Grail, who did not appear much heartened by this information, gave Lanching a perplexed look. “What was he talking about? Who is Pearce?”
“You asked him the name of the secretary of some local photography club, didn’t you? They make films, or try to.”
Grail’s hand rose immediately to riffle through his silky, silvery-grey hair. “God, yes! I’d forgotten.” He turned to the housekeeper. “Do you know this gentleman Harry Pearce, Mrs Patmore?”
“Not ever so well. He used to keep a shop but it’s been taken over by Brown and Derehams. His wife’s one of the Harrison girls, but you’d not think it to look at her now. Of course, it was Harry who got mixed up with some rather nasty goings on in that Folklore Society or whatever they called themselves. 1 I always thought he was a bit of an old woman, myself. Still, I don’t suppose you...”
1 Reported in Broomsticks Over Flaxborough
“No, not really,” Grail interjected mildly.
Unoffended, Mrs Patmore completed Mr Pearce’s biography, as she understood it, and added as bonus the news that he once had discovered a body.
Grail was by then sorting some pages of typescript that he had taken from a slim leather case. He favoured the housekeeper with a bright, if brief glance and an encouraging “Oh, yes?”
“Well, not to say body, exactly,” she amended. “She did die soon afterwards, though. That was photography. Poor Edie. Well, I expect you remember it. It was all in the papers.”
“So it was,” murmured Grail automatically. This time he did not look up.
Lanching appeared much puzzled by the ascribing of the mysterious Edie’s death to “photography”. Some time later, he again brought up the subject. Birdie Clemenceaux and Becket had returned and all four had eaten Mrs Patmore’s substantial offering of a game casserole and an apple and elderberry pudding, of which even the normally abstemious Grail had accepted a second helping. Lanching, happily somnolent, eyed his coffee. “A bit odd, the old girl’s story about that woman,” he said.
“What woman?” Birdie asked. She looked at the others. “What old girl, for that matter?”
“Oh, of course. You weren’t here. Mrs Whatsername—the housekeeper—she was burbling on about photography and a woman getting poisoned.”
“Edith Bush, you mean.” Birdie gave a slight shrug. “So?”
Grail said: “It was in the London evenings. Didn’t you notice it, Ken?” His tone was casual, but the interjection had come very promptly. Lanching looked at him uncertainly.
“Yes, but the story we’re on up here...” He turned to Birdie. “You knew her name. When I mentioned poisoning just now, you came straight out with it. Edith Bush. As if it was familiar.”
“Well, of course it was. Heavens, the story ran for several days.” Birdie scooped a fourth spoonful of sugar into her coffee. The look she gave Lanching was lazy, amused.
“Names—some stick, some don’t. It doesn’t signify,” said Grail, smoothly.
Lanching glanced down the room at Becket, as if in appeal, but Becket appeared to be taking no interest in anything beyond his own knees, which he had hitched up against the edge of the table and was regarding fixedly with an expression of absent-minded gloom.
“Very well, then,” Lanching said at last. “Don’t bloody tell me if you don’t want to.”
Grail sighed. “It’s not a question of not telling you anything, Ken. The stuff I’m doing up here...”
“The stuff we’re doing.” Lanching’s somnolence had evaporated.
“All right. We. Sure. The stuff we are doing is what I told you—a straight expose feature...”
“The wicked burgers of Little England,” Birdie explained. “Quailing before Grail’s flail.”
From Grail, a nod of gracious indulgence. “Miss Tit-brain expresses the matter precisely,” he said to Lanching. “My column—oh, with your help, dear colleagues, with your most valuable help—my column, I say, is devoted exclusively to the one and only object that justifies the existence of the cant-ridden, meretricious old harlot that we call the Press. That object being? Right, dearly beloved. Muck-raking.”
All of which was said in a gentle, beautifully modulated voice and accompanied by the delicate gesturing of long, alabastine fingers.
“Mr Stamper,” said Lanching, “asked me if you two were lovers.”
“Oh, blissikins!” trilled Miss Clemenceaux.
Bob Becket slowly slid his regard from his knees to Grail’s face.
Grail looked more beatific than usual. “Salt of the earth, is Mr Stamper. Have you noticed how he blows steam from his nostrils?” He paused, then said, half to himself: “I wonder if the art of the cinema is among his passions.”
In another room, a telephone began ringing. Grail turned his chair from the table, as if in expectation. And it was to him that Mrs Patmore soon afterwards imparted the message that he was required by a gentleman speaking from London.
Immediately Grail had left the room, Lanching leaned forward across the table and spoke hurriedly to Becket. “Hey, Bob, you’ve kept bloody quiet up to now. Just what exactly are we supposed to be getting into? One minute I’m being told to chat up some old birds in an amateur photographic society, and the next I get briefed on how to point a shotgun if anyone walks in without knocking.”
“Briefed? Who briefed you?”
Lanching jerked his head towards Grail’s empty chair. “The holy father.”
“He hasn’t got a shotgun,” said Birdie.
“Well, what do you think that is, hanging over the fireplace? A vacuum cleaner?”
“That’s an antique,” said Becket. “Like carriage lamps and that sort of crap.”
“It’s a double-barrelled twelve-bore,” said Lanching firmly. “And it’s got two shells ready to go off.”
Birdie regarded the weapon with a little wrinkle of distaste.
“It’s Stamper who keeps it loaded,” explained Lanching.
This information appeared to come as no surprise to Becket. “I tell you,” he said bitterly, “they have a homicidal streak round here. Police. Farmers. All of them. You talk about muggings in London. But at least London’s got bloody lights. You go outside this house and you might as well be in the Underground during a power cut.”
Mrs Patmore, entering to clear the dishes, expressed the hope that they had had enough belly-timber. She added—seemingly with reference to Birdie’s having left her potatoes untasted—that she’d never grow much of a kedge if she didn’t eat her orts—an assurance which Birdie decided to accept smilingly as a compliment. Whereupon Mrs Patmore roguishly observed to the company at large that young Mistress Grail wouldn’t be able to blame tates when the time came for her to be in calf, would she?
“Oh, Christ!” said Miss Clemenceaux, when the housekeeper had borne away her great piled tray. “She thinks I’m Mrs Pius XIII.”