by Colin Watson
“But hasn’t this man’s own shop been involved?”
“The oldest trick in the world. Self-inflicted injury.” Larch leaned forward. “As a matter of fact, it wasn’t terribly clever in this case. That sign was so high up that no one could have got at it without using a ladder or a chair or something. But it’s quite accessible from Hoole’s own upstairs window.”
“Motive?”
Larch smirked derisively. “You don’t want to worry about motives in this town, old son. There’s just one that goes for the lot. Sheer bloodymindedness. Anyway, I’ve told you—Hoole’s down on monuments.”
“Right; who’s next?”
“Joe Kebble. Editor of the local rag. He finds life a great bloody joke and I wouldn’t put it past him to help the fun along a bit, especially if it provided him with some copy.”
“Whoever’s responsible would need explosive, I suppose. Is it sold hereabouts?”
Sparing this bland inquiry no more than a grunt. Larch went on with his suspect list. Mr Grope was on it. This was because of the opportunities for nocturnal villainy that his hours of employment afforded. Constant film-watching, moreover, might easily have put violent ideas into that great rhyme-rocked noggin.
Somewhat to Purbright’s surprise, Councillor Pointer was included. “My father-in-law, if you must know,” Larch frankly divulged. “I’ve nothing against him otherwise, nothing I can put my finger on, but he’s hard to weigh up.”
Purbright reflected that if everyone of whom this might be said qualified for investigation as a potential dynamiter he was going to need detention camps. Larch, however, had a more specific charge to level.
“Ozzy Pointer takes a long time and goes a long way round when he wants to do anybody but, by God, he does ’em in the end all right. Now for some reason or other he’s taken a dislike to a chap in the town, a haulage contractor. I know him pretty well myself, as a matter of fact. He’s settled down now but he used to be a bit on the wild side and the name’s stuck. Pointer knows that and he’s doing his damnedest to get the fellow knocked off for this bomb nonsense. I might add that Ozzy’s word carries quite a bit of weight in this town.”
“You mean you think that Mr Pointer has set the things himself?”
“To frame Stan. Yes, he could have done.”
“Far-fetched, surely?”
“Far-fetched as hell, I know. But you see I also know that father-in-law of mine.”
Larch remained silent while he picked a spot on the back of his neck. Then he slammed the file shut and growled: “Well, there you have it. Enjoy yourself. And if one of our home-smoked maniacs blows your own bloody head off, don’t blame me.”
Chapter Ten
On the First of July a bloody head was blown off. But it was not Inspector Purbright’s.
The day began inauspiciously enough with his removal from the White Hind Hotel, where he had been ill-fed and insulted by a staff who behaved like emigre dukes, to the boarding house of Mrs Crispin.
It was one of the suspects who had recommended the move. Treated to Purbright’s account of his discomfiture at the hands of autocratic porters, waiters and chambermaids at the White Hind, Kebble had shaken his head and exclaimed: “Good God! You don’t want to stay there, old chap. Whoever put you on to that four-star pest house?”
Purbright loyally forbore from mentioning the advocacy of Chief Inspector Larch and said he had just happened to pick it because it was central.
“Get out,” said Kebble, “quick. Now let me see...you want to stay clear of all the hotels: there’s not one I’d quarantine a sick dog in. I’d put you up myself, but the wife’s got the loom working...” He thought for a minute. “Ah, I know. The chap’s just left who was in with old Payne. You’ll be alright there, if she’ll have you. Leonard...take this gentleman round to Mrs Crispin’s.”
And Mrs Crispin, to whom Purbright presented himself as plain Mister, did have him and gave every indication of being delighted.
She was a woman of incredible girth, but the legs beneath her capacious skirts must have been very short, for she travelled as if on rails, with no vertical movement whatever. Her face, which registered constant ecstasy in the presence of her ‘gentlemen’, was red and round under a black Japanese fringe. It was like the face of a rubber doll, enormously inflated.
Mrs Crispin having taken Purbright (metaphorically, he thanked God) to her gasometer-sized bosom, she detailed her help, Phyllis to escort him to his room and glided kitchen-wards.
Purbright clambered breathlessly up three flights of stairs, marvelling at the ease with which the fine, farm-bred back and thighs of the girl with whom he tried to keep pace conquered the steep and angular ascent.
“Here you are, sir,” she said at last, preceding him into a bedroom lined with varnished match-boarding and containing various tall, dark pieces of furniture that he was too exhausted to bother about identifying but which seemed to be awaiting him like chapel deacons, stiff with disapproval of a new communicant.
Phyllis set his heavy case on the bed with finger and thumb, gave him a quick but deeply dimpled smile, and departed.
Purbright sat and recovered his wind. Then he went to the narrow dormer window and, leaning on its sill, stared down at the little town where things had taken so unaccountably to going bump in the night.
