“What is the secret of Lucillite’s power to give your wash the sort of lightness and brightness and whiteness that will set all your neighbours talking?”
Purbright adopted an expression of intense mental effort.
“Only...” prompted the girl, watching him.
“...Lucillite...” she added, a few moments later.
Purbright shook his head. “I’m being really very stupid.”
“..has...”
“No, it’s no use. I’m sorry.”
“...sa...saponi...saponif...” The girl mouthed the syllables with all the patience of a teacher of deaf Hottentots.
Purbright felt the burden of his obligation becoming too much to be borne much longer.
“It’s no good, really it isn’t,” he said firmly. “Why don’t you try the lady next door? She’s more intelligent, and she gets around more than I do.”
The girl sighed. She looked up and down the road, then came close.
“Only Lucillite has saponified granules.”
Purbright snapped his fingers. “Of course!” He knuckled his brow in self-reproach. “The things one can forget!”
For the first time in the interview the girl’s solemn expression thawed. She gave him a little chin-up smile that wrinkled her nose.
“You can have the Gift now.”
Opening the satchel at her side, she took out and handed to Purbright first a sample packet of Lucillite Family Wash Granules, then—reverently—a yellow plastic frame made in the form of a spoked wheel, the spaces between the spokes containing polythene windows of graded degrees of smokiness.
“The Gift?” Purbright asked softly.
She nodded. “It’s a Scintillometer. You see...” She took it from him. “You turn these little windows against your shirt or whatever you want to wash until you get one that matches, then it says here”—she indicated the rim of the wheel—“how much Lucillite you have to use to get it white.”
“And bright.”
“That’s right.” She handed him back the Scintillometer and began re-fastening the strap of her satchel. “Pity you didn’t have those packets, though. You could have gone in for the Paradise Island competition.”
“Gosh,” said Purbright.
“It’s a special promotion for Dixon-Frome and it’s because there’s been a lot of consumer-resistance in places like...” She broke off, looked up from her satchel-strapping. “What’s this place called again?”
“Flaxborough.”
“Yeah, Flaxborough. But I can’t give you the invite, not without the packet tops. I only wish I could.”
“Never mind,” said Purbright. “I’ve always got these, haven’t I?” He cheerily waved the packet of Lucillite and the Scintillometer and withdrew.
Half an hour later, in an office that would not even have made bottom reading on the Scintillometer, Inspector Purbright began to read a report in the laboured but legible handwriting of Constable Palethorp. He was less than half-way through when he heard the sound of scrap iron in epilepsy that signified that somebody was climbing the spiral staircase from the ground floor.
“I thought you might like some tea.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you, Sid.”
Purbright cleared a space on the desk top to accommodate the two large mugs borne by Detective Sergeant Love. He cautiously sipped at the steaming rim of one of them without taking his eyes from Palethorp’s report.
“What,” he asked, “is all this about an abandoned car and folk singers and laundry, for God’s sake?”
Love’s face, pink and patient like a boy martyr’s, held in addition something of the innocent pleasure of the preinformed.
“You mean the Edna Hillyard business?”
“If it’s her car that’s over at Orchard Road, yes. Although why we should assume that it’s been abandoned I really cannot see.”
“Funny place to leave a car,” Love said.
“It would have been at one time. What you call funny places are the only ones where you can leave a car nowadays.”
The inspector read to the end of the report. He shrugged. “Well, unless this girl has been reported missing...”
“She hasn’t,” Love assured him. “Not as per the present. But she’s not a girl. She’s thirty-four.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, you know who she is, don’t you?”
Purbright looked blank.
“Niece of old Rupert Hillyard,” Love supplied. “She came here from Glasgow with her mother in 1954 and went to the High School for a year. She was seventeen.” The sergeant smiled sadly, as if at some fragrant memory.
Purbright good-naturedly gave him a glance of inquiry.
“I remember the age, actually,” Love said, “because she came into the station to ask if one of us would sign her passport application. It was the year Flaxborough was knocked out of the Eastern League. She would have been, wait a minute...yes, twenty-four when Doctor Hillyard died in prison. Did I say twenty-four—no, twenty-five, it must have been. Good lord, nine years...”
“Sid. Please.” The inspector had raised his hand. “We’ve established the woman’s age. All we want to know now is whether or not she’s come to any harm. I’ve yet to be convinced that whoever made that nine-nine-nine call wasn’t trying to be funny.”
“Would you like somebody to ask around? She works for the Council. They might know something in her department.”
“Tomorrow, Sid. Wait until tomorrow. If she hasn’t turned up by then, we’ll take some action.”
Love nodded, then rubbed his chin. “Of course they do reckon,” he said, “that she’s a bit...” His lips pouted, seeking le mot injuste.
“Oh, naturally,” said the inspector. He measured with lacklustre eye what was left of his tea, then quickly drank it down.
The telephone rang just as Love was about to leave the room. The inspector motioned him to stay.
“All right. Bring him along.”
Purbright put back the phone. He straightened some papers, half rose to glance at the condition of the only other chair, sat back, sniffed.
“Guess who’s coming to see us.”
Love co-operatively took the empty mugs off the desk and put them on top of the filing cabinet.
“The vicar,” said Purbright. He joined fingertips and smiled tightly in parody of pastoral solicitude.
For an instant, Love looked alarmed. Then he frowned and made rapid survey of the office as if expecting that something particularly unseemly had been left about.
The door opened with the suddenness of a sprung trap. “Christ!” said Love, spinning to face it.