by Colin Watson
As Kebble described the outrage Hoole’s tight, smooth face gleamed with high amusement. “Oh God, the Snell cenotaph! Does she know?—No, of course she can’t; she was in my place just this morning.”
The editor grinned. “Once she does you’ll not see poor old Larch off the chain until he manages to arrest somebody.”
“That shouldn’t give him much difficulty,” said Payne. “Hasn’t Joe Mulvaney confessed yet?”
“Must have done,” said Hoole. “Unless he hasn’t heard about it.”
“Grope will have told him by now,” Kebble said.
“Well, then.”
The editor shook his head. “No, Joe’s been overdoing it lately. Claiming those Leicestershire stranglings was a bit too brown. Right out of his district.”
The trio prolonged the joke a little longer. None really believed that Joseph Terence Alloysius Mulvaney, cinema projectionist and slightly weak-minded victim of a sacrifice compulsion, would take credit for the Jubilee Park affair. It was just that he, together with versifying Grope and genially promiscuous Bess Egan and Edward Summerbine, fit-thrower, and Mavis Baggley, kleptomaniacal house-keeper of the town’s probation officer, and several more, were familiar bent coins in the social currency. They kept turning up among the loose change of conversation: droll reminders of life’s sportive possibilities.
Yet oddly enough, just as the talk in the Nelson and Emma had reverted to that morning’s road accident and Hoole was yielding to the temptation to tell a story about belladonna tincture, Mulvaney was doing precisely what had been so lightly predicted.
He was confessing, and to Chief Inspector Larch in person.
Larch had summoned the determined self-accuser into his office partly to deprive his staff of an opportunity for wasting time. But he had another reason. Like many of his kind, he allowed to percolate through his dislike of humanity in general a sentimental sympathy for freaks. He would allow Mulvaney to perform his act of sacrifice without the depressing indignity of conforming to a sceptical sergeant’s dictation speed.
Mulvaney, who had never recovered from the experience, in the first week of his apprenticeship, of seeing “The Informer” screened, sat hunched in his chair and scowled with pale obstinacy at Black-and-Tan Larch. In spite of the heat, he wore a long, tightly belted raincoat and kept his hands in its pockets.
“Sure and I don’t care if me poor body’s full of English bullets this night,” he was saying with a whining lilt that Larch found strangely soporific, “but not a word of treachery you’ll drag out of me. Haven’t I told you what happened, now? There was meself in it only, and that’s the holy truth.”
“You’ve not said why you did it, Mulvaney.”
Scorn blazed suddenly in Mulvaney’s big, gentle eyes. “Is it seriously you’re asking me that? You’ll be telling me next you’ve never heard of the annexation of Ireland!”
“Oh, of course,” Larch acknowledged.
“Or of the Organization? Let’s see if you’ll say you’ve never heard of the Organization?”
Larch let this irony pass.
Mulvaney stood up. He clicked his heels. “Very well; I’m ready.” He closed his eyes and added: “I suppose there’ll be a farce of a trial?”
The Chief Inspector also stood. “Er, no,” he said. “I can’t say that there will.”
A pained smile flickered over Mulvaney’s face. “Ah, yes. So it’s the cellar and the car’s backfire you’ll be having in mind, captain?”
Larch came round his desk, walked to the door and opened it. Mulvaney continued to stand blindly at attention. Then, hearing Larch cough, he opened his eyes.
He stared at the doorway, gave a quick, bitter laugh, and strolled carelessly towards the proffered freedom. “Ha! It’s the ambush, is it, after all?”
Larch nodded as he passed. “I’m afraid so. The cellar’s being re-decorated.”
Chapter Four
The obliteration of the Courtney-Snell memorial had no significant sequel for two weeks. It was reported, at considerable length and with biographies of everyone who could be remotely associated with it, in the following Friday’s issue of the Chalmsbury Chronicle. Police inquiries proceeded, of course, or were said to. Mrs Courtney-Snell quivered and threatened and enjoyed the solicitude of her peers. And small children in Jubilee Park went thirsty. That was all.
It was agreed to have been a queer affair, but not unduly alarming. As a topic it fell quickly to grade three.
And then, during the night of Tuesday, 17th June, there was a second explosion in Chalmsbury.
Councillor Pointer did not hear this one. It occurred more than a mile from his red brick villa in Holmwood and was not particularly loud, anyway. So Sergeant Worple’s successor on night duty remained undisturbed by the telephone and was able to leave the Occurrence Book fulfilling its proper function as a door stop.
The next morning two women happened to step simultaneously out of the front doors of their adjoining houses in Chapel Terrace. She who failed, by a split second, to start speaking before the other stood staring stonily across the road awaiting her chance to seize the conversational initiative. At first she gazed unseeing, intent only upon having ready a counter-stream of loquacity, but after a while she became aware that something in her line of vision was most curiously amiss. She grasped the second woman’s arm, shook her into silence, and exclaimed: “Look—his head’s gone!”
