Lilian, My Dear—I wonder if you can imagine how much our little stroll together meant to me. It is so true all that about “sermons in streams and books in trees and good in everything”. At least, I see it is true when you are with me. Isn’t the country marvellous? What a lot I was missing up there in my big Mayfair flat. Now I do nothing but dream of our little cottage. I am seeing the agent again tomorrow and I hope to have good news from my publisher before the end of the week. It is just this matter of the deposit that is a teeny bit awkward. But do not worry, my true one. We cannot have a Cloud in those clear eyes, can we?! Until Tuesday.
Your Impatient Rex.
“Bloody hell,” muttered Sergeant Love.
Purbright raised his eyes. “Ah, you’ve spotted the misquotation. If Rex is an author he’ll have to do better than that.”
He placed the second letter on the bed.
Lilian, My Dear—I took a trip, or pilgrimage should I say? to the church this morning. How right you are, what a noble edifice and how fitting for vows unto death. I think I must use the scene for my next novel. Thank you for lending me back those earlier letters. I was right, I think, they do contain some phrases that ought to be worked into the book. You see what inspiration you give me!! And here is some good news. My publisher sent me a long telegram this morning begging me not to consider the oiler from that big rival I told you about. He says he will personally send me two thousand pounds (think of that, Lilian!) out of his own private fortune if his other directors do not manage to raise the money before Settling Day, as they call it “on Change” (you remember I told you about that). What a pity publishers are the slaves of the City these days. Art should be far above that sort of thing. Anyway, I tell you all this so you can feel easy about the little “investment in our happiness” that you want to make. You will see that I am right when I say you have a “business head” on those graceful shoulders!! By the way, the agent say that cash
will
be best—these “country swains” are suspicious of cheques! Goodnight, a sweet goodnight, my dear. I will be waiting tomorrow at Our Tree.
Your Impatient Rex.
P.S. The agent also tells me that he thinks our “enemy” will withdraw his bid for the cottage once our deposit is paid. Good-O!
The third letter was more brief.
Lilian, My Dear—Something has “cropped up”, as they say. That literary luncheon in Town has been brought forward to Wednesday. What a nuisance! but my publisher says it cannot be helped because J. B. Priestley couldn’t manage Friday so you will understand I am sure. Come to Our Tree on Friday at seven and I shouldn’t be surprised if I bring “something special” from a certain merry goldsmith in Old London Town!!
Your Impatient Rex.
“Exit Mrs Bannister,” said Purbright. “Via Our Tree.” He folded the letters and slipped them into an envelope before peeling off the white cotton gloves.
“He certainly writes like an author,” Love said. The inspector gave him a shocked stare.
Downstairs, Purbright emptied the contents of the sideboard drawer upon the dining table. They consisted mainly of household bills and receipts for small amounts, insurance documents, old building society records, recipes snipped from magazines, ageing snapshots and detergent circulars. In a separate envelope was correspondence relating to the sale of the house. There were also two bank statements covering a fairly lengthy time and a cheque book with seven cheques remaining. Mrs Bannister clearly had not made frequent use of her bank’s services. All the better, thought Purbright.
He turned back the counterfoils, one by one. The uppermost, dated a month previously, was marked “Self”, a withdrawal of four hundred pounds.
The “investment in happiness”, obviously.
There followed stubs recording payments to the borough council—rates, presumably—and to such other unexciting bodies as water and electricity boards, an insurance company and a mail order house.
Only one counterfoil related to a transaction that could not be immediately dismissed as orthodox.
Its date was four months old; the amount, twenty guineas; the payee, Sylvia Staunch.
Purbright looked at it for several seconds. He turned to Sergeant Love.
“Have you any notion, Sid, of who Miss or Mrs Sylvia Staunch happens to be?”
Love pondered. He pulled at his smooth, pink, cherubic cheek.
“It rings a bloody bell,” he said at last.
Chapter Three
Flaxborough. What a nice name. Long before the London train pulled in behind the Gothic extravagance of Flaxborough station’s façade—before even it had rumbled across points somewhere north of Derby and settled to a smooth pace on a lonely line towards the ever enlarging, ever brightening skies of eastern England—Miss Lucilla Teatime had decided that Flaxborough was going to be very much to her taste.
She was ready for a change, for a withdrawal from familiar places and the familiar round. That round, she warned herself, had been on the point of catching up with her lately. And if one wanted to preserve one’s independence and interest in life, it didn’t do to be caught up with.
A slight sense of disloyalty—a twinge, merely—had visited her with the decision to leave London for a while. She had spent nearly all her life there and with keen enjoyment. Her physical health remained excellent and she was fairly sure that she was as alert as ever. But she realized that she was not necessarily the best judge of that. There had been one or two occasions in the past year when a lapse of memory or of shrewdness had put her at a temporary disadvantage. In a way, she was thankful for them; they were timely signals of the danger of complacency.
Londoners, Miss Teatime reflected now in the cosy solitude of her first-class compartment, did tend to be complacent. It explained their gullibility. The cleverness one needed to be an active component of that vast turbulent city was so obvious that the possibility of being outsmarted was unthinkable. Hence the success of so many hard-headed provincials in creaming off their fortunes in London before the natives realized that they hadn’t come just for a football match and a look at the pigeons.
No, it would do her no harm to spend a spell away from dear, parochial old London. Her faculties needed a stretch. Something fresh, something challenging was indicated.
She looked out of the window. Huge rectangles of cultivated land, bordered by long, cleft-like drains and low hedges, succeeded one another as far as the misty, blue-grey horizon. The clusters of farm buildings, lying at what seemed miles apart, looked clean and symmetrical and efficient. Not in the least picturesque. Miss Teatime thought of the farms pictured in television commercials for processed foods and smiled at the simple faith of the city dweller.
Not a smock in sight. The place seemed depopulated. Only the occasional scarlet flash of a tractor crawling over the black acres testified to human activity. She gazed to the landscape’s indistinct, lavender-coloured rim. It was smudged with clumps of trees and spiked, here and there, with steeples—mere thorns they seemed against the vastness of the sky.
Miss Teatime picked up the book on the seat beside her. Barrington-Hoole’s Guide to Eastern England. She began to glance through its illustrations and soon came to a scene that corresponded almost exactly with the view through the carriage window. She felt pleased with herself and with the book too, and turned to the chapter on Flaxborough.