by Colin Watson
“I was in bed, of course. What else should I have been doing?”
“You heard nothing?”
“I heard a damn great bang all right. A lot of other people did too, I expect.”
“Did you think it came from the park here?”
“I didn’t think anything. I went back to sleep.”
“But when you arrived here for work...”
“I found this how-d’you-do.” Harding jerked his head towards the outrage. Just then the water jet faltered, sank and disappeared. The plumber had located the stopcock.
“You had the job of maintaining the fountain, I suppose: cleaning it, and so on?”
“That’s right.”
“Bit of a nuisance, was it?”
Harding blew out his cheeks. “Here, what do you think you’re getting at?” He stared,belligerently at Larch, then looked across at Kebble, as if challenging him to translate the innuendo into plainer terms. But Kebble was busy examining a cigarette he had just lighted.
Larch said smoothly: “It’s entirely up to you, Mr Harding, to decide what you think I mean. I don’t think I have said anything to which you should take exception.”
“You as good as said I’d blown the damn thing up myself to save cleaning it.”
For the first time in the interview Larch looked directly at the park keeper. “Really, Mr Harding,” he said reprovingly. Then he turned and regarded the few ancients who still lingered around the site of the explosion. “I’d be obliged if you could find a few stakes and rope that area off. We shall want to take a closer look at it without being trampled to death by the Over-Sixty clubs.”
As they drove back into town, Kebble said: “You don’t really think he did it, do you?”
Larch smiled. “Why not? He’s a cheeky bastard.” With effortless precision he swung the big car out to the crown of the road and overtook a slow procession of vans and lorries. “Unless, of course,” he added, “you know who’s responsible.”
“Me, old chap?” Kebble affected the pained surprise that he knew Larch expected of him.
“Certainly. But I was forgetting—a journalist never gives away the source of his information, does he?”
“Never,” Kebble cheerfully confirmed. He found the strain of playing to Larch’s humour did not diminish with the years.
As the car approached the Borough Bridge he was reminded of the other matter he had intended to mention. “You knew Stan Biggadyke had piled his car up, I suppose?”
“Has he really?” Larch sounded as if he had been told that the Great Lama had hairs in his nostrils.
“Didn’t anyone tell you!”
“Maybe. What special reason have you to be interested?”
God, thought Kebble, here we go again. He said: “I’m interested in everything and everybody. A professional nosey parker. Squalid, isn’t it?”
“You’re a damned interfering old nuisance.” Larch remained silent for a while, as he always did after a vituperative remark so as to give opportunity for it to be wondered at and worried over. Then, quietly and with the calculated indifference of a man fond of fancying himself much feared, he went on: “Yes, I know about Biggadyke. He was taken slightly ill when he was driving. He hit a lorry. I believe he’s likely to be in hospital for a day or two. That’s all.”
“No charge?”
Larch gave Kebble a quick, angry glance. “Why should there be?”
“I just wondered.”
Drawing the car to the curb outside the Chronicle office, Larch leaned across his passenger and opened the door. Then he jocularly punched flat the editor’s hat and handed it to him. “Don’t forget it’s the police ball on the 14th. If you give it a respectable mention this week I might cancel the instruction I’m just about to give for you to be booted out of the station next time you try and bother me.”
From the pavement, Kebble acknowledged the sally with a patient grin as he restored the dignity of his hat and set it once more on the back of his head. Thoughtfully, he watched the big car accelerate towards the Fen Street junction.
Chapter Three
Shortly after Larch had sat down again at his desk. Councillor Pointer looked round the door. Larch beckoned him in.
Pointer sat down carefully and placed his bowler hat, brim uppermost, between his feet. He looked sour enough for this arrangement to have been a precaution.
Larch rested his jaw on his palm and regarded him lazily. “Now then, what’s bitten you?”
“I was just about blown out of bed last night. I rang down here to find what had happened.”
“Well?”
“The clot who answered couldn’t grasp what I was talking about. He tried to tell me to ring the blasted gas board.” Pointer’s tiny black moustache quivered.
“He probably hadn’t heard anything. Your place is a bit out of town.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Hector. It rocked the street. You’re not going to tell me you didn’t hear it?”
“Not from Flaxborough, I didn’t. Tuesday’s my civil defence night.”
Pointer grunted acknowledgment. “All the same, you can take my word for it; the windows nearly came in. And all that fool could do was to spell out my name letter by letter as if he was cutting it in granite. I want you to see he gets a kick up the backside.”
Larch sighed. “Look, pop: we know all about that explosion. Sergeant Worple’s over there now. It was Worple who took your report. Don’t worry, he knows his stuff.”
“Yes, but...”
“You’re just in time for some coffee.” Larch reached to a bell push at the side of the desk.
