“...a skeleton at the feast?” suggested Periam, almost jocularly.
“Oh, but such a nice skeleton!” Purbright had the brief but disconcerting sensation of Doreen’s bosom being nuzzled roguishly against his arm. Then she was walking away and looking back at him over her shoulder as she munched another of Periam’s biscuits.
Sergeant Malley breathed hard but contentedly between puffs at a pipe in which seemed to be smouldering a compound of old cinema carpet and tar. He sat in the windowless little office in the police station basement where witnesses at forthcoming inquests were induced by the huge sergeant’s calm and kindness to give more or less lucid expression to their recollections of tragedy.
Malley, whom even inspectors and superintendents treated as host in his own confined quarters—if only because they could not bear to see him trying to uncork eighteen stone from an inadequate chair—listened without surprise to Purbright’s account of his call at the hospital.
“I could have told you that you’d be wasting your time. Harton’s about as obliging as an empty stamp machine. And those bloody women...” He shook his head.
“Look, Bill, I’ve no objection to these people playing at guess-what-God’s-up-to if that makes them happy. But I’d still like to find the character who started all this phoney M.I. Fivemanship.”
Malley wriggled forward a few inches and folded his arms on the desk. “If you’re really interested in that operation, I think I might be able to find you someone who’ll talk. He’s one of the theatre assistants and a pal of Jack Sykes—the bloke in the lab I was telling you about. Do you want me to have a go?”
“I wish you would. It may not be important, of course; Periam said Hopjoy just hurt his leg slightly and carried no sign, but I suppose he can’t know for certain.”
“Hurt his leg?”
“That’s right.”
“But Harton doesn’t do legs. He’s an innards man.”
“Oh.” Purbright considered. “Yes, you said something about that before. Then perhaps Hopjoy was just spinning Periam one of his celebrated tales.”
“Maybe.”
“I wonder why...Never mind—let me know if you get hold of Mr Sykes’s friend, won’t you.”
A face, thrust inquisitively into the narrow doorway, creased with nausea on encountering Sergeant Malley’s pipe fumes. “Christ!” said Sergeant Love, adding ’sir” when he discerned the inspector through the haze.
Purbright joined him in the corridor.
“I’ve gone right through the people in Pawson’s Lane, sir. And guess what?” Love’s eye glistened with something more than reaction to smoke.
“No, you tell me, Sid.” The inspector put a paternal arm round his shoulder.
“I’ve found the woman who wrote that anonymous letter.”
Purbright stared at him. “What anonymous letter?”
“The one we got about the do at Periam’s place. You know, sir. The thing that started all this.”
Chapter Fifteen
“My Dear Sidney, we know all about that letter. It wasn’t written by a neighbour. Hopjoy wrote it himself.”
Love shook his head. “I’m afraid I’m not with you, sir.”
“I said Hopjoy wrote it. He wasn’t terribly subtle; a pad of the same paper was among the stuff in his bedroom.”
Love grudgingly digested the information. “Well, all I can say is that there must have been two, and that the Cork woman’s got lost. It was one of the first things she said. ‘I feel rather bad about sending that letter,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to cause trouble.’ I told her not to worry about it because it hadn’t really made any difference and anyway she hadn’t put her name to it, then she cheered up a bit and said something about it being the least she could have done for the poor boy’s mother. I think,” Love added by way of explanation, “that she’s a bit clobby in the cockpit.”
“There are two women there; which one are you talking about?”
“The daughter. There wasn’t a squeak out of Ma. She just hovered.”
“You asked about the row in the bathroom?”
“Yes. She said she didn’t hear shouting or anything like that although she’d been watching the window while the light was on.”
“But if she was awake, surely she must have heard something. There’s not thirty yards between those houses. And even Periam admitted Hopjoy was yelling his head off. He of all people had nothing to gain by making that up: very much the reverse. Anyway, if there was no disturbance why the devil should she have taken it into her head to send off this letter she talks about?”
Love remained silent for a few seconds. Then, as if trying to compensate for some lapse of his own, he said: “Mind you, she did say she thought she heard a noise like breaking glass later on when she’d gone to bed. That could have been the acid thing, couldn’t it? And she said she got up again and saw somebody moving about in the garden.”
“I rather think,” Purbright said, “that I should have a word with Miss Cork myself. In the meantime, Sid...”—he drew from his pocket an envelope—“I wonder if you’d mind hawking this lighter around Hopjoy’s acquaintances to see if they can identify it.”
Contrary to Purbright’s expectations, the Corks received him with something approaching affability. The daughter led him to a parlour with the temperature of an orchid house—a small but fierce fire burned in the scrupulously tidy grate—and went off to make tea. Mrs Cork greeted him with a slow inclination of the head. She sat in a tapestried chair in the window bay. While her daughter was out of the room, she said nothing but stared at him approvingly, nodding from time to time as if she were half afraid that he might, if not thus encouraged, take himself off before the kettle boiled.
Purbright looked about him at a room that he supposed its owners would describe as a treasure chest of memories. Scarcely a single feature of its clustered contents had the look of ever being put to use. Books in a glass-fronted cabinet had been pushed into obscurity to make shelf room for ornate china cruets, an old calendar, dusty oddments of barbola work, and a collection of cards from bygone Christmases. Vases, of which there was a great number, were dry and flowerless, although a spray of paper roses emerged lopsidedly from a biscuit barrel. Within a set of three square decanters were the pale ochre stains of ancient sediment. An alabaster ashtray, bearing a card suit indicator, was lodged with a box of counters, a china boot and a manicure set, inside a cut glass salad bowl.
Pictures blockaded the room. Their flagships, so to speak, were a heavily framed lithograph depicting a horse thrusting its head through an open cottage window during the family meal (‘An Unbidden Guest’) and an enormous tinted engraving of Windsor Castle with besashed and garlanded picnickers in the foreground. A dozen or so photographs, standing on pieces of furniture or suspended on long cords from the picture rail, projected the sad, sepia stares of dead relations, trussed for their appointments with posterity by studio palm or rustic bridge.
The room smelled of linoleum and passed-down sewing boxes. There hung also upon the over-heated air the faintly mothballish odour of female old age.