And so it had. Alderman Arnold Berry was no longer regarding the wide world with that straining-at-stool expression that denotes, in the convention of public sculpture, a man of high but unpopular principles. He was peering instead—or rather his head was—into a bed of wallflowers.
“Whoever could have done that?”
“Those Mackenzie kids, I expect.”
“Not that, they couldn’t. It’s metal.”
“Here, do you know, I thought I heard something in the night...”
“A sort of slamming noise?”
“A bang. Just outside.”
“That’s right. It was.”
“I wonder if...”
“Well I never!”
And so the report eventually reached Chief Inspector Larch that the statue of Alderman Berry had been decapitated and that two residents of houses opposite the railed courtyard in which the memorial stood had heard an explosion during the night. He drove immediately to the scene, accompanied by Worple.
The bronze figure had been transformed into something a surrealist might have found eminently satisfying. The spread hand of its down-reaching arm indicated the recumbent head, as if in proud witness to a feat of strength. The alderman’s other hand, robbed of the cheek it had supported in an attitude of pious bloody-mindedness, now stuck erect in jaunty salute. The statue of the town’s foremost temperance pioneer could not have been more shockingly desecrated had a brazen beer barrel been riveted between its feet.
Worple stared at the topped effigy for fully half a minute. “It quite turns you up, doesn’t it, sir?” he said at last.
“No,” said Larch. He faced the other way, scowling at the houses that overlooked the chapel courtyard and searching his memory for the names of such of their occupants as had incurred his displeasure in the past.
The sergeant knelt and examined the head.
It appeared to have been cleanly fractured except for an area at the back of the neck where the metal was twisted and jagged. The charge must have been placed there, like a poultice. It had been enough merely to smash a smallish hole and to topple, rather than blast, the head from the trunk.
Worple stood and gave Larch his opinion, adding that explosions were funny things and he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of damage coming to light further afield when a thorough search was made.
“Never mind that,” retorted the chief inspector. “Just have a quick look round on the spot. There’s someone over there I’m going to have a word with if he’s in.” He strode to the gates, crossed the road and knocked on one of the doors in the gre
y stone terrace.
Mr Grope, as it happened, was not in. He was playing his favourite role of bearer of strange tidings to the receptive Kebble.
His wife told Larch simply that he was down in the town and started to close the door.
“Just a moment, Mrs Grope...”
She paused, regarding him suspiciously through weak, puckered-up eyes. “He’s out. You’ll have to come again.”
“I am a police officer, Mrs Grope. Might I ask you a couple of questions?” The woman made no move and Larch added firmly: “Inside, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”
She turned, leaving the door open for him to follow. He caught up with her in a tiny, furniture-crammed parlour that smelled of old wardrobes. Without invitation, Larch seated himself in an arm-chair.
“I’d like you to tell me if you heard anything unusual during the night. Something like a firework going off, perhaps.”
Mrs Grope shook her head. “I don’t enjoy very good hearing,” she explained huskily. “My hubby, now—he’s very keen in the ear. He says he can hear the gentleman next door picking his nose.” Her mouth dropped open to disclose toothless gums and Larch’s face was fanned with short, noiseless exhalations. Mrs Grope was laughing.
The spasm stopped as suddenly as it began and she added: “That’s just in the way of being one of his jokes, of course.”
“Was your husband here in the house all last night?”
“Eh? Yes, where else would he be? There’s nowhere to go when he gets back after the last house pictures.”
“But if he had gone out again, you might not have known, might you, if your hearing’s not too good?”
Mrs Grope looked blank. She sensed enmity.
“I do seem to remember, you know, Mrs Grope, that your husband took a night trip once before without your knowing anything about it.”
She stared at the long, pallid face above the prow-like jaw. “How do you mean?”
“He was reported missing, wasn’t he? We wasted quite a lot of time that night.”
Mrs Grope gave an angry little puff. “Well fancy throwing that up again! You know very well that was all a mistake and no harm done.” She patted the blouse over her thin chest and indignantly tugged her apron straight. “Anyway, if anyone was to blame it was Mr Biggadyke. He nearly lost father his job over that business.”
The memory was not one that she cared to be revived, least of all by a coldly aggressive policeman who seemed intent on forcing her into association with some new unpleasantness that she knew nothing about.
The incident to which he referred had happened about two years before. Grope had awakened in the middle of the night, uncomfortably aware that he had neglected, for once, to search the back row of the circle before leaving. This was a moral duty that he imposed upon himself whenever Mr Biggadyke visited the cinema in consort. ‘My ladies’, as Grope termed the morning cleaners, deserved better, he considered, than to suffer the embarrassment of chancing upon evidence of Mr Biggadyke’s diversions.
