Mr Chubb hastily made correction.
“No, I’m wrong. It was a paper the vicar showed me. But that doesn’t make the matter less serious.”
Purbright debated the likelihood of the chief constable’s appreciating an explanation of the tactics of the newspaper interview but decided against.
“I’m sorry about this, of course, sir, but I think you’ll find that where information is refused altogether the press can be very vindictive—as one might argue it has a right to be.”
For a moment, Mr Chubb turned upon the inspector that gaze of sad and perplexed reproof with which he habitually reacted to outlandish opinion. Then he examined the buttons on the cuff of his coat.
“Mrs Chubb tells me,” he said, almost casually, “that she was taking some of the boys for a walk yesterday” (the “boys” were a swarm of Scotch terriers bred and fostered by the Chubbs)—“when one of them was attacked by a beast belonging to a woman named Gooding...” He raised his eyes. “Do you know of a Mrs Gooding?”
Purbright shook his head and glanced questioningly at Love, who said at once: “Could be Mrs Margaret Gooding, sir. Beatrice Avenue. Husband, George. We’ve had complaints about him shooting arrows in the garden. I believe he writes to the Queen a lot.”
The inspector looked proudly at Mr Chubb, as if to solicit reward there and then for omniscient Love, but the chief constable merely nodded.
“That’s her. The dog is black and very vicious. Mrs Chubb naturally remonstrated with the woman. Now here’s the significant thing—at least, it could be significant. This Gooding person was rather offensive and she ended up by saying (now just let me get this right) yes, by saying: ‘You’ll be getting a call from my Meffie later and he’ll wind your bowels round and round the bed post.’ ”
“Good lord,” said Purbright. He tried to look more surprised then he felt at this fairly ordinary example of dog owners’ rhetoric. “Who’s Meffie, though—the husband? I thought he was called George.”
“She was referring,” the chief constable said very deliberately, “to her dog.”
“Her dog?”
“Certainly. Mrs Chubb had no doubt whatever about that. The woman indicated the beast while she was talking. My Meffie, she called it. Several times.”
The inspector, at a loss to see the relevance of this incident to the earlier subject of Mr Chubb’s complaint, waited for a hint.
“No smoke without fire, Mr Purbright.”
“I suppose not, sir.”
There was another silence.
“No, I didn’t understand either,” conceded the chief constable at last. “It was Mrs Chubb who opened my eyes, so to speak. The dog, you see—Meffie. Well, Meffie’s not a dog’s name. I mean, no one would call a decent self-respecting animal Meffie, would he?”
“Certainly not,” agreed Purbright, anxious not to protract what seemed to him an idiotic excursion into Fetology.
“But Mrs Chubb realized straight away that the name was short for something else. Now are you with me?”
The chief constable’s face was as nearly expressive of excitement as either of his officers had ever seen it. Love said “Ah!” loudly, out of sheer nervousness.
“The sergeant’s got it,” said Chubb, almost jocularly, to Purbright. “What about you?”
“I’m afraid I’m rather dense this morning, sir.”
“I’m afraid you are, Mr Purbright. Perhaps the shock of”—he glanced at the pile of newspapers—“so much notoriety has not yet worn off. When it does, you might reflect that Meffie is an abbreviated form of Mephistopheles.”
There was a pause.
“You think, then, do you, sir, that Mrs Gooding may be associated with the kind of activities described—or hinted at, rather—in these newspaper stories?”
“I leave you to draw what inference you care to.”
Purbright consulted his own Familiar. “Has Mrs Gooding ever been in trouble of any kind, sergeant?”
Love answered without hesitation.
“Only for not having a dog licence. I think that was two years ago. And we were called once to a bit of disturbance with neighbours. They reckoned she’d got into their garden during the night and sprinkled everything with battery acid, but there was never anything proved.”
“Beatrice Avenue,” observed Mr Chubb, “went down badly after that dreadful business a few years ago at number fourteen.3 There were some very nice people living there at one time.”
3 Reported in Hopjoy Was Here
Purbright reflected, not for the first time, that the chief constable was inclined to regard vice and violence as systemic infections, mysterious as dry rot, that might be checked but never completely eradicated from the neighbourhood corpus in which they once had manifested themselves. Their spores, it seemed, were secreted in local property values which thereafter steadily and irrevocably shrank, the process being known by Mr Chubb as “going down”.
“Would you like me to have Mrs Gooding questioned?” Purbright asked. “What she said to Mrs Chubb might well be construed as a threat. And then there is the possibility of her dog coming within the definition of a dangerous animal, not under proper control.”
The chief constable vetoed this suggestion at once. Mrs Chubb did not bear a grudge and would not, in any case, care to be involved.
Purbright began to tidy up the newspapers.
“I expect you will have noticed that there is no mention of Mr Persimmon’s disappearance in any of these stories, sir.”
Mr Chubb’s tone was still chilly.
“Let us be thankful for small mercies.”
“His wife, I think, is less worried than she would like us to believe. His spending a night away from home and without warning is no novelty, apparently. She may or may not suspect that he has gone off with another woman—my impression after talking to her is that her husband’s fidelity is not the most important thing in life for Mrs Persimmon.”
“She is very interested in flower arrangement,” volunteered Mr Chubb. “The Club committee room is beautifully done out sometimes. Tell me, though, Mr Purbright—why are you so sure that Bert Persimmon is carrying on with this Hillyard girl? There’s been no whisper at the Club.”
“Coincidence, mainly, sir. I agree there has been an absence of gossip, but that in itself would tend to confirm that Miss Hillyard’s lover is a person of some local consequence. Both would be careful to keep the affair quiet.”
“You’re guessing, you know.”
“Yes, sir. I am.”
“But the girl’s clothes that were found in her car—how do you explain those?”
“She had been attending this folk dancing thing and I should think the arrangement was for him to pick her up there when it finished, or when she could slip away. She was probably hot and sweaty, so she changed into a fresh outfit there by the car. She wouldn’t want to go back to her lodgings so late in the evening and possibly draw her landlady’s attention to the man she was going off with.