by Colin Watson
Purbright saw that Pointer was trembling. He sat down on the grass and motioned the wine merchant to join him.
Pointer squatted, wiping his brow and staring gloomily across the valley. “I know this much,” he said. “If Hector does find out about Hilda—and it must be common knowledge when you managed to pick it up so soon—if that happens, I wouldn’t give much for my girl’s chances.” Pointer clutched the policeman’s arm. “Suppose she’d been with Biggadyke that night in the caravan. It could have been meant for her, too.”
“Look, sir,” said Purbright, “I think we’d be wise at the moment not to envisage too many possibilities. The chances are that your son-in-law is a perfectly decent and harmless fellow and that your daughter’s in no danger whatever. They’ll probably get over their troubles like any other married couple who hit a bad patch.”
He hoped that these shameless platitudes would have sedative effect upon poor Pointer. The last thing he wanted was for the man to panic; he had underestimated his vulnerability to suggestion.
But Pointer showed an entirely unexpected reaction. Mottled with sudden anger, he stared savagely at Purbright. “What the hell do you think you are? A marriage counsellor?”
“I’m sorry; I don’t quite...”
“You don’t quite,” Pointer mimicked bitterly. “Oh, but you do quite. You must have got something for your rooting and grubbing. They’ll have been ready enough to tell you.”
Purbright watched the inflamed, protuberant little eyes. To his embarrassment, they were beginning to flood with tears of self-pity.
He shrugged gently. “Unless I know what you’re talking about, sir...”
“Lovers, Mr Purbright.” He forced out the word like a distraught shop girl pronouncing some indelicate medical term for the first time. “They run in families, you know. But of course you must know. A busy-bodying detective inspector. My God, man, they even told me! The very day I got back.”
Purbright divined that he was expected to help the man play out some familiar rite of self-abasement. “I see,” he murmured.
Down the wine merchant’s memory-puckered cheek a tear rolled. “I was away in France all that fortnight. In the Rhone Valley. An extraordinary summer. Marvellous.” He looked woodenly at Purbright. “But you’ll remember it yourself, I expect?”
Purbright glanced warily at his watch. “Hadn’t we better be getting back now, sir?”
“I asked you,” said Pointer in the tone of a moneyed diner putting a waiter in his place, “if you remembered the summer we had in 1937.”
The inspector gave a controlled sigh. “Not very clearly, sir. It...was a long time ago, wasn’t it.” He got up and stood by the car.
Pointer remained sitting in silence for a few seconds more, then rose and climbed in behind the wheel. When next he spoke it was to draw Purbright’s attention to some village church.
Chapter Fourteen
Mrs Crispin fully realized that gentlemen boarders needed an adequate substitute for the ministrations of absent or non-existent mothers and wives. They were deprived creatures, leading an unnatural life from the moment when they returned from business (she used the term with flattering lack of distinction, whatever their employment) until they retired to that good-night-sleep-tight whither they were consigned some five hours later by their guardian, still beamingly solicitous as she stood holding ajar the door of the staircase cupboard and beginning silently to count up to the hundred at which she would switch off the electricity and glide to her own chaste and immensely strong couch in the kitchen.
But how could the gentlemen’s exile from homes proper and complete be rendered less arid? She had given the question much thought and it was in accordance with her conclusions that the appointment, furnishing and tending of the gentlemen’s sitting room had evolved.
Cosiness, Mrs Crispin had mused, was what the domestic male valued above all else. She therefore sank some of her capital in a hook and stable wherby the door connecting the sitting room and kitchen could be held open on winter evenings, thus allowing air warmed by the kitchen stove to circulate freely through both apartments.
Mrs Crispin considered next the frequent use, in magazine stories about happily integrated husbands, of such adjectives as old, battered, well-thumbed, chewed, shapeless. These, she noticed approvingly, nearly always appeared in conjunction with favourite (his favourite old pipe/hat/old easy chair, moulded into comfortable contours by his grateful frame, etc.) Such guidance to masculine predilections in the furnishing line was perfectly clear, and Mrs Crispin followed it faithfully.
She showed consideration for eyes tired after a day at business by making the room lighting as discreet and restful as a single forty-watt bulb could render it.
The same motive partly dictated her decision not to install a television set, but in this case, too, she was influenced by her gleaned knowledge of male psychology. In the comfort of their well-moulded old easy chairs, their favourite pipes drawing well, men wished to chew the fat and swap yarns, not to gaze dumbly at a little screen.
Unfortunately for Mrs Crispin’s careful designs, neither Cornelius Payne nor Inspector Purbright shared her idealist conception of manly leisure. After the celebration of high tea, they would retreat, a trifle furtively, to one or other of their bedrooms and there play chess.
On the evening after Purbright’s excursion with Councillor Pointer, it happened to be Payne’s turn to provide hospitality. This meant that he sat on his bed while his guest occupied a small cane-seated chair by the window. The chess board was set between them on a pile of three suitcases.
