The inspector nodded, as if satisfied.
“Now maybe you’d be good enough to tell me about the call that Mr Persimmon did take, sir.”
“I can’t tell you anything about it. I don’t know anything.”
“Look, sir, I’m sorry, but this time I must insist.”
“Insist all you like. I just cannot help you. And this time it is not a case of respecting confidences. The phone rang—at about midnight, as I told you—and Persimmon answered it. He listened, not saying a word himself, and then slammed the phone down and rushed out straight away. We both heard his car start off and that was that. He didn’t come back.”
“Did he say nothing when he was leaving? Nothing at all?”
“Not a word.”
“Presumably he knew who the caller was?”
“I suppose so.”
“Was it a man or woman, sir?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“But it would be fairly quiet at that time. And one can generally catch the tone, at least, of somebody’s voice coming over a phone in the same room.”
“Not when Bert was listening, poor devil,” Bird said. “He had an odd habit of holding a telephone tight against his ear.”
“A secretive man?”
“In some way, yes, decidedly.”
“But not, would you say, sir, a guilt-ridden one?”
Bird took some seconds to reply.
“I have,” he said hesitantly, “wondered sometimes about that. Only wondered, mind you.” He quickly finished his drink and set down the glass. “You know what I mean?”
The Lucy-probationer who, in her enthusiasm, had strayed off scheduled territory into the municipal bungalow settlement of Twilight Close, made two discoveries in quick succession.
The first was that if Mr Stamper had a wife he kept her neither in his kitchen nor anywhere else within calling distance. The second and much more welcome discovery was of the remarkable elusiveness of her plastic costume in the grip of a Senior Citizen.
Miss Westmacott backed into a recess between the sink and the refrigerator. Her hands were behind her, against the wall.
“Whoaa...come up, there!” cried Mr Stamper. He made a grab for her withers. She bobbed down and at the same time thrust herself away from the wall. Her head collided with Mr Stamper’s stomach.
When he had recovered breath, he clicked his teeth good-naturedly and followed her into the passage. She was trying to open the front door.
Mr Stamper copiously licked both hands, rubbed them on the seams of his trousers, and lumbered towards her.
She turned and swung her satchel at the same time.
Against the side of Mr Stamper’s head there landed the combined weight of 450 forms of entry to the Lucillite “Win-a-Paradise-Island” competition and three one-gross packs of Scintillometers.
For a moment he remained inert, one glazed eye only six inches from Miss Westmacott’s coveted forequarters. Then he began to slide down the wall—quite happily, as she judged from his smile—and subsided in folds upon the floor. She stepped over him carefully and hurried back to the kitchen.
The key was in the farther door. She turned it.
From the passage came a grunt, then a chuckle. She glanced back. Already Mr Stamper was hauling himself upright. He waved cheerily and made groom-like noises of enticement.
The girl pulled open the door and ran into the garden beyond.
“Whooaa there!” cried Mr Stamper. “Coom ’ere and git mounted, theer’s a good gel!”
Miss Westmacott looked about her. The garden was flanked on two sides by a high fence of woven osiers. At the bottom of the garden was a wall. The only way of reaching the road by which she had arrived was to go back through the house. “Whooaa-back, gel!”
She sprinted over the patch of lawn and across vegetable beds neatly staked and strung to keep birds off their rows of sprouting seeds, plunged through a tangle of spear-grass and dead thistle, and with a leap and a scramble reached the top of the wall.
The wall continued for some distance in each direction, forming part of the boundary to the Close. Below her lay concrete, cracked and ruptured by weeds growing though it. The concrete extended for fifty yards or more, as far as a second wall. There were two buildings within this silent and seemingly derelict area.
The girl gave a backward glance at her thwarted pursuer and jumped lightly down.
She walked towards the nearer building.
It was tall but of only one storey, made of cement-faced brick and quite plain in design. At one corner a plant with long leaves and little red flowers had sprouted from the edge of the flat roof. Most of the panes in the big steel-framed windows had been smashed.
Barbara raised herself on tip-toes and looked in. It was like peeping into a den filled with petrified mammoths. She glimpsed vast jaws and beaks of steel, dulling over with rust. The place was a store for snow-clearing machinery.
As the girl turned away, there registered on the very edge of her consciousness a slight movement. She looked at once towards where she could not help fancying that something odd, something out of place, had happened while her attention had been on the ploughs and bulldozer blades.
All she could see was the grey wall of the other building in the depot, blank save for green and brown streaks of moss and lichen and a small blind-looking window about twenty feet above the ground.
Towards this window she gave an occasional glance while she made her way to a gate in the depot wall that rounding the plough store had revealed.
The gate was padlocked. The wall on either side was a good foot taller than the one she had climbed to escape from Twilight Close. From the farther side came the sound of a passing car.
She tugged and rattled the padlock, then brushed her hands with her handkerchief and patiently turned away. There would, no doubt, be another way out.
The window, though. Something was hanging from it. That must be what she had glimpsed before. A white arm, listlessly swinging from the elbow. Just the arm—forearm, rather—hand and forearm—swinging limply.
But how extraordinarily white it was.
Impelled partly by a practical intention to ask advice in her predicament, but chiefly by curiosity tinged with unease, Barbara crossed the yard and stood beneath the window. She looked up.
“Excuse me,” she called, and waited.
There came no sign that she had been heard. The hand above her continued to hang motionless.
Half a minute went by.
“I say!”
The sound echoed from wall to wall. Watching—anxiously now—Barbara thought she saw the chalk-white fingers twitch.
She called again.