“Quarrelling, you mean?”
“Going on at each other. You know—shouting and that.”
Broadleigh beckoned the boy into the shelter of the drive. All three stood under the trailing branches of a laburnum. A notebook appeared. “Now, then, son—what’s your name?”
In the grounds of Dunroamin a pump throbbed. Two firemen wearing shiny black thigh boots stood looking at the rapidly descending surface of the water in the well. One held a stick with a wire mesh hemisphere at its end. Now and again he made a sudden lunge with the stick and brought up glittering in the basket a threshing orange fish which he tipped into a small cistern.
The other fireman held out his hand. “Let’s have a go.”
“Only one left. Fly bugger, an’ all.”
After some ineffectual scooping, the survivor was captured. A minute later the last of the water disappeared with a noise like German political oratory.
Hearing the sharp rise in the tone of the pump, Harper and Fairclough came out of the house, where they had been having a cup of tea in the kitchen, and joined the firemen.
Harper peered down at the weedy mud in the well’s bottom.
“That’ll be a nice job.”
Rubbing his hands down his trouser seams, as if in anticipation, he looked about him and then wandered across to a small wooden shed. When he came back, he was carrying a rake.
Inspector Purbright also had heard the pump motor change its note. There hadn’t been much water in that thing after all, he thought. Enough, though. He looked at Palgrove’s hands while he was speaking. They were podgy, but large—the long thumbs, their ends back-curved, seemed especially powerful. From the wrists black hair sprouted.
“You’ll appreciate what a difference has been made by this report of the doctor’s, Mr Palgrove. I’ve been perfectly frank about it because I want to know if you can suggest an explanation of the bruises on your wife’s legs—an explanation, that is, other than the sinister but obvious one.”
“Hundreds of things can cause bruising.”
“Symmetrical bruises? Five each side? And spaced so?” Purbright held his hands in a posture of grasping two upright poles.
“Yes, but you don’t know. I mean, nobody can say for certain, just looking at marks.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I think you can take it from me that these particular marks can be interpreted in only one way.”
The sound of Love’s turning over a page of the notebook in which he was clawing down shorthand on the other side of the room drew a glance from Palgrove. He looked not nervous but hurt and perplexed.
“Does he have to?” Palgrove murmured to the inspector.
“I’m afraid he does, sir,” Purbright said.
Palgrove reached to his inside breast pocket, paused, then patted both side pockets. From one he drew a pack of cigarettes. He offered it to Purbright and bleakly noted his shake of the head. He lit a cigarette himself. The pack he laid on his chair arm.
“I should like you to tell me now,” Purbright said, “everything you did last night. From teatime, say, until you arrived at your office this morning. Take your time, sir; I’d prefer you to be fairly precise.”
Palgrove stared at the opposite wall, then at his cigarette, which he held in the bottom of the cleft between his second and third fingers.
“This is going to sound a bit unlikely,” he said. “What I mean to say is if it’s alibis you’re thinking about I suppose I just haven’t got one.”
“You mustn’t worry about what you suppose I’m wanting you to say, Mr Palgrove. So long as it’s true, what I’m able to make of it is my problem.”
“Yes, well...” Palgrove took time off to draw on the cigarette, sweep his hand clear, and expel smoke upwards with noisy determination. He picked a shred of tobacco from his upper lip; his tongue tip continued to explore the spot.
“I had made arrangements to go to Leicester, actually. Seeing about some machinery.”
“Yes, sir?”
“I was hoping to stay over with an old friend of mine. Wilcox, he’s called. On the board of Hardy-Livingstone. Anyway, I left here round about six.”
“By car?”
“In the A.M., yes.”
Purbright frowned. “I thought we were talking about the evening, sir.”
“That’s right...Oh, I get you. No. A.M.—Aston Martin.”
“I see.”
“As I was saying, I left here about six. I’d had a spot to eat with the wife—not much, I’m not a tea man—and told her where I was going, of course, and that I’d be back some time in the morning.”
“Would you say it was usual or unusual for you to spend a night away from home?”
“I don’t know—unusual, I suppose, really. But I have to occasionally. Henny didn’t mind. She’d lots of interests of her own.” He took another fierce suck at his cigarette and leaned back to blow at the ceiling. “Anyway, to cut a long story short, there was I halfway to Leicester when I thought I heard one of the tappets knocking. Well, I was a bit put out because the bus had only just been in for a service yesterday and Henderson’s are generally pretty efficient. So what I did was to pull into the next lay-by and have a proper listen under the lid. I couldn’t trace a damn thing wrong. I went on a few more miles and, damn me, if it didn’t start again. Same old pantomime—pull in, listen, fiddle around—nothing. Three times I did that. In the end I just tried to forget about it and bashed on. But naturally I’d lost a lot of time. I didn’t get to Leicester until...oh, must have been nine at least. I was a bit tired—you know, fed up—and there didn’t seem much point in chasing up the fellow I’d come to see. Anyway...”
“Excuse me, sir, but wouldn’t eight or even seven o’clock in the evening be a rather unconventional time to discuss business in any case?”
“I suppose you could say that, yes. But I just don’t happen to be conventional. It doesn’t pay, inspector. Not these days.”
“All right, sir. Go on.”
“Well, to cut a long story short, I drove round to Tony Wilcox’s place and saw straight away that I’d boobed. Not a light in the place. I thought, should I wait? Then no, I thought, they might not be back for hours, and it would hardly be on for me to be waiting for them on the doorstep, the uninvited guest. Not at that time of night. So I just turned around and started back.”
“To Flaxborough?”
“Sure. Now then, I don’t know whether you know a pub called The Feathers just the other side of Melton Mowbray...”
There was a knock on the door. Love went over and opened it. Palgrove glimpsed a man in uniform. The man murmured something to Love, who turned and gave Purbright a questioning look. “It’s Fairclough, sir—if you could just spare a minute.”
The inspector spared three. When he came back into the room, he apologized to Palgrove and invited him to continue.
“Yes. This pub. It wasn’t The Feathers, actually—I must have been mixing it up with another one. I don’t know its name, but it’s somewhere yon side of Melton. The point is that I stopped there for a drink. It was nice and comfortable, so I had another one. I was tired, and of course I’d had nothing to eat. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I’d drunk four or maybe five whiskies by the time I left. And as soon as I started to drive again I knew I was going to feel woosey. So I did the sensible thing and pulled off the road there and then. I went bang off to sleep and didn’t wake up until nine o’clock this morning.”