Purbright was by far the inferior player and Payne had handicapped himself by a bishop, a rook and two pawns. His victory would thereby be postponed long enough for the game to last until dusk when Phyllis, prompted by a mistress who associated lodgers’ silence with suicidal intentions and a possible sudden rise in the gas bill, would burst in and ask if they were ready for supper.
“How did the inquest go?” asked Payne, opening the game with one of his depleted pawns.
Purbright surveyed the board while he reached for cigarettes. “Misadventure,” he said. “All it could be really.”
“Wouldn’t an open verdict have suited?”
“Too, vague. All right for drownings. Explosions, no.”
“There couldn’t have been much evidence, though.” Payne accepted a cigarette and struck a match for them both.
“Nothing direct. It really boiled down to the rejection of coincidences. One, two, three explosions in a small town. Then another. How could they be dissociated? Then there was Biggadyke’s reputation, of course.” Purbright leaned forward and moved a pawn.
Payne placed a finger lightly on one of his knights and considered. “His reputation, yes...” He moved the knight to threaten Purbright’s advancing pawn. “But what evidence could be brought to prove reputation?”
“None, now that you mention it. It seemed taken for granted.”
“Not very legal. Did no one suggest why he had been doing those curious things?”
“Motives weren’t questioned. It might have been interesting if they had been.”
Payne smiled. “You haven’t been making guesses, then?”
“The coroner seemed to assume that the man was simply an exhibitionist. I never met him, but from what others have said about him I should think that explanation is the most logical, bald as it is. Did you know him, by the way?”
“Slightly.”
Purbright catalogued. “Arrested development; pot-pinching sense of humour; technical expertize of sorts, combined with irresponsibility and a touch of dipsomania. How’s that?”
“Not bad,” Payne said. “Actually, though, there are thin threads of reason running through this business, you know.”
“Ah, now those,” Purbright said promptly, “I should like to hear about.” Spotting the threat to his pawn he moved out a knight to cover it. “Let’s take the explosions in order. What grudge did he bear the drinking foun
tain?”
“Not an aesthetic one, I assure you, though God knows that would have been understandable. No, the thing was a memorial. It was put up by the widow of a man called Courtney-Snell. And Courtney-Snell, in his time, had won an action for slander against Biggadyke.”
“Posthumous vengeance, you think?”
“Niggardly; but satisfying, perhaps.”
“All right. And the statue?”
Payne paused to open a path for his remaining bishop. “The statue,” he repeated. “That gesture was a little less personal, but if you knew Chalmsbury you would appreciate it. Does the name of the late Alderman Berry mean anything to you?”
Purbright shook his head.
“He was a notable zealot—or notorious bigot—according to taste,” Payne said. “I scarcely remember him, but they say that when he died the local brewery issued their draymen with white ribbons to wear in their hats.”
“A warrior of abstinence.”
“He was indeed. He also made a great deal of money, with a modest fraction of which he endowed an ugly chapel, so canonization—in Chalmsbury terms—was inevitable. We immortalized him in gunmetal, or whatever it was that Biggadyke found so challenging.”
“You suggest, then,” said Purbright, bringing up another pawn, “that Biggadyke’s second onslaught was that of a drinking man upon a totem of teetotalism.”
“You express it neatly. Yes, a gesture of principle, I should say. Biggadyke was not richly endowed with principles, so he was all the more likely to proclaim spectacularly what few he had. Had he lived, I feel he might have founded a Fellowship of Bad Templars.”
Purbright silently scrutinized the new position of Payne’s queen, which his opponent had just moved to the van of his bishop. Then he said: “And what of the great eye of Mr Hoole? That affair has a Kiplingesque flavour, to my mind.”
“The most intriguing of the three,” Payne agreed. He groped beneath the bed and produced a bottle. Without taking his eyes from the board, Purbright felt in his pocket and handed Payne a corkscrew. Soon they were sipping from tooth glasses one of Councillor Pointer’s more moderately priced clarets.
“You’ve met Barrington Hoole, I presume,” said Payne.
“Fleetingly, yes.”
“Quite a brilliant chap, oddly enough. We were in the same year at Cambridge. I never dreamed then that we’d wind up by being fellow shopkeepers. However...” Payne eyed his wine quizzically and scratched a fragment of dried toothpaste from the glass rim with his nail. “It seems he was rather unkind to the oaf Biggadyke—absolutely deservedly—about a month ago. Hence, I think, the reprisal on the eye. He was very fond, of it, poor chap,” Payne added sadly.
Purbright blocked with a pawn the line of threatened advance by Payne’s queen, and went on: “The question that no one seems able to settle is where Biggadyke obtained his explosive. It looks as though I shall have to go back without an answer.”
Payne looked up. “So that’s why they sent you, is it? I was wondering if you were M.I.5 or something. Kebble’s convinced of it.”
