Like a peal proclaiming a peace treaty, the ringing of the telephone on Chubb’s desk provided a distraction from uncharitable thoughts. At a nod from the Chief Constable, Purbright took the call.
When he replaced the receiver he thrust a hand beneath his jacket, scratched himself gently, and announced: “The car’s been traced, anyway. At the moment it’s parked in the Neptune yard at Brockleston. It might be as well if I nipped over there now, don’t you think, sir?”
Chapter Five
The thirty-mile drive to Brockleston brought Purbright into the town’s main street at exactly five o’clock, when it looked like a row of aquarium tanks.
Staring out at him from behind the windows of the twenty-three cafés and snack bars were the perplexed, hostile eyes of holiday-makers awaiting the fish and chips, pies and chips, ham and chips, egg and chips, sausage and chips—in fact, every permutation of succulence except chips and chips—that were being borne to their plastic-topped tables by girls with corded necks and dress seams strained to the limit as they ferried their great trays.
Brockleston was a day trippers’ resort. Its resident population, no greater than that of a village, occupied a string of timber bungalows on the lee side of the dunes or lived in the flats above the few shops not associated with the chips industry. There were no boarding houses, for the ephemeral pleasures of the place did not justify a protracted visit. The dunes, while adequate for desultory, gritty fornication, served no other purpose than mercifully to screen a muddy beach from which jutted derelict anti-tank blocks. The sea at most times was an afternoon’s, march away.
Yet it was the sea, distinctly visible as a glinting streak of silver beyond the steamy, creek-veined plain, and therefore an object of pilgrimage, that accounted for all the coming and going along the Flaxborough road, the seasonal cramming of the twenty-three cafés and two small pubs, and the enforced but bitterly begrudged construction by the rural council of a public convenience whose necessarily ample proportions had earned it the local epithet of the Taj Mahal.
The Neptune Hotel represented a totally different tradition.
It had been erected only five years previously by a Flaxborough jobbing builder whose coincidental relationship with the chairman of the housing committee had put him in the way of contracts for five estates of bay-windowed rabbit hutches and made the chairman the brother-in-law of a millionaire. The Neptune was now as valuable a property as any three hotels in Flaxborough put together.
There may have been something a little Victorian about the Flaxbrovians’ propensity to translate a novelty into a fashion and a fashion into a steady habit, but the creator of the Neptune saw no point in derogating any trend from which he might capitalize. He knew his fellow citizens, Victorian or no, and was concerned, as he put it, only with what they would ‘go for’.
“You know, Lizz,” he had said to his housekeeper one night, “they’re a rum lot of buggers in Flax. They like to get the hell out of the place to enjoy themselves, but all the same old faces have to be there at the other end when they arrive. Even when they just want to tread each other’s missuses once in a while, damn me if they find any fun in it unless they can say how d’ye do to the women’s husbands on the stairs. They pretend not to be sociable, but that’s just a pose, you know, Lizz. What I reckon they want is a place right off the track where they can be sociable in private. Here, gal, pass us that map a minute...it’s on the table there, just by your pillow...”
Thus had the Neptune been conceived.
Its progenitor had not attempted the actual construction himself but had entrusted it to a competent builder whose tenders for the Council estates he had always managed to underquote and on whom, therefore, he felt constrained to bestow a measure of compensatory patronage.
The hotel was an imposing building, four storeys high and with a glass tower at one corner. In this tower sat a huge robot fashioned in neon tubing, a mechanical celebrant that raised at regular intervals a glowing tankard and pledged good cheer to the surrounding acres of empty sea and marsh. The only people who considered it merely vulgar were those who wouldn’t have spent much in the hotel anyway and therefore didn’t matter; the rest, eagerly seeking from their Brockleston-bound cars a first glimpse of the roysterer in the sky, thought it a marvel of cleverness that reflected great credit on one and all, including, naturally, themselves.
At the hour when Purbright drove into the great concrete forecourt of the Neptune (his earlier reference to it as a ‘yard’ had been in deference to the Chief Constable’s known contempt for the modern conceits of the licensing trade) the entowered automaton was not working. He was able to appreciate, however, the other, only slightly less impressive features of the building: the dawn-pink façade pointed with black asterisks, the candy-striped sun awnings, the sculpted representation of nude nymphs playing leapfrog before the main entrance itself—a shallow but wide portico framing two immense concave plates of heavy glass, counter-sprung to yield to the touch of the most diffident venturer into high life.
Purbright parked the rather shabby police car beside half a dozen much grander vehicles already standing in the forecourt. One of them, he noticed, bore the number plate which had been identified by a Brockleston constable—presumably the florid-faced youngster in uniform whom Purbright spotted in an attitude of assumed and unconvincing nonchalance against the far wall of the court.
Gently elbowing open one of the glass plates, Purbright crossed a quarter-acre of bottle-green carpet to the reception counter. Beyond and seemingly below this formidable rampart sat a girl whose shoulders moved with the rhythm of knitting. At the inspector’s approach, she raised a small, melancholy and mistrustful face.
“Yes?” She glanced back at her needles.
“I should like a word with the manager if he’s available.”
“Mr Barraclough?” The girl seemed not to deem Purbright worth a second look.
“Yes, if that’s his name.”
“I’ll see if he’s in.” She knitted on to the end of the row, thrust the wool into some recess below the counter, and rose. Purbright was a little startled by the revelation of silk-encased thighs. The girl’s costume, evidently intended to transform her into a stimulating replica of an American night club attendant, proved in fact a bizarre detraction from whatever charm she might have had. As she walked indolently to a door at the end of the counter her flesh wobbled within the incongruous tights with as much sexual provocation as a blancmange on a waiter’s trolley.
Purbright turned and gazed gloomily round the big empty reception hall, shadowlessly aglow with the light from orange opalescent panels in the ceiling. There were three tall doors, black and thinly striped with gold and pierced with clear glass portholes, set in each of the side walls; they led, he supposed, to bars and lounges. The hall funnelled gently at its opposite end to a broad staircase. The apparent absence of a lift puzzled Purbright at first. Then a plunging purr of deceleration drew his eye to what he had taken to be a round supporting pillar in the very centre of the hall. It split and opened like the rind of some Arabian Nights fruit and disgorged a tubby man with a professional smile and rather a lot of cuff. As he walked briskly towards Purbright he gave the curious impression of paddling himself along on his elbows. He stopped just short of a collision. “Sar!”