There was a pause. Purbright felt a little mean at having disrupted the sergeant’s happy theorizing.
“There’s one thing I can’t understand at all,” he said, magnanimously. “Why does she say she can’t sign the letter? Presumably she would have been immediately identifiable from the photograph that was supposed to be enclosed.”
Love confessed that this point was very queer indeed—as was the absence of the photograph.
“She might have forgotten to put it into one of the letters, but it didn’t come with any of them. And look here...”—Purbright pointed to the corner of each page—”There are pin marks on all three.”
“She must have changed her mind,” said Love.
“Possibly.”
“Unless...”
Purbright looked at him with polite expectancy.
“Unless,” said the sergeant, “somebody tampered with her mail.”
“Ah,” Purbright said. He put the letters aside with the air of having received a judgment upon them that would not soon or lightly be upset.
There were more pressing problems to be solved, certainly, than what had seemed from the outset to be an isolated spurt of barmy correspondence from some local victim of persecution mania.
As soon as Love had departed to make his inquiries at the shop of Mr Oliver Dawson, bookseller and stationer, the inspector sent to the canteen for a mug of tea and turned his thoughts to charity.
Or, more precisely, to charities.
Of these, there were in Flaxborough forty-three known species. A further dozen undocumented examples were thought to exist, but evidence of their survival was unreliable. The biggest group—eighteen—was classifiable as canine. It included the O.D.C. (Our Dumb Companions), the Barkers’ League, the Dogs At Sea Society, the Canine Law Alliance and the Four Foot Haven. There were seven societies devoted specifically to the welfare of other domestic animals. A further six were dedicated to the protection of wild ones. Of the remaining twelve organizations, four could be said to have cornered the ministry of comforts to the human aged, and three to have swept the board of orphans.The objects of the rest were of astonishing diversity and ranged from the reclamation of fallen gentlewomen to the Christianization of Mongolia.
It might be thought that the common motive of benevolence would have ensured the mutual neutrality if not the co-operation of all these bodies. Inspector Purbright suffered no such delusion. He knew from long experience that the world of organized charity was one of contested frontiers, of entrenchments and forays. As far back as he could remember, the arrangement of a flag day or the timing of a fête had been as bitterly disputed as any filched military advantage. Membership of the various committees—a much sought after social cachet—had always carried the risk of assault, moral if not physical, by the unsuccessful contenders. Plots and counter-plots went on all the time. The town council, practically every member of which had his or her own charitable axe to grind, was bullied this way and that on behalf of all causes in turn. Letters winged every other week into the columns of the Flaxborough Citizen bearing insinuations as nearly libellous as their authors (advised, quite often, by the editor, Mr Lintz, who well knew the circulatory stimulus of correspondence just on the safe side of scurrility) dared render them.
Viewed dispassionately—or uncharitably, perhaps one should say—it was a lively sport that diverted into relatively harmless channels energy that might otherwise have fuelled crime and commotion. As a policeman, a professional upholder of the Queen’s peace, Inspector Purbright could not but approve. It was his earnest opinion, for instance, that had Alderman Mrs Thompson lacked the vocation of preserving the lives of pigeons that roosted behind the balustrade of the public library, she would long since have done for Mr Thompson and possibly a fair sprinkling of their neighbours as well. There were others he could call to mind whose equally unthinkable propensities had been sublimated into what the Flaxborough Citizen liked to term “tireless devotion to the well-being of the old folk of the town”.
The public took it all in pretty good part. It was true that there had been casualties. These had mounted steadily with the increase in the number of street collections (practically every Saturday of the year was now a flag day in some cause or other). But not one victim cared to acknowledge that the reason for his injury had been an unseemly dash into traffic to avoid the solicitations of yet another flag seller. For the most part the citizens of Flaxborough responded to calls on their charity with no less enthusiasm—and no more—than that with which they would have paid a bridge toll. Indeed, many of them vaguely supposed these demands to be ordained by authority—not the government, perhaps, but some kind of important consortium (of bishops, was it?) that also ran religion and cemeteries and Armistice Day and double summer time.
No, it was probably the recipients of the charity, or of what was left after expenses, for whom one really ought to feel sympathy, Purbright reflected. All those saved dogs, helpless in their havens, being patted by Mrs Henrietta Palgrove. The poor old horses in the Mill Lane meadow, too decrepit and narrowly penned to escape their weekly ‘cheering up’ by a mass muster of the Flaxborough Equine Rescue Brigade (or FERB). The orphans up at Old Hall...well, no; perhaps not the orphans, he decided. They were well able to stand up for themselves, even against such an inveterate curl-rumpler as Alderman Steven Winge, who had been bitten four times since Christmas. Purbright felt sorriest of all for the pensioners, the Darbys and Joans, the defenceless old men and women who, week after week, were jollied out of their peaceful cottages and trundled away to ‘treats’—usually at places like Brockleston-on-Sea, where they sat on hard benches at long board tables, there to be personally plied with tiny cakes and screamed solicitudes by ladies whom none had ever seen without hats, and by gentlemen who looked as if they had smiled steadily, remorselessly, awake and asleep, since birth...
Purbright gave a little shake of the head and resolutely hitched his chair nearer the desk. He opened a file marked “Charities: Incidents and Complaints” and began to read, not for the first time, the letters and reports it contained.
There was no doubt about it: Flaxborough’s charity war had hotted up alarmingly of late. Hostilities were beginning to bear the marks of professional generalship.
•
•
•
“Flower, sir? Buy a flower. Help the animals, sir.” Mr Mortimer Hive found his progress along the narrow pavement of Market Street barred by a girl of fourteen or fifteen with big, earnest brown eyes and a mouth like pale pink candy. Slung from her neck was a tray of paper emblems. Mr Hive glimpsed words along the front of the tray—KINDLY KENNEL KLAN—before a large slotted can, resoundingly cash-laden, was thrust to the level of his chin.
It was a highly inconvenient encounter for Mr Hive, engaged as he was in following a woman whose native familiarity with Flaxborough streets put him, a London inquiry agent, at disadvantage enough without the intervention of third parties.
However, good breeding made his response automatically chivalrous. He swept off his grey felt hat with one hand and thrust the other into the hip pocket of trousers whose cut, expensive and de rigueur in days when dinner and adultery were dressed for with equal fastidiousness, now looked oddly voluminous, like split skirts.