“Yiss,” snapped Grandma Tring, to Braine’s surprise and alarm. He stared at the back of her head and fancied for an instant that he saw supplementary eyes, but they were only the glass heads of her hat pins.
“And plenty of sugar, mind,” she added.
Inspector Purbright found the old woman contentedly nosing the steam from a canteen mug. He told her it was a shame about young Digger, and he was sorry.
She accepted his sympathy without remark, but seemed to pass it as genuine. Rocking gently over her tea, she asked when that dratted trial was going to be got over because it wasn’t doing any good to anybody.
“It’s an inquest, Miss Tring, not a trial. The coroner asks questions and tries to find out what caused the accident.”
“That was nivver no bloody accident, son. You can have twenty inquests and they wain’t make it any different. Inquests isn’t nobbut wind and piss.”
Purbright appeared to consider this axiom carefully. Then he asked:
“Miss Tring, have you any reason for supposing that your grandson’s death was other than accidental?”
She gave a businesslike grunt and leaned forward.
“Reasons? Listen, I could give you reasons enough to boil three and bust six, but you ain’t got all day no more than I have, so shut up and pay heed. It weren’t accidental because it were on purpose. That’s the first thing you niwer got told, ain’t it. And here’s another. There was them after ’im as he knew something about and likely wanted a quid or two for, as is natural in a lad.”
“Ah, now that I did not know.” The inspector nodded sapiently.
Grandma Tring paused to suck up some tea. Her face saddened. “We reckoned at home,” she said, “that young Digger had got into bad company.”
The possibility of their existing within a hundred miles of Flaxborough any company susceptible of unfavourable comparison with the Trings had never occurred to Purbright.
The old woman, supposing his startled expression to indicate concern, elaborated.
“What kind o’ company? Fancy company. That’s what kind. And fancy’s bad as often as not. We reckoned Digger was sarvin’ wimmin out of ’is class.”
“Sarving?”
She peered at him, dubiously. “Aye, sarvin’—like ’orses an’ ’ogs. Ain’t you nivver sarved yer missus?”
He led her back to the point at issue. With what lady, or ladies, had her grandson formed a misalliance?
Ah, she couldn’t help him there—not as to names. Digger and his friends didn’t use names. The girls they picked up were too busy getting pleasured by one lad or another in the old bike shed to be called anything special. Well, when you were young, you didn’t bother. But there was one tottie she’d seen him with in town, not just once neither, though at a distance, and that one she could tell right away was the scent and pink frock kind. And she’d got a motor of her own.
“A married woman, would you say, Miss Tring?” Purbright asked.
“Shouldn’t wonder. Them’s the ones as touch up easiest. Specially after church.” Grandma Tring’s sudden cackle made the inspector jump. He recalled, and did not disbelieve, Sergeant Bill Malley’s assertion that she was frequently the guest occupant, with her knitting, of the big old basket chair in the building behind Edward Crescent that served the Flaxborough Hellcats as motor-cycle store, clubhouse and bordello.
“If you’ll forgive my saying so, what you’ve told me up to now doesn’t add up to very much,” Purbright said. “It can hardly be said to prove that someone wished your grandson harm.”
Grandma Tring scowled. “All right, then. What about the photo, eh? That fellow who came round. Said he was from the paper, but he bloody wasn’t, ’cause I’ve asked. And what”—she thrust her face closer—“about Digger’s medal?”
“Medal?”
“Ah, they niwer told you about that, did they?”
“No. I can’t say they did. What did he win it for?”
“I an’t sayin’ ’e won it. Not like in a war or jumpin’ in rivers an’ that. But ’e’d got it and once ’e showed it me, and ’e said, Gran, ’e said, that little old sod’s worth a thousand pounds any day I like to pick up a tellyphone. That’s what ’e said. And ’e meant it. A thousand pounds. So where’s it gone, eh?”
“How do you know it’s gone anywhere?”
“It’s not in Digger’s things. We’ve all had a look.”
“Can you describe this medal?” Purbright squatted down by the old woman’s side and handed her a pencil and a folded envelope. “Show me what it looked like.”
She smoothed the paper flat on a thigh skirted in what seemed to be black roofing felt, and made a wavery circle with the pencil.
“Ain’t no good at drorin’ ”, she said. A few squiggles and dots appeared within the circle, which was about an inch and a quarter across. “Them’s printing,” explained Grandma Tring. “Words.”
“Can you remember what they were?”
She shook her head. “Digger kep’ it in ’is ’and. Aye, but I reckon”—an eye half closed in effort of recall—“as it was somethin’ to do with Mister Churchill.”
“Sir Winston Churchill?”
“Yiss. ’Im.”
There was silence while the old woman stared at her sketch and ruminatively twisted the little bunch of hairs that decorated a mole on her jaw. Then the pencil went to work again. Some short jabs and dashes appeared on the rim of the circle.
“It was cut about a bit,” she announced. “Sort of jaggy.”
Purbright took back pencil and envelope and rose to his feet.
“I’ll certainly let you know if it turns up, Miss Tring. But there is something else missing, isn’t there? A framed picture of your gra...”
“Silver.” The word snipped off the tail of his sentence like a sprung mousetrap.
“My sergeant tells me that the man to whom you handed that photograph—and frame—told you he was from the Flaxborough Citizen office. You now know that wasn’t true.”
She pursed her lips, as if the only appropriate comment was too venomous to be let out.
“I understand from Mr Love that he was a bearded man, smartly dressed, well spoken. A biggish man—is that right?”
Yes, that was it, biggish. And with the looks of a fancy eater. A prissy talker, too, as if he had a bit of foreigner in him. She would not be all that surprised if he put scent on his whiskers.
“What sort of questions did he ask you, Miss Tring?”
“Well, about Digger, didn’t ’e. Where ’e went to school and if ’e’d played football and such and where ’e went to work. All that. It would’ve been a lovely piece in the paper after what I told him.”
“And what did you tell him?”