Pointer did not pursue the argument but his boot button eyes continued to pivot restlessly. He found singularly irritating his son-in-law’s reluctance to admit the inefficiency of his staff.
“Are you calling in on Hilda later on?” Larch asked him.
“Possibly.”
“Well you might tell her that Stan had an accident this morning. Nothing serious. Bent his wagon a bit.”
Pointer’s anger broke surface. “Biggadyke, you mean. Why that...”
“That’s right,” Larch interrupted smoothly. “He’s in the General, I believe...Oh, Benson”—a squat, sandy-haired constable had appeared in the doorway—“make it two coffees, will you?” He waited until the door had closed, then looked at his visitor. “Why, what’s Stan done wrong?”
“Just about everything he’s ever had a chance to get away with. You know perfectly well what he is. It beats me why you let the swine into the house. As for allowing Hilda...”
Larch’s long, sunken cheek twitched. “Yes?” he lisped.
“Well, damn it all. Hector...” Pointer glared at his hat, then suddenly picked it up and clapped it on the desk. The topmost of Larch’s neatly stacked papers was fanned from the pile and floated to the floor.
Larch bent slowly and retrieved it. “Hilda’s friends are her own affair, and when one of them happens to be a friend of mine as well so much the less need for you to worry. Or,” he added after a pause, “her mother.”
Pointer looked up at the ceiling. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!”
“All right: I know she doesn’t like him.”
“I don’t care a rap who she likes. I’m giving you my opinion, not hers. Biggadyke’s not the sort of specimen I should have thought a policeman would care to associate with.”
“You’d be surprised if I told you some of the people I have to keep on my social register. They’d be cut dead in the mayor’s parlour but they’re damned useful to me.”
“That’s different. I have to mix with some queer customers in my trade, but I don’t invite them home if I can help it. Always keep ’em the other side of the counter, son.”
Larch felt like telling his father-in-law that this, his advice-to-my-men manner, did not wash outside the committee room of the Comrades of the Trenches Club. But his shrug was a dismissal of the subject. He never carried an argument beyond the stage at which his ultimate winning of it b
ecame problematical.
In Jubilee Park, Sergeant Worple paced slowly and in isolation around the enclosure roped off by Mr Harding. He contemptuously ignored the stares of those whom the spectacle of his apparent quarantine had drawn, like inquisitive badgers, from the Old Men’s Shelter. He also affected not to hear the disrespectful remarks of two or three small boys who kept asking him the time.
During the previous half hour the sergeant had collected a lot of measurements, in the relevance of which he had no faith whatever, and also what few material clues—mostly twisted metal fragments—as he thought might testify to his zeal and perspicacity. These he had put in an envelope.
Worple was about to quit his compound when he was greeted by a man who, though grey-haired, stood apart from the solemn excursionists from the Old Men’s Shelter.
The policeman strolled over and ducked beneath the rope.
“Sheep dog trials?” the man asked pleasantly.
“Actually,” said Worple, “no, sir. Your guess is very wide. The talk is all of an explosion.”
“My!”
“Look over there, Mr Payne.” He pointed to the concrete apron from which the last vestiges of water were steaming off into the midday sunshine. “We have reason to believe that that was the work of a bomb.”
“Wasn’t there a sort of memorial there? I seem to remember one.”
“A drinking fountain, Mr Payne. An amenity. One pressed a button in the centre of the representation of a lion’s face—its nose, as it were—and a stream of water was released downward from a faucet. It worked on the principle of mains pressure.”
“Ingenious,” remarked Mr Payne. He drummed his cheek with two fingers and stared thoughtfully at the space vacated by the drinking fountain.
Cornelius Payne bore a striking resemblance to the late Arturo Toscanini—not that the fact was much remarked upon in Chalmsbury. He had a triangular, sensitive face; crisp hair that tended to bunch at the sides; dark but by no means mournful eyes, deep set and watchful; and a waxed moustache that emphasized the firm, slightly sceptical set of his mouth.
The two men turned and strolled slowly toward the park gates. It was very hot and to the scent of drying grass mowings the light breeze added the oily tang of tar, spreading in wrinkled waves beneath the roadside dust.
When they were a safe distance from the eyes of the old men, Worple brought out from his tunic pocket the envelope of clues. He invited Payne to look inside. “That’s about all I managed to find,” he explained. “Of course, a mine detector’s what you want on a job like that. You wear headphones, you know, and they give a sort of high-pitched squeal when the detector passes over metal.”
Payne peered politely at the collection of mangled bits and pieces.
“They all mean something, looked at properly,” urged the sergeant.
Payne gingerly extracted one of the objects and held it on his palm. “Try interpreting this,” he invited.
The sergeant regarded it with head inclined first one way then the other. Finally he said: “Part of the firing mechanism, I shouldn’t wonder, sir. Of the bomb, you know. That hinge, you see, would enable contact to be made when...”
