“By the office stairs, I think he means,” Love reassured the inspector. They hastened after their guide.
Pook was waiting for them at the top of the staircase. The office door was by his hand. He ignored it. “Along here, sir.”
From the platform on which they stood, a railed catwalk had been built above the showroom to an opening high in the wall dividing the showroom from the service bay. Seeing it, Purbright swallowed and took breath. Not as dreadful as that roof, anyway.
Pook cantered across like a goat. How brave, the inspector reflected, are the stupid. He took firmer grip of the handrail and walked forward, closely followed by Love, whose attention and admiration had been captured by one of the cars beneath them, a concoction of grilles and fins that Mr Blossom had accepted in settlement of a debt.
When Purbright emerged in the service bay, he found himself on a gallery that continued for about twenty feet along the side wall. At the end of the gallery, a flight of steps descended to floor level. Part of the gallery’s width had been put to use as storage space; Purbright saw stacks of boxes, some small drums and canisters, and shapes in pressed steel that he took to be car body parts.
Pook was already halfway along the gallery, carefully avoiding the stacked obstacles as he advanced.
Purbright remained still for a moment and surveyed the scene below. It was dominated by the big car, held aloft by the scissored girders of the hoist. Blossom had slumped a little further down in his seat. His head now lolled forward, but his curious headgear was still in position.
At this distance, Purbright could not discern the wires, but he noticed that a battery and some tools lay on the floor a couple of yards from the base of the hoist.
Three other cars were in the bay, at various stages of dismemberment.
There was no sound. The only movement in Purbright’s field of vision was that of Pook, now stealthily going down the staircase while he kept his eyes on a point beyond one of the cars under repair.
The inspector and Love hurried to the end of the gallery and began to descend. Their combined weight on the iron stairs put a violent end to silence. Pook, tip-toeing across the floor below, was so startled that he nearly fell into an inspection pit.
Simultaneously, there broke cover at the spot he had been watching a bent and stumbling figure, a man with a square-shaped load cradled in his arms.
It was Robert Becket, and he was carrying a car battery. He shambled with what speed he could towards the hoist.
Purbright shouted. Becket neither faltered nor looked aside.
Pook tried to interpose himself between Becket and his goal. He succeeded only in getting rammed by the heavy battery. By the time the policeman had regained his breath and balance, Becket was beneath the hoist and setting the battery down beside the one which, presumably, he had already tried and found flat.
“The wires, Sid!” Purbright shouted. “Don’t let him get hold of the wires.”
Love was only a few paces away from Becket now. He bore down, one arm held forward like a bowsprit.
Becket, crouched protectively over the battery, his back to the advancing sergeant, was holding the bared end of one wire. He gave it a turn around the nearer terminal post of the battery and sought with his free hand the other wire.
Love saw the outstretched fingers groping across the oil-blackened concrete floor. They encountered the wire, pulled it closer, grasped it firmly near the end. The freshly scraped copper core glinted as Becket picked it up.
At the same moment, Love made a homing plunge.
His left shoulder made extremely painful contact with part of the hydraulic hoist and his right ankle struck a carelessly placed can of grease, but most of the rest of him landed on Becket, whose upper torso was forced thereby into conformity with the unsympathetic contours of the two car batteries.
Purbright and Pook came up. The inspector watched Love rubbing his shoulder and his ankle by turns. He looked concerned. “All right, Sid?” Love groaned. Pook helped him up.
Becket did not stir. Disregarding him for the moment, Purbright retrieved both wires, wound several feet together into a short skein, and tossed it over a projection on the hoist.
It was Love who assisted Becket to his feet and handed him a handkerchief to dab a gently bleeding wound in his cheek. “Sorry,” said Love, who had done very little in the arresting line.
The inspector scrutinized the silent Becket. He looked ill and confused and very tired. No candidate for mad dashes to freedom.
“Take him to the car, Mr Pook. We’ll be there shortly.”
To Love, Purbright said: “How do we get this damn contrivance down again?” He leaned back to try and get a view of the elevated garage proprietor.
By happy coincidence, a partly recovered Mr Blossom had just pressed the button to lower the car’s window. He thrust his head out and peered down wearily at Purbright and Love like a disturbed innkeeper.
“You jumped me, matey. What did you go and do that for? Who are you? I’ve not done anything to you, matey. God-alive-o. What did you want to hit me for? You didn’t have to do that. Blimey-O’Reilly, I don’t know what you’re on about, matey.”
“We have not hit you, Mr Blossom. We are police officers. How do we get you down?”
The head rocked about drunkenly for some seconds, as Blossom tried to break out of his bewilderment long enough to make sense of the question. Then he muttered: “Lever...red knob...” and went back to sleep.
Chapter Nineteen
“How beautifully things were made in those days,” said the chief constable. He ran a finger along one edge of the hinged lid of a large boxwood case. The lid was open. On its inner surface was a label, yellowed by time and partly eroded by spilled chemicals. It bore a faded picture of an old-fashioned shop front, and the words, in ornate type, Clawson & Becket, Photographic Studio. There was a carrying handle on one side of the case. The inside was subdivided to accommodate photographic plates, filters and lenses, a number of jars and tins, and, in a compartment of its own, a small metal tray set on a handle.
“What is that thing’s function?” asked the chief constable.
Purbright held it aloft in demonstration. “It is the ancestor of the flash bulb. A small quantity of a mixture containing magnesium was tipped on this platform and fired off by striking a flint at the moment the photographer opened the shutter. A very violent reaction, I understand, sir—it could generate a welding temperature.”
Mr Chubb looked shocked. “And you say that Becket...” He left the sentence unfinished.
“...Clapped a flash-powder poultice on poor old Blossom? Yes, I’m afraid he did, sir. His intention was to use electric ignition, of course, not a flint.”
“Never mind the fine distinctions, Mr Purbright. His intention was monstrous, whatever the means employed. And think what a fearful fire might have been caused. All that petrol in the car’s tank, to say nothing of what the man had deliberately poured over the upholstery. And the film, of course—your young sergeant told me Blossom was absolutely cocooned in it!”