Not open, the woman mimed. Eleven. She turned to forklift an Almond Dainty out of the window.
I want a word with you, Love silently but urgently mouthed as soon as she glanced again in his direction.
She frowned. What about? her mouth framed.
It was like a conversation between two acute laryngitis patients.
I’m a po-lice off-i-cer, went Love’s lips.
He saw the woman consider, nod brusquely, then disappear. He pushed his way to the side of the shop and went through into the tearoom. The woman was already there. She looked offended.
“We’re very busy, you know.”
“Yes, I’m sorry, but I’ll not keep you.” He took out his two photographs.
“I just want to know if you’ve seen either of these ladies here in the café at any time. In the last two or three months, anyway.”
She took a long, grave look.
“What have they done?”
“Nothing,” said Love, blandly. His blue eyes met her glance of disbelief and remained steady.
She held Mrs Bannister’s picture. “It might have been this one who was in the other week. I’m not sure, mind.”
“How long ago?”
“A fairish while. Two or three weeks. If it was her.” She started. “Look, I’ll have to get back to the shop.”
“All right. But can you remember who she was with?”
“Oh, but really...” She thrust the photograph back into his hand and turned.
“It’s important. Honestly.”
Relenting, she paused and stared at a table in the far corner. She seemed to seek there some left-behind impression. Love watched her face cloud with the effort of recollection, then saw a small smile.
“Dicky bow,” she said suddenly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“He was wearing one of those dicky bow ties. You don’t often see them nowadays. That’s all I remember, though.”
“Nothing else?”
She shook her head, but her gaze did not leave the corner table.
“How old was he?” Love asked.
“So-so. Middle aged, I suppose. Like her.”
“Hair?”
She shrugged.
“Dark? Fair?”
“Fair. He was...”
“Yes?”
“Well, I’m not sure how to describe it. Rather gallant.” She stressed the second syllable. Purbright would have diagnosed from this slight flippancy a desire to be thought more level-headed than she really was. Love suffered from no such devious process of thought.
“What, a bit of a fancy lad, you mean?”
“Sort of,” she said, and departed.
The sergeant drew no results at all from “The Pewter Kettle”, a fearsomely hag-ridden chintzery in St Ann’s Place, or from the Church Tower Restaurant. At “The Honey Pot”, he had to contend with a good deal of indignation from a maiden proprietress who was unshakeably convinced that he had come to accuse her of peddling purple hearts. The Clock Tea Rooms, in Market Street, he found to be closed for redecoration.
It was his last call, at an unnamed first-floor café near the bus station, that produced the only response to the photograph of Martha Reckitt. A plump Italian girl, whose pneumatic occupancy of her waitress’s frock gave her the appearance of the maid in a stage farce, recognized the picture at once.
“She come the day I start. Maybe the first, second customer.”
“That’s why you remember her?”
“Sure.”
“Was she with anyone?”
“Yes. A man. I think a priest.”
Love looked surprised. “A priest?” In his limited religious experience the word had an exotic ring. He had a fleeting vision of a figure in voluminous robes pouring tea like sacrificial wine.
“I think so. Very dark clothes and hands like so.” She joined the tips of her fingers. “And all the time he is looking very sad at my legs.”
“Oh, you mean a clergyman,” Love said.
“I think. Yes.”
“Can you describe him?”
The girl pouted doubtfully. Oo, you little smasher, said the sergeant to himself.
“A man,” she said. “Not young. Not as young as you.” Love glowed. “But with a...a something—you know?” Had he a something, the sergeant wondered, hoping very much that he had.
“Is there anything else you can think of? Colour of eyes or hair?”
“Oh, yes. Not dark hair. Colour like...” She rippled fingers in the air, seeking a comparison within what vocabulary she had acquired, then brightened. “Like chips!”
Purbright seemed quite pleased with his sergeant’s report.
“You’ve gathered more than I expected, Sid. I wish I had your way with women.”
“I wouldn’t have thought the descriptions were much help.”
“They seldom are, unless they include six-inch scars or a club foot. The point is that we now have a much clearer idea of the kind of man we’re looking for—his line of business.”
“A clergyman who writes books, you mean?”
“Not at all. What we have to find is a non-clergyman who doesn’t write books.”
“That ought to be easy,” said Love, hoping he was keeping his end up in the matter of trading ironies.
“Not easy,” Purbright qualified, “but less difficult in the context of Flaxborough society than looking for, say, an embezzler or a fornicator. A needle is much simpler to find in a haystack than in a bin of other needles.
“Now then, whoever won the affections of Miss Reckitt and Mrs Bannister is obviously a professional or semi-professional con man. Among these people there is quite narrow specialization. The bogus charity collector does not cross into the territory of the encyclopaedia salesman. Nor does the inventor in need of capital to market his everlasting petrol capsule work overtime as a spirit guide.”
“Remember that bloke,” Love interrupted, “who was supposed to have put old Alderman Wherry in touch with Edward the Seventh?”
“Just so,” said the inspector. “A full-timer. They hung eighty-three taken-into-considerations on him.
“But to get back to the business in hand. Here we have another kind of full-timer. The con man who’s forever pointed towards an altar. He’s probably the hardest worker of them all. Think of a life that is perpetual courtship of the last woman on earth you’d care to marry. That’s real graft, Sid.”
Sergeant Love, who was finding even his own restricted and unambitious wooing a bit of a strain from time to time, looked suitably awed.
“So you see we are not looking for an ordinary criminal,” Purbright went on. “We seek a man who can pose convincingly as an author, probably as a clergyman, and possibly as other romantic things. It would be interesting to know what he is at the moment.”