“It’s a suspender,” said Payne. He dropped it back in the envelope.
Some minutes later when they were walking along East Street (it was regarded in Chalmsbury as no great reflection upon either party for a policeman and a civilian to be seen in companionship) Worple returned to the subject.
“I believe you’re right about that thing being a memorial. I remember now. It was subscribed—paid for, you know—by Mrs Courtney-Snell.”
Payne nodded. “Leather-chops. That’s right.”
Worple gave him a reproachful glance. “She’s a magistrate, sir.”
“Ah!”
“Yes, indeed. A Justice of the Peace. Now I wonder if anyone had a grudge against her. Or against her late husband, for that matter. He was a decent enough gentleman, though, as far as I recall.”
“Wasn’t he mixed up in a law-suit or something just before he died?”
“Not mixed up exactly,” the sergeant corrected. “He was the successful plaintiff. He sued that haulage contractor, Mr Biggadyke, for slander. That’s defamation of character by word of mouth, sir.”
“A somewhat impetuous man, Mr Biggadyke, by all accounts.”
“Very likely. But that was no excuse for him going round and telling everybody that story about the Colonel and Bessie Egan.”
“Ah, yes. And the spurs.”
Worple shook his head gloomily and turned his attention to the mussel boats that were slipping in slow procession beneath the Borough Bridge, bound for the stages another quarter of a mile up river. “Tide time,” he remarked, with the countryman’s instinct for allowing no merely human speculations to interfere with the conscientious marking off of nature’s periods.
“I suppose,” added Worple, “that you’ll be off for your dinner now. Think of me, won’t you: straight off nights and being kept out of bed by this bomb business.” The words were belied by his air of self-congratulation; obviously he found the bomb business a welcome diversion.
“Rotten luck,” said Payne, watching for a chance to cross the road.
“Of course, you know what the trouble is,” confided the sergeant closely. “It’s the chief inspector. He hasn’t the first idea when it comes to looking into something unusual. He’s not had the education, you know. Still, keep that to yourself.”
“I shall indeed. Naturally.” Payne raised his hand in farewell and stepped from the kerb.
He did not, however, go straight to lunch. Outside the Nelson and Emma he encountered Barrington Hoole.
Wordlessly, as if by treaty, both men stepped down into the cool stone passageway of the inn. They pushed past the arguing overflow of farmers and seed merchants from the great bow-windowed market bar and entered the comparatively deserted tap room.
Seated in a corner was Mr Kebble, diligently writing on the backs of envelopes a platitudinous confection that he hoped would pass muster as that week’s “Pew and Pulpit”, a feature normally contributed by a rota of local clergymen, the copy for which had been lost in the case-room.
Taking a hasty swig from his tankard of brandy and water, the editor spotted the new arrivals and beamed. “With you in a minute.” Then he penned, with the ease of long practice, three final unexceptionable sentiments, measured at a glance the total column-inchage, and thankfully screwed on the cap of his pen. “God bless us, every one,” he murmured and swept the envelopes into his pocket.
This action seemed to serve as a reminder. He delved into another pocket and withdrew a still damp print which he put down on the table before Payne and Hoole.
The optician pinched his lips and hummed nasally a little tune as he appraised the photograph. “I ought to know this ostentatious projectile.” He looked up. “It’s Biggadyke’s, isn’t it?”
Kebble nodded. “Look at the depth of focus,” he said enthusiastically. “Dead sharp.”
“What happened to Biggadyke, then?” Payne asked.
Kepple leaned towards him and pointed to parts of the picture. “He’s got every dent, has Harry. Every scratch. Look at that.”
“Yes, but what happened?” Payne repeated.
“Hit a lorry—you can’t touch the old focal-plane half-plate jobs. Heavy, but...God, see that fellow’s foot near the back wheel ? You could count the stitches in his socks.”
“I trust the lorry driver escaped injury,” said Hoole, anxiously.
Kebble wrenched his gaze from Harry’s achievement and picked up his tankard. “Oh yes, he’s perfectly alright.”
“What about Biggadyke, though?” Payne persisted.
“In hospital, they tell me,” He drank, then shook his head and frowned. “Those nurses must have a pretty rotten life.”
Hoole stared out of the window. In the gap between two warehouses a mast came briefly into view. “Tide time,” he dutifully observed.
Payn
e broke the silence that followed. “Didn’t I,” he asked Kebble, “see you in Jubilee Park this morning? With a policeman?”
“You did, old chap. I didn’t know you were there. That fellow Larch swoops about so. It’s like keeping up with someone on stilts. I say”—he poked his face forward and looked suddenly earnest—“who do you reckon did it?”
“Did what?” Hoole asked.