“The name, Sid. You can elaborate in the morning. All I want now is the name.”
There was a slight pause. Impatience always disconcerted Love, to whom it seemed a vastly unreasonable reaction.
“Well,” he said, huffily, “it was the one you suggested in the first place. Naturally.”
“Don’t go away.” Purbright rang off. He was at Fen Street in less than ten minutes.
Love was in the front office with the night duty sergeant. They were looking through a furniture catalogue that Love’s young lady had left for his attention earlier in the day. Purbright disregarded this token of abiding sanguinity.
“Any word from Godfrey, sergeant?” Detective Constable Godfrey was the man assigned to keep observation on the home of Henry Pearce.
“Reported in at eleven o’clock sir. Said everything was quiet.”
“And Pook?”
“Not two minutes before you came in.” The sergeant drew towards him a loose-leaf message pad. “He said three cars had come and gone between nine and half-ten. All bona-fide customers. Only one since then.”
“In the last half-hour or so.”
“Yes, sir. It is an all-night garage, sir.”
“Do I detect a subtle distinction, though, sergeant? Pook called the others ‘bona-fide customers’. Was this last one in some other category?”
Pook’s reputation as an officer notable for doggedness rather than intelligence was not disputed by the duty sergeant.
“Oh, I think Pookie was too over-awed to think about it much,” he said. “He’d take the view that you couldn’t get anything more bona-fide than a Rolls, whoever was in it.”
“A Rolls Royce?”
“Yes. Very splendid, by Pookie’s reckoning. He was most impressed.”
“Get him for me, will you, sergeant.” Purbright sat and peered uncertainly at the station radio equipment. “And I just want to ask questions—you do all the Roger-and-Out bits, will you?”
Soon the voice of Detective Pook was announcing his readiness to be of service. It sounded gravelly and conspiratorial, but voices do, Purbright reminded himself, when screened by coat collars in the doorways of shops.
“When did that Rolls arrive, Mr Pook?”
“Seven minutes ago, sir.”
“And the registration number?”
On Pook’s promptly quoting it, Purbright looked with raised brows at Love. Love nodded emphatically in confirmation.
“Where’s the driver?” Purbright asked the microphone.
“Talking to Alf Blossom at the moment, sir. I can just see them in a corner of the upstairs office. The car’s inside the service bay. From the way he drove it in I’d say it’s on the inspection ramp—that hydraulic lift thing.”
“Sergeant Love and I are coming over straight away. As you know, the man may offer Mr Blossom violence; if you see anything of that kind developing, you must act as the situation demands. I think it’s unlikely, though, that he’ll do anything drastic while his car is off the ground—he’ll want to be able to drive away pretty promptly.”
On their way to the South Circuit, Love asked if Purbright did not find odd Pook’s reference to the hydraulic lift.
“A car like that. It doesn’t suddenly develop a fault underneath that needs looking at in the middle of the night.”
“Probably not, Sid. But how otherwise do you persuade a garage proprietor to let you bring it through to a part of his premises that’s out of public view?”
Traffic had almost ceased on all but the main roads, but a few cars were still going past the South Circuit Garage, the facia board of which was lit in a garish pink. Purbright drove on to the forecourt and parked in the corner furthest from an illuminated, all-night, self-service pump.
A figure crossed the road and came to join them. It was Pook.
“They’ve left Blossom’s office,” he said. “They must be in the service bay, where the car is.”
“Is there no way of looking in?” the inspector asked.
“I’ve not been able to find one, sir. The entrance is through that main sliding door beyond the showroom, but they shut that as soon as the Rolls had gone through.”
“What about windows?”
“Round the other side,” Pook replied. “Three. They’re all filthy, though, and boxes and things have been piled up on the inside sills. That was all I could see, anyway.”
The slight emphasis on the I made acknowledgment of the inspector’s notable advantage in height.
When they had picked their way through a sort of automobile boneyard, a peril-fraught clutter of parts of cars rotting in the rank grass of what once had been a meadow, they came to the back wall of the service bay. The three windows showed as dim, smokey-yellow rectangles.
Purbright peered in vain through the first two. The upper portion of the third appeared to be less obscured. With the aid of Pook’s torch, he found a discarded oil drum. Love set it upright beside the third window and held it more or less steady while Purbright clambered up, selected a patch of glass that happened to be almost free of grime, and set an eye close to it.
He was surprised to find himself looking straight at the face of Mr Alfred Blossom.
It was not exactly a face in repose, despite the eyes being closed and the mouth slightly open. Rather did it express inert acceptance. The spectacles had gone; without them, Mr Blossom no longer resembled a pert mole. In the blue glare of the workshop lighting, the normally rosy cheeks hung like uncooked pastry.
Not only had Purbright to adjust to the change in the man’s appearance; Mr Blossom’s situation was even more disconcerting. He was propped in the front seat of the Rolls in an attitude of driving without due care and attention a vehicle whose wheels, by Purbright’s calculation, must have been four or five feet off the ground.
The last circumstance that the inspector noticed was, he realized, the most sinister of all. Blossom was wearing a cap. Not a cap, perhaps, but a sort of pad. Held in place on the top of his head by two chinstraps of adhesive tape.
And trailing down from the pad was a twisted string. No, not string.
“Bloody hell!”
Electric flex.
The inspector landed heavily between his aides. “Quick, we’ve got to get in. He’s going to try to blow poor Alf’s nut off.”
They scrambled back the way they had come and looked up at the big corrugated steel door. Pook and the inspector seized its handle and levered themselves against it. They felt the dead resistance of an internal bolt or catch. There was no wicket door.
“We’ll have to go over the top,” Pook said. Purbright glanced with some trepidation at the outlined edge of the roof, twenty feet above their heads, but Pook was already running along the forecourt.