by Colin Watson
The Neptune Hotel represented a totally different tradition.
It had been erected only five years previously by a Flaxborough jobbing builder whose coincidental relationship with the chairman of the housing committee had put him in the way of contracts for five estates of bay-windowed rabbit hutches and made the chairman the brother-in-law of a millionaire. The Neptune was now as valuable a property as any three hotels in Flaxborough put together.
There may have been something a little Victorian about the Flaxbrovians’ propensity to translate a novelty into a fashion and a fashion into a steady habit, but the creator of the Neptune saw no point in derogating any trend from which he might capitalize. He knew his fellow citizens, Victorian or no, and was concerned, as he put it, only with what they would ‘go for’.
“You know, Lizz,” he had said to his housekeeper one night, “they’re a rum lot of buggers in Flax. They like to get the hell out of the place to enjoy themselves, but all the same old faces have to be there at the other end when they arrive. Even when they just want to tread each other’s missuses once in a while, damn me if they find any fun in it unless they can say how d’ye do to the women’s husbands on the stairs. They pretend not to be sociable, but that’s just a pose, you know, Lizz. What I reckon they want is a place right off the track where they can be sociable in private. Here, gal, pass us that map a minute...it’s on the table there, just by your pillow...”
Thus had the Neptune been conceived.
Its progenitor had not attempted the actual construction himself but had entrusted it to a competent builder whose tenders for the Council estates he had always managed to underquote and on whom, therefore, he felt constrained to bestow a measure of compensatory patronage.
The hotel was an imposing building, four storeys high and with a glass tower at one corner. In this tower sat a huge robot fashioned in neon tubing, a mechanical celebrant that raised at regular intervals a glowing tankard and pledged good cheer to the surrounding acres of empty sea and marsh. The only people who considered it merely vulgar were those who wouldn’t have spent much in the hotel anyway and therefore didn’t matter; the rest, eagerly seeking from their Brockleston-bound cars a first glimpse of the roysterer in the sky, thought it a marvel of cleverness that reflected great credit on one and all, including, naturally, themselves.
At the hour when Purbright drove into the great concrete forecourt of the Neptune (his earlier reference to it as a ‘yard’ had been in deference to the Chief Constable’s known contempt for the modern conceits of the licensing trade) the entowered automaton was not working. He was able to appreciate, however, the other, only slightly less impressive features of the building: the dawn-pink façade pointed with black asterisks, the candy-striped sun awnings, the sculpted representation of nude nymphs playing leapfrog before the main entrance itself—a shallow but wide portico framing two immense concave plates of heavy glass, counter-sprung to yield to the touch of the most diffident venturer into high life.
Purbright parked the rather shabby police car beside half a dozen much grander vehicles already standing in the forecourt. One of them, he noticed, bore the number plate which had been identified by a Brockleston constable—presumably the florid-faced youngster in uniform whom Purbright spotted in an attitude of assumed and unconvincing nonchalance against the far wall of the court.
Gently elbowing open one of the glass plates, Purbright crossed a quarter-acre of bottle-green carpet to the reception counter. Beyond and seemingly below this formidable rampart sat a girl whose shoulders moved with the rhythm of knitting. At the inspector’s approach, she raised a small, melancholy and mistrustful face.
“Yes?” She glanced back at her needles.
“I should like a word with the manager if he’s available.”
“Mr Barraclough?” The girl seemed not to deem Purbright worth a second look.
“Yes, if that’s his name.”
“I’ll see if he’s in.” She knitted on to the end of the row, thrust the wool into some recess below the counter, and rose. Purbright was a little startled by the revelation of silk-encased thighs. The girl’s costume, evidently intended to transform her into a stimulating replica of an American night club attendant, proved in fact a bizarre detraction from whatever charm she might have had. As she walked indolently to a door at the end of the counter her flesh wobbled within the incongruous tights with as much sexual provocation as a blancmange on a waiter’s trolley.
Purbright turned and gazed gloomily round the big empty reception hall, shadowlessly aglow with the light from orange opalescent panels in the ceiling. There were three tall doors, black and thinly striped with gold and pierced with clear glass portholes, set in each of the side walls; they led, he supposed, to bars and lounges. The hall funnelled gently at its opposite end to a broad staircase. The apparent absence of a lift puzzled Purbright at first. Then a plunging purr of deceleration drew his eye to what he had taken to be a round supporting pillar in the very centre of the hall. It split and opened like the rind of some Arabian Nights fruit and disgorged a tubby man with a professional smile and rather a lot of cuff. As he walked briskly towards Purbright he gave the curious impression of paddling himself along on his elbows. He stopped just short of a collision. “Sar!”
Purbright raised his eyebrows and glanced from the man to the stalagmite lift shaft. “The genie of the lamp?”
The man’s smile remained tightly screwed on, but the rest of his facial furniture shifted slightly; he obviously did not care for levity. “Or Mr Barraclough, rather,” Purbright corrected himself.
