by Colin Watson
“Yes, sir?”
Mr Chubb traced a pattern on the carpet with one well-shined toecap. “Yes, well I think I ought to tell you that Major Ross and his colleague don’t share your opinion that Periam is the man responsible. In their parlance, he is described as ‘cleared’, and they are looking much farther afield.”
“I don’t think we should take exception to that, sir. I’m glad of any assistance they can give.”
“Oh, quite so. I’m sure you don’t regard their co-operation ungenerously. No, that isn’t what I’m anxious about. It’s simply that outsiders tend to underestimate our people, Mr Purbright—in the country districts particularly. We don’t want these gentlemen running into any unpleasantness, do we? After all, they are our guests, in a sense.”
Purbright nodded. “I’ll do my best to look after them.”
Mr Chubb achieved a smile. “I thought I’d better mention it. Major Ross did say something about making a few inquiries in Mumblesby, as a matter of fact.”
“Merry Mumblesby,” said Purbright, reflectively. He opened the door.
Chapter Eleven
“Ingenious,” Ross said. He lifted the narrow rectangle of paper aloft with his pipe stem, held it in draped balance a moment, then withdrew the pipe sharply. The paper side-slipped twice and floated to rest on the table by Pumphrey’s elbow.
“Chubb was perfectly correct, you see. It is a betting slip.” Ross lengthened his face in mimicry. “ ‘We collect plenty of those, Mr Ross: they are merely symptoms of one of our little local weaknesses.’ Poor old Chubb. Tretnikov or Dzarbol would have three of him for breakfast. It isn’t innocent things like bus tickets or jam labels that pass unchallenged, but the obviously illegal ones. Betting slips? Of course they are taken for betting slips. What else could they be?”
Pumphrey peered at the paper earnestly, pulling his right ear lobe as if it put him in circuit with an electronic scanner. “Five shillings each way Needlework Hurst Park 4.30 Peter Piper” he read in an unpunctuated monotone.
“Pre-selected pseudonymic code: impossible to break. We needn’t waste time on it.” Ross held out his hand.
“Hold on a minute...” Pumphrey’s ear became tauter, redder. He muttered the message again to himself, then tapped the paper. “Needlework,” he said with emphasis and looked up.
“Name of the horse. I’ve checked. It’s running in the 4.30 all right.” Ross spoke mechanically. His attention was held by the bright, blood-flooded lobe of Pumphrey’s ear. He pictured the fearful rending tongs fashioned by that Cracow goldsmith whom fate, and an ungrateful party secretariat, had made their first victim; ‘unfeatured’ was the word that had been sardonically entered in his prison hospital record.
“Yes, but needlework...examine it association-wise. Needle...sewing...thimble...Thimble Bay.”
Interest glimmered in Ross’s eye, but only briefly. He shook his head. “Attractive, Harry, but just that fraction too obvious. No, what matters is that our friends’ main communication channels are being confirmed. It’s our immediate job to follow them. I’ll say this for F.7: he left some pretty positive leads.”
Pumphrey watched Ross place the betting slip in his briefcase. “I’ve sent a screening requisition on Anderson, of course.”
“Anderson? Oh, old dot and carry one. Good. Chubb’s fellows have him tabbed simply as a bookie’s runner, but I expected that. They probably think nuclear disarmament’s another name for the Oxford Movement.” Ross looked at the ivory and zirconium face of his wristwatch. “Just nice time,” he observed, “to pay Mrs Bernadette Croll a call before Farmer Croll homeward plods from his turnip patch or whatever. Coming along for the drive?”
Mumblesby was a hamlet of fourteen houses, a decrepit church and a ruined water mill. Its founders seemed to have tucked it quite deliberately into a green fold of the hills so that no one else should find it. Even today, when a main road to the coast ran within a quarter of a mile of its crumbling gables and rat-ridden thatch, Mumblesby still crouched in its valley unseen and unsought.
Speeding silently away from Mumblesby was a huge Bentley with a prow of gunmetal, whose pilot, Ross, remarked to his companion: “About another four minutes should do it.” But the car, painstakingly misdirected by humorous rustics, continued to sail through the high, greenish-white foam of cow parsley and past banks empurpled with campion before a signpost confirmed Pumphrey’s suspicion that they were about to re-enter the out-skirts of Flaxborough.
Ross grasped the situation immediately. He neither slacked pace nor changed direction. “We’ll stop at the first decent-sized stationers and get an ordnance survey map,” he announced. “You shouldn’t have taken those fellows literally, you know, Harry. I thought they were having you on.”
Pumphrey’s lean and diligent face swung round indignantly. It had been Ross who had taken charge of what he called the ‘peasant-parley’. “But look, I didn’t...” Ross quickly smiled and patted his arm. “My dear Harry, you’re far too easily drawn into categorical protestations; it doesn’t do, you know.”
At the newsagents where the required map was produced, Ross bought himself a fudge and roasted hazlenut bar. Pumphrey he treated to a sixpenny Yummie—honey-spun raisins in a cushion of chocolate praline, twice whipped for lightness.