Purbright grinned. “That’s probably because I took your advice and was shockingly indiscreet. Tell me, though, from what you know of Biggadyke how do you imagine he’d set about that queer campaign of his? Where would he get the stuff?”
Payne considered. “As a haulage contractor he made some useful, if questionable, contacts during the war, I believe. Perhaps there’s a black market in gelignite, or something.”
“There is, unquestionably. But I should suppose that quotas are pretty well taken up by gentlemen with banking interests. I’d be most surprised to learn that Mr Biggadyke had been able to whistle any his way. Anything else occur to you?”
Payne poured out some more wine before replying. “There was a rumour,” he said slowly, “of some explosive having disappeared from that Home Guard place...”
“Civil Defence,” Purbright corrected.
“Yes, but that’s at Flaxborough anyway. You’ll know all about it.”
“Not all, no. But the connection with this lot seems very tenuous.”
Purbright returned his attention to the game. Payne’s last move, he noticed, appeared to have no immediate object. But his own interest had waned and he contented himself with advancing another pawn. After quite a long silence he asked: “Would it be possible, do you think, for Biggadyke to have manufactured his explosive himself?”
Payne hesitated. “Chemically, you mean?”
“Yes. Say it were some nitro compound. Nitro...well, nitro-glycerin: I suppose that’s the best known.”
Payne thoughtfully caressed the waxed points of his moustache, then shrugged. “Feasible, I imagine. Very dangerous, though.” He got up and crossed the room to a bookcase. “There may be something among these that will help. They’re a little out of date as textbooks go but organic chemistry is less subject to fashion than physics.”
Purbright watched him kneel and pull out, one by one, the books on the bottom shelf. The lettering on the spines of most of them was nearly indiscernible; they probably had been second-hand when Payne acquired them in his university days.
At last Payne found the volume he had been seeking. He reached up and put it on the top of the case between a pair of photographs while he tidied the rest of the row. Purbright glanced idly at the two pictures. One was a faded sepia portrait of a woman in late Victorian or Edwardian dress; the other was of a small girl standing beside a television camera.
Payne brought the book over, referred to its index and thumbed back to the section he wanted.
“Simple enough in theory,” he said after a while. “Allow a mixture of concentrated nitric and sulphuric acids to act on ordinary glycerin and separate the oily liquid that rises. There you have it—nitro-glycerin.”
“Well, then: even Biggadyke...”
Payne shook his head. “No, I said it was simple in theory. But the stuff is deperately unstable, remember. You can’t carry it around like lemonade. One good jolt and—whoosh!”
“Yet dynamite is safe enough to handle, surely. Isn’t that nitro-glycerin in some form or other?”
Payne turned a page. “It is, actually. Hang on a minute.” He read further through the text. “Yes, here we are: they absorb the liquid nitro-glycerin in something called kieselguhr.”
“And what’s that?”
“No idea. Here it just calls it ‘an inert, clay-like substance’.”
Purbright, feeling somewhat inert himself, said nothing for a few moments. Payne closed the book and waited.
“Detonators,” Purbright said suddenly. “All these timebomb things are set off by detonators, aren’t they?”
“Yes, I suppose they are.” Payne frowned at the cover of the textbook. “I don’t think this would be any use,” he said. “You’re still thinking along do-it-yourself lines, are you?”
“More or less.”
“Well, the only detonating agent I can call to mind is mercury fulminate. I don’t know whether it’s still used nowadays.”
“It could be made at home, though? Or something like it?”
“I wouldn’t like to say offhand.”
Purbright stretched, yawning. “Never mind,” he said, “it all sounds terribly unlikely. Anyway, from what I’ve heard of Biggadyke I can’t picture him tackling anything so complicated.”
Payne smiled gently and began to pour more wine. “We all have our unsuspected talents,” he observed.
The next morning, Purbright caught an early train to Flaxborough in order to report upon his perplexities to the county chief constable.
Mr Hessledine’s manner was courteous but clinical. He had, he said, studied already a verbatim report of the inquest. The affair had been closed to the coroner’s satisfaction, certainly, but the essential question of the source of that impossible fellow’s explosive had not even been touched upon. One of his officers was under a cloud, and he trusted that Mr Purbright had produced evidence sufficient either to eliminate Chief Inspector La
rch—which was much to be desired—or to prove his complicity. Now then, what had Mr Purbright to say?
Mr Purbright confessed unhappily that he was in no position to relieve the Chief Constable of his doubts one way or the other. He had been unable to resolve the ominous coincidence of the explosions and the theft from the Civil Defence store. Worse, far worse, his inquiries had revealed a relationship between Biggadyke and the chief inspector that was at once paradoxical and pregnant with possibilities that did not exclude murder itself.
Hessledine listened impassively to the account of Larch’s friendship with Biggadyke; of the local rumours of their collusion; and of the seduction of Hilda Larch.
When he had finished, he looked apologetically at the Chief Constable and said: “I don’t seem to have made matters any easier, do I, sir?”