The whole transaction, whatever it was, had taken no more than a minute.
The barber, awkwardly pulling up his white coat so as to be able to reach his hip pocket, was again at Pumphrey’s side. “Anything on, sir? Spray...cream...?”
“No, nothing.”
Mr Tozer repossessed himself of the scissors, which he poised over Pumphrey’s face. “The nostrils, now?” he inquired eagerly.
“Certainly not.”
“Ah, you’re very wise, sir; clipping does tend to stimulate. I personally find the best answer to what we might vulgarly call the hairy nose-hole is to fire it a couple of times a year.” His eyes wandered to a jar stacked with wax tapers. “Like a railway embankment, you know.”
Pumphrey shook his head vigorously. He had been staring at the cupboard. Was it the curious traffic in envelopes which had first attracted Hopjoy’s attention? Here, no doubt, was some sort of relay station in the complicated intelligence system he had been trying to delineate. Had his too persistent patronage of Mr Tozer’s shop aroused suspicion and ultimately brought to his lodgings the silent, workmanlike attendance of a liquidation cadre?
“Would Mr Hopjoy’s friends be your friends, by any chance, sir?” Mr Tozer was drawing out the cotton wool roll and assiduously brushing his collar.
“I suppose we might have one or two mutual acquaintances. Why?” Pumphrey spoke softly, refusing to be provoked by the calculatedly irritant quality of the barber’s harping on friendship. He thought he recognized one of the newer East European techniques for drawing admission of political affiliations.
Mr Tozer winked. Or rather he drew down the blind at the end of one of his dark occular tunnels. “Ladies, I was thinking of in particular, sir. The best friends of all.”
What a lewd word was ‘ladies’, Pumphrey reflected. Then it dawned on him that the course of this man’s chatter conformed remarkably closely to another, more familiar anti-counter-espionage tactic. Its aim was the discrediting and incapacitation of the investigator by imputation of immoral motives and even actual involvement in compromising situations.
“I cannot imagine,” he said coldly, “that my social life could be of the slightest concern to you.”
Mr Tozer shrugged and tweaked away the sheet. “Just as you like, sir.” He did not sound offended and his smile lingered as he bent to brush the front of Pumphrey’s coat. “I try to be of service in these matters, that’s all, as I’m sure...”—he stood upright and directed upon Pumphrey a full and friendly gaze—“...your old friend Mr Hopjoy will tell you.”
Chapter Seven
“I really can’t see that you have any need to be worried about Bry. He’s a bit of a rolling stone, you know.”
Gordon Periam certainly did not look anxious. His expression, which Purbright felt was probably habitual, was one of bland earnestness. The smooth face, rounded by a well-fleshed chin a couple of sizes too big, betokened placidity born of a sheltered existence. The mouth was calm, but set in the permanent pout of the protractedly unweaned. Even the little lobeless ears were suggestive, somehow, of infancy.
The inspector looked away from Periam’s brown eyes, gentle and unblinking, and watched an arrowhead of duck winging out over the flats. The two men were seated on a bench at the side of the sea bank road that ran between the Neptune and the dunes, Purbright having declined the hotel manager’s offer of his own littered and airless cloister in favour of what the policeman had sanguinely termed “a blow along the front”.
In fact, there proved to be no wind at all, while ‘front’ was scarcely an accurate designation for a rampart some two miles from the nearest wave. But at least the smell of the sea was there: a cool yet pungent compound of weed and salted mud, threading through the scents of hot sand and yellowing dune grass.
“And surely,” Periam was saying, “somebody has to be reported missing—officially, you know—before you chaps start looking into things. Who would report Bry missing?” The voice was level, untroubled, like that of an inquirer into natural history.
“Some of the neighbours are a little apprehensive, I believe. And there are one or two rather odd circumstances that we do feel need explaining.” Purbright’s gaze was now upon a steamer smudging almost imperceptibly the grey-green rim of the horizon. “You see, sir, we’ve taken the liberty of looking inside your house.”
“But...but why? I can’t understand this, inspector. Really I can’t.” The slightest frown of reproof clouded Periam’s brow.
Purbright sighed, as if acknowledging the distasteful and inconvenient nature of his investigation. “When,” he asked, “did you last see Mr Hopjoy?”
Periam considered. “It was one night last week; wait a minute...yes, Thursday night.”
“And where was this?”
“Oh, at home.”
“That would be before your marriage.”
“The day before, actually. Doreen and I were married on the Friday.”
“I see. Now tell me about Thursday, will you? You said you saw Mr Hopjoy that evening. Were you not together earlier?”
“No, he hadn’t got up by the time I left the house. I drove over here after breakfast and brought some things—mine and Doreen’s. The room had been booked and I’d arranged to move in the day before the wedding so that everything would be ready. Well, that’s just what I did. Once the stuff had been shifted out of the car I just killed time toddling around and having meals. Then I went to bed. It was quite early: about nine, I should say. I’d just nicely dropped off when the phone rang—there’s one by the bed, you know.
“It was rather a queer call, really, now that I come to think, but I was a bit muzzy, being wakened like that, and I didn’t ask the girl’s name. She just said she was speaking for Bry and would I come over right away. Then she rang off. Well, what could I do? I dressed and drove back to Flaxborough.
“Bry was at home on his own. Naturally, I’d thought there’d be something wrong, but there wasn’t. He just said he wanted to ask me a few things—oh, I can’t even remember them: they weren’t important. Strictly entre nous I got the impression he was a weeny bit tiddly. If it had been anyone else it would have got my rag out, but it’s never any good getting waxy with Bry, it’s like water off a duck’s back. In any case, he’d been very decent about letting us have the car.
“To cut a long story short, I made allowances for his having imbibed not wisely but too well and humoured him. But I certainly lost some beauty sleep that night. Dor must have thought I’d been out on the tiles when I turned up at the registry office. No, you mustn’t take that seriously—Dor’s terribly sweet and...and loyal.”
Periam wound up his speech by taking from his pocket a paper bag which he offered to Purbright. The inspector declined graciously and resumed his contemplation of the horizon. He wondered if the production of the sweets had been a reflex comment on the bride.
“What is your general opinion of your neighbours, Mr Periam? In Beatrice Avenue, you know, and round about.”