He thought over his gleanings of the past couple of days: the readily offered accounts, guesses and insinuations, the terse police reports, the photographs and lists of times. They all boiled down to very little, perhaps no more than a series of eccentric pranks that had set off a chain reaction of parochial gossip.
Why, then, had Hessledine thought the affair worthy of special inquiries by an officer unconnected with the Chalmsbury Force? He had certainly not ordered them in response to representations by nervous civic dignitaries of whom he had said: “One end’s so like t’other it’s a wonder that when they take their hats off they’re not run in for indecent exposure.”
To only one confidence had he made Purbright partner. There had lately been reported missing from Flaxborough’s Civil Defence training centre a quantity of explosives quite large enough to account for the incidents to date, with a handsome reserve for encores. “There may be no connection,” the Chief Constable had said, “but the coincidence is far from happy.”
He had not laboured the point. There was no need. Purbright was well aware that the leading light in the Tuesday evening demolition and heavy rescue course at Flaxborough was Chief Inspector Larch.
Purbright leaned out of the window and let fall a small and manly droplet of C.I.D. saliva upon the third of the basement steps below. The tiny smack it made was quite audible: sound was carried by the summer air as though it were strung with infinitely fine wires (later in the afternoon one would think to see them, glinting in the heat).
Larch, though...it was absurd. Each Tuesday he left for Flaxborough long before dusk and did not return until the following morning. All three bombs had exploded in public places; it seemed inconceivable that they could have been set in position during daylight.
What object could Larch have, anyway? He certainly gave the impression of being anti-social, but not to a maniacal degree.
A car came slowly along the street and stopped immediately below. It was a large, old-fashioned car. Through its retracted sunshine roof Purbright saw the driver lean forward and switch off the ignition. He got out of the car and entered the house. This, Purbright guessed, was his fellow lodger and doubtless a harbinger of lunch. He carefully made his way downstairs.
Mrs Crispin made introductions with the air of springing a joyous surprise. Then she stood back, beaming expectantly at each in turn. Purbright wondered if he were supposed to embrace this new blood brother, but Payne, accustomed to his landlady’s transports, merely held out a hand and winked.
As soon as they were alone, however, he produced a minor surprise of his own “I must say. Inspector, that you don’t look a bit like a policeman.”
Purbright looked up from his soup analysis. “And who says I am a policeman?”
“Mrs Crispin. She’s very proud to have acquired you.”
“Indeed.”
“You mean no one is supposed to know?”
“It really doesn’t matter. I’m only a little disconcerted to find that one arrives in front of oneself, as it were. The communications system in this town must be excellent.”
“First-rate,” Payne agreed.
“And yet there are some things—quite well known facts, in all probability—that one simply cannot find out.”
Payne raised his brows. “Really? But are you sure you’ve asked the right people? Even the most obliging can’t help if they don’t know the answers. The trouble with Chalmsbury is that no one wishes to seem unobliging. You’ll always be given some sort of information, but the odds are that it will be wildly misleading.”
“I see what you mean,” Purbright said, “but I can’t say that I draw much encouragement from it.”
“Perhaps I can be more helpful. You are, I presume, following some specific line of inquiry here?”
“After a fashion.”
“Police Probe Mystery Blasts?”
Purbright winced. “You really must not draw me into any indiscretions, Mr Payne.”
“Indiscretions are currency in this town, Inspector. One is traded for another. You must be prepared to start somewhere.”
“Is that my cue to ask whether I may trust you?”
“Nothing so banal. But as we are to share one of Mrs Crispin’s cabinet puddings—today being Tuesday—we might as well recognize the bond of common tribulation and peril.”
Purbright smiled. “Very well. Your guess—if it was only a guess—was perfectly correct. Blasts are what I probe.”
Payne ate a while in silence. Then he said: “You will have heard already, or noticed yourself, that there is a pattern about these things.”
“A regularity.”
“That is so. Cabinet pudding is not the only feature peculiar to Tuesdays.”
“One Tuesday, the second one, produced nothing.”
“Why, I wonder.”
“The gap may not be significant. Perhaps there happened to be no opportunity.”
“Or perhaps our bombardier was otherwise engaged—detained, even.”
“Quite.” Purbright poured water for them both. “And what is your occupation, Mr Payne? No one,” he added, “intercepted me on the stairs to tell me.”
“I am a shopkeeper.”
“How odd,” said Purbright after appearing to give the reply some thought.
“Odd?”
“I’m sorry: I didn’t mean to sound rude, but the term shopkeeper is so seldom used now. Scarcely ever by shop-keepers themselves. They seem to consider it derogatory and prefer to be known as provision merchants or shoe repairers or confectioners.”
“In that case I suppose I should claim to be a jeweller. It’s a pretentious description, though, for one who merely wraps up manufactured articles and passes them over a counter.”
“Is that all that’s entailed?”
