“What, against Mrs Crispin?” Purbright thought Kebble sounded slightly offended.
“No, no; but all lodgings are intimidating, however hard a landlady tries to make one feel at home. In fact it is precisely their homeliness that always alarms me. I half expect to find an embalmed mother propped opposite the teapot.”
“Payne’s been in digs for years,” Kebble said. “He must be an authority.”
“Oh, he copes expertly. But even the most competent, self-possessed lodger is essentially a sad fellow. And Payne is too intelligent to be able to hide it.”
“You’ve spotted that? I’m glad. Sometimes I forget what I think of people—d’you know that? It sounds queer, but life drags on from year to year in a little place like this without anything happening to confirm an opinion. I mean nobody’s going to give Payne or Barry Hoole a Nobel Prize, for instance, yet there was a time when they seemed absolutely brilliant.”
“Talking of Hoole,” Purbright said, anxious lest Kebble’s sudden lapse into subjective philosophy should prove intractable, “I cannot fathom why he qualified for one of Biggadyke’s infernal machines.”
The editor brightened at once. “Oh didn’t you hear the story?”
He might have known, Purbright reflected, that there would be a story. “No,” he said, “I haven’t heard that one either.”
Kebble told him at some length about the sight testing, the belladonna, the collision.
“Rather a murderous trick,” commented Purbright, a fraction more censoriously than he had intended. The editor looked surprised, then pained.
“Well, rather ill-advised, shall we say?”
Kebble accepted the amendment with a shrug. “Mind you,” he said anxiously, “I only told you for your own amusement. Barry would be very upset if he thought that I’d let a confidence slip into the police files.”
“It doesn’t seem terribly important now that the man’s dead. I shouldn’t worry about it, Mr Kebble.”
Kebble nodded gratefully. “Trouble is, old chap, we’re used to the gendarmerie here being a bit on the heavy-handed side. They don’t enjoy it, but Larch pushes them, you know. I can’t get used to a policeman who isn’t for ever holding a cell door open, as you might say.”
“I don’t want to spoil my holiday, that’s all,” Purbright said. “Let’s go out and get sunburned, shall we? Then perhaps you can show me where Mr Pointer might be found.”
Chapter Thirteen
As it happened, there was no need to seek out Councillor Pointer. When Purbright and Kebble rose from their table they saw him framed in the narrow, raised doorway, peering about him like an angry little sea captain disturbed by voices in the hold.
Spotting them, he nodded curtly. “They told me I’d find you in here.”
Purbright marvelled once again at the omniscient ‘they’ without whom, it seemed, all channels of information in Chalmsbury would dry up. To Pointer he said: “Won’t you stay and have a drink, sir?”
The courtesy elicited only a sharp stare and “Aren’t you on duty?”
“Not rigidly so, sir. No.”
Pointer grunted. “I never drink outside my own place and even there it’s only in the way of business. Doesn’t do, you know,” he explained in a slightly more conciliatory tone. He turned and led the way to the street.
In the sunshine Purbright was able to gain a clearer impression of Larch’s father-in-law. He saw a short, angrily energetic man, whose restless and inflamed eyes had a faint smile about them even when he was being offensive. His moustache, though diminutive, was eloquent: it could bristle furiously, twitch to an angle expressive of sceptical amusement, or, most rarely, lie straight and sad in the shadow of the councillor’s cavernous nostrils and testify to its master’s essential simplicity.
“I’d like a word with you, Mr er...”—Purbright supplied his name and rank—“if you’ve time. You are the chap the Chief Constable sent over, I suppose? Oh, you needn’t look coy, man. I know all about it.”
Kebble, of whom Pointer seemed inclined to take no notice at all, decided that he was not going to be invited to share whatever frankness the wine merchant had in mind. He glanced at an imaginary sky-clock, appeared to note that it was much later than he had thought, said “Ah well,” and strode off cheerfully.
Pointer led Purbright to his car, a large and costly pale blue affair. “I don’t suppose,” he said, “that you want to sit in a stuffy office on a day like this. We’ll just have a ride round.” He climbed in stiffly, stretched what he had in the way of neck until he could just see between the spokes of the steering wheel, and switched on the engine.
They left the town by the coast road, passed swiftly through the flat, intensively cultivated acres from which Chalmsbury drew most of its prosperity, and began to climb the gentle incline of the spine of hills on the town’s eastern side.
Pointer kept silent save for an occasional terse comment on some feature of the landscape. He drew his companion’s attention to several churches of a massiveness at odds with the obvious sparsity of population in these sleepy folds of pasture, trimmed with dark, narrow woods; and urged him once or twice to look back at a view of the receding plain, its patchwork of fields now obscured by the blue-grey haze of noon.
After about half an hour, Pointer slowed and drew the car on to a patch of turf on the brow of a hill more steep and rugged than the rest. Below them was the great scoop of a sandstone quarry. Behind lay the falling undulations of fields and woodland, ribboned with the yellowish lanes that linked hidden hamlets.
Almost immediately the car came to rest, it filled with the oppressive scents of hot leather, rubber and steel. Purbright stepped out gratefully upon the short, springy grass.
“They say you can see both Chalmsbury steeple and Flaxborough Cathedral from here,” Pointer informed him. They tested the theory but could discern neither. “Perhaps they mean with a telescope,” added Pointer, sourly. “Still, it’s as good a spot as any for a private chat. And I mean private, mind.”
Purbright met his sharp, challenging stare with his own mild gaze. “You’ve no need to say anything at all if you don’t wish to, sir. I’ve not sought this interview and I think you ought to remember that I’m not a private confidant, even if I have no official status here as a policeman.”
Pointer shrugged and looked down at a handful of change he had taken from his pocket. “You’re perfectly right, of course, Inspector. I realize I can’t impose conditions on you: that was silly of me. The fact is that I’m rather worried.”
“About the Biggadyke case, sir?”
“That comes into it, yes.” Pointer cupped his hand and gently rattled the coins.
“But the affair’s closed now. You don’t disagree with the verdict, do you?”
“No, certainly not. It was what everyone expected. We went as near as we decently could—the council deputation, I mean—to telling the Chief Constable that Biggadyke was the fellow he ought to be after.”
“The fellow your son-in-law ought to be after.”
Pointer accepted the correction with a scowl. “Don’t you worry: I’d already made sure that Hector knew the risk he’d be running if he ignored Stan Biggadyke, for all he was a personal friend—because of that, in fact.”