The door was opened by a woman of about the same height as Stamper. Under black, untidy hair, was a lean, well-weathered face; the mouth wide, not ungenerous, but tightened by a sort of grim amusement that could have betokened a long and mainly successful struggle for independence. The chin and cheekbones were sharply angular, the nose narrow, straight and red-ridged by exposure to the winter winds of the fen country. Her eyes were half closed for the same reason; they were steady, though, and almost impertinently speculative.
The name of this lady was Lily Patmore.
She addressed the owner of the house. “Now, then, y’old bugger.”
Farmer Stamper was not a man to give vocal expression to his emotions, but as he pushed past Mrs Patmore into the hallway he cupped one of his great hands about her bottom and honked it good-naturedly.
“I see Mawksley’s beet’s doing bloody badly. If there’s one acre with the yellows, there must be bloody forty.”
The housekeeper observed that sugar beet wouldn’t be the only thing to suffer if he didn’t give up making free with her arse, whereupon Mr Stamper offered to wemble her: a proposition that moved Mrs Patmore to remark that his persistence in pawming her when there was company in the house was simply begging for a kick in the lesk.
At which point in their amatory exchange, a door opened so suddenly behind them that both jumped as guiltily as poachers.
Turning, they saw the newspaperman, Ken Lanching. He was holding a twelve-bore shotgun.
Stamper stumped towards him, waving his hand down. “Never you hold a bloody gun like that, son. You’ll have some bugger’s head off.”
Lanching lowered the barrels until they nearly touched the floor. He kept hold of the stock with obvious reluctance. “It was over the fireplace,” he said. “I don’t suppose it’s loaded.”
“Of course it’s bloody loaded,” Stamper retorted. “What good’s a bloody gun wi’out?” He took the weapon, broke it to check that both cartridges were in place, and strode into the dining-room. Effortlessly with one hand he lifted the gun back on its hooks.
“Where’s your mates?”
Lanching looked slightly bewildered by the question. “Oh, around,” he said.
“Everything all right? Lil’s seeing to you, is she?” Mr Stamper seemed not to require answers. He winked. “Mind you don’t try and see to her, though.” A nod towards the housekeeper. “Eh, Lil?”
Mrs Patmore glanced aloft with mock patience and left the room.
“Where’s your Mr Grail?” inquired Stamper, suddenly businesslike. Lanching said he had gone out for a walk but would soon be back.
The farmer gave an appraising stare around the room while he asked casually: “You’re managing all right, then, are you? Finding what you wanted to know?”
“Well, more or less...”
“I must say,” said Stamper, approvingly feeling the texture of the wallpaper with fingers as big as dinner rolls, “that I can’t think of anything in bloody Flax as’d interest a newspaper in London.”
Lanching shrugged uncertainly. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. It depends.”
The farmer gave him a long stare. “You know,” he said at last, “I reckon you’re the recklin of this bloody litter.”
“The what?”
“Recklin. The weakest. The one as won’t make bacon.” He pronounced it “bayacon” with a diphthong that sounded as if it were being dragged through heavy loam.
“I can’t say I have any ambitions in that line.” Stamper grunted.
“That lass of yourn’s not as green as she’s cabbage-looking, though. I’ll bet she keeps you lot snaped.”
“Keeps us...?”
“Snayaped.” (Again the laboured diphthong.) “Under control. Ready to jump when she tells you.”
Lanching clearly found translation difficulties too substantial to permit of argument.
The farmer plunged into even more outrageous speculation. “Whose tottie is she, anyway?” he demanded. “I’d not like to cause trouble by getting it wrong. Which one’s serving her—the boss?”
“Boss?” echoed Lanching, praying for rescue from this importunate hayseed.
“Gaffer,” explained Stamper. “Top man. Grail. The one who writes the pieces in the paper. She’s his little bed-tommy, is she?”
“I know nothing of Miss Clemenceaux’s relationships, and I can’t say I’m wildly interested.”
Stamper regarded him as if he were beginning to show signs of incipient stem wilt. “Not wildly interested. Ah.” He turned his attention to a sideboard on which several bottles of spirits were set out. “Cost three hundred and eighty five quid, did that. Four years back.” One of the great fingers explored the surface. “You want to put some bloody newspaper on it before something gets spilt and snerps the polish.”
Lanching started towards the door. “If there’s anything else you want, Mr Stamper...”
The farmer did not look round. He said to the bottle of gin he had picked up: “What’s your friend Grail want with Alf Blossom, then?”
“Blossom?”
“South Circuit Garage. Asked me where it was. Among other things. Why should he want to know that?”
“No idea.”
“Thought it was the tottie who turned your top soil.”
“Miss Clemenceaux is the research assistant, if that’s what you mean.”
“Aye, well, now I’ve put a spade in, mister. P’raps I’ll get my name in the paper.” Stamper put down the gin bottle and picked up one of whisky. As he squinted through it against the light from the window, he threw out another of his blunt, apparently aimless questions. “What do you reckon to the boss asking me if I know who’s the secretary of the Flaxborough bloody Camera Club?”
“Why shouldn’t he ask you, if that was what he wanted to know?”
“Well your mate’s the snapshot man, isn’t he? Not Grail. Struck me he’s got a harse-forrard way of doing things.”
Someone was crossing the hall. Stamper went to the door and looked out. He stepped back a moment later to admit Clive Grail, who was closely followed by Mrs Patmore.
“There’s some dinner ready if you’d like to come through,” she said, carefully angling the invitation to by-pass Stamper. The farmer tap-tippied one of her breasts with the backs of his fingers in the manner of a vet, and started to leave.
From the other side of the doorway he called back: “That club secretary. Draper Pearce. Harry.” Footsteps receded heavily, as if over furrows.
“You mustn’t mind him,” Mrs Patmore said to Grail. “His dad’s worse. And he’s pushing ninety. The warden’s wife will never go on her own into that old folk’s bungalow of his.”