Bump in the Night f-2

by Colin Watson

  Hilda’s, then? Handsome, bitter, faintly mocking. He pictured Hilda Larch hiding intense shock and disgust beneath the simple mechanics of lighting a cigarette; she had managed it with the brusque carelessness of a horsewoman between gymkhana events. The sense of an unplaced resemblance grew stronger. It was something to do with Hilda, perhaps her whole features and bearing, or at least some look or mannerism of hers, that Purbright had seen in another person since his arrival in Chalmsbury.

  He tried to conjure a mental identification parade, but it was no use. The faces blurred and merged, like images in wind-ruffled water. He crossed to the shaded side of the road and sauntered, with blank mind and painfully hot feet, back into the town.

  Larch, in shirt sleeves, sat at his desk by an open window. He looked cool, but unrelaxed. Purbright gave him a somewhat dessicated account of his afternoon’s visiting.

  “What a good job you’re a policeman, Mr Purbright. The husbands of bitches are terribly prone to be blackmailed. Did you know that?”

  The pleasantry was ignored. Larch tried another. “Well, have you found poor Stanley’s bloody murderer?”.

  “Certainly.”

  “Go on, then, Mr Purbright.”

  “He’s your mother-in-law’s lover.”

  Larch stared, his face twisted as if he were trying to catch a scarcely audible sound. Then, suddenly, his jaw dropped like an excavator bucket and there emerged a guffaw that turned Sergeant Worple, sitting in the charge room fifty feet away, pale with alarm.

  When the short spasm was over, Purbright demurely corrected himself. “Former lover, I should have said, of course.”

  “Yes, by God you should!” A rumbling echo of amusement sounded in Larch’s gullet. “But it doesn’t take you much further does it? I’m afraid our filing system doesn’t run to records of the ex-boy friends of the town’s middle-aged ladies.”

  “We might not need records. There are pretty long and retentive memories in a place like this.”

  “Retentive in more than one sense. They don’t open up in the name of the law, believe me.”

  Purbright looked at Larch thoughtfully. “Excuse my asking, but you’re a few years older than your wife, aren’t you?”

  “What the hell’s that to do with it?”

  “Only that it struck me that you might remember something yourself of what went on here twenty years ago. Gossip, you know. Were you around then?”

  “I was, as it happens. But I hadn’t married into the bloody Pointers.”

  “I didn’t mean family gossip—just parade room talk.”

  Larch leaned back with a sigh. “Look, son: this was a real police force in the ’thirties. We didn’t sit around over tea and knitting. If you think...”

  “Mr Larch,” Purbright interrupted firmly, “I don’t much mind your being aggressive, obtuse, bombastic and generally offensive. What I shall not tolerate, though, is the old copper gaff. Now, do we understand each other?”

  There was a long silence. Then Larch gave a slight, dismissive wave of the hand and looked down as though calculating something rather difficult.

  “No,” he said quietly at last, “I can’t recall a damn thing that might give you a lead. I knew the Pointers, of course. Not intimately; I hadn’t met Hilda then. And I remember something about Ozzy going over to France. That’s all.”

  “How old would his wife have been?”

  “Thirty, thirty-fivish.”

  “Promiscuous?”

  Larch seemed almost shocked. “Damn it, man. You’ve seen her. Even twenty years...”

  “Perhaps not,” Purbright agreed. “We’ll give her credit for having been selective. It was probably a genuine first-and-last romance. And as discreet as a spinster buying a bottle of scent.” He paused. “Yet there was something...

  “Tell me,” said Purbright, suddenly brisk, “you knew this Celia girl, I suppose?”

  “Only by sight.”

  “That’s what I mean. Would you say she showed resemblance to anyone in particular?”

  “I realize now that she was remarkably like my wife.”

  Purbright nodded. “That’s understandable. Anyone else? Anyone exceptionally tall, for instance?”

  “Tall?”

  “Whover stuck those bombs on the statue and that shop sign thing must have had a phenomenal reach. And no short man could have climbed the park railings, either; remember that the water fountain could only have been mined after the park closed.”

  “What about a ladder? A box, even?”

  “Too noticeable. It might have served for the park business, but not for the jobs in the main streets on clear summer nights. They were done very neatiy. A quick approach, a quick departure, no messing about.”

  Larch picked up his pen and peered into one of his trays. “Sounds a principle worth copying,” he remarked. “Anyway, I thought you were going to use this...this holiday of yours to get some sunshine.”

  Purbright rose slowly from his chair, walked to the window and stood gazing absently at the roofs of the buildings beyond the courtyard.

  “Sunshine,” he repeated. “Of course. No, I don’t want to miss that.”

  As the inspector strolled across the Borough Bridge, glancing down over the massive, shabby cast-iron parapet into the ebbing river, he tried to decide what he should do about the killer of the unmourned Mr Biggadyke.

