“Phone call?” repeated Purbright, patiently.
“When he knew about having to do the oversticks. He rang up this party and said he’d come straight over when he could.”
“Might it not have been his wife he was talking to?”
“Oh no, he never rang her. Not the boss. Not his wife, he wouldn’t.”
“Who was it, then? Do you know?”
“Me? No, I never heard him. It was Julie who was getting stuff out of the stockroom to refill one of the special offer bins. The phone’s in there.”
“You say Mr Persimmon was not in the habit of telephoning his wife. Do I take it that they weren’t on very good terms?”
The under-manager shrugged. “Well, just sort of average. I don’t suppose he thought much of her, but they’d been married ages, hadn’t they?”
“You’d call the relationship unenthusiastic rather than hostile, then.”
“Yeah, I suppose you could say that.”
“Was anyone—anyone at all—inclined to be hostile to Mr Persimmon?”
Mr Baxter considered carefully this wider question..
“What, customers, you mean?”
“Not necessarily.”
There was a pause. Then the under-manager shook his head.
“I can’t think of anybody in particular,” he said, “but I don’t reckon he was liked much. Not by men. You know.”
“I’m not sure that I do know, Mr Baxter. Effeminate, was he?”
“Far from it. I’d say he was a randy old sod, if he hadn’t been my boss.”
“I think we can take it that his death absolves you from professional loyalty, Mr Baxter.”
“Right. Then that’s what he was.”
Julie Bollinger, bin-filler and shelf-recharger, entered Purbright’s presence with a draggle-tailed awe that argued years of parental warning of the policeman who would fetch her away if she didn’t eat her dinner. She was sixteen years old, sallow and straight-haired, and looked as if the threats had failed in their purpose.
Purbright got up and gave her his chair. She perched on the edge of it and covered bony knees with large red hands.
The inspector squatted on the farther end of the camp bed and waited until she glanced his way, when he gazed admiringly at a huge buckle of chrome and coloured glass on her belt.
She saw him looking and was pleased and just a little reassured.
“Julie, you know that Mr Persimmon is dead and that we think somebody killed him. Obviously all this has nothing to do with you, and I’m not going to bother you with a whole lot of silly questions. But there’s one thing you might have remembered from last Wednesday which could be important. Now listen. When you were working in the stockroom and therefore happened to hear Mr Persimmon talking on the phone, did anything of what he said come over clearly to you?”
Julie, whose mother would have prefaced such a catechism with the observation that “little pigs have big ears” and a blow on each just to prove it, thought how nice and understanding this big, yellow-haired policeman was. She closed her eyes and rummaged conscientiously through the little rag-bag of her memory.
“He said,” she announced at last, nodding slightly at each word in warranty of its truth, “that he couldn’t make it that night and that whoever it was he was talking to should be sure to let Dilly know. I think he said that bit twice. And then there was another bit where he laughed and said well it was a bit of luck for whoever was at the other end of the phone because she’d get an extra turn.”
“She?” queried Purbright. “Do you think it was a woman he was talking to, Julie?”
She frowned, confused by the complication.
“I don’t know, really. He never called whoever it was by name. I just...” Her thin shoulders rose and subsided.
Purbright hastened to say, never mind, she’d got a jolly good memory and the odds were that her first impression was probably the right one.
“Did you like Mr Persimmon?” he asked casually.
“He was all right. I’m sorry about what’s happened to him.” Julie’s mouth trembled. Purbright thought she was chiefly upset by the looming so near of the fearsomeness of death, but there was some pity there too, some regret.
Of the four other girls who worked at the supermarket, only one was able, or inclined, to say about her late employer anything that might be a clue to the circumstances of his death. She was an eighteen-year-old cashier, Doris Periam, and she told the inspector of having seen Mr Persimmon’s car being driven along Priorgate fairly late on the previous Wednesday night.
“How late?”
“It had gone twelve. A friend was taking me home. I live in Moss Road and it was half-past when I got in.”
“You know Mr Persimmon’s car, do you?”
“Oh, yes. It’s a big powder-blue thing.”
“Why did you notice it especially that night?”
“Well, there wasn’t much about. And then, this car went by. It was going ever so fast. I thought it would turn over at that bend into Marshside Road. It just scraped round, though. And my friend said look at that something fool. And I said it can’t be, yes it is, it’s my boss. Because I could see the car and the colour and everything in the light of that lamp outside Morrison’s. And my friend said he must be drunk, but I said no, not Mr Persimmon, he never touches it. I thought it was ever so funny, though, him driving like that.”
During the few minutes it took him to walk back to the police station in Fen Street, Purbright pondered the behaviour and the route of Persimmon. Haste was uncommon enough in Flaxborough to be noticed at once, even by a courting cashier, and Persimmon must have been in an uncharacteristically rash frame of mind that night to use Priorgate as a speedway. He certainly was not drunk at the time, if, as seemed likely, he had met his death within the next few hours. No trace of alcohol had been revealed at autopsy. So why the erratic driving?
There was no doubt of where he had been going. Marshside Road, the continuation of Priorgate, led only to Orchard Road, And there, presumably by arrangement, waited his mistress, Edna Hillyard, in the privacy of her little tree-screened car.
But even at that time there must have been people about. The folk-dancing affair had gone on “pretty late” according to Mrs Gloss. Both Persimmon and Edna had always taken good care—unusual care, in her case—to keep their meetings secret. Why, then, choose for an assignation the grounds of a house where characters had been prancing around at large all evening? Persimmon’s car, it seemed, was readily identifiable. And as a local store manager, he himself would be familiar to the sort of middle-aged, middle-class women likely to join a folklore society.
Then—and Purbright reproached himself for having accepted at first an explanation more convenient than convincing—there was the point about the girl’s neatly stacked clothes. Had she really had the forethought to set out that evening equipped with a duplicate set of clothing to put on after the revels? And if so, what had she carried it in? There was no suitcase in the car—not even a box or wrapping.