Twenty minutes later, the Bentley rocked to a halt among roadside flowers, just clear of the narrow lane that pierced Mumblesby’s encircling groves of ash and elm. Ross examined the map. “I’ll go up to the farm; it’s about two hundred yards up there on the right, according to this. You stay here if you like, unless you want to nose around what there is of a village.”
Ross turned from the tree-vaulted lane, where the air was cool and green as old glass, on to a flint work road that ran straight between brown, sun-hardened fields. The earth was yielding the first clenched leaves of a potato crop, but still so few that no pattern of its sowing could be discerned. At the end of the track, the grey brick and funereal slate of a Victorian farmhouse defied the sun to soften their sour angularity. The older out-buildings, preserved when the original house was demolished and replaced, were roofed with red pantiles. They looked like robust, bibulous suitors attending upon a sick widow.
A few chickens pecked in the dust of the untidy yard, the only other occupant of which was a mired and malevolent-looking goose. Ross stepped carefully over the wheel ruts that still held in their depths the foetid residue of winter rains and seepage from the crew-yard, opened a wicket in the wire fence enclosing the house and its narrow strip of garden, and walked up to the front door.
His knock produced a hollow, unpromising reverberation, as if the house had sullenly murmured ‘go away’ in its sleep. He waited, knocked again, and listened. From somewhere fairly distant came the sound of music. The door remained shut. Ross reached for the big brown enamelled knob. It twisted loosely and without effect.
“Are you the killer?”
Ross spun round. The soft, rather bored voice had delivered its appalling question as flatly as if it had asked him for a match. “People usually come round to the back, you know. You could have waited here all day.”
“Am I the what?”
The girl, unaware of the singularity of her accomplishment in having startled, of all people, Ross, looked him up and down. “No, you’re not Mr Rassmussen, are you? I think he’s a Dane or something. Anyway, he’s the killer from Gelding Marsh. Ours has a septic thumb.”
“I see.” Ross tried to imagine a rational connexion between thumbs and assassination. “You mean he’s a strangler?”
“Don’t be silly. You don’t strangle pigs.” There was no amusement in her voice.
“Naturally not. Nevertheless, I’m not your Mr Rassmussen. You are Mrs Croll, though, I take it.”
“That’s right. Why?”
“Do you think we might go inside? I’d like to talk to you.”
The girl subjected him again to doubtful, sulky scrutiny. This time, Ross returned her stare, appraising the lumpish yet i
ndefinably provocative face, a throat fair-fleshed and smooth within the opening of a wine-red linen shirt that outlined narrow shoulders and gently understated the existence of breasts.
It was Mrs Croll’s gaze that turned aside first, but the gesture carried no suggestion of defeat or embarrassment. Nor, as she walked before him round the side of the house, did she seem to divine or care that his sensual preoccupation had been deepened by the anterior viewpoint and by the addition of movement. She was perfectly familiar with the standard of her charms—she could have defined it instantly as ‘34-23-38’—and her faith in their effect was as simple and absolute as if all these parts bore the tattoed warranty ‘as seen on TV’.
Television, Ross discovered when they entered the small, over-furnished parlour, was the source of the music he had heard. As she walked through the doorway, the girl’s eyes sought automatically the steel-blue radiance of the screen in the corner. They slotted at once into focus as though held upon invisible antennae springing in parallel from the set, and abdicated responsibility for all else. Thus, as she felt her way to a couch in the room’s centre, her body moved round pieces of furniture with the cautious, sensitive independence of the blind.
Ross watched the foot that felt for and pushed aside a stool in her path. Its toes, half revealed by the green suede shoe’s shallow cut, squeezed like plump baby mice against their nylon caul. Her instep, he noticed, was gracefully arched but too puffy to display the delicate bone structure that he would claim to have been taught to value by the bagnio-masters of south-eastern Turkey. The ankle was similarly spoiled, yet the failing was its very merit, for it hastened with impatience the upward progress of Ross’s scrutiny to a limb he deemed so eloquent of erotic responsiveness that his fingers involuntarily curved in sympathy. Especially compelling was the flexed roundness of muscle, behind and a little above the knee—the thigh’s beginning—that gleamed momentarily as the couch arm caught at the girl’s skirt.
She arranged herself among the cushions like a florid signature. Ross, for whom she spared no further glance, sat uninvited in a chair a few inches away, his back to the television set.
The girl spoke first, but without turning her head. “Well, what was it you wanted?”
“To talk to you.”
“My husband handles all the farm business. Anyway, you’re wasting your time if you’re selling something; he’s satisfied with everything he gets now.”
“That I can believe.” Ross watched her face. She was smiling faintly.
“Is your husband about?”
“Naturally. You didn’t think he worked in an office. He’s down on the bottom field. Harrowing.”
“It must be.”
The girl suppressed a giggle, then frowned. “I don’t like sarcastic people. If you’ll just tell me what you want...”
“I’m trying to trace a friend of mine.”
“Someone round here, you mean?”
“I think he’s been here.”
