“You don’t seem all that impressed, inspector. I did wonder when I read some of the Sunday newspapers. They depicted you as tolerant to the point of indifference.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“What are you proposing to do about this bit of foolery at my front door?”
“In the first place—and with your help, I hope, sir—to establish whether it was just foolery or something more serious.”
“You didn’t have to come traipsing over here, you know, Purbright. I didn’t send for you. Now why don’t you be a good fellow and run along. The mess is cleaned up. If the papers want to make a silly song and dance about it, that’s their business. So far as I’m concerned, the incident is over.”
“That is what you told the press, is it, sir?”
Sir Henry laughed. “Yes, but in much more forthright terms, believe me.”
It was the laugh—a controlled, fruity chuckle which suddenly skidded into falsetto—that confirmed Purbright’s suspicion. Bird had been frightened, and quite badly. Was it by the sudden prospect of publicity? As deputy chairman of the Bench, he had suffered, or enjoyed more likely, enough newspaper quotes to have broken his coyness in that respect. In any case, his reputation both in business and more recently in public life was that of an extrovert, a pusher.
“Well, we’ll leave that for the moment, Sir Henry. It wasn’t the only reason for my coming to see you. I’ve been wanting to ask you about a certain charity organization.”
Bird stared. He half rose from his chair.
“Now, look, Purbright, I realize you’re not a chap who rushes round with a harassed expression all the time, but aren’t you supposed to be in charge of this Persimmon business?”
“That is so, sir.”
“Yet you have time to trot over here to investigate a mutilated chicken—no, your words, Purbright—mutilated chicken—and when I laugh off that one, as you should have done in the first place, you start chatting about charities.”
“Perhaps I chose an inapt phrase,” Purbright conceded patiently. “It was what I judged to have been meant by Mrs Persimmon when she spoke of her late husband’s ‘samaritan nights’. She named you, Sir Henry, as one of his associates on these occasions.”
Bird said nothing for a while. He gazed unseeingly towards an alabaster nude preening herself on the big, white-painted overmantel. A sheet of cellophane, strapped round the figure to protect it from dust, glistened wetly in the room’s ochre twilight.
“Have you had words with the vicar?”
The quality of Bird’s voice had undergone a radical change. It was quiet and earnest and free of the half-mocking, half-accusing tone he had employed before.
“Not on this subject specifically, no, sir. He did call to see me on Friday, but about something else.”
“About what he’d found in the church, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“That,” Bird said gravely, “wasn’t ‘something else’, Purbright. All these events have a common cause, as I think you are beginning to realize. There are forces at work in this town—highly dangerous forces—which can’t simply be arrested and locked up. They have been operating under the surface for a long time.”
Bird got up and crossed to the window. He stood staring out through the muslin folds. In profile, the chin was virtually non-existent. His head at that moment seemed to Purbright to be a round, yellow globe, featureless as a turnip.
“You say you’ve not mentioned the watchnights to the vicar.”
Bird turned and the turnip had a mouth again, and a nose, and eyes caved beneath those anxiously contracted bundles of hair.
“Watchnights? I’m sorry, I don’t think I know what you mean, sir.”
Bird made an abrupt, dismissive gesture. “No, never mind. I’ll explain. You’ll have to know, obviously. But not until I’ve spoken to Grewyear. That would be quite wrong.”
He left the room at once, closing the door behind him. The policemen heard the sharp ting that signalled the lifting of a phone.
On his return, Bird made no reference to his conversation with the Vicar but his manner suggested that Grewyear had sanctioned whatever he was about to say.
“About a year or eighteen months ago,” began Bird, “some rather queer reports started to come in to a little social welfare set-up that a couple of friends and I had been running in our spare time. It was a sort of moral advice thing—you know what I mean? Quite unofficial, but with connections. Cropper, for instance—he’s in the right job to know about problem families and so on. I’m on the Bench and a few committees. Grewyear—well, his value is obvious. And poor old Persimmon had his Boy Scout and Home Mission contacts.
“The first strange story that came to us was told by a woman who claimed that an animal of some kind kept clattering about on the roof at night and pawing at the tiles just above her bed. When she looked up from the street, there was nothing there. She was a widow and lived alone. One morning, she woke up parched with thirst and hardly able to breathe. The space in the bed beside her was hot, she said—not just warm but hot—and she saw hairs on the sheet, rough and wiry, like a goat’s hairs. Know what I mean?
“Then a young girl brought us something she said she kept finding on the floor in various rooms at home, no matter how often she threw it away outside or even burned it on the kitchen fire. It was a rough figure made out of straw. We knew what it was, but we didn’t tell her. It was a Hugger-doll. The tale goes that if this thing isn’t discovered during daylight, its maker will be able to take its place after dark and do what he wants—you know what I’m getting at, don’t you?—to anyone in that house—kill them, even—without fear of discovery.
“I could go on, but those two first cases were fairly typical. Some of the people who came to us were absolutely frantic. They thought they’d seen the devil, or were dying of some illness their doctors couldn’t discover, or had been possessed—and I mean physically possessed, you understand, in the sense of being ravished, coupled with, inseminated—you know what I mean?—by creatures not human. There were others who complained of mysterious infestation of their houses or their bodies— particularly their secret parts—you know what I mean?—by hordes of strange insects that disappeared when doctors or health inspectors were called.”
Bird had been leaning further and further forward in his chair as his story progressed. Now he paused and sat back.
“You see what we were up against, don’t you? Oh, we didn’t believe it at first, any more than you would have done. Or a doctor. Or a lawyer. Of course, Grewyear had to pretend to. Not that he actually did any interviewing of these people himself. It was understood from the beginning that the rest of us would constitute a sort of auxiliary—you know what I mean?—to leave him free to get on with his regular parish duties. We passed on the details, though, so that he could advise. And in the end, none of us had any doubts at all any more.