Yet oddly enough, just as the talk in the Nelson and Emma had reverted to that morning’s road accident and Hoole was yielding to the temptation to tell a story about belladonna tincture, Mulvaney was doing precisely what had been so lightly predicted.
He was confessing, and to Chief Inspector Larch in person.
Larch had summoned the determined self-accuser into his office partly to deprive his staff of an opportunity for wasting time. But he had another reason. Like many of his kind, he allowed to percolate through his dislike of humanity in general a sentimental sympathy for freaks. He would allow Mulvaney to perform his act of sacrifice without the depressing indignity of conforming to a sceptical sergeant’s dictation speed.
Mulvaney, who had never recovered from the experience, in the first week of his apprenticeship, of seeing “The Informer” screened, sat hunched in his chair and scowled with pale obstinacy at Black-and-Tan Larch. In spite of the heat, he wore a long, tightly belted raincoat and kept his hands in its pockets.
“Sure and I don’t care if me poor body’s full of English bullets this night,” he was saying with a whining lilt that Larch found strangely soporific, “but not a word of treachery you’ll drag out of me. Haven’t I told you what happened, now? There was meself in it only, and that’s the holy truth.”
“You’ve not said why you did it, Mulvaney.”
Scorn blazed suddenly in Mulvaney’s big, gentle eyes. “Is it seriously you’re asking me that? You’ll be telling me next you’ve never heard of the annexation of Ireland!”
“Oh, of course,” Larch acknowledged.
“Or of the Organization? Let’s see if you’ll say you’ve never heard of the Organization?”
Larch let this irony pass.
Mulvaney stood up. He clicked his heels. “Very well; I’m ready.” He closed his eyes and added: “I suppose there’ll be a farce of a trial?”
The Chief Inspector also stood. “Er, no,” he said. “I can’t say that there will.”
A pained smile flickered over Mulvaney’s face. “Ah, yes. So it’s the cellar and the car’s backfire you’ll be having in mind, captain?”
Larch came round his desk, walked to the door and opened it. Mulvaney continued to stand blindly at attention. Then, hearing Larch cough, he opened his eyes.
He stared at the doorway, gave a quick, bitter laugh, and strolled carelessly towards the proffered freedom. “Ha! It’s the ambush, is it, after all?”
Larch nodded as he passed. “I’m afraid so. The cellar’s being re-decorated.”
Chapter Four
The obliteration of the Courtney-Snell memorial had no significant sequel for two weeks. It was reported, at considerable length and with biographies of everyone who could be remotely associated with it, in the following Friday’s issue of the Chalmsbury Chronicle. Police inquiries proceeded, of course, or were said to. Mrs Courtney-Snell quivered and threatened and enjoyed the solicitude of her peers. And small children in Jubilee Park went thirsty. That was all.
It was agreed to have been a queer affair, but not unduly alarming. As a topic it fell quickly to grade three.
And then, during the night of Tuesday, 17th June, there was a second explosion in Chalmsbury.
Councillor Pointer did not hear this one. It occurred more than a mile from his red brick villa in Holmwood and was not particularly loud, anyway. So Sergeant Worple’s successor on night duty remained undisturbed by the telephone and was able to leave the Occurrence Book fulfilling its proper function as a door stop.
The next morning two women happened to step simultaneously out of the front doors of their adjoining houses in Chapel Terrace. She who failed, by a split second, to start speaking before the other stood staring stonily across the road awaiting her chance to seize the conversational initiative. At first she gazed unseeing, intent only upon having ready a counter-stream of loquacity, but after a while she became aware that something in her line of vision was most curiously amiss. She grasped the second woman’s arm, shook her into silence, and exclaimed: “Look—his head’s gone!”
And so it had. Alderman Arnold Berry was no longer regarding the wide world with that straining-at-stool expression that denotes, in the convention of public sculpture, a man of high but unpopular principles. He was peering instead—or rather his head was—into a bed of wallflowers.
“Whoever could have done that?”
“Those Mackenzie kids, I expect.”
“Not that, they couldn’t. It’s metal.”
“Here, do you know, I thought I heard something in the night...”
“A sort of slamming noise?”
“A bang. Just outside.”
“That’s right. It was.”
“I wonder if...”
“Well I never!”
And so the report eventually reached Chief Inspector Larch that the statue of Alderman Berry had been decapitated and that two residents of houses opposite the railed courtyard in which the memorial stood had heard an explosion during the night. He drove immediately to the scene, accompanied by Worple.
The bronze figure had been transformed into something a surrealist might have found eminently satisfying. The spread hand of its down-reaching arm indicated the recumbent head, as if in proud witness to a feat of strength. The alderman’s other hand, robbed of the cheek it had supported in an attitude of pious bloody-mindedness, now stuck erect in jaunty salute. The statue of the town’s foremost temperance pioneer could not have been more shockingly desecrated had a brazen beer barrel been riveted between its feet.
Worple stared at the topped effigy for fully half a minute. “It quite turns you up, doesn’t it, sir?” he said at last.
“No,” said Larch. He faced the other way, scowling at the houses that overlooked the chapel courtyard and searching his memory for the names of such of their occupants as had incurred his displeasure in the past.
The sergeant knelt and examined the head.
It appeared to have been cleanly fractured except for an area at the back of the neck where the metal was twisted and jagged. The charge must have been placed there, like a poultice. It had been enough merely to smash a smallish hole and to topple, rather than blast, the head from the trunk.
Worple stood and gave Larch his opinion, adding that explosions were funny things and he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of damage coming to light further afield when a thorough search was made.
“Never mind that,” retorted the chief inspector. “Just have a quick look round on the spot. There’s someone over there I’m going to have a word with if he’s in.” He strode to the gates, crossed the road and knocked on one of the doors in the grey stone terrace.