“What’s his name?” She leaned along the back of the couch and stretched to turn down the volume of the set. She could just reach the knob with the tips of her fingers. Ross noted appreciatively the hardening of the nearer buttock into the semblance of a lute. “Hopjoy,” he said, “Brian Hopjoy.”
“Never heard of him.” She settled again into the cushions, drawing one leg closely beneath her and allowing the other to trail to the floor. Ross abandoned himself to a familiar sense of wonder at the contrast between a stocking’s steely, slippery containment and the petal-white vulnerability of overtopping flesh. He once had thought the Can-Can a vulgar and pseudo-, indeed anti-sensual concession to callow tourists. Now he understood its truth. It was a sermon upon the insubstantiality of what separated the pretentiousness and artificial properties of civilization from venal reality—a division no greater than a garter’s width.
Ross leaned forward in his chair. “Mrs Croll...”
Abstractedly she felt for her skirt hem and tugged it down to her knee. Her fingers straightened and travelled on, in the lightest self-caress; then she raised the hand and held it towards him. He grasped her wrist and experienced a sort of contentment in exploring, with one finger-tip, its complex of fragile bones.
“You might not have known him as Hopjoy,” Ross said.
“Mightn’t I?” Still she stared at the screen; only the tiniest twitch of the hand Ross held contradicted her attitude of absolute indifference to what existed outside it. He slackened his hand and extended it slowly, her forearm slipping through the cupped fingers until his thumb nestled in the soft, warm hollow of the arm’s crook. A pulse—his own or hers, he did not know—stirred gently within the area of contact; it seemed a microcosmic prelude to...
“Here, we’re wasting time.” He withdrew his hand and reached into an inner pocket.
She looked round, startled by his brusqueness. Immediately she saw the photograph, her eyes widened. “Is that your friend?”
“Tell me about him.”
She pouted. “Why should I? I don’t know who you are. You haven’t even got his name right, anyway.”
Ross saw the look she gave the photograph of Hopjoy; it was compounded of fondness and a curious detachment, like that of a marksman turning over a shot bird with his foot.
“Names,” he said, “don’t matter much in our game, Mrs Croll. I don’t care what you called the man, nor what he meant to you...”
“And just what are you insinuating?” She had put on a tradesmen’s entrance voice. Ross decided that he recognized the dissimulation of the bored middle-class wife, hungering for sexual humiliation. “Your antics in your husband’s hay-loft are rather beside the point, my dear. I am interested solely in what brought Mr Hopjoy to this farm and in what he learned here. Now perhaps we understand each other.”
She had risen at his first words and stood now in what he diagnosed as trembling enjoyment of the insult he had offered. The rigidity of her indignation, he noticed, thrust into satisfying prominence a narrow, muscular belly and slightly flattened breasts like burglar alarms.
Mrs Croll turned, switched off the television set as if for ever, and faced him again. “There is nothing,” she announced coldly, “in the relationship of Mr Trevelyan and I that is any of your damn business.” She paused. “So damn you!”
Ross felt a twinge of pity. The clumsiness and inadequate sonority of the retort, its little grammatical discord, betrayed the girl’s uncertainty. He smiled at her. Into the suddenly silent room threaded the thin, clattering whine of a distant tractor.
“Trevelyan, you say?”
“Howard Trevelyan.” She pronounced the words defiantly and with schoolgirl relish.
“Sit down.” He took out his pipe and ruminantly fingered the rim of its bowl. The girl hesitated, then moved farther off and sat on a straight-backed chair in an attitude of prim exasperation.
Not looking at her, Ross said: “You are going to have to trust me, Bernadette. I could tell you my name—it’s Ross, as a matter of fact—and the nature of my work, but there really would be no point in doing so. I can neither prove my identity nor give you convincing evidence of my profession. If I could, it would cease to be my profession. You don’t understand. Naturally. You are not expected to understand. But at least let me assure you that what might seem to you duplicity and mystification are terribly necessary.”
He glanced at her face, which had become more bewildered than angry. “Don’t worry, you’ll not get hurt. I can see no need for your husband to learn anything you don’t wish him to learn concerning, er, Trevelyan”—he lingered sternly over the name as if he personally disapproved of it—“provided you are frank with me.”
“Are you a detective, or something?”
He considered, smiling again. “A something—I think we’d better settle for that.”
“Are you working with Howard?”
“We have certain objectives in common.”
Mrs Croll looked at the door. Then she crossed the room and settle
d in her habitual place on the sofa. Her face was turned fully towards Ross. She ran her tongue-tip over her lips before she spoke.
“Has anything happened to him?”
Ross shrugged. “We can’t trace him just at the moment.”
“He’s not back in hospital?”
Ross went quickly back over his mental copy of the Hopjoy reports. There had been a spell in hospital. Attacked with iron bar. Assailant thought to be Bulgarian. Never traced; probably smuggled out of Flaxborough dock. For victim, special compensation grant. But all that was some time ago. “No,” said Ross, “I think he got over that all right.”
“I was terribly worried. That’s where he came down...” She nodded towards the window. “Right on top of an old kennel that used to stand there. I thought Ben had killed him...”
“Ben?”
“My husband. He threw Howard out of the bedroom window.”