“After all, sir, no one has had word of this woman for four days. Persimmon’s death must change radically whatever theories we might have formed previously. I admit my own view was decidedly over-complacent.”
Sergeant Love spoke. “We don’t know for certain that she was still his girl friend. She’d knocked around a good deal before and the people who talked to me about her didn’t strike me as thinking that she was likely to settle for anybody in particular.” Love leaned round Harper to address the chief constable directly. “She’s not what you might call a home-loving girl, sir.”
Mr Chubb pouted dubiously. “That may be so, sergeant, but I’m afraid the only hypothesis we can afford to accept is that both these unfortunate people were involved in the same event. We must hope it did not have the same outcome for both of them.”
“One of my proposals,” Purbright said, “is that apart from trying to find out what happened on Wednesday night, and where, we should assume that Miss Hillyard is still alive and make a special effort to trace her. With your agreement, sir, I should not rule out door-to-door inquiries. The county people might help with men.”
Mr Chubb made a note on the pad before him. “I’ll have a word with Hessledine,” he said.
Harper asked Love something under his breath, then spoke aloud. “Does anybody know if Mr Persimmon had a car?”
“Yes, Malley said, a big Ford, he thought a Zodiac, was almost certain a Zodiac.”
“Do we know where it is now?”
Purbright acknowledged the point to be a good one. He added—but inwardly—that there was no excuse for his having failed to think of it himself, then sent Love into the next office with instructions to telephone Mrs Persimmon and ask if her husband had been using the car on the day of his disappearance.
“Surely,” said Mr Chubb to the inspector when Love had departed, “she would have mentioned the car to you when you called on her yesterday if her husband had taken it with him?”
“She was somewhat distraught, sir.”
“Yes, I can understand that. Even so, cars are pretty expensive items, you know.”
“His probably had been provided by the firm.”
“You think so?”
“It’s customary.”
“Ah.”
Love returned with the information that Persimmon’s car, the registration number of which he had obtained from the widow, had not been seen by her since the previous Wednesday morning. Nor had she thought about it. Was it, perhaps, in the parking bay behind the supermarket? She had no other suggestions to offer.
Chapter Ten
With the air of a generous sportsman leading his second best golf clubs to a friend who has never played before, the County Chief Constable acceded to Mr Chubb’s request for help in the hunt for Edna Hillyard.
Six uniformed men and two detective-constables were relieved of their duties in Chalmsbury, Brocklestone and some of the smaller county divisions and told to report at Flaxborough, where, if the search should prove protracted, they would be found lodgings.
Purbright awaited the result of his call to Ayrshire, where lived Edna’s only traceable relatives. If door-to-door inquiries were to be made, recognizable duplicates of a photograph of the woman would have to be run off. Neither her landlady nor any of her friends interviewed so far possessed a picture.
The day before the county men were due to be briefed, a carefully wrapped, framed portrait arrived at Fen Street. It was of a five-year-old child with whimsically gappy teeth and dressed in a gauze fairy costume and ballet shoes.
The inspector showed it to Love.
“Her auntie in Scotland produced it. It’s all they’ve been able to turn up. You’ve seen the girl. Is this going to be any good?”
“No,” said the sergeant.
“No hint of features? Nothing that might just connect in people’s minds?”
Love shook his head firmly.
Purbright put the photograph aside. “Could we get a drawing made, do you think? We’ve got to have something for people to be shown.”
“Have you tried the Citizen office?”
It was, the inspector reflected, just as well that Love had a kind of built-in guilelessness that prevented his exploiting or even gloating over the gaffes and shortcomings of his superior officers. So gross a lapse as failure to go straight to the local newspaper file as the most likely source of a picture hardly bore thinking about.
“My dear Sid, you mean you haven’t been round there yet?”
“I can’t remember that you asked me to.”
Purbright regarded with fond admonishment the pink face of Love, helpful, unsurprised.
“Never mind,” he said at last. “You’ve had a lot to think about. It’s often the most obvious things that get overlooked.”
The sergeant nodded, forgiving himself.
Ten minutes later, he was searching through the efficiently maintained photographic index of the Flaxborough Citizen in Market Street.
As Purbright, upon reflection, had surmised, Miss Hillyard was by temperament the sort of woman who might be expected to have had a history of entering beauty competitions. The most recent, apparently, had been only five years ago when she was twenty-nine. Love withdrew and gazed with admiration upon the print entitled “Miss Arcadia Ballroom, 1966”. It showed a large but well-proportioned brunette, whose sexual attractions—without question considerable even in straight presentation, so to speak—had been lent breath-catching emphasis by a choice of costume that not only was flagrantly translucent but seemed to have been shrunk on like the wrapping of a vacuum-packed ham.
“She looks fairly capable of looking after herself,” Purbright said, trying to feel confident.
He handed the print back to Love. “Get Harper to run off two or three dozen copies.”
With twelve of the duplicated photographs in his pocket, the inspector called at the Roebuck Hotel and asked if he might see one of the gentlemen associated with the detergent advertising campaign currently mounted in the town.
He was ushered into a small, brown room, papered in simulation of panelling and hung with as many sporting prints as could be accommodated in single file around the walls. The room smelled of gin, with an underlying tang of horseradish sauce.
Three men and two women sat round a mahogany dining table on which lay a jostle of pamphlets, correspondence and what Purbright took to be accounts or statistical extracts. Several bottles and two siphons were grouped in the centre of the table. On a sideboard were more bottles and a portable film projector.
The girl who had acted as the inspector’s guide retreated and shut the door behind her without attempting introductions.