Harton moved round in front of him and squatted a little to one side of the dressing table. He pointed. “This I left until last. It was always something private to her; I didn’t have a key.”
Purbright leaned close. Harton was showing him a small drawer, the lowest of three on the left hand side of the dressing table. Some of the rosewood veneer was split away near the keyhole. “I had to force it,” Harton said. He pulled the drawer out and laid it on the cover of the nearer bed.
Without saying anything, Harton picked up the topmost object in the drawer and handed it to Purbright.
It was an envelope. A slightly grubby, unaddressed, unsealed manilla envelope.
Purbright lifted the flap and took out the photograph it contained. He glanced immediately at Harton and saw that his face was tense and almost white. He motioned him to sit on the edge of the bed.
“It’s not very nice,” said Harton, “to have to show you a thing like that.”
“No, sir.” The simple, gentle negative was kinder than any formally framed expression of regret. Privately, though, Purbright was wondering why Harton had thought it necessary to share knowledge of the photograph.
Then he saw that bluish indentations on the surface of the picture were in fact words. They had been scrawled with a ball-point pen. He tilted the photograph slightly towards the light from the window and read what the words were.
Worth £2000, ducky? Ask your old man.
Purbright indicated them to Harton. “Crude. But explicit.”
“Certainly.”
“Do you think she made any attempt to raise this sort of money, Mr Harton? Recently, I mean?”
“Not from me.”
“Do you suppose ‘old man’ could mean Mrs Harton’s father?”
“I doubt it. He’s only a school teacher.”
“Still, it’s the implication that matters—the threat of exposure. That’s clear enough.”
Harton put forward his little finger, hesitantly, as if wishing to indicate something hateful. “The boots, you see? The same.”
“Yes, sir; that is my impression, too.”
Angrily, Harton turned away his head. “By Christ! I wonder if she’d have looked so pleased with herself if she’d known she was posing with a bloody blackmailer!”
Purbright replaced the photograph in the envelope. “I’ll take this with me, if you don’t mind, sir. You needn’t worry. It will be treated with the very greatest discretion.”
Harton made as if to object, then paused, shrugged. “Of course, inspector.”
The little drawer was between them on the bed. Purbright bent and looked into it, gently shifting its contents about with one finger.
“What are these, sir?”
Purbright held forward in his palm two pale blue plastic tubes, each about four inches long and fitted with a white cap.
“No idea. It’s all her stuff in there. Odds and ends. There was only the photograph that was important, though.”
While Purbright examined the tubes and read what was printed upon them, he addressed Harton in a quiet, almost absent-minded manner.
“Do you have any suggestion to offer, sir, as to why your wife is missing? By ‘serious trouble’ I’m sure you mean something more drastic than running away from the consequences of a rash affair, even if they do include attempted extortion.”
Harton made no reply. Purbright looked up. “Am I right?”
Harton got up abruptly and strode to the window. He stared out.
“Inspector, I want you to believe that I am only talking to you now because there seems no other way of helping my wife. I would have kept silent—I would have lied—I would have done anything, however stupid, if she had asked me. But she simply ran away, so I have to make my own decision. All I can do is to pass to you such facts as I have, also my impressions. I hope to God some of those impressions are mistaken. But we shall only know when she is found and everything thrashed out in the open. Pray God I’m not making things worse for her.”
Harton turned and faced the inspector. He was rubbing the tops of the fingers of his right hand into the palm of the left and watching the action as if expecting something to come of it. Purbright waited silently.
“I’ve told you that I knew about Julia and Tring—well, knew half and guessed half. You can imagine that hearing at work last Monday about his getting killed in that accident came as a bit of a shock. Later on, I thought about it and read what there was in the paper. I suppose I ought to have felt some sort of satisfaction, but I didn’t. Things didn’t feel right. I kept on watching Julia for signs of reaction, but instead of looking upset she seemed actually calmer than usual. Then, all of a sudden, she wasn’t there any more. From that moment I was really scared. And why?—Because it was then that I admitted to myself the possibility I’d been afraid to recognise immediately after the accident.”
“Which was, sir?”
“That Julia had had something to do with it.”
“With the accident?”
Harton nodded. “I was awake nearly all the night, wondering and worrying, but it wasn’t until the next day—last night, actually, as I told you—that I came across that motor-cycling kit. And after that, the picture, that filthy bloody picture. From then on, I tried not to think. I just rang Chubb and waited for somebody to come.”
Purbright replaced in the drawer the two tubes.
“I’m sure you’ve acted for the best in the circumstances, Mr Harton. I appreciate what a strain this business must be. What I propose to do now is this. I shall ask my sergeant to await me at headquarters. Then, with your permission, we shall come back here again as soon as possible after lunch and take a thorough look round the house. We can also use the opportunity to ask you a few more questions and perhaps take your formal statement.”
Harton seemed to be only half aware of Purbright’s words. He stared in front of him for two or three seconds, then gave a start. “Yes, sure, of course...” He looked round the room, saw the phone as if for the first time, and waved towards it.
“Thank you, sir.”
Sergeant Love, Purbright reflected as he picked up the phone, was not going to be pleased. He had planned, with that abiding childlike confidence in the inviolability of sporting fixtures which made him one with Drake, to travel to Peterborough that afternoon as a co-opted member of the Flaxborough Furnishing Company’s mixed hockey club, for which his young lady played goal.
Chapter Thirteen
Before that Saturday was over, the immediate enjoyment prospects of more officers than Sergeant Love were dashed. On Purbright’s urgent application, Mr Chubb agreed that every CID man who could be reached either on or off duty, should be mobilised, together with three or four uniformed constables.