“No, you mustn’t, because that would be quite wrong.”
Purbright glanced down at some notes he had been making, then thoughtfully rubbed his right forefinger with three fingers of the left hand. He surveyed, one by one, the three journalists and the barrister.
“I think it is only fair to tell you,” he said, “that the phone call I received a few minutes ago was from the acting police surgeon, Doctor Spenser, and that he had something disturbing to tell me. It appears from his preliminary examination of the body that Grail’s death was not from natural causes, but that in all likelihood he died from some form of poisoning.”
The ensuing silence was broken by the portentous sound—a kind of laryngeal fanfare—of Sir Arthur’s preparation for an important statement.
“It is quite clear,” the barrister began, “from what you have just said, inspector, that my clients are now under mandatory obligation to reveal certain facts which loyalty to their employers had previously prevented them from making public. They will wish me, I know, to set forth those facts without further delay, in the hope that they may be of aid to the police in their inquiries.
“Firstly, Mr Grail did not—as might have been thought natural—simply wander away while under strain and ultimately find himself in London. He did go for a walk yesterday morning, certainly, but no one knows where that walk ended. And he did speak to his colleagues by telephone at about midnight, but by then he was acting not so much under strain as under duress.”
“Duress,” repeated Purbright, flatly.
“Not to put too fine a point on it,” said the barrister, “he was being held prisoner. The first indication of this had come in the form of telephoned demands—at about seven in the evening, wasn’t it, Miss Clemenceaux?” (Yes, she said, just before seven.) “And there was, in fact, a meeting of a kind. All this you will doubtless wish to be put on record as detailed statements by my clients.”
“That would seem to be indicated, yes.”
If Sir Arthur recognized in Purbright’s urbane manner a rebuke of his own case-hogging propensities, he made no remark upon it. Instead, he hooked one elegantly tailored arm over the rail of his chair, crossed his legs, and leaned back as if in confident expectation of a vote of thanks.
Purbright looked at the others. “Two or three of my officers will be here shortly,” he announced. “When they arrive, your statements will be taken. I should also appreciate co-operation during whatever searching of the house we may consider necessary. Miss Clemenceaux—should the telephone ring, will you please answer it just as if we weren’t here.”
It was nearly half an hour later that an opportunity occurred for Birdie to vent her feelings in private. She was in the kitchen making coffee when Lanching entered with an offer to help carry the eight cups.
“And now what the hell do we do? That bloody old woman of a lawyer! What a great performance he’s put up. We’d just about managed to ditch Grail’s unstuck plot when along comes that idiot to hand it back to us. Kidnappers and all. Christikins, it’s too bloody much, it really is.”
Lanching watched her carry the kettle from the stove and jet boiling water savagely into the cups. “It’s certainly made things difficult,” he said.
Birdie wrenched open the door of the refrigerator and stood staring, not seeing at first the bottle of milk that confronted her. “Difficult!” she echoed, bitterly.
Lanching pointed to the milk. “I got the impression,” he said, “rightly or wrongly, that that inspector wasn’t buying the kidnap story, anyway.”
She turned and stared at him. “Why ever not, for God’s sake?”
“It could be,” said Lanching, “that he’s one of those people who aren’t as stupid as newspapers would like them to be.”
Chapter Fifteen
The inquiries into the death of Clive Grail were in the charge of Detective Inspector Purbright, acting on behalf of the chief constable, Mr Harcourt Chubb. He was assisted by Detective Sergeant Sidney Love; Sergeant William Malley, coroner’s officer; three officers in plain clothes, named Harper, Pook and Hollis; and five uniformed constables. Subsidiary and specialized aid was provided by the East Midlands Forensic Science department; the Post Office; the acting police surgeon and the pathology department of Flaxborough General Hospital. Co-operation on less formal levels was forthcoming from Josiah Kebble, editor of the Flaxborough Citizen; from Chung Lee Ha, restaurant proprietor; and from an old gentleman in Brocklestone-on-Sea who remembered the making of a cinematograph record of that resort’s Armistice celebration in 1918.
Subsequent, and vitally important, information was to come from a draper, a garage proprietor and a murderer, with degrees of reluctance in that order.
The actual process of investigation might have appeared to the casual observer to be neither urgent nor sequential.
Soon after nine o’clock on that Wednesday morning, Sergeant Love and a man with a camera and a case of equipment arrived by car at Hambourne station. Two constables in uniform were already standing outside the building.
Love rubbed his hands and glanced about him with a heavily judicious expression until one of the uniformed men tapped his arm and pointed out some marks on the ground. Love stared at the marks, frowned, stroked his lower lip for a few moments, then nodded gravely and indicated that the photographer might record them for higher authority. When that had been done, the sergeant made some measurements.
They moved into the station’s entrance hall and surveyed the rubble-strewn floor and disfigured walls. In a broken frame, the attractions of the sea front at Great Yarmouth were commemorated by a poster of two children with buckets and spades and beards. The beards, together with a speech balloon inscribed “Aggy Hall has big tits”, appeared to have been added later.
In a room adjoining the hallway, an irregularly shaped space on the ground was marked out in white tape. The photographer took a shot of it in relation to its surroundings, then another in close-up. Love had a long look round. He picked up various small objects, examined them, and dropped a selection into an envelope. The glances he directed at the photographer from time to time were at first portentous, then inscrutable. Neither kind drew response. “You’d think he was working for a different firm,” the sergeant was later to complain to Malley.
Purbright’s direction of inquiries at the house proceeded fairly smoothly until mid-morning, when Mrs Lily Patmore appeared at the kitchen door. Loyalty to Farmer Stamper, combined with a delicious intuition of something odd going on, had overweighed sisterly concern and put her on the 11.15 bus.
At the sight of Detective Constable Hollis methodically pillaging the waste bin, Mrs Patmore swelled with indignation and demanded what the hell he thought he was sossing about with. Hollis said she would have to put such questions to the inspector, and very soon the housekeeper found herself seated in confidential company with a man who was actually interested in what she had to say instead of forever awming twixt arse and tit.