Sergeant Love occupied the passenger seat next to Purbright. Sergeant Malley filled the back.
The inspector said to Love: “You’d better tell Bill here about the names you got yesterday from Dawsons. He’s already seen the letter that was sent round.”
Love spoke over the back of his seat. “I asked them who’d been buying that kind of writing paper—you know, that grey stuff. They could only think of three people. One was Mrs Palgrove.”
“Oh, aye?” Malley was scraping out the bowl of his pipe with an enormous clasp knife. He blew through the pipe experimentally, then pulled away the stem and held it up to one eye.
“Well, then?” urged Love, a little irritably. He did not like wasting dramatic announcements on people who messed about with pipes all the time.
“Very interesting,” Malley said.
Love faced forward again. For a while he stared through the windscreen without speaking.
“It could be,” Purbright said to him, “that you’ve put us on to something important, Sid.”
Love glowed.
The car pursued its slow, dignified course up Heston Lane. It looked rather like a straggler from a funeral procession that had been cut off at traffic lights. Indeed, as it turned at last into the driveway of Dunroamin, a woman in the house opposite called upstairs to her bed-ridden mother: “It’s right about Mrs Palgrove, then. The undertaker’s just come.”
Purbright parked the car near the main door of the house. He rang the bell. After a fairly long interval it was answered by a squat, middle-aged woman. Although she wore an apron, she had kept on her hat. It gave her the air of a helper prepared for flight at the first sign of fresh disaster. And she clearly regarded the appearance of the three policemen as just that.
“You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got to get along home now.” She began to unfasten the apron.
“You will be Mrs...?”
“George. Mrs George. I help here. But I’ll have to be getting back.”
“I see. We shan’t keep you long, Mrs George. There are just a couple of things I’d like to ask you, though.”
They were now inside the entrance hall. Love looked around approvingly and rocked a little on his heels to test the elasticity of the carpet. Catching Malley’s eye, he raised his brows and pouted; Love was a great fancier of house interiors.
The woman opened a closet door and hung the apron inside.
“Was it you who telephoned us this morning, Mrs George?”
She nodded.
“Then I wonder if you’d mind telling me exactly what you found when you arrived. You’d come to help with the housework, had you?”
“That’s right. I come every day and give a hand. This morning the bus was a bit late but even so I don’t think it was quite nine o’clock when I got here. I went round to the kitchen door expecting it to be open as usual...”
“Open?”
“Well, not open—unlocked, I mean. Anyway, it wasn’t, so I knocked a few times and waited about a while but nobody came so I went to the big door and rang the bell. Still nobody answered. I couldn’t hear a sound inside and I thought, funny, because Mrs Palgrove hadn’t said anything the day before about going away, which she would have done, of course. Well, I thought I’d better give them a few minutes just in case, so I started to walk about a bit outside and look at the flowers. Of course it was then I...I...”
Mrs George felt instinctively for her apron. Tears had started afresh from her already reddened eyes. She rubbed them with the back of her hand which she then pressed to her mouth.
Purbright put an arm round her shoulders and led her to a chair by the foot of the stairs. Love and Malley left, at a sign from the inspector, to join their colleagues in the garden.
“Yes, Mrs George?”
She raised a face lined and puffy with distress. “Yes...well...I mean, there she was. Sort of doubled over the wall of that well thing. Half of her outside, the other half inside. Right in the water. Oh, arms, shoulders, head—right under. And them fishes...swimming about round her hair. In and out...”
Mrs George looked down at her skirt and pressed her knuckles into it. She swayed slightly backward and forward.
“Did you pull her out of the water?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t seem able to manage it. She’s quite a big woman, you know.”
“It was very sensible of you to telephone.”
“I tried to get her out. I tried all ways. It was no good though. I mean, people are a lot heavier than they look, aren’t they, especially when they’re lying awkward. Well, anyway, I just couldn’t. So I ran down to the phone at the corner. It seemed best, I mean...”
“Of course. By the way, how did you get into the house eventually?”
“Get in?”
“You did open the door to us.”
“Yes. One of the policemen who came found a window open and he got through. He said it would be all right.”
“I suppose Mr Palgrove is away from home, is he?”
“I don’t know. I mean, he’s not here now and it’s not usual for him to leave for business until, oh, an hour or more after I arrive. The other policemen wanted to know and I told them the same. They’d most likely know at his office. I mean, you could try his office.”
“I could, couldn’t I. All right, Mrs George, there’s no reason why you should stay any longer. You’ve been most patient.”
He helped her to her feet, then opened the door. As she trotted dumpily past him, she gave a nervous little smile of farewell followed by a brief, fearful glance towards the distant policemen grouped about a shrouded shape in the grass.
“Dead for hours,” Love announced when Purbright came up. He drew back the blanket that Harper had brought from the house.
The inspector looked down at the big vacuous face in which the eyes were just two dark dots. The wet hair, close-clinging as a cap but with a few unravelled strands wandering down over forehead and cheek, seemed too sparse, too lank, to be a woman’s. This dissolution of sexual identity, furthered by the laxity of the cheeks and the jaw, was made more shocking still by the survival of the woman’s last application of lipstick and eye shadow, now garish daubs amidst the water-bleached flesh.
“How long do you think the doctor will be?”
Harper looked at his watch. “Any time now, sir. It’s Doctor Fergusson from the General. We couldn’t get hold of Reynolds.”
“You’ve tried to contact the husband?”
The uniformed man, Fairclough, coughed and gave Harper a glance before replying.
“We haven’t had much luck, sir. There was only the cleaner here when we arrived and she seemed to think he was away from home. I rang his firm, but...”
“That’s Can-flax, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. I rang them straight away, but he wasn’t there. They said he doesn’t usually turn up before ten. I called a bit later when his secretary had come in and she said he’d arranged to go to Leicester last night.”