“Virtually. I keep a shop: that’s the sum of it. A parasitic existence, but it harms no one.”
“You may not appreciate,” said Purbright, “how precious that apparently negative virtue has become in these days.”
Payne smiled and they talked of other things until the arrival of the cabinet pudding.
Where would the fourth bomb explode?
No one doubted that a bomb would go off. And Tuesday having been established as ‘fuse-day’ in the public mind by the phrase-coiners of Fleet Street, location was all that remained to be guessed.
Chief Inspector Larch grudgingly ordered special measures. Day duties were reduced to a minimum so that as many men as possible might be switched to patrolling after dark. They were told to concentrate on the main town area and to pay particular attention to such obtrusive features as statues. The chief inspector expressed regret that his Civil Defence duties in Flaxborough precluded his personal supervision of the precautions. He emphasised, however, that were he to find on his return that they had failed in their object, the life of his menials would cease to be worth bloody well living.
There was one serious flaw in Larch’s plan. He had failed to realize that a considerable number of citizens would regard the occasion as a treat rather than an ordeal. So when all the carefully saved policemen were dispatched upon their appointed beats at lighting-up time they entered upon streets already crowded as if for a carnival. The closing of the pubs not only added to the number of spectators but instilled a recklessly jocular mood. There were shouts of “When’s the rocket going up?” and one group in Great Market began chanting, “Ten, nine, eight, seven...” The policemen, who had been led to expect that the town would soon be deserted save for themselves and the prowling dynamiter, whose apprehending would therefore be a simple matter of challenge and chase, instead found themselves jostled, ironically hailed, and pushed by sheer weight of numbers from the path of duty. A hundred saboteurs, they bitterly reflected, could have concealed themselves in such a throng.
Shunning these scenes of excitement, with their flavour of an auto da fe, a youth in sleuthing suit worked his way round by side streets to the northern outskirts of the town and sought the fence-flanked path that led to a remembered stile.
Leonard Leaper had waged and won a short tussle with his conscience earlier in the evening. His first intention on changing into dark clothes and soft shoes had been the same as the week before: to discover, outwit and expose the criminal. Almost immediately, however, a sense of the unlikelihood of success flooded coldly over him and left him helplessly receptive to a much less creditable idea. The fact was that he had forgotten the revulsion that events in the caravan had initially aroused in him; it had been replaced by a lively desire to attend a second performance.
On arriving at the stile, he peered down the field. The windows of the caravan were dark. He cautiously approached through the grass. No sound came from inside. He tried to remember at what time he had arrived behind Mrs Larch the previous week. It must have been at least half an hour later than this—perhaps an hour, even. There was no need yet to conclude that his second excursion was to be fruitless.
Leaper walked slowly round the caravan, looking through the windows. There was still enough light in the western sky for him to distinguish the shape of objects inside: a chair, a small stove, the shelf on which he had seen the drinks and the handbag. Something was lying on the shelf now, something of about the shape and size of a boot box.
When he reached the forward end of the caravan, Leaper noticed a break in the window. His instinct for the dramatic told him that so small a hole—it was about four inches in diameter—in so large a pane of glass could have been caused only by a projectile. He received the daunting image of another secret observer, less fortunate than himself, spotted by the hairy-armed philanderer and promptly shot.
Leaper glanced nervously towards the stile. There was no one there. Realizing that his own figure would be visible in silhouette against the caravan’s light grey paintwork, he hurried away in the shortest line to the edge of the field.
He stood in the shelter of the corrugated steel fence and kept watch for arrivals by way of the stile. It was not a comfortable vigil. A rising mist soon drove off the lingering warmth of the day. The air became damp and the chill of the soggy ground crept up his legs. Bats, hurling themselves in zig-zag quests, passed within inches of his face. An occasional moth made soft whirring contact with his skin. When this happened, he would shake himself frantically at the dusty, legged and whiskery, feathery, flailing creature that he imagined to be aiming for his mouth and nostrils. In the intervals between assaults by bats and moths, he listened apprehensively to rustling noises in the grass around him and fancied that he heard the gnashing of tiny, ankle-seeking teeth. Leaper was no nature lover.
He had almost made up his mind that he was paying too high a pric
e for an uncertain and risky measure of libidinous entertainment when he caught the sound of approaching footsteps.
There was something odd about them. They came from somewhere nearer than the path beyond the stile, yet they rang upon a hard surface.
Leaper listened, puzzled and with increasing unease, as the firm unhurried footfall grew louder. Then suddenly there was silence. He stood tense and open-mouthed with the effort of estimating where his danger—and he felt sure it was danger—would reveal itself.
Several seconds passed. Leaper started: tiny metallic sounds had reached him, a scraping and a click. Behind him, were they? But...
He threw himself flat at almost the exact moment when a section of the fence, a couple of yards from where he had been standing, swung out with a clangorous shudder.