So Grope had arisen silently from his bed and had gone back to the picture house. But having repaired his lapse he inadvertently fell asleep again in one of the seats and remained there until the arrival of the charwomen some six hours later. It was then that he learned of the awakening of his wife, her descent downstairs and horrified discovery of what she took to be a suicide note on the dining-room table, and the subsequent hunt for his corpse by the half-dozen policemen whom Larch had managed to mobilize in grudging response to Mrs Grope’s hysterics.
Mrs Grope, though not sharing her husband’s addiction to rhyme, would never forget the couplet whose first line Grope had jotted down in a moment of sudden inspiration before leaving the house that night.
Weary of sights on earth, I’ll stretch my neck,
To glimpse the clouds that Luke’s high tower bedeck.
The second line, being still at the chewing over stage, had not been added. How foolish they had been made to look. And Mr Larch certainly had not believed the explanation. His present attitude showed he still thought Father had been deliberately having him on. You’re spiteful, she said to herself; that’s what you are, Mr Dishcloth-face.
Larch questioned her a little longer, but to no avail. She was by now convinced that his sole design was her self-incrimination as a deceiver of policemen. The best defence was to know nothing about anything and this line she sourly maintained until Larch abandoned her parlour.
The chief inspector found Worple still perambulating slowly around the chapel courtyard, his head bowed. Now and then he halted, gently probed the gravel with his foot and bent to peer at it. In one hand he carried an envelope.
“I think we can get back now, sergeant,” said Larch. “No use fooling round here all morning.” He spotted the envelope. “What have you got there?”
Worple held it out to him, as if offering a toffee. “Odds and ends, sir. Like we collected in the park the other week.”
Larch glanced into the envelope and eyed without much interest the bits of metal it contained. The only recognizable fragment was a tiny toothed wheel. “Might be anything,” he said.
Worple folded the envelope and put it in his pocket. “That’s so, sir. On the other hand, they might be”—he paused—“of forensic significance.”
“What? Oh yes; quite.” Larch had not caught Worple’s undertone of reproof. He was looking up at the rapidly clouding sky. “Come on, man; it’s going to rain.” They hastened to the car as the first swollen drops smacked down.
Within ten minutes the late Alderman Berry’s favourite beverage was fast filling his hollow legs.
Mr Kebble liked rain. It protracted and seemed to make more intimate, more productive of confidences, the visits of his friends and informants. On fine days they merely looked in to deliver the bare bones of a story, were content sometimes to toss them from the doorway. Kebble, like a fat but agile pug, caught them easily enough and expertly digested them, but he much preferred to make leisurely and careful selection from the offerings of callers who were not for ever looking at his clock and saying, ‘Ah, well’ or ‘Good Lord!’ Visitors marooned by the weather never behaved like this. They sat, as Mr Grope was sitting now, well back in their chairs and carelessly signalled time’s winged chariot to overtake.
“It didn’t exactly wake me, mind,” Grope said. “Nothing ever wakes me. Only worry sometimes. Left over thoughts, you know—they lie like pastry. But I must have heard it, all the same. As soon as the better half came up with my breakfast this morning I sat up and said, ‘There’s been another one.’ She knew what I meant and I was right.”
Kebble nodded happily. News of the posthumous execution of Alderman Berry, whom he remembered as an incorrigible hand-shaker and tops for humility among the highly competitive penitents of the New Zion Brotherhood, had put him in an even better humour than usual.
“Do you reckon there’s any connection?” he asked.
“Connection with what?”
“Why, that park business. The drinking fountain.” Grope considered. “It may very well be,” he said after a while, “that both crimes were the work of the self-same...” He searched for the word.
“Miscreant.” This timely contribution came from Leonard Leaper, who was standing at one side of the editor’s desk and following the conversation like a starving footman at a banquet.
Grope turned his sad eyes slowly towards the reporter. “I was talking to Mr Kebble,” he said.
The editor waved Leaper to his own desk. “I’m still waiting for the Ferguson wedding. Did you collect the form?”
The youth held aloft a grubby sheet of paper.
“Good,” said Kebble. “Write it. By the way, just remember that for our purposes marriages are neither consummated or ‘solomonized’. And for God’s sake don’t ever again describe the bridesmaids as wearing Dutch caps.” He returned his attention to Grope.
“There was a film being shown to our patrons last week,” the commissionaire resumed thoughtfu
lly, “that was all about a man who was unjustly convicted of someone else’s misdoings. And when he came out of prison he was an enemy of society and did a lot of dreadful things that were much worse than the one he had been sent to prison for not doing, if you follow me. There was some blowing up in it, I remember, and...” He lapsed into silence.
“Yes?” Kebble prompted.
“I don’t know. I always had to leave at that part and check the ice cream trays. Mrs Hardacre in back stalls said she’d take it over on the Saturday but she must have forgotten because she didn’t come out until it was time to put her harness on and then it was Coming Attractions.”
“Oh dear,” said Kebble politely.
“So you see the person I think the police ought to be looking for is someone here in the town who’s been turned into an enemy of society—perhaps through being sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”