  He recognized, and half-admired, the parochial loyalties, compounded with a sort of pagan amorality, that made the people of Chalmsbury policeman-proof. Although he normally enjoyed his job, if only as an exercise in ingenuity, he had no illusion of being an instrument of absolute justice. Some kinds of crime made him angry; none made him righteous. He gave every criminal credit for knowing, if not what he had been about, at least what he didn’t want to have happen to him in consequence. In this he was different from most policemen, who take as a personal insult the unwillingness of a wrong-doer to be caught.

  Purbright was also well aware that the public is less zealous to see the triumph of the law than it likes to pretend. Its diffidence was shown in Chalmsbury to a degree suggestive of a Robin Hood fixation. Could long years of rule by men like Larch have been responsible, he wondered.

  None would blame him—perhaps he would not blame himself—for slipping out of this town that was so obviously content to allow the false interpretation of Biggadyke’s death to stand as the official record. He had some sympathy with this communal conspiracy to let a dead dog lie.

  By the time he reached Mrs Crispin’s front door and let himself into the cool, dark lobby, smelling of mackintoshes and vinegar, Purbright was very nearly resigned to desertion.

  He went into the dining room. The table was set already for two, but his fellow lodger had not yet arrived. Purbright picked up the copy of the Chalmsbury Chronicle which had been put by Payne’s plate and sat down to await his meal.

  The report of the inquest, solidly set and so explicitly headlined in depth as to render the reading of the matter beneath almost superfluous, had been given pride of place on one of the centre pages. Purbright began to scan it rapidly and without much interest.

  Then, as he turned into the second column, his eye did what a car will do on being taken round a sharp bend too quickly and inattentively. It skidded and came to rest in column three.

  The inspector went on staring at the photograph before him while the truth about Biggadyke’s murder took sharp and clear form like a crystal growing out of a suddenly cooled concentrate.

  After perhaps half a minute he looked down and read the caption.

  “Mr Joseph Mulvaney, senior projectionist at the Rialto Cinema, Chalmsbury, has been nominated to receive the Grand Brooch of Erin, an honour conferred upon Irish nationals ordinarily resident in this country for outstanding service in the cause of Anglo-Irish relations. Mr Mulvaney (pictured here in the projection room where he has worked for the past twelve years) hopes to be able to travel to Dublin to receive his award in person when the presentations are m
ade next Tuesday.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Purbright folded the paper and replaced it on the table. He went in search of Mrs Crispin. The only occupant of the kitchen was Phyllis, shaping fishcakes with the nonchalant expertise of a prize-fighter’s masseur. She bathed him in her dimpled sir-she-said smile and said that the Missus had gone out for the evening but that his tea was on the way.

  “Has Mr Payne not come in yet?”

  She slid the first of the fish cakes into the frying pan. “Not unless he went straight up to his room. I suppose his car will be at the door if he’s here.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Purbright cast a nervous glance at the blue cloud rising from the pan and returned to the lobby. He opened the front door and looked out, then walked quickly and quietly up the stairs.

  There was no answer to his knock on Payne’s door. He pushed it open. The room was as he had last seen it; tidy, ordinary, and wearing the faintly depressing air common to all apartments, whether prison cells or bed-sitters, in which a man must share his dreams with his shoe brushes.

  Purbright took a step towards the bookcase and stopped. In the photograph frame on its top shelf there was only the white card backing. The picture of the little girl standing by what he had mistakenly assumed to be a television camera had been removed.

  Not that it mattered greatly now. He was clearly aware that it was the child’s face he had seen in the features of Hilda Larch. Solemnly staring out upon Cornelius Payne’s lonely little world had been Celia, photographed ten or twelve years ago—probably by her foster father—in the projection room of the cinema where he worked.

  He knelt and began looking through the titles of Payne’s books. Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury’ was among them, and next to it an anthology of modern verse. He took out the anthology and opened it by its ribbon marker. Half way down the left-hand page was the poem by Emily Dickinson. “There’s been a death...” it began. Purbright closed the book and put it back.

  In the textbook on organic chemistry he found the chapter dealing with nitro-compounds to which Payne had made his deceptively cool and co-operative reference. The instructions for making nitro-glycerin were full and precise. Purbright thought it sounded an eminently feasible operation, given laboratory equipment and expert caution. The fragment of a conversation drifted into his mind. Kebble had spoken in the same breath of Payne and the Nobel Prize. Nobel...inventor of dynamite: the man who discovered that the dangerously unstable nitrate of glycerin could be tamed by soaking it into a subsance called kieselguhr.

  Purbright searched further along the shelf. At the end, among three or four volumes in faded but undamaged bindings that suggested they were old school prizes, was one entitled ‘A Boy’s Dictionary of Natural Substances’. Without much hope, he thumbed through to the K’s. It was there. Kieselguhr.

