In the path of the hurtling ball, Ross became limp as a new corpse. The incredibly effectual mental annealing processes of Course Five were now being proved. His mind was a calm, dark void, prepared for pain’s fertilizing penetration.
It did not come. Three feet short of Ross’s head, the ball rose miraculously and shot past his ear.
Wonderingly, Ross reached out and groped for what had saved him. His fingers met an angular fragment. It was the vestige of a cube of billiard chalk.
The bowling went on methodically. But the particular danger it represented had passed with the diversion of the sailorman’s attention to other rows of tables. Looking back along the floor, Ross saw that the followers of the attempt to drive him to a view were moving in a group behind the bowler. They seemed in general a good deal less anxious to mount an offensive than the earlier intervention of the man with the cue had suggested. Ross decided that his best course was open retreat, coupled with the risk of the red door’s being locked.
He crawled swiftly across the last two aisles and rose to his feet, lifting the door’s catch bar at the same time. He pushed. The door remained shut. A hoarse, angry cry signalled his having been seen. As he heaved against the unyielding door he heard the rapid thumping of the enemy crutch. He put his foot against the bar and kicked. This time the long-disused bolts jumped from their corroded sockets. The door swung back and Ross leaped into blinding daylight.
He was in a passage comfortingly filled with the noises of the street at its end. In a few seconds Ross stepped out into the Corn Exchange.
No one had followed him.
Chapter Nine
In the Neptune kitchen, a waiter reached up through the warm, savoury steam and pulled a bottle of 1953 Beaune from the rack. He tossed it jocundly from hand to hand a few times, twirled it in the dust box, and cradled it. Just before he passed through the service doors into the restaurant, he stiffened his unexceptional face into the lineaments of omniscient superiority and drew back his shoulders. Then he glided to the table of Gordon Periam and party, bearing the wicker basket as if it contained the last surviving fragment of the True Cross.
Periam looked up. “Ah.” He reached out and touched the bottle. “Is it cold?”
The waiter winced. “You did ask for a Beaune, sir. A red wine.” He drew back the basket and stared with pained incredulity at Periam’s finger marks in the dust.
“You would wish me to decant it, sir?”
“You’d better, yes.”
Back in the kitchen, the waiter briskly uncorked the bottle between his knees and tumbled three parts of its contents, merrily gurgling, into a jug. The remainder, thriftily, he swigged.
While the waiter contrived, in comfortable wine-warmed scrutiny of the Daily Mirror, an interval suitable to the delicacy of his supposed task, Inspector Purbright took stock of Mrs Periam.
She would be, he estimated, twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, although an almost offensively inept hair style—plaits coiled into round pads over her ears—gave a first impression of mid-thirties. In the plump white face, brown eyes looked out with an alert directness which might have been adjudged a token of honesty; Purbright was not quite sure, though, whether their frankness was unalloyed with pleading, a hint of nymphomania. He resisted the suspicion partly because he felt it to be unfair at such short acquaintance, partly because of his awareness that the self-flattery of the middle-aged too often takes the form of a fancied discernment of sexual irresponsibility in younger women.
Nevertheless, a certain physical lushness about Doreen Periam was undeniable. It was rendered the more disturbing by the paradoxical prissiness of her dress. The frock she was wearing, for instance, was an outlandish affair in heavy, dark blue silk, that seemed to have been designed to constrict her bust into prudish formlessness. Its actual effect was to squeeze up into provocative cloven prominence at the base of her neck the breasts that a less ‘modest’ garment would have accommodated quite unspectacularly. From the long, tightly cuffed sleeves emerged small hands as white and delicate as potato shoots. Their continual movement might have been merely a symptom of genteel nervousness. But as they strayed over the dark silk, they seemed to be exploring underlying areas of erotic ache.
“I think we can acknowledge quite frankly between the three of us,” Purbright was saying, “that until recently you were a particular friend of Mr Hopjoy, Mrs Periam.”
She glanced apprehensively at Periam, who nodded. “I told the inspector about that, darl. He understands how things were.”
“It’s just that he wasn’t...wasn’t the right one. It does happen, you know.” The bright, brown eyes had widened.
“Of course. I’d like to know, though, whether he accepted that view. Was he reconciled to your preference having changed?”
“Oh, I’m sure he was, really. I mean a boy’s bound to be upset when someone else comes along, but mostly it’s his pride that’s hurt. Don’t you think so?”
Purbright declined to endorse the sentiment. He was wondering whether Doreen were as simple as she sounded. “Jealousy, Mrs Periam, isn’t altogether a matter of hurt pride. From what your husband has told me already, I’d say that Mr Hopjoy took the affair rather badly.”
“Our barney in the bathroom, darl,” interjected Periam. “Remember I told you.”
“Oh, that...” She looked down at the cloth and absently edged a fork from side to side. “I suppose I was a bit of a beast to him, really. Brian was so happy-go-lucky, though; I never thought he’d come the old green-eyed monster.”
Periam took her hand. “It was my fault. We should have broken it to him sooner.”
The waiter, priest-like, was at Periam’s shoulder. He administered a sacramental sample, then straightened to stare gravely into the middle distance. Purbright was reminded of a well-bred dog owner awaiting the conclusion of his animal’s defecation in a neighbour’s gateway.
Periam sipped, assumed for some seconds the wine-man’s look of trying to work out a square root in his head, then nodded reassuringly at his wife. “I think you’ll find it not too bad. Maybe a shade young...” The waiter, who thought he had spotted the arrival of an expense account junta at the far side of his territory, hurriedly filled the three glasses and took himself off.
Doreen pronounced the Beaune “nice but a bit acid”. Purbright glanced at Periam’s face. It betrayed no sign of his having found the remark unfortunate.
The girl resumed her contemplation of the tablecloth. Her hand remained clasped in her husband’s. After a while she disengaged it and, unconsciously, it seemed, allowed it to fall into Periam’s lap. She smiled. “Fancy,” she said, half to herself, “you and old Brian having a set-to over poor little me.”
“Well, not a set-to, exactly,” Periam said. He captured Doreen’s hand, which had been running affectionately up and down his thigh, and returned it to table level. “It was Bry who flew off the handle. I couldn’t get a word in edgeways.”
The soup arrived. Both Periam and his bride hitched forward their chairs and looked pleased. Their honeymoon seemed to have given them an appetite.