Detective Boggan’s colleague was on one knee at the edge of the lawn, near a shallow pit in the flower bed. He was brushing soil from a sack that now lay on the grass. Suddenly he snatched away his hand, swore, examined a finger and pressed it to his handkerchief. When he withdrew it there was a glint of scarlet.
“You’d better go in and wash it,” Purbright said. He leaned over the sack. From a small rent protruded a fin of pale green glass; There were several other tiny holes in the sack. They looked like burns.
Purbright gingerly pulled back the neck of the sack. It was full of broken glass, some pieces as much as six or seven inches long. All were slightly concave as if they had formed a huge bottle.
“There’s your carboy,” said Warlock. He looked a little longer at the spilling fragments. “I wonder where he put the basket.”
“Basket?”
“Yes, these acid containers are usually set in iron lattice things like big fire baskets. They’re to protect them while they’re being shifted about.”
“Buried too, I suppose,” said Purbright. Boggan looked without favour at the stretch of flower bed that remained to be explored.
The detective who had cut his hand came out of the house and walked up to the group on the lawn. “I think,” he said to the inspector, “that I know where that thing was smashed up.”
He led Purbright and Warlock back into the kitchen and through a side door that opened into the garage. He pointed to a corner of the floor. “There’s a whole lot of little splinters round there, sir. I noticed them earlier on when I was looking for a spade.”
The others examined the floor, nodded acknowledgement of their guide’s perspicacity, and turned their attention to the rest of the garage.
Along one wall, lit now by the sun rays that filtered through a long, grimy skylight, there hung from hooks and nails a rusted saw, an oil-stained pictorial calendar for 1956, a cylinder head gasket, a tyre worn to the canvas, an old scouting haversack and something discernible as porcelain under its covering of dust. Purbright identified it, with some surprise, as a bed pan.
Tools, most of which looked long disused, lay neatly on a workbench supported by brackets at the end of the garage. There were several tins of oil and polish and paint on the shelf above the bench; among the miscellany stacked below it Purbright noticed the incongruous presence of playroom relics—a bagatelle board, a tied bundle of toy rails, a battered magic lantern.
He looked up from these to see Warlock stooped in one of his now familiar sinuous postures and to hear: “This household certainly seems well stocked with hammers. One for each job.”
Purbright peered over Warlock’s shoulder. Lying in shadow along a wall beam about a foot from the floor was a hammer almost identical with the one found in the bathroom. Warlock pointed to faintly glistening fragments on its head. “This is what must have been used to bust up the carboy, squire.” He turned upon the inspector a look compounded of satisfaction and expectancy; Purbright, surfeited with clues for one day, had the odd fancy that if he grasped and threw the hammer Warlock would leap, snap unerringly upon it in mid air, and with canine idiocy lay it again before him.
“Looks like it,” Purbright said, flatly.
Warlock whipped out a very clean handkerchief and picked up the hammer by the end of its haft. Holding it suspended before him, he slowly stood up and regarded it, frowning.
“I wonder why he didn’t bring the other one down and use that. I’d have thought it was a pretty natural thing to do.”
“Squeamishness?” suggested Purbright.
“On his showing up to now you could hardly put him down as a sensitive type. Another thing—why should he have left these things about, anyway? He went to the trouble of smashing the carboy and burying it. Me, I’d have chucked the hammer in as well. Every time.”
Purbright smiled, a little wearily. “Murdering people, Mr Warlock, must be a somewhat distracting business. Even the most conscientious practitioner probably tends to overlook things,”
As they re-entered the kitchen, there came from somewhere outside the house a short cooing call, soon afterwards repeated. The inspector went to the window and looked out.
Boggan, one foot on his spade, was turned towards the right-hand fence. A woman, apparently standing on something on her side of it, beckoned him eagerly. Boggan strolled across the lawn and listened to what she had to say. She was, Purbright noticed, an elderly woman, but rosy-faced and alert. For as long as she was talking she tilted back her head and kept her eyes tight shut, while her hand occasionally sought to discipline a stray wisp of her almost white hair.
Boggan sought the inspector.
“It’s Mrs Sayers next door, sir. She’d like a word with you. She says she can tell you about Mr Periam.”
Chapter Three
Mrs Alice Sayers celebrated the installation of a police inspector in her drawing-room by serving a jug of hot milk and water mixture delicately tinctured with coffee essence, switching on an electric fire that produced a cinematic representation of flames and a terrible smell of singeing fluff, and unshrouding the cage of a budgerigar called Trevor.
Also offered was a plate of slightly soft wheatmeal biscuits.
Purbright sat in a massive but unyielding armchair and watched Mrs Sayers administer fragments of biscuit to Trevor. This she did with a pout and a curious chuffling, sucking noise that was apparently intended to whet the bird’s appetite.
At intervals she turned her head and with closed eyes addressed herself to the second most important creature in the room.
“I do hope you’ll not think I’m just being terribly inquisitive, inspector, but I’m really very fond of Gordon and of course I didn’t know what to think when I saw policemen all over the place. Well, people do fear the worst when it comes to digging, don’t they?”
Her eyes opened and stayed watchful while she smiled, waiting to see how much she would be told.
“There’s no need to let that alarm you, Mrs Sayers. All we know at the moment is that the two gentlemen next door appear to be...unaccounted for. There may be a perfectly simple explanation, but so long as there’s the possibility of something being wrong we shall have to cast around a bit.”
Trevor, neglected, emitted a stream of staccato squawking that sounded like enamel being chiselled off a saucepan bottom. Purbright shivered. Mrs Sayers lovingly tapped the bars of the cage with her fingernail and reached for another biscuit.
“What you mean, I suppose, is that Gordon’s missing? But how extraordinary. Couldn’t he be on holiday, or something?”
“That is what we should very much like to know. When I received your message, I was hopeful that you might be able to tell us something definite.”
“Oh, naturally I shall do all I can to help, inspector. Mrs Periam was a very dear friend of mine. And Gordon was a crutch to her; I can’t think of any other word. I wonder...” She paused. “Have you by any chance had a word with Mrs Wilson? She’s next to the Periams on the other side.”