Their tasks, consisting of nothing more dramatic than walking about and asking much the same questions over and over again, had four main objects: to bring to a conclusion the inquiry already instigated into the local provenance of Glenmurren malt whisky; to find some person among the relatives and known acquaintances of Julia Harton who knew or could suggest her present whereabouts; to seek among the showmen, odd job men and hangers-on in the fair a more satisfactory clue to the identity of the second rider in the module “Hermes” than had been forthcoming so far; and to speed the interrogation of counter assistants at every chemist’s shop in the locality where someone might have bought recently two tubes of “Karmz” pills for the prevention of travel sickness.
Aid on a wider, but not necessarily more productive, scale was canvassed in a message for transmission to all police forces throughout the country. This asked that Mrs Julia Harton, aged 31, housewife, of number six, Oakland, Flaxborough, who might have registered at an hotel on or subsequent to September 11, be detained for questioning in relation to the death of a man in a fairground at Flaxborough on September 6. The picture circulated was a wedding portrait by Spoongate Studio, Flaxborough, and not, Purbright thought, much of a current likeness, but he had firmly vetoed Love’s suggestion that a more lively response to their appeal would be secured by the circulation of copies of the other photograph in their possession.
First result of the local campaign of inquiry was achieved in less than an hour. The officer responsible was P.C. Hessle. In the second pharmacy he entered, a shop on East Street, he found a girl who remembered very well selling two packs of “Karmz” the previous week. The double sale was what impressed the occasion on her mind; it was the normal thing to buy one pack only—well, they weren’t sweets, were they?
P.C. Hessle, overwhelmingly conscious of the gravity of his mission, forbore from trading opinions. He demanded instead an effort to recall the age, sex, and physical characteristics of the party who had made the purchase.
“Well, it was this bird in motor-cycle get-up, wasn’t it?” replied the girl, in that curiously rhetorical tone of disdain that implied the questioner to be an ageing mental defective.
“I’m asking you, Miss,” said Mr Hessle, icily.
“And I’m telling you, aren’t I? Of course, it could have been a feller. You can’t tell, can you?”
Pressed for less equivocal details, the girl conferred with the shop manager and then told the policeman that yes, it was last week—on the Thursday morning, actually—and it must have been a bird because she spoke, well, a bit posh, sort of, but nobody could be sure, not with that great skid-lid hiding half her face.
P.C. Hessle’s finding, such as it was, proved an isolated success. None of the “Moon Shot” operators could add to what they had told both police and insurance men already, which was simply that apart from noticing a number of motor-cyclists among the customers (a not unusual circumstance) they had seen nothing memorable in the way of faces or behaviour on the night of the accident.
The two plain clothes men entrusted with the straightforward but substantial labour of visiting every one of the forty-three innkeepers of Flaxborough and the manager of every shop and off-licence where spirits were sold, had worked by closing time about two-thirds of the way through their list. They had found no one who could recall having stocked Glenmurren whisky within the past ten years or even having been asked for it. It was, the more knowledgeable declared, a very pricey liquor and not often encountered in these hard times.
Perhaps the most discouraging outcome of the day’s work was the discovery that Julia Harton’s sole surviving near relative, her father, Mr Clay, headmaster of Flaxborough Grammar School, was not only ignorant of his daughter’s disappearance but resolved to treat it with the utmost scepticism until the police could prove to his satisfaction that she was not making a melodramatic gesture in the hope of discrediting him, Mr Clay, “in the eyes of my boys”.
It was Sergeant Love who had gone directly from the Hartons’ home to interview Mr Clay at the house on Field Street still known by its eighteenth-century name of the Headmaster’s Lodging.
“Do you mean you think Mrs Harton may have gone off just to annoy you?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t say that, exactly,” replied Mr Clay. He rubbed his nose, as if to impart an even higher polish to it, which would not have been easy, for every feature between Mr Clay’s stiff white linen collar and the first ledger-line of his thin but strictly distributed hair was as shiny as glazed porcelain. “No, no—not to annoy me.”
“Why, then?” persisted Love.
“Why does any young person in these times do anything? To express what he or she supposes to be freedom from obligation and independence of authority. A passing phase, one hopes.”
“Your daughter’s a bit of a campus rebel, is she?” inquired the sergeant, good-naturedly desirous of showing himself familiar with the phraseology of higher education.
Mr Clay looked strongly inclined to put Love in detention, but asked instead if it was “that husband of hers” who had taken the story of disappearance to the police.
“Mr Harton telephoned us yesterday.”
“Mm,” said Mr Clay, pursing his lips so that his cheeks looked shinier than ever. Then, with sudden end-of-interview resolution, he strode to the street door, opened it and bade Love a good afternoon.
As the sergeant walked from the Lodging, he would not have been surprised to hear Mr Clay call out: “Next boy!”
The police station that evening presented to such pedestrians as still were about in Fen Street the sight of an unusual number of lighted windows, associated, it seemed, with the presence at the roadside of several cars and the occasional arrival or departure of men who looked as if they had been on their feet all day.
Among the cars was the chief constable’s Daimler. Mr Chubb, anxious to subscribe to the principle of equality of sacrifice, had closed his greenhouse, noted that it was a poor night on television, and deputed to Mrs Chubb the feeding of the dogs. He then had looked in at his club for an hour or so and was now, at a little before nine o’clock, asking Love in the front office if Mr Purbright was still in the building.
“The inspector’s in the murder room,” Love declared.
Mr Chubb stared at him in alarm. “The what?”
“In the CID office,” the sergeant amended.
The chief constable found Purbright and two detectives seated at the big central table. One of the detectives was screwing some sheets of newspaper into a ball. Purbright was wiping his hands on his handkerchief. There was a smell of fried fish.
“Ah—a little ad hoc nourishment, gentlemen?” Mr Chubb donned a democratic smile. It put Purbright in mind of toothache, bravely endured.
The two detectives murmured something about “pressing on” and went out with their ball of fish and chip wrappings.
“And how are things going, Mr Purbright?” Mr Chubb placed a pair of yellow pigskin gloves inside the slightly raffish county cap that he wore as a sign of off-duty diligence. The cap he set on the top of a filing cabinet, beside which he remained, leaning lightly back against it, hands clasped behind.