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       Mrs Gloss was silent for a moment. She shrugged. “You could be right. But it is not for me to speculate, either. I only know that the bar...”

       “The ‘quaffing bench’?”

       “If you prefer to call it that.”

       “It’s what the paper calls it.”

       “I see. The point is, though, if I may return to it, that any notion of unregulated drinking on anybody’s part can be dismissed from your mind at once. The refreshment was the one customarily served at our meetings—a very wholesome drink made to an old country punch recipe.”

       “Chiefly home-made wine,” averred Miss Parkin.

       “Ah,” Pook said. (Purbright once had observed that one of what he called Pook’s “rancid monosyllables” was as intimidating as a search warrant.)

       “About Miss Hillyard,” Pook said. “Has either of you ladies any idea at all where she might have gone after you last had sight of her?”

       Miss Parkin replied first. “One would have expected her to return to her apartment.”

       “Apartment?”

       “She has rooms in Cheviot Road,” said Mrs Gloss.

       “That’s rather a long way from here, isn’t it? If she walked, I mean. And late at night.”

       “There were others here with cars. She probably got a lift home.”

       “In that case, there might be somebody who could tell us what happened to her on the way. Because she certainly didn’t arrive at her lodgings.”

       Pook brought out this piece of reasoning with the air of having forced some wily miscreant into a corner.

       Mrs Gloss made no comment. She poured more coffee for Miss Parkin, refilled her own cup, and moved the remaining biscuits to the side of the table farthest from Detective-Constable Pook.

       Miss Parkin took small but audible sips from her cup and gazed unsympathetically past the head of coffeeless Pook. Although the room was warm, she was dressed in the same thick, stiff cape which she had been wearing the previous Wednesday night. Her hat, in matching material, was round and hard-crowned and of broad brim, like a lifeboatman’s. When she put down her cup and wiped her lips with a handkerchief produced from beneath the cape, there was a faint scrubbing noise.

       “Just one more question, I think, Mrs Gloss.” Pook consulted some notes he had made in the margin of his copy of the Citizen. “Could you tell me if Mr Persimmon, the supermarket manager, is a member of your society?”

       “Persimmon?”

       “That’s right. Mr Bertram Persimmon. Lives off Partney Drive.”

       Mrs Gloss shook her head dubiously. “I very much doubt it. Do you know, Amy?”

       “We do not have a Mr Persimmon. That is for sure.”

       “There you are, then, officer. Your final question is answered.” Mrs Gloss made as if to rise.

       “Was Miss Hillyard an acquaintance of Mr Persimmon, do you happen to know?”

       “I haven’t the faintest idea. And now, if you wouldn’t mind....”

       “Can you answer that, Miss Parkin?”

       “No.”

       Pook stood up.

       “I understand my colleague left the key of Miss Hillyard’s car in your safe keeping, madam.”

       Mrs Gloss stepped to the Jacobean television sideboard and pulled open a drawer.

       “Do be careful how you drive it round the side of the house, won’t you, officer. We don’t want to lose any of the bedding plants.”

       For a moment she kept the keys in her hand, ignoring his outstretched palm.

       “You do have a driving licence, I take it?”

       When the policeman had gone, both women waited in silence until they heard the distant grind of a starter succeeded by the bursting into spasmodic life of the sports car’s engine.

       “I don’t think I liked him very much. Did you, Amy?”

       Miss Parkin grunted and thoughtfully tugged at a whiskered mole under her right ear.

       “I wonder,” she said very quietly, “where he lives.”

•      •      •

The five pressmen, Purbright soon found, had been commendably busy since their arrival in Flaxborough the previous evening.

       They had sought out the Vicar, pierced his hostile reticence, and flattered him into providing a colourful account of the discoveries in the Parish Church.

       They had found several shopkeepers willing to testify to disturbing but unaccountable interference with trade by what they called “rum goings on”.

       A Miss Lucilla Teatime, secretary and treasurer of the Edith Cavell Psychical Research Foundation, had been prevailed upon to describe the level of poltergeist activity in the area as “well above that which we investigators of paranormal phenomena would expect to find in the circumstances”.

       And the unknown lady whose telephone call to a London newsagency had aroused Fleet Street’s interest in the first place had since asserted—again anonymously, but this time in a letter addressed to “The Gentlemen of the Press’ and left on the reception counter at the Roebuck Hotel—that she had personally attended more Black Masses in Flaxborough than she cared to remember.

       “Even making allowance for exaggeration,” said the representative of the Sunday Dispatch, a young man with the beginnings of a Fu Manchu moustache, “I would have thought there was enough in this story to have worried the police. Are the police worried, inspector?”

       Purbright smiled apologetically.

       “If I say yes, it will mean that the constabulary doesn’t feel confident to deal with the powers of evil. If I say no, I’m inviting the criticism that we don’t believe in them. I would prefer to be allowed the middle course of benevolent agnosticism: tell me where a black mass is going on—or likely to take place—and I’ll see if there’s anything we can or ought to do about it.”

       “What you’ve said,” quickly observed a girl with a pretty but worried face and a shaggy motoring coat, “strikes me as sort of...oh, I don’t know, sort of uninvolved. I mean, like you had a lot of permissiveness around out here in the country—you know, the Provinces—and sort of wanted to turn a blind eye. I mean, I’m not criticizing you, or anything, but...” All the time she was talking, the girl kept capping and uncapping a fountain pen and fixedly staring at it.

       “Would you say you had a permissive society here, inspector?”

       This question was issued on behalf of the readers of the Empire News, whose representative, a plump youth in Victorian style trousers, flowered shirt and velvet jacket, was clearly devout in desiring the answer to be yes.

       The girl with the pen, a Sunday Pictorial feature writer, looked up and gave her colleague a grateful smile.