Ross disengaged with controlled, skilful gradualness. As might a superb driver cast his eye over his engine after a trial burst of speed, he made a brief inward check of the muscular and glandular apparatus of his prowess, He dismissed as imaginary a touch of breathlessness, a fleeting impression of cramp in his right shoulder. No, these were nothing; the old mastery was unimpaired. He prepared to inaugurate the second, the behold-my-need phase. As he gazed earnestly down into her eyes, he set off at irregular but artistic intervals a tiny tic at the corner of his now tightly compressed mouth. He raised one eyebrow in mute request for licence, while simultaneously contracting the other to indicate the irresistibility of his desire. This refined and difficult performance had never failed to win compliance with the subsequent phase of his technique, the tactile assessment and breach of dress fastenings and his hands’ assured colonization of their discoveries.
But at this point Ross’s calculated progression was disrupted utterly and with no hope of the re-establishment of his control. With a cry like that of a teased and hungry seal seizing a dangled fish, Bernadette suddenly arched and twisted her body, pincered him between iron-like legs, and bore him to the floor, where she proceeded to chew his neck, shoulder and ear with every indication of determination and delight. Within seconds, the rhythm of seduction had been checked, perverted, and monstrously accelerated in reverse. Through the hot clamour of Bernadette’s love-making, Ross seemed to hear, as if from outer space, the thin, mocking laughter of enemies.
An hour and ten minutes later, Ross was making his way back to the car while Bernadette Croll, her face as animated as a calf’s, watched a pan of potatoes and cabbage frying for her husband’s tea.
Ross felt like the survivor of an ambush. He glanced wearily at the peewits that glided and side-slipped above his head and plunged to the furrows in an untidy, tumbling descent as if they, like him, had been drained of impetus. Yet he felt neither self-pity nor rancour. What mattered now was to sift from the more embarrassing memories of the past hour the story about Hopjoy that he had been able to extract from his conquest during the few and brief periods of respite from her importunities.
Hopjoy, as his own reports indicated, had called at the Crolls’ farm in the first instance to make inquiries about some European labourers who were employed there. On that and subsequent visits, it was Mrs Croll whom he had seen. The farmer, Benjamin Croll, spent all daylight hours in his fields except at mealtimes, which were strictly predictable. Mrs Croll had told ‘Howard Trevelyan’ what she knew and what since she had been able, on his instructions, to find out about the three workers, but this amounted to little and seemed innocent. It had been nice, though, to see Howard once or twice in each otherwise killingly boring week and she had been thrilled and proud when he told her—on his third visit—that he was a British counter-espionage agent.
Ross dwelt a moment on this somewhat surprising circumstance. He did not think the girl was lying when she said the confidence had come from Hopjoy. There must, therefore, have been some very compelling reason for the breaking of so elementary a rule of security. Had Hopjoy hoped thereby to draw his quarry into the open? To offer himself as bait? If so, it meant the situation had become critical.
Such a likelihood was strengthened by Hopjoy’s urgent assertion to the girl, whom obviously he had decided to accept as an active ally, that his life was in danger. She had responded by hiding him in her bedroom on a number of occasions when the absence of her husband at Flaxborough market might have encouraged the enemy to arrange a convenient accident.
The accident when it did come was of entirely unexpected authorship. Not sharing his wife’s knowledge of the situation at the farm, Croll had returned early from a cancelled ram sale and gone straight up to the bedroom to change his clothes. He had brushed introductions aside, and, according to Mrs Croll, ‘behaved dreadfully’.
Ross opened the gate into the lane and thoughtfully latched it behind him. Who, in fact, had been Hopjoy’s assailant? Was it really Croll, the misunderstanding husband, who, if his wife’s story were to be credited, had regretted his impulsiveness, picked the unconscious man from the roof of the dog kennel and driven him to hospital with a tale of a fall from a stack?
Or had Bernadette’s account—so sharply at variance with the F.7 reports—been concocted and rehearsed in fear of reprisals from the organization that had spirited back to the East the practitioner with the iron bar?
Within fifty yards of the Bentley, in which he saw glimmering the pallid paraboloid of Pumphrey’s skull, Ross paused to listen. The sound of the tractor engine, to which he had kept tuned a wary ear during the whole time he had spent in the farmhouse, was in the air no longer. Its sudden extinction loosed a third and startling possibility into his brain.
Was it Benjamin Croll himself who had been the real object of Hopjoy’s investigations? Whose agent had struck too clumsily? Who then prepared in person and with deadly thoroughness to finalize Hopjoy’s elimination at the villa in Beatrice Avenue?
Chapter Twelve
Mr Alfred Blossom, proprietor of the South Circuit Garage, Flaxborough, received with considerable scepticism his foreman’s report that one of four carboys of battery acid had disappeared from the yard at the side of the servicing bay. “Even our blokes couldn’t lose a thing like that,” he declared. “And who the hell would want to pinch it? You’d better count them again.”
But not all Mr Blossom’s homely humour, developed over long years of stonewalling the complaints of milched motorists, could alter the fact that where four carboys had stood there were now only three. So he stared awhile at the empty space, bent to retrieve a small object that shone in the shadow of the next caged and straw-pillowed bottle, and put through a telephone call to the police.
There the matter rested until Inspectdr Purbright’s request for a check on all local garages, wholesale chemists and factories for news of missing sulphuric acid struck a chord in the memory of the clerk who had filed the peculiar little item from South Circuit.
Purbright found Mr Blossom an affable informant, graced with that air of sincerity and solicitude characteristic of the habitual inflator of invoices.
“It was the queerest thing,” said Mr Blossom. “I mean, we’ve had stuff disappear before. It goes on all the time, as a matter of fact. Between ourselves, I don’t make much of it. Put it down as wastage—sort of evaporation, you know. But a bloody great thing like that... Dangerous too. And it’s not as if you could flog it.” A good foot shorter than the policeman, he stood with his head tilted sharply upward like a bespectacled mole.
“Have you any idea of how it could have been taken?”
“Oh, in a car or on a truck, I suppose. People are always in and out of a place like this. We don’t watch everybody all the time. Some poor barmy sod probably took a fancy to the thing and heaved it into his boot when no one was looking.” He spread his hands and smiled forgiveness.
“They’re pretty heavy, though, aren’t they?”