“Excuse me...”
A third man had silently entered the room. He looked inquiringly at each of the searchers. “Detective Inspector Purbright?”
The kneeling man rose. “I’m Purbright.”
“Good-O!” The new arrival grinned and launched himself at the inspector with a curious crouching stride, his hand extended like that of a Japanese wrestler. After involuntarily stepping back a pace, Purbright braced himself and allowed his arm to be pumped.
“My name’s Warlock. Hang-’em-on-a-thread Department.” He peered kindly into Purbright’s face and added: “Forensic science lab, you know. I understand I might be able to help you, squire.”
Purbright murmured politely, introduced his companion as Detective Sergeant Love, and gave Mr Warlock a quick but careful scrutiny.
The man seemed to be itching to play basketball. He kept stretching up on his toes, flexing first one leg then the other, and swaying gently from side to side. Every now and then he touched finger-ends and drew them apart again with delicate restlessness.
Love regarded him sullenly. He put him down as a clue-hog, an alien live wire.
Still undulating like an undersea plant at the turn of the tide, Warlock glanced rapidly round the room. “What’s supposed to have been going on?” he asked. “I’ve only just got here. They didn’t tell me much.”
“I’m not surprised. We’re in a bit of a vacuum at the moment, Mr Warlock.” Purbright drew out two of the cold seated, rigidly matched dining chairs. “Here, we’d better sit down for a minute.”
Warlock abandoned his limbering up exercises and perched in an attitude of comparatively immobile attention. The sergeant turned his back and started going through the contents of a varnished oak bureau surmounted by twin cupboards behind leaded glass: an arrangement that Love approvingly voted ‘dinky’.
“The day before yesterday,” Purbright began, “we received an anonymous letter. That was...yes, Tuesday. I haven’t got it with me at the moment but I can give you the gist of it. ‘Why don’t you take a look into fourteen Beatrice Avenue because I’m sure something awful has happened there.’ That was the first sentence, I remember. Then there came some rather confused stuff about a lot of noise coming from the house last Thursday night and what did we make of that? You’ll have noticed how damnably rhetorical these anonymous letter writers always are?”
Warlock nodded his small, very round head. His face, Purbright reflected, was that of a vigorous, self-employed artisan: weathered, a little coarse, but perkily good-humoured. He had thick, straight hair, carefully combed low across the forehead, and as he nodded a hank of it slipped down to the bridge of his button nose; he reached automatically for the comb in the breast pocket of his rumpled sports jacket.
“The letter posed a few more questions, all very portentous. Why should someone want to dig in the garden at two in the morning? Why was the bathroom light on half the night? That sort of thing.”
Purbright stared past Warlock through the glass panelled door that led to a small formal garden. “We don’t take much notice of our back bedroom vigilantes as a rule. They’re mostly old friends, of course, and we’d rather they worked their persecution mania off on us instead of mangling the neighbours. This letter was different, though. For one thing, it didn’t hint at fornication. Secondly, it was just a bit more circumstantial than usual. And thirdly...”
Purbright’s voice trailed off. He watched a big grey cat, gloomily hunch-shouldered, picking its way along the fence at the bottom of the garden.
Warlock glanced behind him just as the cat halted, turned its head at right angles and scowled. “Thirdly?” prompted Warlock. The cat presented its rear, its tail momentarily a quivering exclamation mark, and disappeared into the farther garden.
“Well, as a matter of fact we did happen to know a little about the set-up here,” Purbright was speaking more carefully. “Nothing sinister, but there were features that might be thought unusual.”
Again he paused. Then, “Look, I know you’ll think this damned stupid and starchy, but can I have a peek at your identification?”
Warlock stared, grinned, disinterred a slim wallet from a bunch of papers and handed it to the inspector. Purbright glanced at it apologetically and hastily returned it. “I do hope you didn’t mind.”
“Not a bit of it, squire. Who did you think I was, anyway—Philby?”
Purbright shrugged. “Everyone goes through the prescribed motions nowadays. The discipline of disbelief. It’s supposed to make us feel safe.”
The chained onyx light-bowl in the centre of the ceiling rattled as footsteps passed across the floor of the room above. Purbright leaned towards Sergeant Love.
“Sid, I think you’d better clear those lads outside again. Tell them to get a spade apiece and do some gardening. The places to try will be obvious enough still—if there are any, of course.”
Love moved to the door.
“Oh, and there’s no need for both the uniformed men to stay. Peters can go back to the station.” Purbright turned to Warlock again. “You’ll not want a herd of them trampling on your insufflator. Now let’s get on with the story.
“There are—or were—two people living in this house. Both fellows in their late thirties. Not related. The actual householder is called Gordon Periam. He keeps a tobacconist’s shop in the town. The house he inherited from his mother. She was a widow and they lived here together until her death just over a year ago.
“The name of the other chap is Brian Hopjoy. He’s supposed to be a commercial traveller based here in Flaxborough with a line in pharmaceutical sundries, or something like that. Is there such a thing?”
“I believe so,” Warlock said.
“Aye, well it doesn’t matter much; I gather the travelling job is just a cover for something else. Anyway, Hopjoy turned up a few months before the old woman died and she took him in as a lodger.”
Warlock fleetingly reviewed the solid, carefully tended furniture. “Paying guest, surely,” he amended.
“Quite. It seems to have been a pretty amicable arrangement because after Mrs Periam’s death Hopjoy stayed on. I don’t know how they managed for meals and cleaning up; there’s no sign of a regular housekeeper, although the woman next door says a girl came round occasionally. She thinks she was a friend. We’ll sort that out in time.”
Purbright saw that Warlock had had enough of sitting. Refusing a cigarette, he began to rock slowly on the very edge of his chair and to make short chopping gestures with his hands. The inspector looked away. “I wonder if you can see an ashtray anywhere...”
Gratefully Warlock leapt to his feet and began a spring-heeled, neck-craning tour of the late Mrs Periam’s ornaments.
Purbright flicked his ash into the fireplace and resumed his story.
“I wasn’t at the station when that letter arrived on Tuesday. The sergeant was rather sceptical—naturally enough, on the face of it—and he just sent one of the uniformed men round to ring the bell and give the place the once over. There was no one in, and they left it at that.
“Yesterday morning the letter was reported to me. I took it straight to the Chief Constable—have you met old Chubb, by the way?” Warlock, peering at a row of silver trophies on the sideboard, shook his head. “Oh, you must,” said Purbright. “He thinks that crimes in this town are committed only in his policemen’s imagination. This time he’s worried, though.”