•
•
•
“Flower, sir? Buy a flower. Help the animals, sir.” Mr Mortimer Hive found his progress along the narrow pavement of Market Street barred by a girl of fourteen or fifteen with big, earnest brown eyes and a mouth like pale pink candy. Slung from her neck was a tray of paper emblems. Mr Hive glimpsed words along the front of the tray—KINDLY KENNEL KLAN—before a large slotted can, resoundingly cash-laden, was thrust to the level of his chin.
It was a highly inconvenient encounter for Mr Hive, engaged as he was in following a woman whose native familiarity with Flaxborough streets put him, a London inquiry agent, at disadvantage enough without the intervention of third parties.
However, good breeding made his response automatically chivalrous. He swept off his grey felt hat with one hand and thrust the other into the hip pocket of trousers whose cut, expensive and de rigueur in days when dinner and adultery were dressed for with equal fastidiousness, now looked oddly voluminous, like split skirts.
Mr Hive selected a half-crown from the withdrawn handful of change. The girl smiled happily at it and made a pick from the emblems on her tray. A plump little forearm nestled for a moment upon the lapel, old-fashionedly broad, of Mr Hive’s jacket. He felt a glow of pleasure, an almost fatherly benignity. He allowed a palmed penny to clink into the collection can and surreptitiously returned the half-crown to his pocket.
“Delighted to be of assistance, my dear!”
The girl popped prettily back into the doorway from which she had accosted him and, with a final flourish of his hat, Mr Hive was on his way.
The woman he had been following was now out of sight. He made what haste he could, consistent with courtesy, and side-stepped from time to time into the roadway to gain an extra yard or two whenever there was a gap in the traffic. This was a fairly perilous manoeuvre because the pedestrians were stubbornly disinclined to break ranks in order to let him rejoin them; it was rather like trying to haul oneself over the gunwales of an over-crowded lifeboat.
At last, anxious, out of breath and smarting from having been grazed by the tailboard of a truck, Mr Hive spotted again the patch of bright lime green that was his quarry’s hat. It was bobbing along in a tide of heads twenty yards away on the opposite side of the road.
Mr Hive pressed forward, but made no attempt to cross the road. By keeping close to the kerb, he was able not only to maintain progress but to preserve an almost uninterrupted diagonal view of the respondent (no, no—the Subject—he’d really have to master this new terminology). And by the time she disappeared through a doorway he had no difficulty in seeing that she had entered the Market Street branch of Flaxborough Public Library.
A minute later, Mr Hive also was in the building. He mounted a short flight of stairs, pushed open a glass door and found himself by a counter. Behind it, perched in a sort of dock, a straight-haired young woman was ready with a quick-freeze stare.
Mr Hive affected not to notice.
There was a hiss. It sounded like “Tickets?”
Mr Hive gave a confident, member-of-the-committee nod and patted his breast pocket.
The young woman raised no further objection but as he walked on into the room he had the impression that his arrival had given her a shock of some kind. Covertly, he glanced down at his trousers. No, nothing amiss there. Anyway, it had been something higher up that disturbed her, he thought. Odd...
There were some dozen people at the shelves, all draped in the attitude of slightly awed self-consciousness characteristic of book borrowers. Silence was almost absolute, and several glances of censure were earned by the sucking noises of satisfaction that emanated from an old man in the Biology Section who had come in for a warm at Havelock Ellis.
Mr Hive made a quick survey. The Subject was not in the room. Then he noticed a second glass door. It was marked REFERENCE. He walked nearer and peered through.
The woman in the green hat was bent, half kneeling, to a shelf close to the floor in which a number of slender but over-size volumes were stacked. She seemed to be replacing one. Mr Hive noted that its binding was pale blue and tooled in gold. He thought it lay about eighth from the end of the row.
The woman got up and straightened her dress. As he had done several times before during the past three days, Mr Hive took stock of her figure. It was plump but certainly not fat, with a lively curvaceousness which, though modified by strictly fashionable clothing, made direct appeal to Mr Hive’s sense of beauty. He much regretted that his calling imposed so tenuous a relationship between him and his Subjects. It was a mean, unnatural way of earning a living. How he longed sometimes to break cover, sweep up to the Subject and grasp her hand, crying: Madame, I am Hive, the detective, at your service! Take supper with me and you shall have my secrets!
She was reaching for the door. He stepped quickly aside and masked himself with a book. She walked past, behind him, with short purposeful steps. As he heard her turn by the counter and pause, her wake of perfume eddied around him. That, too, he liked about her. Lots of scent—very feminine. Most of them scarcely smelled at all nowadays.
In the empty reference room, Mr Hive stooped and pulled out the book in the pale blue cover. It was one of a selection of operatic scores. The Bartered Bride. An appreciative smile lifted the corners of Mr Hive’s Menjouesque moustache. He riffled speedily through the pages of the score.
The scrap of paper was nearly at the end. He read its message without removing it, then closed and replaced the book. The whole operation had taken only twenty or thirty seconds. Mr Hive felt distinctly encouraged; this was one of his better days.
A middle-aged woman with a little girl stood outside the door. Mr Hive pulled it back and stood aside with a flourish to let them pass.
The, woman thanked him mournfully and began to advance into the reference room, ushering the child before her. Then, quite suddenly, she stopped and stared, first unbelievingly, then with disgust and horror, at Mr Hive.
Painfully disconcerted as he was, Mr Hive recognized in the silent convolutions of the woman’s mouth an opportunity for lip-reading practice. It gave him no trouble at all.
Filthy beast...
Clutching the child to her skirts, she gazed angrily about her as if in search of some strong-armed champion. Mr Hive saw that his wisest course was prompt disengagement. He strode towards the exit.
As he approached the counter, he noticed that the librarian who had hissed at him was now in anxious conference with a tall, angular, bald-headed man, doubtless a senior colleague well versed in the handling of filthy beasts.
Both looked up together. The man made a movement suggestive of challenge.
Mr Hive avoided looking at him and marched straight for the door. It would not have surprised him in the least to hear the clanging of an alarm bell and the rushing descent of steel shutters. But nothing happened and he was soon safely immersed in the throng of Market Street.
Was there any point in again picking up the trail of the Subject? He thought not. The message she had implanted in the third act of The Bartered Bride was specific as to the time and place of her a
ssignation.
Anyway, he wanted to get back as soon as possible to the privacy of his lodgings. The long bedroom mirror seemed to hold the best hope of his being able to solve the mystery of the outraged women in the library.
Had he unknowingly collected some horrid stigmata? A mark of plague? Delicately, Mr Hive ran fingertips over his cheeks. An intimation of evening stubble; nothing more. He thrust from his mind a certain ridiculous but disturbing suspicion dating from his boyhood reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Mr Hive eased the slim gold pocket watch from its fob and pressed the catch. The outer case sprang open to reveal the twin information that the time was a quarter to five and that the watch had been presented ‘To Mortimer Hive, In Appreciation—Roly’ over the arms of the Marquess of Grantham. It was the arms of the Marchioness, a muscular and predatory lady from Wisconsin, that Mr Hive had cause chiefly to remember (“It was like a night in the python house,” he had averred afterwards to the Granthams’ family solicitor) but he bore old Roly no illwill and still treasured the watch that had accompanied his fee.