by Colin Watson
Instead, a very strange thing happened.
Following the same trajectory as the trousers, a small fawn bundle sailed before Leaper’s eyes and unfurled in mid-air into two slim, translucent pennants that floated down to join the jacket.
At first, Leaper was dazed by this so wildly incongruous arrival of a pair of nylons. Then slowly he began to realize that in assuming the person he followed to be a man he had been deceived by scarf-bound hair, masculine jacket and slacks.
Once the truth dawned that he had only to move his head a couple of inches to glimpse some latter-day Salome at the sixth veil, his cautious reasoning died as a candle flame in the gust from a furnace. He thrust his face against the window with such avidity that his long nose threatened to snap, like a carrot, on the glass.
The woman stood in the centre of the floor, about three feet to Leaper’s left. She seemed to be having difficulty with the fastening of her penultimate garment. Her back was towards the window and she was looking down over her left shoulder, apparently at the owner of the long and hairy arm that Leaper could discern in the lower corner of his view.
The arm was extended in an eagerly helpful attitude, but the woman remained just beyond its reach, frowning slightly as her fingers struggled with a strap.
She was not, in Leaper’s estimation, a young woman. Her face was of the kind he was accustomed to seeing at doors when he sought funeral details: it was a married daughter’s face.
Where had he seen her before? If only she were wearing a normal complement of clothing, he felt sure he would recognize her. As it was, the strange, shocking, but irresistable circumstance of near-nudity somehow rendered her anonymous.
Leaper’s memory was not helped even by the full view of her features that was presented a moment later when, her brassiere having yielded at last, she spun round in a kind of triumphant abandonment and with a brisk, matter-of-fact peeling action, achieved that state which Leaper had wistfully seen advertised outside fairground booths as Beauty Unadorned.
The watcher, whose pressed-brawn visage against the glass had miraculously escaped the woman’s notice, found the revelation an anti-climax. Marriage with the light on, he decided, would be rather awful. He stepped back from the window, feeling weak and sour.
The moon had set and Leaper’s only guide back to the stile was the outline of the Carriage Company’s iron stockade against the faint luminescence of the summer night sky.
As he climbed down to the path, he glanced once more at the caravan. It was in darkness now. His sense of guilt and dismay grew suddenly stronger. He knew that sooner or later he would meet the woman again: no two inhabitants of Chalmsbury could avoid communion for long, even if it were only as customers in the same shop or companions at a bus stop. In any case his conviction increased that she was someone he had seen fairly regularly in the past and taken for granted, perhaps as the wife of some local big-wig. Whatever sort of a fool would he make of himself on coming face to face with her again? Suppose she were a public figure whom he was liable to have to report or interview. He began mentally ransacking a file of female councillors, magistrates and committee members.
At this juncture, though, Leaper’s uncharacteristically rapid course of thought was arrested. He stood still and stared at the point on the skyline where he had just seen a small flash of reflected light.
Two seconds later came the sound of the explosion.
In Leaper’s ears, it was like the boom of the cannon that signals a prisoner’s escape.
Chapter Six
One of Barrington Hoole’s most cherished possessions was a period piece among shop signs: a huge double-sided representation in coloured glass of a human eye. It was of the same shape as a tinned ham, though three times as big, and had been suspended from a bracket above the doorway of his consulting rooms since the early days of his predecessor, no believer in professional reticence, more than forty years before.
So awesome was this Cyclopean grotesque that it promised to outlast every other piece of portable or breakable property that Chalmsbury shopkeepers were rash enough to leave on display after barring their doors. Youths with catapults shunned it. Drunks veered to the opposite side of the road rather than pass beneath it. Even the pranksome bucks of Chalmsbury Rowing Club forebore from trying to add the thing to their collection of trophies.
The great eye, fringed with artificial lashes the size of liquorice sticks, had glared out from its brass frame for as long as Chief Inspector Larch could remember. So when Sergeant Worple came into his office to report that it had vanished he said merely: “Go to hell” and pushed the message out of his mind.
Worple stood patiently in front of the desk until Larch raised his eyes again. Then he said: “Beg pardon, sir, but it looks like another of these bombing affairs.”
“What does?”
“The destruction of Mr Hoole’s shop sign, sir.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The glass part of the sign has disintegrated—split up, sir—into pieces like grains of sugar. They’re underfoot for quite a way along Watergate Street. Crunchy, they are.”
Larch laid down his pen and gave Worple a jaundiced scowl. “Crunchy,” he repeated flatly.