The manager nodded and rested one hand on the counter, behind which the leggy receptionist had silently reappeared.
Purbright handed him a card. “I should like,” he said, “to verify the presence in your hotel of a gentleman who may be able to help me with a few inquiries.”
“One of the staff?”
“I think it more likely that he is among your guests, sir.”
The manager’s momentary expression of anxiety faded. At that time of year customers were much more readily expendable than employees. He turned to the girl. “The register, please, Dorabel.”
“There is one minor complication,” said Purbright. “I do not precisely know the man’s name”—Barraclough shrugged and seemed about to countermand his request for the register—“but never mind, I can give you the choice of two.”
The manager’s suspicion deepened that this tall, smart-aleck policeman was making faintly menacing jokes as a prelude to extorting an offer of free drink. He ran through quickly in his mind those most recent instances of malfeasance at the Neptune which might conceivably have come to the notice of authority.
“I hope,” he said, taking an opulently bound volume from the arms of Dorabel, “that these inquiries of yours won’t cause trouble of any kind. Mistakes aren’t too easy to put right once they’re made.” That part of his brain that had been sifting the possible reasons for the inspector’s arrival struck suddenly upon a lantern lecture given the previous Wednesday night in one of the private lounges to a Flaxborough Chamber of Trade party. A slide discovered among the bottles the next morning and brought to him by a distressed chambermaid had suggested a somewhat liberal exposition of the lecture’s theme, ‘Commercial Deviations in the Near East’.
“Perhaps you’d better come along to my office,” said Barraclough. He picked up the register and led Purbright through one of the black doors, a short way along a corridor and into a relatively austere cubicle that contained a filing cabinet, an untidy, old-fashioned desk and a stack of cartons of cigarettes. He reached towards a bellpush. “You’ll have a little refreshment, inspector?”
“That’s kind of you, sir, but I don’t really feel in need of any at the moment.”
To Barraclough such apparently eccentric asceticism was confirmative of even more serious matters being afoot than he had been able so far to imagine. He meekly invited Purbright to a chair and opened the register. “Those
two names?” he prompted.
“One of them is Hopjoy.”
Barraclough looked up sharply. “What’s he been up to?”
“You know Mr Hopjoy, then?”
“He’s spent quite a bit of...time here. On and off, you know.” The information was delivered cautiously.
“A good spender? Other than of time.”
“We’ve always valued his custom, certainly. In this business one has to be accommodating on the odd occasion, of course. Mr Hopjoy has excellent credentials. Naturally, I cannot divulge them, but I dare say they’d surprise you.”
Purbright recognized the nervous loyalty of a creditor. “Do you happen to know,” he asked, “Mr Hopjoy’s occupation?”
For a moment, the manager hesitated. Then discretion won. “He’s an agent for some big manufacturing firm. An excellent position, I understand.”
“Is he staying here now, sir?”
Barraclough did not refer to the register. “Not at the moment, he isn’t. We haven’t seen him for a few days. I should explain that he is not in the way of being a regular resident. Just the odd night—when he happens to be covering this district, I suppose.”
“Mr Hopjoy’s car is outside now.”
Barraclough looked only faintly surprised. “Yes? Well, I’m not absolutely certain about this but I should say it’s on loan to a friend of his. I believe they do share it to some extent.” He paused, then asked, almost hopefully, Purbright thought: “It is the car that these inquiries of yours are about?”
The inspector shrugged. “Not primarily; though cars do tend to figure in all sorts of investigations these days—they’re becoming our second skins, aren’t they? No, it’s the driver I really want to see. I presume he’s a Mr Periam.”
“Mr Periam is staying here.”
“Do you know for how long?”
“Another week, I believe.”
“I should appreciate a word with him, sir. Perhaps if you can give me the number of his room...”
Frowning, Barraclough reached for the telephone on his desk. “I’d really rather you...Dorabel, has Mr Periam in number eleven gone out yet? All right, dear; hold the line a moment...” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “He’s in his room. You can see him in here if you like—that would be best, wouldn’t it?” Hurriedly he spoke again into the phone. “Ask Mr Periam if he’d be good enough to come down; when he does, show him into my office.”
Barraclough sat back in his chair and flicked at his sleeve. “I’m sorry if I seem a bit formal over this, inspector, but I’m assuming your business is confidential and I shouldn’t like one of my guests to be embarrassed. He might be, you know, if you barged straight up to his room. And then there’s Mrs Periam to be considered, of course.”
Purbright stared at the plump, watchful little man, who now had given his smile a wistful cast to suit the part of tactful paternalism. “Mrs Periam?”
“Oh, yes; a rather dear little thing. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to spoil her honeymoon.”
Chapter Six
In the privacy of a bedroom in an hotel a great deal less considerately appointed than was the Neptune for honey-mooning or, indeed, any other purpose, Ross and Pumphrey considered a course of inquiry that was to be separate and, for a while at least, divergent from Purbright’s.
