“Do you know what we were doing? We were fighting a battle, Purbright, a battle with evil. Right here in this town. Make no mistake about that.
“Forces had gained hold in Flaxborough that would have corrupted and then devoured it. You think that’s a melodramatic way for an experienced business man and a magistrate to talk, don’t you? All right. But I tell you this. If there’s such a thing as the mark of the devil, I’ve certainly seen it in Flaxborough. And not just once or twice.”
Chapter Twelve
Lucy-probationer Barbara “Bubbles” Westmacott was feeling inspired and ambitious. She had been permitted, together with four other junior members of the team, to watch some of the re-making of the Lucillite campaign film and so splendidly had the occasion gone off—with lots of absolutely spontaneous Ooo’s from the washwives, quips and grins galore from Hughie, and a spell-binding imitation by boatman Heath of Long John Silver—that she had set herself to convert eleven households (eleven was her lucky number) to whiter, and therefore more joyous, living that very day.
“If Lucillite is in your home, I’ve brought good news from Dixon-Frome.”
Miss Westmacott, spruce and plump and engaging in her fractionally too tight uniform, smiled confidently at the old lady who had opened the door of the pretty little bungalow.
“Eh?”
Miss Westmacott repeated her incantation.
Nutcracker jaws champed four or five times while the white plastic tunic was submitted to slow and dubious scrutiny by eyes like mildewed bilberries.
“You from the chiroppy?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Come to do me feet, ’ave yer?”
“Oh, no, I’m not a chiropodist. I am here to show you how to get a whiter wash.”
With speed almost incredible in one so frail, the old lady snaked back behind the shelter of the door and slammed it shut.
“There’s a Gift!” cried Miss Westmacott, as mellifluously as she could manage in the discouraging circumstances.
From behind the door came an angry and very brusque retort. It sounded, curiously enough, like Russian. Then, in English, the girl heard that she was to tell them dratted council lot to bloody well get a bath themselves and stop bloody pesterin’.
Barbara sighed and conscientiously put a cross on her progress analysis chart in one of the squares marked “consumer resistance”.
She went up the path between the lawns of bright green not-to-be-walked-on turf, and rang the bell of the next bungalow.
After some delay, it was opened generously and suddenly by a woman five feet tall and two feet thick all the way down. The hat of her butcher-blue uniform looked like a chopping block with a brim. Sticking out at one side of the hat was a big amber bead. Diametrically opposite there emerged an inch of steel point. Barbara tried with some bewilderment to decide whether the woman had an uncommonly flat head or a cranium insensitive to the passage of hat pins.
“Yes?”
“If Lucillite is...”
The girl faltered, having grasped belatedly that the woman was a visiting nurse and not the householder.
“It’s all right,” she said, turning away.
“Here, I hope you’re not selling things,” said the woman, sternly. “Not in Twilight Close.”
“No. Oh, no.”
Barbara gave the next bungalow a miss, just in case the nurse was still watching. She turned a corner past a row of symmetrical tame-looking almond trees, and walked up the path to a dwelling similar to all the others except that there came from its half open door waves of pop music from a turned high radio.
The girl felt encouraged. She let her shoulders and hips rock gently in time with the pop and drummed her fingers on the white plastic satchel while she awaited a response to her ring.
It was not long in coming.
The prolonged stare of astonishment melting into delight that the girl received from Mr Herbert Stamper, one-time farmer of Flaxborough Fen, would have warned a more worldly caller to make some quick excuse and depart.
But Miss Westmacott’s head was too tightly packed with her dream of the Dixon-Frome Golden Merit Medal to notice, let alone interpret, a look that in its time had made even goats bolt for cover.
“If Lucillite is in your home, I’ve brought good news from Dixon-Frome!”
“ ’Ave ye, be-Christ!” gruffled Mr Stamper, his regard ranging appreciatively from hock to haunch.
The Lucy accepted this as a token of understanding.
“Do you have the three packets, then?” she inquired. “They can be empty or full—it doesn’t matter.”
Mr Stamper scratched one ear (Barbara decided, on thinking about it later, that it was the only time she had actually heard anyone do this) and made a remark about “three bags full” at which he shuddered with merriment for more than half a minute.
Then, abruptly, he indicated with a jerk of his head the interior of his bungalow.
What vestige of self-preservative instinct had survived a Dixon-Frome Product Loyalty Course prompted the girl to hesitate.
“Your wife...shall I find her in the kitchen?”
Mr Stamper made a noise she took to signify assent.
She walked primly past him into a passage-way that smelled of paraffin and raspberry jam. He left the front door open long enough to admit daylight while he admired Miss Westmacott’s hind quarters and calculated the best approach for a serving throw.
Sir Henry Bird had suspended his narrative while he fetched whisky for Purbright and himself, and on the sergeant’s insistence that he would prefer it, a glass of orange cordial for Love.
“Am I right,” Purbright asked, “in thinking that this small group that had been formed eventually became concerned solely with—what shall I say?—with apparently supernatural occurrences?”
Bird stared into his glass and pouted. “I’d just like to qualify that a little,” he said. “You make it sound as if we were investigators. There was nothing detached about our attitude. To help these people—to rescue them, if we could—that was our object.
“Of course, we didn’t pretend to have any scientific training. But we discussed and we read and we kept our eyes open. And by the end of our first year’s working we had noticed something very peculiar. Do you know what it was? I’ll tell you. It was something to do with dates.
“We noticed that nearly all the most horrible incidents that people described to us had taken place about the same time—or at least during the same period. There would be a whole crop of these happenings, all within a few hours, all during darkness. Then nothing—nothing serious, anyway—for weeks. And then, off it would go again. Another night of poor creatures being tormented in the most dreadful, filthy ways. You know what I mean?”