At this juncture, though, Leaper’s uncharacteristically rapid course of thought was arrested. He stood still and stared at the point on the skyline where he had just seen a small flash of reflected light.
Two seconds later came the sound of the explosion.
In Leaper’s ears, it was like the boom of the cannon that signals a prisoner’s escape.
Chapter Six
One of Barrington Hoole’s most cherished possessions was a period piece among shop signs: a huge double-sided representation in coloured glass of a human eye. It was of the same shape as a tinned ham, though three times as big, and had been suspended from a bracket above the doorway of his consulting rooms since the early days of his predecessor, no believer in professional reticence, more than forty years before.
So awesome was this Cyclopean grotesque that it promised to outlast every other piece of portable or breakable property that Chalmsbury shopkeepers were rash enough to leave on display after barring their doors. Youths with catapults shunned it. Drunks veered to the opposite side of the road rather than pass beneath it. Even the pranksome bucks of Chalmsbury Rowing Club forebore from trying to add the thing to their collection of trophies.
The great eye, fringed with artificial lashes the size of liquorice sticks, had glared out from its brass frame for as long as Chief Inspector Larch could remember. So when Sergeant Worple came into his office to report that it had vanished he said merely: “Go to hell” and pushed the message out of his mind.
Worple stood patiently in front of the desk until Larch raised his eyes again. Then he said: “Beg pardon, sir, but it looks like another of these bombing affairs.”
“What does?”
“The destruction of Mr Hoole’s shop sign, sir.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The glass part of the sign has disintegrated—split up, sir—into pieces like grains of sugar. They’re underfoot for quite a way along Watergate Street. Crunchy, they are.”
Larch laid down his pen and gave Worple a jaundiced scowl. “Crunchy,” he repeated flatly.
“That is so, sir. Glass is a crystalline substance, as you may know, with a lot of internal stresses”—he illustrated the point by hooking his fingers and pulling them—“so it tends to shatter on receiving a blow. The more sudden and powerful the blow, the more pieces the glass will fly into. An explosive, now...”
“Never mind the bloody lecture. Who reported this?”
“Mr Hoole was the complainant, sir, but he didn’t exactly report it. He just stood under where the sign had been and used bad language. I advised him to be careful and he changed to much longer words that didn’t seem to give as much offence to bystanders. One of them told me it was the sign having been smashed that had upset Mr Hoole.”
Larch rose, signed Worple to follow, and strode out of his office. A few minutes later they were looking up at the twisted remains of the framework that had contained the giant eye.
The chief inspector pounced into several shops nearby and promptly alienated their proprietors with aggressive questioning. One or two who lived above their premises said they had heard a loud bang during the night but they had no further information to offer and each plainly resented the implication that he was the author of the explosion.
Larch left Barrington Hoole himself until last.
The optician did not appear immediately but when he did descend from the upper floor he looked flushed and ready to lay tongue to more expletives of the kind he had been persuaded earlier to abandon. He nodded curtly at Larch and stood silent and challenging.
“I understand you’ve had a spot of trouble with your, er, advertisement out there, sir.”
Hoole regarded him speechlessly for a moment then tightened his mouth and retorted: “Don’t be fatuous, officer. You mean some blackguard blew the damn thing to smithereens. And just at the moment I happen to be in the middle of a consultation. You will have to pursue your inquiries elsewhere.”
Larch swung his great jaw from side to side like a bulldozer seeking soft earth. “I wouldn’t take too uncooperative an attitude if I were you, sir. The ownership of the advertisement doesn’t give you the right to be indifferent to a police investigation, Mr Hoole. Blowing up property in a public place is a serious matter.”
“Well you don’t imagine I blew it up, do you?”
“In our job we imagine nothing, sir. We seek the facts.”
“How you elicit facts without using imagination is your business, but it does help to explain your remarkably consistent lack of success.”
“Did that sign thing of yours happen to be insured?” Larch inquired. His new description of the article in question lent itself to an even more contemptuous tone than he had succeeded in applying to ‘advertisement’.
“Of course,” said Hoole. “For thirty thousand pounds.”
Larch looked wearily up at the ceiling. “Indeed, sir. In that case you must be exceedingly grateful that someone has enabled you to capitalize on the policy.”
“Naturally.”
“When did you leave your shop yesterday evening?”
“I left my consulting rooms at precisely five o-clock.”
“And you didn’t return until this morning?”
“No.”
“You are certain of that?”
“Not absolutely. I am a schizophrenic, you know. Half of me takes a good deal of watching. Perhaps it slipped away in the night.”
One side of Larch’s mouth curled up like paper on a hot stove. “It strikes me, Mr Hoole, that both halves of you could do with watching.” He reached for the door. “I may have further questions to ask you later.”
“I gravely doubt if I shall have either the time or the inclination to answer them.”
Larch opened the door, looked into the street, and turned back. “Ah, Mr Hoole,” he sighed, “we have had our fun. But next time I shall bring a witness. And fun may then appear as obstruction and very wrongful.”
Hoole put his finger tips on the counter, and leaned close to the chief inspector.
“May your truncheon take root in your orifice and become a thorn bush,” he said with quiet sincerity.
Sweeping Worple into step beside him, Larch marched grimly back towards the police station. Worple, who had learned by now to keep a ready supply of envelopes in his tunic pocket, tried to explain on the way that he had performed his usual gleaning duty at the scene of explosion number three. But Larch waved down his report with some exasperation and the sergeant had to content himself with adding his latest collection of oddments to the two packets already lying between a tea caddy and a confiscated revolver in the charge-room cupboard.