“Becket’s was an extraordinarily powerful obsession, sir. His attitude towards his sister was something we don’t often see in this country—something almost Sicilian—was that how you described it to my sergeant?”
“I...might have done,” said Mr Chubb, who most certainly had not.
“Unfortunately for Blossom,” the inspector went on, “Becket’s fury led him into errors, despite his considerable intelligence and ability. He says in his statement, for instance, that he wanted to kill Blossom because it was he who had filmed the girl’s performance. But Blossom had no skill at all with a camera—all his fellow members agree on that. The filming almost certainly was done by Pearce. I think he would have much enjoyed it.”
“Pearce comes out of the affair very badly,” asserted the chief constable. “He seems to have given us no help at all.”
Purbright gave a slight shrug. “He was a very frightened man—particularly when he learned of Henry Bush’s murder. His first reaction was to ask if the person responsible had been caught.”
“Was he not aware that Becket was in the town at that moment?”
“Oh, no; he had no idea, sir. And until he heard that Bush had been killed, it probably had not occurred to Pearce that anyone outside the small circle responsible for making the film was aware of the involvement in it of Bush and his wife.”
“Did Pearce even know that she had a brother?”
“Yes, but he had never met him. Edith and Robert saw very little of each other after her marriage. Robert regarded Bush as a pimp—and I must say his opinion seems to have been borne out by events. After Bush left her and added insult to injury by setting the moral watchdog Grail on her, she wrote to her brother, begging him to help. He was a regularly commissioned contributor to the Herald and could have exerted a certain amount of influence.”
“And he refused?”
Purbright stared at Mr Chubb, whose patience with narrative was inclined as a rule to evaporate after a few minutes. He could recall very few instances indeed of the chief constable’s having actually helped things along with an expression of curiosity.
“No, sir; there was no question of his refusing—he simply did not get the letter in time. He was abroad. Working for the Herald, ironically enough. By the time it was forwarded to him, his sister had committed suicide. As her letter hinted she might.”
It was Mr Chubb’s turn to stare, which he did with considerable sternness. “But the woman did not commit suicide, Mr Purbright.”
“I’m afraid she did, sir. Becket has kept the letter. He showed it to me.”
“Are you suggesting that a false verdict was recorded at the inquest?”
“An erroneous verdict, sir. And quite understandably, on the evidence. Most of which was circumstantial and, I might add, provided by Mr Pearce.”
Mr Chubb’s expression of gravity deepened. “I feel that that gentleman is going to have to answer for perjury.”
“You are, of course, speaking figuratively, sir,” said the inspector, comfortably. “And I agree that a charge could not be sustained in court.”
“You think not?” The chief constable looked a little ruffled.
“Unless Pearce admits what I now think really happened—that when he found Edith Bush he had no doubt but that she had poisoned herself, and that he tried to expunge his own guilty feelings by rearranging matters a little so that it would appear that the cyanide deliberately spooned into her drink by Edith herself would appear to have spilled from a packet accidentally knocked over on an upper shelf.”
Gloomily, the chief constable pondered this hypothesis. What he felt to be unnecessary complications were beginning to spoil his earlier pleasure in the prospect of a neat piece of crime solving, fortuitously witnessed at close range by representatives of Fleet Street. Why did Purbright have to create confusion?
In seeming innocence, Purbright created a little more. “Of course, you will be the first to point out, sir, that even if proceedings were taken against Pearce, no jury would convict in a case where the only crime would seem to have been an attempt to protect the reputation of a dead woman. The stigma of self-destruction is much disliked by respectable people.”
“And understandably so,” said the chief constable, who thought he had sniffed the sulphur of scepticism in Purbright’s comment. He went on: “It’s a funny thing, you know, but a sort of old-fashioned chivalry has kept showing itself in this affair.” A slight shrug. “In a perverse way, you understand.”
“Oh, yes,” agreed the inspector, at once. “Becket has a distinctly quixotic element in his character. Which is just as well for Miss Clemenceaux, incidentally.”
Mr Chubb raised his brows. “Really?”
“As you will see when you read it, he goes to great trouble in his statement to deny her complicity in any part of what was going on. In particular, he insists that she believed Grail’s death to have had a natural cause; and that she had no hand in moving his body from the phone box where he collapsed to the railway station where it was found next morning.”
“Do you believe the girl to be as innocent as all that?”
Purbright considered, half smiling, then sighed. “Birdie Clemenceaux is now back in London—if only to seek another job. So is Mr Lanching. So also is Sir Arthur Heckington and the Sunday Herald’s safely restored cash. Becket insists that the kidnapping fraud be laid to his account alone. The newspaper wants the whole business forgotten as quickly as possible. Even the mayor, I understand, is prepared to consider the town’s honour restored. You must admit, sir, that an accurate apportionment of guilt and innocence would be extremely difficult to establish while so many people are being inspired to take chivalrous attitudes.”
Mr Chubb regarded Purbright in silence for several moments, thoughtfully at first, then with an air of increasing abstraction. “Yes,” he said at last, quietly and slowly. “Fine. Just you carry on, then, Mr Purbright.”
The inspector drove back to Fen Street from the chief constable’s house in Queen’s Road without encountering the usual confusion of traffic near the railway crossing and in Eastgate. He remembered the reason. It was market day once again, when this part of the town became relatively deserted.
As Purbright’s car rounded Fen Street corner, it was saluted jauntily by Mr Kebble, on his way from a late lunch to a leisurely social session in the Citizen’s editorial chair. The inspector waved back.
Also bound for the Citizen office was Mr Hoole, visiting oculist. He had just left the Antique and Curio Centre of Mr Enoch Cartwright, whom he had given a cheque in payment for a pair of early nineteenth-century horse pistols, held on approval since the previous Friday.