The report of the inquest, solidly set and so explicitly headlined in depth as to render the reading of the matter beneath almost superfluous, had been given pride of place on one of the centre pages. Purbright began to scan it rapidly and without much interest.
Then, as he turned into the second column, his eye did what a car will do on being taken round a sharp bend too quickly and inattentively. It skidded and came to rest in column three.
The inspector went on staring at the photograph before him while the truth about Biggadyke’s murder took sharp and clear form like a crystal growing out of a suddenly cooled concentrate.
After perhaps half a minute he looked down and read the caption.
“Mr Joseph Mulvaney, senior projectionist at the Rialto Cinema, Chalmsbury, has been nominated to receive the Grand Brooch of Erin, an honour conferred upon Irish nationals ordinarily resident in this country for outstanding service in the cause of Anglo-Irish relations. Mr Mulvaney (pictured here in the projection room where he has worked for the past twelve years) hopes to be able to travel to Dublin to receive his award in person when the presentations are made next Tuesday.”
Chapter Eighteen
Purbright folded the paper and replaced it on the table. He went in search of Mrs Crispin. The only occupant of the kitchen was Phyllis, shaping fishcakes with the nonchalant expertise of a prize-fighter’s masseur. She bathed him in her dimpled sir-she-said smile and said that the Missus had gone out for the evening but that his tea was on the way.
“Has Mr Payne not come in yet?”
She slid the first of the fish cakes into the frying pan. “Not unless he went straight up to his room. I suppose his car will be at the door if he’s here.”
“No, it isn’t.” Purbright cast a nervous glance at the blue cloud rising from the pan and returned to the lobby. He opened the front door and looked out, then walked quickly and quietly up the stairs.
There was no answer to his knock on Payne’s door. He pushed it open. The room was as he had last seen it; tidy, ordinary, and wearing the faintly depressing air common to all apartments, whether prison cells or bed-sitters, in which a man must share his dreams with his shoe brushes.
Purbright took a step towards the bookcase and stopped. In the photograph frame on its top shelf there was only the white card backing. The picture of the little girl standing by what he had mistakenly assumed to be a television camera had been removed.
Not that it mattered greatly now. He was clearly aware that it was the child’s face he had seen in the features of Hilda Larch. Solemnly staring out upon Cornelius Payne’s lonely little world had been Celia, photographed ten or twelve years ago—probably by her foster father—in the projection room of the cinema where he worked.
He knelt and began looking through the titles of Payne’s books. Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury’ was among them, and next to it an anthology of modern verse. He took out the anthology and opened it by its ribbon marker. Half way down the left-hand page was the poem by Emily Dickinson. “There’s been a death...” it began. Purbright closed the book and put it back.
In the textbook on organic chemistry he found the chapter dealing with nitro-compounds to which Payne had made his deceptively cool and co-operative reference. The instructions for making nitro-glycerin were full and precise. Purbright thought it sounded an eminently feasible operation, given laboratory equipment and expert caution. The fragment of a conversation drifted into his mind. Kebble had spoken in the same breath of Payne and the Nobel Prize. Nobel...inventor of dynamite: the man who discovered that the dangerously unstable nitrate of glycerin could be tamed by soaking it into a subsance called kieselguhr.
Purbright searched further along the shelf. At the end, among three or four volumes in faded but undamaged bindings that suggested they were old school prizes, was one entitled ‘A Boy’s Dictionary of Natural Substances’. Without much hope, he thumbed through to the K’s. It was there. Kieselguhr.
‘Kieselguhr, or Infusorial Earth, by which name it is known in the jewellery trade, is a fine powder used as a polishing agent. It is also an ingredient of dynamite.’
Downstairs a door slammed. Purbright hurriedly replaced the book and left the room, closing the door. From the landing he heard Phyllis stun the dining-room table with a plate of fishcakes. Immediately after came his summons to tea. It was like a prairie cattle call. The inspector descended and told her that he would eat as soon as he had made a short telephone call from the lobby. Payne, he noticed, still had not returned.
Larch received Purbright’s revelation with a grunt and, “What did I tell you?”
“You didn’t tell me anything,” Purbright justifiably observed.
“Never mind. Go on.”
“It might be as well if I waited here for him. He’s late, but that’s not to say he won’t come. Meanwhile you might like to see if he’s still at his shop. A search warrant wouldn’t come amiss, incidentally.”
“Why?”
“There could be stuff there that you’ll need in evidence. Chemicals, lab equipment and so on. It will probably be a job for a Home Office fellow, but at least you can get the place locked up. Invoices might be interesting, too; check deliveries of something called Infusorial Earth. And don’t let your blokes fiddle with powders—Payne probably used some kind of home-made fulminate to set his things off.”
“Listen: I’m not a bloody Harwell professor.”
“That’s all right. Leave it to Worple: there’s nothing he doesn’t know. I’ll be here if you want me but as far as I can see it’s all yours now.” Purbright tried not to sound too relieved.
Larch said everything would be attended to, but he only hoped he was not being let in for an almighty balls-up.
Purbright said he hoped so, too.
“By the way,” he added, “do you happen to remember where it was that Biggadyke ran down the Grope girl?”
“Of course. It was in Watergate Street. Quite near Payne’s shop, as a matter of fact. Payne never came forward to say she’d been there. It was hardly relevant at the time, though, was it?”
“Not at the time, no.” Purbright rang off.
Within the next few hours Purbright answered the telephone four times.
The first two calls were from Larch, anxious to know if Payne had returned. The shop, he said, had been found in the charge of a young man with the intelligence quotient of a sea anemone. Not only was he ignorant of his employer’s whereabouts; he seemed uncertain of whether he had ever met him. At least he had not been obstructive. The shop was now locked and guarded. A proper search had not yet been made but at first sight it did look as if some of Purbright’s guesses might prove correct.
Purbright gravely acknowledged the tribute and asked whether Larch contemplated putting out a general call for Payne to be held for questioning. Larch retorted that this, of course had been done. He then rang off in order to do it.
The third call was from Sergeant Worple, who explained that he was just checking on the chief inspector’s behalf. Purbright informed him, a little tartly, that Payne was still missing—as Mr Larch might well have adduced from the fact that he, Purbright, had not telephoned to the contrary.