When this light is on, MR DONALD STAUNCH is at the service of any gentleman who wishes to know how we can work to help him. Come straight in and make yourself at home.
He crossed to the other door, and read:
When this light is on, the free and friendly advice of MRS SYLVIA STAUNCH is available to our lady callers. Don’t knock: come in and have a chat with her.
Clever, thought Purbright. He could not have devised a better formula himself to avoid the unfortunate ambiguity of merely labelling the doors “Ladies” and “Gentlemen”.
Perhaps in the circumstances he ought to have a word with Donald first. He opened the right hand door and stepped through.
The contrast to the aseptic waiting room was almost startling.
In the light from a tall standard lamp behind a cushion-strewn oaken settle, the inspector saw what might have been a stage set for an English domestic comedy. Two armchairs separated by a coffee table faced a glazed hearth in which glowed the dummy embers of an electric fire. Upon a sideboard were glasses, decanter, biscuit barrel and miniature dinner gong. An open work-basket was beside one armchair, a rush stool by the other. He saw somewhere a pipe lying in an ashtray, a small scattering of hair curlers, a magazine open at the picture of a nude. The smell of the room seemed to be compounded of flowers and fresh laundry, with just a suggestion of...he sniffed—yes, newly baked bread.
Clever, he said again to himself. Very. Even the versatile “Rex” must have been a little awed by the insight and ingenuity of the Staunches.
“Do sit down, Mr er...”
He turned.
There had entered by a door on the farther side of the fire-place a woman with bluish grey hair, expertly waved and lustered, and the glint around neck and wrists of rather a lot of jewellery. Her eyes were strong and alert.
“Purbright,” he supplied. “Detective Inspector.”
Her smile narrowed for an instant to a pout. It emphasized her precise but heavy application of lipstick. Then the expression of businesslike solicitude was back.
She sat and ventured the small joke that seemed a proper way of getting a measure of the policeman’s attitude.
“I presume you are not here to offer yourself as a client, inspector.”
Purbright smiled back. “Hardly.”
“I thought not. You don’t look married, and that is the surest sign that you have a wife and are well content with her.”
“I shall tell Mrs Purbright that.”
He saw, now that she was seated, that the tailoring of her clothes was excellent. She had slim, rather hard-looking legs.
“You are Mrs Staunch, of course?”
She inclined her head.
“I’d rather expected”—Purbright indicated the door by which he had entered—“that it would be Mr Staunch whom I would find.”
“A small deception of the trade, inspector. I have a husband, but so far as the agency is concerned Donald is a fiction. I interview all my clients myself. It’s just that men seem to find the first step easier if they think they’re going to deal with a man. Once the ice is broken, they’re quite happy to pour out their troubles to me.”
“Your husband takes no part in the work then?”
“In this work? Heavens, no. He has far too much of his own. In any case, I’m afraid Donald doesn’t approve. He has the traditional English middle-class attitude to matrimonial agencies. Terribly infra dig.”
“Yet in no other country are people so insistent on the importance of being introduced. Isn’t that just your function? To effect introductions?”
Mrs Staunch spread her hands. “Precisely!” Her smile implied that she found Purbright a very sensible fellow indeed. “But you try telling that to an architect!” She deepened her voice on the last word in mock solemnity.
“Architect?”
“Donald. Well, an architectural consultant, actually. Next time you want your cells rebuilding, or whatever, send for Donald. He did a prison block once.”
“It is your help rather than your husband’s for which I should be obliged at the moment, Mrs Staunch.”
She bent forward attentively. “Of course.”
“There are two women—both of them live here in Flaxborough, or have done up to recently—whom we are rather anxious to trace. One is a widow. The other is an unmarried woman. We think that they may have approached your agency, probably within the last six months or so.”
“You mean these women have disappeared?”
“In effect, yes. Certainly some of the relatives are worried and no one has been able to suggest any likely reason why either should have left home.”
Mrs Staunch reached for a note pad that was lying on the coffee table. “You’d better give me their names.”
“Mrs Lilian Bannister—she’s the widow, of course—and the other one’s called Martha Reckitt.” He leaned forward and put two photographs on the table. Mrs Staunch finished writing and picked them up.
She looked at Purbright. “You think about six months ago?”
“In Mrs Bannister’s case, four exactly.”
She frowned. “Why ‘exactly’?”
“That was the date on a cheque for twenty guineas which she made out to you.”
“Is it because of that cheque that you came to see me?”
“Because of the counterfoil, actually. At the moment we don’t know that the cheque reached you.”
“Oh, it did.” Some of Mrs Staunch’s affability seemed to have evaporated. She spoke quietly and with care. “Mrs Bannister paid her registration fee and used the services of my agency for several weeks. I’m fairly sure that the other lady was a client as well—I’ll have a look in my records in a moment. The trouble is...” She paused.
Purbright watched her stroke the edge of one of the pictures reflectively with a long, puce-varnished fingernail.
“Tell me if I’m jumping too far ahead, inspector, but I can see that you believe something has happened to these women. Which leads you—naturally—to suppose some kind of criminal is responsible. Which in turn gives you the idea that they might have met him, or them, through the agency. Am I right?”
“I wouldn’t quite...”
“You might as well be frank, inspector. I certainly intend to be.”
“All right. That’s roughly the argument so far.”
She nodded. “Now let me tell you something of how this sort of agency operates. I want you to see certain difficulties that probably haven’t occurred to you.
“In the first place, it is terribly important for people who come here to feel that the whole thing is strictly confidential. It is this that forces us to adopt certain forms of procedure that you might think—well—childish, melodramatic. My husband thinks it’s awful; he calls it M.I.5 for the lovelorn. What he doesn’t understand is that you have to sort of cage lonely people up before you can do anything for them—it’s safety they really want. And that means secrecy.
“Right. Someone comes along. Mrs Bannister, say. I list as much as she’ll tell me about herself—age, hobbies, tastes, what she admires in a man...”