“That is so, sir. Glass is a crystalline substance, as you may know, with a lot of internal stresses”—he illustrated the point by hooking his fingers and pulling them—“so it tends to shatter on receiving a blow. The more sudden and powerful the blow, the more pieces the glass will fly into. An explosive, now...”
“Never mind the bloody lecture. Who reported this?”
“Mr Hoole was the complainant, sir, but he didn’t exactly report it. He just stood under where the sign had been and used bad language. I advised him to be careful and he changed to much longer words that didn’t seem to give as much offence to bystanders. One of them told me it was the sign having been smashed that had upset Mr Hoole.”
Larch rose, signed Worple to follow, and strode out of his office. A few minutes later they were looking up at the twisted remains of the framework that had contained the giant eye.
The chief inspector pounced into several shops nearby and promptly alienated their proprietors with aggressive questioning. One or two who lived above their premises said they had heard a loud bang during the night but they had no further information to offer and each plainly resented the implication that he was the author of the explosion.
Larch left Barrington Hoole himself until last.
The optician did not appear immediately but when he did descend from the upper floor he looked flushed and ready to lay tongue to more expletives of the kind he had been persuaded earlier to abandon. He nodded curtly at Larch and stood silent and challenging.
“I understand you’ve had a spot of trouble with your, er, advertisement out there, sir.”
Hoole regarded him speechlessly for a moment then tightened his mouth and retorted: “Don’t be fatuous, officer. You mean some blackguard blew the damn thing to smithereens. And just at the moment I happen to be in the middle of a consultation. You will have to pursue your inquiries elsewhere.”
Larch swung his great jaw from side to side like a bulldozer seeking soft earth. “I wouldn’t take too uncooperative an attitude if I were you, sir. The ownership of the advertisement doesn’t give you the right to be indifferent to a police investigation, Mr Hoole. Blowing up property in a public place is a serious matter.”
“Well you don’t imagine I blew it up, do you?”
“In our job we imagine nothing, sir. We seek the facts.”
“How you elicit facts without using imagination is your business, but it does help to explain your remarkably consistent lack of success.”
“Did that sign thing of yours happen to be insured?” Larch inquired. His new description of the article in question lent itself to an even more contemptuous tone than he had succeeded in applying to ‘advertisement’.
“Of course,” said Hoole. “For thirty thousand pounds.”
“Naturally.”
“When did you leave your shop yesterday evening?”
“I left my consulting rooms at precisely five o-clock.”
“And you didn’t return until this morning?”
“No.”
“You are certain of that?”
“Not absolutely. I am a schizophrenic, you know. Half of me takes a good deal of watching. Perhaps it slipped away in the night.”
One side of Larch’s mouth curled up like paper on a hot stove. “It strikes me, Mr Hoole, that both halves of you could do with watching.” He reached for the door. “I may have further questions to ask you later.”
“I gravely doubt if I shall have either the time or the inclination to answer them.”
Larch opened the door, looked into the street, and turned back. “Ah, Mr Hoole,” he sighed, “we have had our fun. But next time I shall bring a witness. And fun may then appear as obstruction and very wrongful.”
Hoole put his finger tips on the counter, and leaned close to the chief inspector.
“May your truncheon take root in your orifice and become a thorn bush,” he said with quiet sincerity.
Sweeping Worple into step beside him, Larch marched grimly back towards the police station. Worple, who had learned by now to keep a ready supply of envelopes in his tunic pocket, tried to explain on the way that he had performed his usual gleaning duty at the scene of explosion number three. But Larch waved down his report with some exasperation and the sergeant had to content himself with adding his latest collection of oddments to the two packets already lying between a tea caddy and a confiscated revolver in the charge-room cupboard.
When he re-entered his office. Larch found his father-in-law awaiting him.
“Now then. Pop,” he said, with what pretence of cordiality he could summon at such short notice.
Councillor Pointer looked angry and unhappy. “There’s been another, hasn’t there?”
Larch sprawled in his chair and rubbed his jaw. “There has,” he said, then, smiling slowly, “the best up to now.”
“Never mind about that. Whoever’s playing these damned tricks has got to be taught. The council will be furious. The whole town’s...”
“...up in arms.” Larch completed the councillor’s favourite assertion.
“Well, so it is. I’m not joking. Can’t you see what an impossible situation it puts me in? A chairman having to explain to his own committee that his own son-in-law hasn’t been able to protect the town from a blasted bomb-throwing lunatic.”
“He doesn’t throw them, Pop.”
“See here. Hector...” Pointer paused and went on in a lower tone: “Have you honestly no idea of who’s responsible?”
Larch did not reply at once. Pointer nodded. “So that’s how it is.”
