“A surgeon,” suggested Love, a quick learner.
“Aye, very likely. Plenty of tuck in his jacket sleeve to show off long, sensitive hands, and a sprinkle of Dettol behind the driving seat.”
“What about a secret agent?”
Purbright looked dubious. “Strictly for mentally retarded shop girls, I would have thought. Our man’s a cut above trading on the Bond syndrome.”
“Clever,” Love said, “the way he covered his tracks by getting those letters back from Mrs Bannister.”
“Quite. And we’ve got precious little from the three he didn’t recover. Not even a print, apparently. I wonder how they corresponded between meetings. Without his having to give his address away, I mean.”
“Through some sort of box number, maybe. Could have been the post office.”
“Box number...” Purbright murmured. For some reason, the thought of twenty-one pounds insinuated itself. Twenty guineas. The professional touch. Guineas. Fee. Client.
“Sid,” he said suddenly, “isn’t there one of those matrimonial agencies somewhere in town?”
The question seemed to take a second or two to register. Then Love straightened in his chair.
“That name...”
“What name?”
“On the cheque. Stench...Staunch.” He snapped his fingers. “That’s it—she runs a marriage bureau thing somewhere in Northgate. Where the Liberal Club used to be.”
Purbright rewarded the sergeant with a beam of affability, then looked at his watch. “I’ll go over now. What do you think I ought to ask for, a catalogue?”
Northgate was one of Flaxborough’s more run-down thoroughfares. Older people could remember when it had been “select”—the preserve of the kind of shopkeepers who saw their customers to the door and sent accounts headed “Bot. of...” At one time as many as four of its tall, double-fronted houses had been graced with the brass plates of doctors. No inn had ever been suffered there, and no chapel either, for Northgate’s residents and men of business held in equal abhorrence the vulgarity of public victualling and Methodism’s shrill abstinence. It was a street in which one could picture the aristocratic chemists having actually made up prescriptions from the great jars of gilded porcelain and the gigantic tincture bottles in their windows. There would have been a traffic in hat boxes and packets of gingerbread and Gentlemen’s Relish on the way home to side doors lettered in enamel No Hawkers: No Circulars.
But all that was long ago. With the shift of the town’s commercial axis to East Street on the other side of the river, first prosperity and then dignity had drained from Northgate like sap from a tree. The doctors had departed and their mansions had become tenements or the offices of car accessory firms. Behind the engrimed bow windows of chemists and saddlers and confectioners, there went on the dark labour of cycle repairers and the renovators of sofas. The premises of what once had been the town’s most magnificent provisions store now housed on one floor a refrigeration plant and some tons of frozen fish fingers and on the others the biggest stockpile of bottled sauce east of Manchester. As for the ban, so long sustained, upon Nonconformists and their bleak, hideous architecture, revenge had been taken by the enlargement with corrugated iron and match-boarding of the former carriage house of old Doctor Sanderson into a mission hall, complete with neon cross and posters that repeated the more offensive remarks of Old Testament prophets.
It was the baleful keening of the mission’s congregation (its apparently permanent session embraced the rarest intervals of silence) that droned through the thin walls to Purbright’s ear as he entered Northgate from Farrier Street. Drawing nearer its source, he wondered why religion—the western kind, anyway—laid such stress upon giving God praise. Never sympathy.
He crossed the road. It was pleasant to be warmed by the late afternoon sunshine and the inspector did not hurry. He did not despise seedy streets. Each had points of interest peculiar to itself. In Northgate there was a herbalist’s, for instance. He stopped at the narrow, dark window, and peered at the little piles of crumbled leaves and crushed root set out on kitchen saucers, each with a hand written reference to the organic effect promised. Especially intriguing was the card against slippery elm. “Makes delicious blancmange and is invaluable to the Family Planner (instructions over the counter).”
Farther along was a tobacconist’s. A row of tiny snuff bottles bore such names as Seven Dials, Senator, Barbara’s Muff, Voltaire and Pillycock. There was a photograph of Edgar Wallace above six dusty, foot-long cigarette holders looped to a display card. “The Latest Novelty,” proclaimed a ticket on a pipe fashioned in the likeness of a can-can dancer’s leg.
He glanced into another window and wondered what possible trade could be represented by the display there of a potted geranium, a hank of clothes line and a carton containing two dozen bottles of syrup of figs. Its air of surrealism was not dispelled by the printed announcement, gummed to the glass: Wardrobes Bought.
“Morning, brother.”
Purbright turned. A thin, black-clad figure perched on a bicycle was wobbling over the road towards him.
“Good afternoon, Mr Leaper.”
The cyclist wore a clerical collar but he was obviously very young. He alighted and acknowledged Purbright’s correction with a half smile and a quick, nervous nod. Although he gave the impression of being eager about something, he ventured no further remark, but stood holding his handlebars and staring at the front tyre.
“Lovely in the sun,” Purbright said, and began to walk on.
“Yes,” said Leaper. “I’ve still some calls to do.”
The inspector watched him bend to his peddling and rapidly disappear up the street. He was sceptical about the calls. The Reverend Leaper’s charge was, in fact, the Eastgate mission, and its communicants were never anywhere else to be called on. “Out for a breather, I suppose,” Purbright concluded.
After a few more minutes’ walk, he reached a part of the pavement that broadened back to where a four storeyed building stood on its own. Tall railings flanked the three steps that led to double doors standing open in the shelter of a stone portico.
This was, or rather once had been, the Flaxborough Radical Club. It was said that Mr Gladstone had cut a rose from the bush that still grew in the little earth enclosure beside the steps.
Just inside the doors was a list of the offices above. Purbright looked vainly for the name Staunch or reference to a matrimonial agency. Then he noticed at the far end of the stone-flagged entrance hall an illuminated sign. It hung over a doorway and bore two words in bright green Gothic lettering on a pink ground.
“Handclasp House”.
Chapter Five
Purbright pushed open the door. He entered a small square room, carpeted from wall to wall in dark grey. A paler, pinkish grey was the colour of the hessian-like material that covered the walls. There hung from the ceiling a plain white globe. Three chairs in mushroom plastic were the only furniture. The place was like an optician’s waiting room—neutral, reticent.
Set diagonally across the far corners of the square were two more doors. A little orange bulb glowed in the centre of each. Purbright approached the door on his right. Like the other, it bore a notice.