  ‘Kieselguhr, or Infusorial Earth, by which name it is known in the jewellery trade, is a fine powder used as a polishing agent. It is also an ingredient of dynamite.’

  Downstairs a door slammed. Purbright hurriedly replaced the book and left the room, closing the door. From the landing he heard Phyllis stun the dining-room table with a plate of fishcakes. Immediately after came his summons to tea. It was like a prairie cattle call. The inspector descended and told her that he would eat as soon as he had made a short telephone call from the lobby. Payne, he noticed, still had not returned.

  Larch received Purbright’s revelation with a grunt and, “What did I tell you?”

  “You didn’t tell me anything,” Purbright justifiably observed.

  “Never mind. Go on.”

  “It might be as well if I waited here for him. He’s late, but that’s not to say he won’t come. Meanwhile you might like to see if he’s still at his shop. A search warrant wouldn’t come amiss, incidentally.”

  “Why?”

  “There could be stuff there that you’ll need in evidence. Chemicals, lab equipment and so on. It will probably be a job for a Home Office fellow, but at least you can get the place locked up. Invoices might be interesting, too; check deliveries of something called Infusorial Earth. And don’t let your blokes fiddle with powders—Payne probably used some kind of home-made fulminate to set his things off.”

  “Listen: I’m not a bloody Harwell professor.”

  “That’s all right. Leave it to Worple: there’s nothing he doesn’t know. I’ll be here if you want me but as far as I can see it’s all yours now.” Purbright tried not to sound too relieved.

  Larch said everything would be attended to, but he only hoped he was not being let in for an almighty balls-up.

  Purbright said he hoped so, too.

  “By the way,” he added, “do you happen to remember where it was that Biggadyke ran down the Grope girl?”

  “Of course. It was in Watergate Street. Quite near Payne’s shop, as a matter of fact. Payne never came forward to say she’d been there. It was hardly relevant at the time, though, was it?”

  “Not at the time, no.” Purbright rang off.

  Within the next few hours Purbright answered the telephone four times.

  The first two calls were from Larch, anxious to know if Payne had returned. The shop, he said, had been found in the charge of a young man with the intelligence quotient of a sea anemone. Not only was he ignorant of his employer’s whereabouts; he seemed uncertain of whether he had ever met him. At least he had not been obstructive. The shop was now locked and guarded. A proper search had not yet been made but at first sight it did look as if some of Purbright’s guesses might prove correct.

  Purbright gravely acknowledged the tribute and asked whether Larch contemplated putting out a general call for Payne to be held for questioning. Larch retorted that this, of course had been done. He then rang off in order to do it.

  The third call was from Sergeant Worple, who explained that he was just checking on the chief inspector’s behalf. Purbright informed him, a little tartly, that Payne was still missing—as Mr Larch might well have adduced from the fact that he, Purbright, had not telephoned to the contrary.

  “I quite understand that, sir,” said Worple, unruffled. “Logic’s a great help, even in these days.” He paused to let Purbright make what he could of this obliquity and went on: “I thought you might be interested to know that wherever Mr Payne is he hasn’t taken his car. It was outside his shop.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes sir. You possibly have never noticed it yourself, but it’s quite an old-fashioned model with what they call a sunshine roof. A sliding panel in the top. I mention that because it explains something that has probably been puzzling you.”

  Purbright relieved his feelings by glaring cross-eyed at the telephone mouthpiece and sticking out his tongue.

  The unhurried, provocatively respectful voice droned on.

  “You see, sir, it’s quite clear now that Mr Payne was able to fix his explosive devices on the statue and the shop sign by taking his car right up to the target, as you might call it, and standing up on the driving seat through the sunshine roof. It wouldn’t take him a minute; then he could sit down again and drive off. All unbeknown,” Worple added extravagantly.

  “He could have used the same method to get over the park railings, couldn’t he, Sergeant?”

  “Undoubtedly, sir.”

  “Did the Chief Inspector work all that out?”

  There was a brief silence. “He gave me that impression, sir.” Worple sounded like a man counting short change.

  “Well, well. It does him credit. I’ll give you a call if there are any further developments at this end.”

  It was some time after ten o’clock when the telephone rang for the fourth time.

  “Purbright speaking.”

  He heard a resonant click as the button in a public call box was pressed.

  “It’s Payne here.”

  Purbright swallowed. This he had not expected.

  “Oh, yes, Mr Payne?” Did one deliver a formal caution when a man whose arrest one
had been trying to contrive suddenly popped up on the telephone?

  “Look,” the faint, strained voice was saying, “I rather feel I owe you something?”

  “Yes?” I must sound like a deaf charlady offering to take a message, Purbright thought.

  “I was going to leave you a note, but the idea seemed far from satisfactory. Awfully impersonal, and I’d probably have left out just the things you wanted to know...”