Hilda’s, then? Handsome, bitter, faintly mocking. He pictured Hilda Larch hiding intense shock and disgust beneath the simple mechanics of lighting a cigarette; she had managed it with the brusque carelessness of a horsewoman between gymkhana events. The sense of an unplaced resemblance grew stronger. It was something to do with Hilda, perhaps her whole features and bearing, or at least some look or mannerism of hers, that Purbright had seen in another person since his arrival in Chalmsbury.
He tried to conjure a mental identification parade, but it was no use. The faces blurred and merged, like images in wind-ruffled water. He crossed to the shaded side of the road and sauntered, with blank mind and painfully hot feet, back into the town.
Larch, in shirt sleeves, sat at his desk by an open window. He looked cool, but unrelaxed. Purbright gave him a somewhat dessicated account of his afternoon’s visiting.
“What a good job you’re a policeman, Mr Purbright. The husbands of bitches are terribly prone to be blackmailed. Did you know that?”
The pleasantry was ignored. Larch tried another. “Well, have you found poor Stanley’s bloody murderer?”.
“Certainly.”
“Go on, then, Mr Purbright.”
“He’s your mother-in-law’s lover.”
Larch stared, his face twisted as if he were trying to catch a scarcely audible sound. Then, suddenly, his jaw dropped like an excavator bucket and there emerged a guffaw that turned Sergeant Worple, sitting in the charge room fifty feet away, pale with alarm.
When the short spasm was over, Purbright demurely corrected himself. “Former lover, I should have said, of course.”
“Yes, by God you should!” A rumbling echo of amusement sounded in Larch’s gullet. “But it doesn’t take you much further does it? I’m afraid our filing system doesn’t run to records of the ex-boy friends of the town’s middle-aged ladies.”
“We might not need records. There are pretty long and retentive memories in a place like this.”
“Retentive in more than one sense. They don’t open up in the name of the law, believe me.”
Purbright looked at Larch thoughtfully. “Excuse my asking, but you’re a few years older than your wife, aren’t you?”
“What the hell’s that to do with it?”
“Only that it struck me that you might remember something yourself of what went on here twenty years ago. Gossip, you know. Were you around then?”
“I was, as it happens. But I hadn’t married into the bloody Pointers.”
“I didn’t mean family gossip—just parade room talk.”
Larch leaned back with a sigh. “Look, son: this was a real police force in the ’thirties. We didn’t sit around over tea and knitting. If you think...”
“Mr Larch,” Purbright interrupted firmly, “I don’t much mind your being aggressive, obtuse, bombastic and generally offensive. What I shall not tolerate, though, is the old copper gaff. Now, do we understand each other?”
There was a long silence. Then Larch gave a slight, dismissive wave of the hand and looked down as though calculating something rather difficult.
“No,” he said quietly at last, “I can’t recall a damn thing that might give you a lead. I knew the Pointers, of course. Not intimately; I hadn’t met Hilda then. And I remember something about Ozzy going over to France. That’s all.”
“How old would his wife have been?”
“Thirty, thirty-fivish.”
“Promiscuous?”
Larch seemed almost shocked. “Damn it, man. You’ve seen her. Even twenty years...”
“Perhaps not,” Purbright agreed. “We’ll give her credit for having been selective. It was probably a genuine first-and-last romance. And as discreet as a spinster buying a bottle of scent.” He paused. “Yet there was something...
“Tell me,” said Purbright, suddenly brisk, “you knew this Celia girl, I suppose?”
“Only by sight.”
“That’s what I mean. Would you say she showed resemblance to anyone in particular?”
“I realize now that she was remarkably like my wife.”
Purbright nodded. “That’s understandable. Anyone else? Anyone exceptionally tall, for instance?”
“Tall?”
“Whover stuck those bombs on the statue and that shop sign thing must have had a phenomenal reach. And no short man could have climbed the park railings, either; remember that the water fountain could only have been mined after the park closed.”
“What about a ladder? A box, even?”
“Too noticeable. It might have served for the park business, but not for the jobs in the main streets on clear summer nights. They were done very neatiy. A quick approach, a quick departure, no messing about.”
Larch picked up his pen and peered into one of his trays. “Sounds a principle worth copying,” he remarked. “Anyway, I thought you were going to use this...this holiday of yours to get some sunshine.”
Purbright rose slowly from his chair, walked to the window and stood gazing absently at the roofs of the buildings beyond the courtyard.
“Sunshine,” he repeated. “Of course. No, I don’t want to miss that.”
As the inspector strolled across the Borough Bridge, glancing down over the massive, shabby cast-iron parapet into the ebbing river, he tried to decide what he should do about the killer of the unmourned Mr Biggadyke.
He recognized, and half-admired, the parochial loyalties, compounded with a sort of pagan amorality, that made the people of Chalmsbury policeman-proof. Although he normally enjoyed his job, if only as an exercise in ingenuity, he had no illusion of being an instrument of absolute justice. Some kinds of crime made him angry; none made him righteous. He gave every criminal credit for knowing, if not what he had been about, at least what he didn’t want to have happen to him in consequence. In this he was different from most policemen, who take as a personal insult the unwillingness of a wrong-doer to be caught.
Purbright was also well aware that the public is less zealous to see the triumph of the law than it likes to pretend. Its diffidence was shown in Chalmsbury to a degree suggestive of a Robin Hood fixation. Could long years of rule by men like Larch have been responsible, he wondered.
None would blame him—perhaps he would not blame himself—for slipping out of this town that was so obviously content to allow the false interpretation of Biggadyke’s death to stand as the official record. He had some sympathy with this communal conspiracy to let a dead dog lie.
By the time he reached Mrs Crispin’s front door and let himself into the cool, dark lobby, smelling of mackintoshes and vinegar, Purbright was very nearly resigned to desertion.
He went into the dining room. The table was set already for two, but his fellow lodger had not yet arrived. Purbright picked up the copy of the Chalmsbury Chronicle which had been put by Payne’s plate and sat down to await his meal.