“She isn’t a bit off the beam, is she?”
“Goodness me, no! Perfectly level-headed. And no harm in her, really. I think she just hasn’t enough to do. She never had.” Again the voice plunged confidentially. “Properly speaking and if all were told, inspector, the mother is Miss Cork. Miriam’s illegit.”
Mrs Sayers, satisfied as a blood donor, leaned slowly back in her chair. “I’m dying to know what Miriam wrote to you about. Do tell me.”
The inspector smiled apologetically. “We did receive a letter, Mrs Sayers. I think there’s no harm in your knowing that. It alleged some sort of a disturbance at number fourteen. The bathroom was mentioned. But I don’t know that we can assume who wrote it.”
“We can put two and two together, though, can’t we?”
“Ah, Mrs Sayers, if all the twos put together in this town had proved fertile we should be overrun with fours. I’m afraid I have been keeping you from your lunch.” He moved the ashtray with which Mrs Sayers had supplied him, a china representation of a Dutch clog, from his chair arm to the coffee table, and stood up. “There’s just one thing...”
Mrs Sayers looked round for Trevor’s cage cover. “Yes?”
“I was wondering if you happened to know where we might pick up a photograph of Mr Periam. There are one or two portraits next door, but I don’t suppose he’s a choirboy any longer.”
Mrs Sayers held up a promissory finger, pondered a moment, and trotted out of the room.
Trevor, still untented, immediately became hysterical. It nodded violently, issuing a series of high frequency squawks that produced in Purbright the sensation of piano wires being jerkily reeled in through his ears. He tried to imitate Mrs Sayers’s method of soothing communion but this merely agitated the bird more. He made faces at it, growled, miaowed, muttered words of the kind that are passed to magistrates on slips of paper. Trevor’s slate pencil monody persisted. In a final attempt, Purbright drew desperately on his cigarette and filled the cage with smoke. He was rewarded immediately. The bird swayed a little, raised one claw, then hunched into immobility and utter silence.
Purbright was standing by the window with his back to the fumigated budgerigar when Mrs Sayers bustled in with a photograph.
“Here we are: this was taken at last year’s Operatic. The Student Prince. That’s Gordon—the one holding up the beer mug thing in the second row.”
Purbright examined the picture. It showed upwards of thirty members of the Flaxborough Amateur Operatic Society transfixed in self-conscious attitudes of Ruritanian abandon. There was a wealth of false mustachios, arms akimbo, flourished steins, peasant blouses (“I helped with the costumes,” proclaimed Mrs Sayers) and feet on chairs. A drinking song was clearly in progress. In the foreground was a pair whom Purbright assumed to be the principals of the show. Disguised as a prince disguised as a student, forty-eight-year-old Jack Bottomley, bachelor proprietor of the Freemasons’ Arms, accompanied his singing with a stiff, resolute gesture; he looked like a learner driver about to turn left. His other hand grasped the waist of the Society’s perennial soprano lead, Miss Hilda Cannon, a stick-like female whose desperate grin of simulated coquetry was belied by the angle at which she leaned away from the draught of Mr Bottomley’s romantic protestations...
“No, no; that one’s Gordon.” Mrs Sayers’s plump little finger redirected Purbright’s attention to the face in the second row.
It was an unexceptional face that he could not recall having seen before, although, as Periam was a shopkeeper in a fairly busy part of the town, it was more than likely that he had done so. The features were very smooth, like those of an elderly baby, and their sulky solemnity was emphasized by a big, round, fleshy chin. The posture of gaiety prescribed for the occasion had been adopted by Mr Periam with all the insouciance of a man with suspected rib fractures submitting to X-ray examination.
“He doesn’t look very happy,” Purbright ventured.
“A terribly conscientious boy,” Mrs Sayers explained. “Actually he has a lovely sense of fun, but in a quiet way. He’s not one for roystering about. I think it’s only loyalty, really, that’s kept him in things like this. He’s still a regular Gang Show man too, you know.”
“Does Mr Hopjoy go in for theatricals?”
Mrs Sayers puffed contemptuously. “Not on the stage, he doesn’t. But he’s an actor, all right, take it from me.”
“I’d rather like his picture as well.”
“I don’t know where you’ll get one. By all accounts he flits around too much to be photographed. Of course, some woman might help you there. Or even,” she added darkly, “the police.”
Purbright, pocketing the photograph of the Operatic Society, searched her face for evidence either of amnesia or an unexpected sense of humour.
“No, honestly,” Mrs Sayers soberly persisted, “it wouldn’t surprise me one little bit.”
Chapter Four
Towards conference with the Chief Constable of Flaxborough and one selected senior officer of his force smoothly sped the man known as Ross,
He gazed with languid appreciation through the windscreen of the Bentley—an ordinary Bentley save that its radiator cowl was of gunmetal and of slightly more assertive radius than a standard model’s—at the June countryside. He already had booked rooms for his companion and himself at the Royal Oak, Flaxborough, from a public call box on the road from London, using the names Smith—his own favourite among disarmingly improbable hotel aliases—and Pargetter.
Pargetter-to-be did not seem to be enjoying the drive as much as Ross. As the long car swung up from the last declivity in the wooded, river-watered lowlands below Flaxborough Ridge and gained the straight highway leading to the town, he shifted irritably in his seat and swivelled his head in an effort to read grass-collared milestones.
Ross did not care for the back view of his companion’s head; the gleam of baldness bobbed distractingly in the left corner of his vision and he had begun to receive the curious impression that it emanated from a beard-ringed featureless face.
“Harry,” he said sharply, “what on earth are you looking for?”
The white patch disappeared and a sallow oval one took its place. “I’ve been trying to see how much farther we have to go. I think there was a three on that last milestone.”
Henry Pumphrey spoke rapidly but with a careful emphasis that involved his facial muscles in a good deal of exercise. At the end of each sentence he lightly flicked his tongue across his upper lip. He had a residual North Country accent.
“Three miles will be about it,” Ross agreed. He had glanced at the dashboard and received from it, apparently, information no less precise than Pumphrey’s. Now, his hands laid delicately upon the wheel as upon an open missal, he watched the gradual recession of trees and hedges from the road ahead and their replacement by houses, a filling station, some shops. Cyclists—Flaxborough cyclists who seem grafted to their machines to form unities as formidable and unpredictable as centaurs—swooped out of side roads. Green double-decked buses which had been ticking over in ambush loomed suddenly at intersections. With the serenity of extreme old age, three inmates of an almshouse crossed and re-crossed the carriageway, gently smiled resignation to survival for another twenty-four hours, and filed back into their refuge. A pair of dogs, panting and oblivious, coupled on the road’s crown and performed a six-legged waltz around a keep-left bollard. Children darted between cars and laid down objects which they then watched excitedly from the pavement.