Upon the decrepit bamboo table that divided Ross, seated in the only chair, and Pumphrey, perched on the thinly blanketed concrete slab that served as a bed, lay the file on Hopjoy’s operational reports.
Neither man had referred to the Chief Constable’s claim to be made privy to these papers. The well-meaning but gauche presumption of officers in the civil police were too familiar to be resented or even discussed.
Ross did, however, touch conversationally upon the personalities of those whom the disconcerting interruption of Line F.7 had made their temporary and tenuous associates. Mr Chubb he pronounced “an odd old bird: I kept expecting him to ring for a butler to show us out. The Purbright I’m a shade doubtful about. There’s a streak of cleverness there that doesn’t go with a provincial copper, I suppose he’s been cleared?”
“There’s no R-rating compiled, actually, but I can find no minus entry against him later than 1936, so it seems he’d be entitled to a ninety-four or ninety-five. That’s pretty average for police above sergeant.”
“1936...Left Book Club, I suppose?”
Pumphrey shook his head. “Flaxborough Grammar School Debating Society: he did some sort of a skit on Stanley Baldwin, apparently.”
Ross took his pipe from his pocket and leaned forward over the typescript before him. He read in silence for several minutes.
Pumphrey sat immobile. His breathing was regular but each exhalation seemed to encounter some slight adenoidal constriction. In the small, quiet room, the noise was obtrusive. He sounded like a man patiently trying to cool a very hot dinner.
Flicking over a page, Ross increased the pace of his reading. Soon he was glancing from paragraph to paragraph as if refreshing his memory of already digested passages. The last couple of pages he absorbed whole. He leaned back in the angular, threadbare chair and stared thoughtfully into his pipe bowl. When he spoke, it was without looking up.
Pumphrey gave a start. “Sorry, I didn’t...” He perked forward his pallid, sharp face and half-opened his mouth as though it were a third ear.
“I said he’s kept it all pretty carefully wrapped up.”
“Naturally.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t help us a great deal at the moment. He’s been eleven days out of contact now...”
“Twelve,” Pumphrey corrected.
“All right, twelve. That makes a takeover automatic. But we can’t put another fellow in without some clarification. Considering F.7 ran up some of the fattest exes in the sector I think it might have been left a bit tidier.”
Pumphrey eased another inch or two of neck out of his collar and stroked his chin. “You don’t suppose there’s a tactical explanation, I take it? You feel sure he’s been operationally negatived?”
“Oh, they’ve got him, all right. Rough luck on the poor devil, but we’re not here to organise a wake. As long as we do our job of joining up the cut ends as quickly as possible we can leave the bobbies to worry about what they think is the crime angle. Our people will see that nothing’s let out.”
“Suppose there’s an arrest, though. And a trial.”
“Oh, I hope they get the swine; I do, indeed. All I’m saying is that we aren’t primarily concerned with that aspect. And, believe me, if anyone is convicted it will be as plain Henry Jones, burglar, sadist, deceived husband, spurned queer—anything that a supremely efficient organization can pull out of its bag to hide the true identity and motive of one of its operators who was unlucky enough to be caught.”.
Ross carefully pocketed the doeskin pouch from which he had been shredding Latakia (black, he thought, as the gullet of that Transylvanian girl, rigid and love-groaning as his mouth descended upon hers in the Bucharest pullman...) He struck a match and allowed the last vestige of sulphur in its head to be expelled before holding the clear-burning pine a quarter of an inch above the pipe bowl. As he sucked, the high yellow flame curtsied and sent blue tongues stabbing down into the tight stack of tobacco. The dark laminated strands heaved, separated and became fiery filaments, then grey stamens of ash upon a glowing corolla. Finally they were crushed down beneath the curious bimetallic tamping ram. A blue cloud streamed parallel to the long stem, was divided by the bowl, bright as a horsechestnut newly split from its husk, and joined again in lazy assault upon the unappreciative nostrils of Pumphrey, who coughed pointedly and swung his head aside.
Ross regarded the manoeuvre without sympathy. “You’re no sensualist, Harry,” he reproved, mentally picturing Transylvanian frustration in the face of Pumphrey’s aridity.
“The police,” said Pumphrey, sticking to what he conceived to be the point, “are bound to consider that Periam is deeply implicated.”
“Pe
riam?”
“The man Hopjoy lodged with.”
Ross shrugged. “That doesn’t mean a thing. We can be sure that our friends arranged for someone to appear implicated. There’s nothing here to suggest that Periam really had anything to do with it.” He waved towards the file.
“Oh, no; Hopjoy was confident enough in him. M cross-checked, of course. Right up to Blue One.”
Ross raised his brows. “What on earth did they suppose he was a first sec?”
“It was perfectly reasonable, security-wise...” Pumphrey paused to brace himself against another smoke cloud...“to put maximum screen on anyone sharing a house with one of our own operators. Periam cleared remarkably high, as it turned out. Even his relationship record was negative up to second cousin radius. Associative adulteration, nil. After allowance for stability depreciation he rings up a ninety-nine point six.”