Lintz went straight past the window and to the end of the corridor, where he pushed open a green-painted door and entered a bare hall, also with a stone floor. The hall seemed to serve no purpose other than to collect a mixture of noises from adjoining compartments. He heard the click of billiard balls, the rattle of thick china, the echo of a steel door being slammed, and what seemed to be the distant but lively banter of a team of big men in a small bathroom.
There was an iron spiral staircase in the opposite corner. It sagged and clanked beneath Lintz’s weight as he climbed to the upper floor.
He found Inspector Purbright alone in an office furnished with a desk, a tall, chocolate-coloured filing cabinet, two fairly capacious chairs, and a piece of carpet big enough to underlie not only the desk but one of the chairs as well, if it was drawn close.
Purbright was not sitting close to the desk. He was too tall, too long-legged, to arrange himself otherwise than alongside it. As Lintz looked inquiringly round the door, the inspector turned to view him over his left shoulder.
“Mr Lintz—how nice.” He sounded genuinely pleased. A pen was forthwith capped and laid carefully beside some papers on the desk blotter. In Purbright’s other hand appeared an open cigarette packet. He leaned sideways across the desk, offering it.
“Now, then,” said Lintz, put just a fraction off-balance by the promptness of the inspector’s courtesy. He lit a match as slickly as he could manage. “How’s things?”
Purbright said they were so-so and conveyed by the rise of his eyebrows that the light extended by Lintz was the very thing he had been eagerly awaiting all afternoon.
These formal preliminaries observed, Flaxborough fashion, Lintz hastened to the substance of his call.
“We got a rather queer letter this morning...” He reached into his pocket.
“Did you, now?”
“It may be all balls, but I thought you’d better take a look.”
Purbright accepted the letter, unfolded it and read it through slowly. He put it down on the desk and continued to regard it while he stroked the back of his neck.
“I suppose,” he said at last, “that you get a certain amount of fairly screwy correspondence.” He saw Lintz start, as if offended, and said hurriedly: “What I mean is that I’d always understood that newspaper offices tend to attract the attention of cranks.”
“Yes, but they usually sign their names.”
“Oh—do they? So you think this one is uncharacteristic?”
“It’s something new to me. I shouldn’t have brought it in otherwise.”
“No, you did quite rightly, Mr Lintz. The trouble is that it doesn’t really tell us anything, does it?”
“Not really. But can’t these things be traced? I mean, I don’t think that’s meant as a joke. Whoever it is sounds—you know—serious, scared.”
Purbright suppressed the faint smile brought by his glimpse of Lintz’s ulterior professionalism. Mystery letter sets police puzzle. He shook his head.
“Virtually impossible in the ordinary way,” he said. “On the face of it, this is just a bit of vague persecution mania. There’s been no crime reported with which we could connect it.”
Lintz frowned. The affair was much less promising than he had allowed himself to hope.
“We’ll hang on to it,” Purbright said. “Make what inquiries we can. You never know.”
Lintz shrugged and quickly stood up, running the brim of his hat between finger and thumb until the hat was in the right position to be lifted and put on in one confident movement when he turned towards the door.
“You’ll let me know if...”
“If we turn anything up?” Purbright also was on his feet; he looked genially grateful. “Of course I shall.”
Lintz nodded and turned. Up swept his hat as he stepped to the door.
“Oh, just one little point...”
Lintz looked back. He saw Purbright with the letter again in his hand.
“Photograph,” Purbright said. “You didn’t happen to see a photograph with this did you?”
“There wasn’t one. I asked Prile about that. He’d opened it, actually. He was quite definite.”
“All right, Mr Lintz. Many thanks.”
Chapter Three
“Do you happen to know,” Inspector Purbright asked Detective Sergeant Sidney Love, “of anyone in this town who goes in fear of assassination?”
Love’s pink, choir-boy countenance set in thought. He seemed to find the question perfectly reasonable. Purbright watched him close, one by one, the fingers and thumb of his right hand; then, more hesitantly, three fingers of his left.
“Somebody’s been writing round,” Purbright said. He indicated the small collection on the desk. “One to old Amblesby, one to the paper, and one to the chief constable.”
Love picked up the sheets, read one slowly and examined the others. “They’re all the same.”
“Quite.”
“Sort of circular.”
“Sort of.” Purbright knew better than to hustle his sergeant. Love’s mental processes were more like plant growth than chemical reaction. They flowered in their own good time.
“Well written,” Love observed after further consideration.
“That shortens your list, does it?” Purbright was recalling the silently fingered catalogue of eight.
“Does away with it altogether. None of them could have put this together. Not on their own.”
“The paper’s a bit out of the ordinary.”
“Classy,” Love agreed, fingering it.
“You could try Dawson’s and see if they stock it and if they remember who’s bought any.”
Love nodded. He was re-reading parts of the letter to himself. Over certain phrases his eye lingered while his lips silently formed the words, savouring them. Purbright waited.
“I reckon a woman wrote it,” Love announced at last. He looked suddenly pleased with himself.
“Do you think so?” Purbright’s raised brows hinted, without irony, that he was ready to learn and to commend.
“Well, look...” Eagerness brightened the sergeant’s face by several candlepower. “I mean, things like loyal and faithful companion—see?—and loved hand. And here...heart may be touched. Well, I mean it must be a woman, mustn’t it.”
“I suppose the phraseology is on the romantic side.”
“It’s downright sloshy.”
“You may be right, Sid.”
Nourished by this praise, Love took another, deeper plunge into deductive reasoning.
“This woman... There’s more than just one trying to do her in. Here, you see—They think I do not understand—that’s what she says. They. So there must be two of them.”
“At least.”
“Aye, well... Oh, I don’t know, though—two’s the usual, surely?”