The remainder of the report was straightforward enough. The broken glass unearthed from the garden included large fragments easily identifiable as portions of a commercial acid carboy, whose protective basket of iron strapping had been found in a wardrobe (Purbright loyally forbore from mentioning Love’s encounter with that article). Glass splinters on the second hammer, that left in the garage, clearly indicated its having been used to smash the carboy.
Two sets of fingerprints were recurrent throughout the house. One set corresponded with prints at Periam’s shop. The other, presumably, was Hopjoy’s. There had been found no print belonging to either man which could be considered of special significance in relation to whatever had happened in the bathroom. The surfaces of the hammer shafts, the razor blade, and the pieces of carboy had yielded nothing.
Microscopic examination of hairs taken from combs in Periam’s bedroom and shop and from clothing in a cupboard in his lodger’s room had virtually settled the origin of those on the hammer. They were almost certainly Hopjoy’s.
“There you are, squire. Make what you like of that lot.”
Purbright rubbed his chin reflectively. “You’ve certainly been thorough.”
Warlock beamed. He tossed up an imaginary tennis ball and thwacked it through the window.
“It’s just as well,” said Purbright, “that I didn’t clap Periam in irons this morning. I suppose I couldn’t have been blamed if I had. Yet there was something rather pat about the set-up at that house. It was too much to expect a nice conclusive lab. report...” he tapped the photographs—“...with follicles.”
“Sorry.”
“Those hairs, then, were...”
Warlock winked, turned two fingers into a pair of scissors and snipped off an invisible forelock.
Purbright carried Warlock’s report to the Chief Constable not in confidence that Mr Chubb possessed a superiority of intellect consonant with his rank but rather as a man with a problem will seek out some simple natural scene, the contemplation of which seems to set free part of his mind to delve more effectually towards a solution.
Thus, while he gazed at the gentle, dignified vacuity of Mr Chubb’s face, the inspector mentally weighed and dissected each fact as he passed it on.
Mr Chubb, as usual, was leaning elegantly against his fireplace. He seemed never to sit down except at home, and then almost exclusively at meal times. “Harcourt,” his wife once averred, “even watches television standing up; I think his mother must have been frightened by Edward the Seventh.”
The Chief Constable gave a delicate, dry cough. “Do I understand, Mr Purbright, that you feel an arrest would be unwise at this stage?”
“Ah, I thought that might be your reaction, sir. It’s this queer business of the hammer that’s spoiling everything.”
“It strikes me,” said Mr Chubb, “as a singularly unnecessary complication. Do we really have to take Warlock’s word that the thing was deliberately contrived?”
“I’m afraid we do. And the case won’t hang together until we can explain why the murderer went to that particular piece of trouble. He’d prepared to dispose of the corpse; the logical thing was to erase all other signs of the crime—wash away bloodstains, burn the ligature or bury the knife or get rid of the gun, wipe off fingerprints, and so on. But no, he actually manufactured some evidence of violence by cutting off a few of the victim’s hairs and sticking them on a hammer head with a dab of his blood. You notice the choice of hiding place, incidentally—under the bath—accessible to methodical searchers, yet just not obvious enough to arouse suspicion of a deliberate plant.”
“I hate to see subtlety showing through these affairs, Mr Purbright. Murder is such a beastly business in the first place. It becomes positively crawly when you have to strain a decent intelligence to sort it out. And nowadays, I’m afraid, the better the address the more distasteful the crime turns out to be. Odd, that, isn’t it?”
“You’re thinking of Beatrice Avenue, of course...”
“Well, it is quite a nice road. I remember old Abbott and his sister used to live in that place with a yellow gate, up at the park end.” He paused, frowning. “You know, this is going to drop the values a bit.”
Purbright observed a short, respectful silence. He resumed: “One thing is abundantly clear: the murder wasn’t done on the spur of the moment. If Periam had killed Hopjoy during that quarrel and without premeditation, how could he have set about getting rid of the body so efficiently? A carboy of acid isn’t something you keep handy around the house, and you’d hardly be able to nip out and buy one at that time of night.”
“One might steal it,” suggested the Chief Constable. “It would be a good time for that.”
Purbright acknowledged the possibility, but thought that burglary on top of murder was cramming rather a lot into one night.
“The acid must have been obtained beforehand and hidden in readiness—not necessarily at the house, although there’s an inspection pit in the garage that would have served very well.”
Mr Chubb nodded sagely. “I grant premeditation.”
“Which leads us,” Purbright said, “to two further points of some importance. Firstly, the chances of Hopjoy’s having been killed and, shall we say, liquidated by anyone not actually living in the same house must be considered very remote indeed. The whole situation, before and after the crime, demanded what might be termed residential qualifications—privacy, time, freedom from the curiosity of neighbours, knowledge of the house itself. Periam really is the only candidate, you know, sir.”
The Chief Constable thoughtfully inspected the lapel of his jacket. “Put like that...I suppose there wouldn’t be much point in propounding the roving maniac, much as one would like to. I can’t say I know this Periam myself, but he’s a decent type by all accounts. Why on earth should he want to do such a frightful thing?”
“Precisely, sir. That’s the second point I wanted to bring out. His motive must have been of pathological intensity.”
“Any money involved?”
“Far from it. Hopjoy seems to have left nothing but debts. Even the car was going to be snatched back by the hire purchase people.”
“Debts?” Mr Chubb stared. “But what about the work he was supposed to be doing? I mean, a man in his position would never risk...”
“Oh, but he did, sir. You haven’t forgotten the Arliss business, surely.”
“Arliss?”
“The tailor. He wanted us to do Hopjoy for false pretences. We’d quite a job cooling him down.”
Mr Chubb made show of searching his memory. “Ah...that was Hopjoy, was it?”
“It was. He told Arliss that the suit had been impounded by M.I.5 because one of his machinists was suspected of passing micro-film in hollow fly buttons.”
“And did they get the fellow?”
“Hopjoy, you mean, sir?”
“No, the fellow who was doing that button trick. Nobody thought to tell me afterwards what happened.”
It dawned on Purbright that the point of the affair had eluded Mr Chubb completely. “I suppose,” he said, “that he was investigated. Probably put on less sensitive work—cuffs, maybe.”