There was a long, silent interval. Then Carole rose from her chair. “I’ll have to go up.” She disappeared through a door.
Mr Kebble, still nursing his phone, glanced at the ceiling.
“Supposed to have contracted sleeping sickness in Somalia,” he murmured in kindly explanation.
After another minute, the phone made noises suggestive of an imprisoned and much alarmed midget. Kebble spoke into it. “It’s all right, Kelvin; I just wanted to know if you’d picked up anything about a special court this afternoon... No?... No, don’t bother, old chap, it was just a remand and I’ve got the details myself.”
He returned his attention to Birdie. “There’ll probably be another adjournment,” he said, “but it will come into ordinary open court eventually. You realize that, of course, duckie.” His smile bespoke sad resignation.
Somewhat to Mr Kebble’s surprise, the girl looked eminently satisfied. “Grandikins!” she exclaimed. “It’s just this next fortnight that’s a bit sensitive, actually. You’ve been a precious lamb, Mr Josiah Kebble.” And she swooped forward to nuzzle a cheek against the centre of Mr Kebble’s pink, shiny forehead.
When she had pranced away, having blown a valedictory kiss to Mr Hoole, Mr Kebble remarked chucklesomely what a nice little tottie she was.
The optician regarded him with wry amusement for a few seconds, then turned his attention to one of the pistols. “Mmm... yes...” He squinted into the bell of its barrel. “You really must try, some time, Joss, to view people through the eye of the entomologist.”
“Oh, aye?” Mr Kebble’s expression of extreme geniality was unchanged. “And what should I have seen in that particular little ladybird?”
Mr Hoole pouted, sniffed, said nothing.
Chapter Four
A conversation was being held at the same time, and about the same person and her friends, in the office of Inspector Purbright at Fen Street police headquarters.
Sergeant Love sounded quite excited. “You know who he is, don’t you? Not the bloke Baz arrested—his pal, the big, smarmy-looking one.”
“Apart from his bearing the rather unlikely name of Grail, I’m afraid I don’t, Sid. Why, is he a pop singer or something?”
The inspector’s other-worldliness earned a grimace of exasperation from the sergeant. “No, it’s Grail of the Sunday Herald. He’s a right stirrer, that one.” A sudden gleam in Love’s youthful eye made him look more than ever like a schoolboy autograph-hunter. “Didn’t you see that piece last Sunday?”
Purbright confessed that he had not. Bill Malley, though, made good his deprivation at once. “God, aye—the bit about the nude dollies at the tax inspectors’ conference at Swansea.”
“They reckon that lad can topple governments,” added Love, with sober conviction.
“Look out, Flaxborough chamber of trade,” murmured Purbright.
A hopeful grin lifted a couple of the coroner’s officer’s chins. “This little brush with Baz Cowdrey isn’t going to make Mr Grail very friendly. Perhaps he’ll put something in the paper about the sauna at the Klub Kissinger.”
“Or the probation officer’s dirty postcard trade,” added Love, warming to the spirit of the thing.
“Ah, that’s only among his own clients,” pointed out the inspector. “Be fair, Sid.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Malley, “is what this bunch was doing in the town in the first place. They’re still here, you know. Or just outside. Herbert Stamper’s rented them that place of his on the Chalmsbury Road.”
Purbright allowed a short break in his maintenance of an air of being unimpressed. “God, there’s a gentleman who’d be a natural for the Sunday Herald.”
“A bit of a lad, old Stamper,” commented Sergeant Love.
“They say one of his housekeepers is looking after that London party,” Malley informed them.
“One of his housekeepers? How many does Mr Stamper run to?”
It was Love’s turn to grin. “On the Fen, they reckon he uses a sort of rotation principle. Like fields. The one he’s lent out has probably been lying fallow.”
The inspector looked at him reprovingly. “You’ve been spending too much time with your fiancée’s disgusting agricultural relatives, Sid. Anyway,” he glanced at the clock, “I think we might call it a day.”
Sergeant Malley, who never disengaged from a conversation with anything like dispatch, was rubbing his right ear thoughtfully. “I’d still like to know what this Grail character and his friends are hoping to dig up in Flax. They don’t move a couple of hundred miles out of London just for a change of air.”
Purbright gave him a tight smile, a pat on the shoulder, and was gone. Love hesitated a moment, then shrugged and followed the inspector.
Farmer Herbert Stamper sat at the wheel of his big Mercedes motor car and gazed aside with great satisfaction at the straggles of yellowing sugar beet on the land of a rival who had neglected to apply a preventative spray at the appropriate time. He was driving slowly—at no more than twenty miles an hour—in the middle of the highway that led eventually to Chalmsbury and the coast. Following traffic was obliged to form a procession whose leisurely pace was woefully inconsistent with the patience of the participants. The drivers of approaching cars had no choice but to veer off into the sanctuary of the grass verge, where they wound down windows, shook fists, and shouted imprecations of a violent and obscene kind. Hearing these as a mere murmur through the heavy tinted glass of his mobile pavilion, Farmer Stamper smiled. He liked people to swear at him. It proved that he was still doing well in life.
A couple of miles out of town, Farmer Stamper made a right-angle turn into a lane very suddenly and without giving a signal, and was agreeably cursed by his retinue.
The lane led between two colonnades of elms to a big square house of bright red brick. This house had been recently built at Stamper’s behest but with care that his name should appear on none of the documents connected with its construction and purchase. Its intended function, as such circumspect measures might suggest, was that of doxy-box, or, in other words, accommodation for whichever housekeeper of the moment might be receiving Mr Stamper’s special favours. Unfortunately, his chronically ailing but vigilant wife had got wind of the enterprise and now made spot checks from time to time to ensure that whoever was enjoying the facilities of Mr Stamper’s investment, it was not its proprietor. She had set the seal of her supervision upon the building by insisting upon its being named, after her, “MIRIAM LODGE”.
He parked the Mercedes at a clumsy angle across the front of Grail’s Rolls and emerged heavily, as from the cab of a tractor. The door he swung shut behind him with his boot as he stared up at the house. A survey of the windows, first of the bedrooms then those on the ground floor, took him only a few seconds. He trudged across the gravel to the front door and gave it a hearty thump with its lion’s head knocker.