“That’s how what is?”
“Why did you hesitate just now?”
“I was trying to think what you were suggesting. Hadn’t you better tell me?”
Pointer looked at the floor and began feeling aimlessly in his waistcoat pockets. “It’s occurred to me,” he said slowly, “and to more than one member of the committee that this sort of behaviour sounds remarkably characteristic of your friend Biggadyke.” He looked up. “It does, you know.”
“Why on earth should you think that?”
“Oh, don’t bluster, Hector. You know what the fellow is. Anyone who could have fixed up that horrible contraption in the Ladies at the Mayoress’s At Home last year...”
“That was never proved.”
“We knew, all right. Biggadyke may look half-sloshed most of the time but he’s an ingenious devil. What about that business of the hockey sticks at the High School? Don’t pretend you had any doubt of who arranged that. The fellow has a rotten streak right through. But just because he sponsored your membership of...”
“I don’t think you should say any more about that,” Larch broke in. “This is all rather beside the point, anyway. Stan may have done some silly things in his time but I haven’t the slightest reason to suspect him of this lot. I certainly wouldn’t protect him, if that’s what you’re driving at.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
In the silence that followed. Pointer realized he had gone too far. Larch stared at him in cold fury. When he spoke, the words emerged like slips of snakeskin. “And what specific occasion had you in mind?”
The councillor shrugged uncomfortably. “If you must know, it was that driving case. People talked. As they will, you know. Things were never properly explained. Not the delay in a doctor turning up, at any rate.”
“Go on.”
“Well, it was said you’d given Biggadyke the chance to sober up before he could be examined.”
“He asked for his own doctor. That was his right.”
“His own man was away on holiday.”
“We weren’t to know that.”
“You could have found out in less than the two hours it took you to get somebody else.”
Larch pulled forward a pile of papers and began looking through them. “All that’s been gone over. Forget it.” His eyes still on the sheet of typescript before him, he felt for his fountain pen and unscrewed the cap.
Pointer flushed. “All that black coffee was never ‘gone over’,” he blurted.
Larch’s head jerked up. “What did you say?”
“The coffee you got Biggadyke to drink when you thought no one was looking. A whole flask full that Hilda had made for you.”
“Where the hell did you get that story?”
“Never mind who told me. You ought to know by now that nothing can be kept quiet for long in a town like this.”
“Do you believe it?”
Pointer looked at him intently. “I’m not sure. It wouldn’t go any further if I did. But you needn’t get the idea that I’m going to cover up for you if you insist on inviting more suspicion. At least you should have a go at Biggadyke and let it get around that you’d questioned him.”
Larch considered. “I might,” he said.
“Good. That’s sensible. Of course”—Pointer stood up and stared at the hat band of his bowler—“I don’t say the fellow’s necessarily guilty. You might be able to write him off altogether.”
To this. Larch said nothing.
“And Hector, I do seriously advise you not to see so much of him for a while. Not until this thing’s settled. Tell him to give Hilda a miss, too.”
“I think you might leave me just a little discretion.”
“As you like. I wouldn’t have said anything, except that you don’t seem to realize what trouble you might be bringing on yourself. And the family.”
“The family?”
“Well...Hilda. And me.”
“And dear mother-in-law?”
Pointer gave a short, humourless laugh.
When he had gone, Larch remained for some time gazing blankly at the papers on his desk. Then he lifted the telephone and asked for the Chalmsbury Carriage Company.
Stanley Biggadyke accepted a seat in the chief inspector’s office and grinned in turn at Larch and at Sergeant Worple, who sat in the attitude of an umpire a few feet from the side of the desk.
“You may be wondering,” Larch began, “why I asked if you would be good enough to come and see us, Mr Biggadyke.” He turned his head slightly in the sergeant’s direction as if to acknowledge his share in the proceedings.
“Well, actually...”
“The fact is,” Larch smoothly resumed, “that I wished to ask you a few questions in connection with a routine inquiry we are making. I thought you would prefer the interview to take place here rather than in your own office where unnecessary speculation might be aroused.”
“Oh yes. Sure.” Biggadyke crossed his legs and nodded sagely.
“So we shall begin by stating
what you doubtless know already, Mr Biggadyke: that on three Tuesday nights this month, including last night, there have been explosions in the town which severely damaged various pieces of property.”
“Another one last night, eh? You don’t say.”
“Yes, sir. In Watergate Street. The others were in the Jubilee Park on June third and in the Zion Church courtyard on June seventeen. Nobody hurt, but that doesn’t mean we should view these things less seriously.”