“It’s bloody rubbish, man. I’m not going to waste time discussing it.” Anger, bewilderment, fright, all stood in Palgrove’s blood-boltered face. He hid it behind the hand-cupped lighting of a cigarette.
“Very well, sir.” Purbright carefully refolded the letter and put it, together with Palgrove’s case, into a large buff envelope. He stood.
“There’s just one other little matter I’d like to clear up. If you wouldn’t mind coming out with me to your car.”
Palgrove, hunched with ill grace, stumped doorward. Purbright followed him out, tweaking Love into tow.
The Aston Martin, splendidly a-gleam, stood on the drive near the side door. For a moment, possessive pride modified Palgrove’s air of exasperation. He stepped to one side and watched the inspector’s face.
Purbright opened the car door and slewed himself carefully into the driving seat. He glanced about him. Palgrove drew close and leaned on the door pillar.
“I’m looking,” Purbright said, “for your service record chart. You do keep something of that kind, sir?”
“Over there. Compartment on the left.”
Palgrove gazed gloomily at the inspector’s questing hand. He watched him open a folder, put a finger against an entry, peer at the instrument panel.
“According to the garage,” Purbright said at last, “your registered mileage yesterday afternoon was seven thousand, two hundred and four.” He glanced again at the facia. “Today, you have on the clock seven thousand, two hundred and twenty-five.” He shifted aside a little and turned his head. “Would you care to check that, sir?”
Palgrove said nothing. He did not move.
“I make it twenty-one miles since the car was serviced yesterday. And Leicester is—what, eighty miles from here? A return trip of a hundred and sixty?”
Palgrove shrugged and stepped away from the car. The inspector got out.
“Don’t you think, sir, that it might be as well if you called your solicitor before we do any more talking?”
Chapter Eleven
From a barmaid’s bed rose Mr Hive. He went to the window and gently, with one finger, parted the flowered cotton curtains, already bright with sun. Below him in Eastgate the morning citizens passed and met and hailed and gossiped in their twos and threes. Shop boys, smarmy haired to start the day, punted forth blinds with long poles. Crates of vegetables, rows of loaves on wide wooden trays, square anonymous cartons, beef flanks and bacon flitches, were ferried into doorways from parked farm trucks and high-roofed vans. A girl in a white coat too big for her stretched tip-toe from the top of a stool to clean the window of her grocer employer; she scrubbed away with short, vigorous arms while the grocer, a dim image behind the glass, kept supervisory watch upon her legs. A few women with shopping bags moved purposefully from window to window, pricing, judging, rejecting. Two old men in long, shroud-like overcoats inclined together to examine a piece of newspaper. A crying child’s face, wet scarlet disc with a big hole in the middle, appeared and disappeared amongst the legs and baskets.
Mr Hive let the curtain close. He poured out half a glass of water from the carafe on the marble-topped washstand and stood drinking it in small sips with his eyes closed as if it were acrid medicine. With his free hand he reached round and scratched the small of his back, the hem of his long nightshirt rising and falling.
He heard behind him the shift and re-settling of a warm-nested body, a sniff and a sigh and a yawn. He glanced over his shoulder. Above a ridge of bedclothes, rumpled hair and one interested eye.
“Morty...”
“My love?”
“Those women with titles you were telling me about...Did they wear nighties or pyjamas?”
“I think you may take it that nightdresses are favoured by the aristocracy as a rule. The exception I always remember was a Lady Beryl somebody-or-other from Winchester way—we managed to scrape her in at the tail-end of the 1935 season—and she, believe it or not, insisted on going to bed in a polo jersey.”
“I’ll bet that tickled!”
Mr Hive shrugged good-naturedly. “Every profession has its little irritations. I’ve been very lucky. There was only one thing I was always particular about: I wouldn’t take a client while she had a cold.”
“What, like dentists won’t?”
“It may sound a rather trivial prejudice, but I think I owe my very good health to it.” Hive glanced aside at the dressing-table mirror and straightened his stance. Part of his paunch went somewhere else.
Another rustle from the bed. “Jewels...Did they wear lots of jewels, Morty?”
Still looking at the mirror, Mr Hive preened with arched fingers his wavy, silver-grey hair. “I have awakened in the night, dear girl, with enough emeralds up my nose to pay the entire hotel staff double wages for a year!”
The humped bedclothes reared, subsided and squirmed into another shape. Hair and eye disappeared. As from afar off, a muffled giggle.
Mr Hive considered for a moment more his own reflection. He pouted, put down the almost empty glass, held a finger tip to his wrist, nodded judiciously, gave his nightshirt a hitch, and marched, like a monk to matins, back to bed.
In the street below, an ageing, box-like saloon car was being steered by a fat policeman past the parked vans and lorries. Flaxborough’s ancient coroner glared and champed in the seat beside him. The policeman, in consideration for the life of a hypothetical child, rammed two hundred and twenty pounds against the brake pedal. “Sorry, sir, but I did tell you to sit behind.” The car moved forward again. Mr Amblesby, indestructible, clawed himself back on to his seat.
Already assembled in the little court-room when Malley and the coroner arrived were Inspector Purbright, Sergeant Love, Doctor Fergusson, Mr Justin Scorpe and Mr Scorpe’s client, Mr Palgrove. Also present—but only just, for he seemed to be loitering peripherally and without concern—was the chief constable. Mr Chubb very seldom attended inquests, but Purbright had hinted to him that in the circumstances of this one it would be as well for him to show the flag.
Last to put in an appearance was the chief reporter of the Flaxborough Citizen. Mr Prile looked as if he had been roused from a twenty years’ sleep especially for the occasion. As he sat down behind the ricketty table reserved for the Press, dust puffed from creases and crevices in his raincoat.
Sergeant Malley shepherded the proceedings along as smartly as the tetchy obtuseness of Mr Amblesby would allow. The convention was observed of letting the doctor give his evidence first “so that you can get away”, as Malley invariably explained—rather as though he was offering a sporting chance to a fugitive.
Fergusson read rapidly from his post mortem report an elaboration of what he had told Purbright over the telephone. He was emphatic about the sound state of Mrs Palgrove’s health that the examination had revealed and described in considerable detail the bruises on the legs and abdomen.
“Would everything you have found, doctor,” Purbright asked, “be consistent with this woman’s having been held forcibly by her ankles—held upside down, that is?”
“Yes. Rather in the way one tips up a wheelbarrow to empty it.”