“No charge?”
Larch gave Kebble a quick, angry glance. “Why should there be?”
“I just wondered.”
Drawing the car to the curb outside the Chronicle office, Larch leaned across his passenger and opened the door. Then he jocularly punched flat the editor’s hat and handed it to him. “Don’t forget it’s the police ball on the 14th. If you give it a respectable mention this week I might cancel the instruction I’m just about to give for you to be booted out of the station next time you try and bother me.”
From the pavement, Kebble acknowledged the sally with a patient grin as he restored the dignity of his hat and set it once more on the back of his head. Thoughtfully, he watched the big car accelerate towards the Fen Street junction.
Chapter Three
Shortly after Larch had sat down again at his desk. Councillor Pointer looked round the door. Larch beckoned him in.
Pointer sat down carefully and placed his bowler hat, brim uppermost, between his feet. He looked sour enough for this arrangement to have been a precaution.
Larch rested his jaw on his palm and regarded him lazily. “Now then, what’s bitten you?”
“I was just about blown out of bed last night. I rang down here to find what had happened.”
“Well?”
“The clot who answered couldn’t grasp what I was talking about. He tried to tell me to ring the blasted gas board.” Pointer’s tiny black moustache quivered.
“He probably hadn’t heard anything. Your place is a bit out of town.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Hector. It rocked the street. You’re not going to tell me you didn’t hear it?”
“Not from Flaxborough, I didn’t. Tuesday’s my civil defence night.”
Pointer grunted acknowledgment. “All the same, you can take my word for it; the windows nearly came in. And all that fool could do was to spell out my name letter by letter as if he was cutting it in granite. I want you to see he gets a kick up the backside.”
Larch sighed. “Look, pop: we know all about that explosion. Sergeant Worple’s over there now. It was Worple who took your report. Don’t worry, he knows his stuff.”
“Yes, but...”
“You’re just in time for some coffee.” Larch reached to a bell push at the side of the desk.
Pointer did not pursue the argument but his boot button eyes continued to pivot restlessly. He found singularly irritating his son-in-law’s reluctance to admit the inefficiency of his staff.
“Are you calling in on Hilda later on?” Larch asked him.
“Possibly.”
“Well you might tell her that Stan had an accident this morning. Nothing serious. Bent his wagon a bit.”
Pointer’s anger broke surface. “Biggadyke, you mean. Why that...”
“That’s right,” Larch interrupted smoothly. “He’s in the General, I believe...Oh, Benson”—a squat, sandy-haired constable had appeared in the doorway—“make it two coffees, will you?” He waited until the door had closed, then looked at his visitor. “Why, what’s Stan done wrong?”
“Just about everything he’s ever had a chance to get away with. You know perfectly well what he is. It beats me why you let the swine into the house. As for allowing Hilda...”
Larch’s long, sunken cheek twitched. “Yes?” he lisped.
“Well, damn it all. Hector...” Pointer glared at his hat, then suddenly picked it up and clapped it on the desk. The topmost of Larch’s neatly stacked papers was fanned from the pile and floated to the floor.
Larch bent slowly and retrieved it. “Hilda’s friends are her own affair, and when one of them happens to be a friend of mine as well so much the less need for you to worry. Or,” he added after a pause, “her mother.”
Pointer looked up at the ceiling. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!”
“All right: I know she doesn’t like him.”
“I don’t care a rap who she likes. I’m giving you my opinion, not hers. Biggadyke’s not the sort of specimen I should have thought a policeman would care to associate with.”
“You’d be surprised if I told you some of the people I have to keep on my social register. They’d be cut dead in the mayor’s parlour but they’re damned useful to me.”
“That’s different. I have to mix with some queer customers in my trade, but I don’t invite them home if I can help it. Always keep ’em the other side of the counter, son.”
Larch felt like telling his father-in-law that this, his advice-to-my-men manner, did not wash outside the committee room of the Comrades of the Trenches Club. But his shrug was a dismissal of the subject. He never carried an argument beyond the stage at which his ultimate winning of it became problematical.
In Jubilee Park, Sergeant Worple paced slowly and in isolation around the enclosure roped off by Mr Harding. He contemptuously ignored the stares of those whom the spectacle of his apparent quarantine had drawn, like inquisitive badgers, from the Old Men’s Shelter. He also affected not to hear the disrespectful remarks of two or three small boys who kept asking him the time.
During the previous half hour the sergeant had collected a lot of measurements, in the relevance of which he had no faith whatever, and also what few material clues—mostly twisted metal fragments—as he thought might testify to his zeal and perspicacity. These he had put in an envelope.
Worple was about to quit his compound when he was greeted by a man who, though grey-haired, stood apart from the solemn excursionists from the Old Men’s Shelter.
The policeman strolled over and ducked beneath the rope.
“Sheep dog trials?” the man asked pleasantly.
“Actually,” said Worple, “no, sir. Your guess is very wide. The talk is all of an explosion.”
“My!”
“Look over there, Mr Payne.” He pointed to the concrete apron from which the last vestiges of water were steaming off into the midday sunshine. “We have reason to believe that that was the work of a bomb.”
“Wasn’t there a sort of memorial there? I seem to remember one.”
“A drinking fountain, Mr Payne. An amenity. One pressed a button in the centre of the representation of a lion’s face—its nose, as it were—and a stream of water was released downward from a faucet. It worked on the principle of mains pressure.”
“Ingenious,” remarked Mr Payne. He drummed his cheek with two fingers and stared thoughtfully at the space vacated by the drinking fountain.
Cornelius Payne bore a striking resemblance to the late Arturo Toscanini—not that the fact was much remarked upon in Chalmsbury. He had a triangular, sensitive face; crisp hair that tended to bunch at the sides; dark but by no means mournful eyes, deep set and watchful; and a waxed moustache that emphasized the firm, slightly sceptical set of his mouth.
The two men turned and strolled slowly toward the park gates. It was very hot and to the scent of drying grass mowings the light breeze added the oily tang of tar, spreading in wrinkled waves beneath the roadside dust.