Purbright gave him first a summary of the interview with Harton.
Mr Chubb listened, as he always did, with courtesy and every sign of attention. But then he frowned dubiously.
“Rather bizarre goings on, I should have thought, Mr Purbright. I know odd things happen nowadays even in the nicest districts, but the liaison alleged by this man sounds right out of character.”
“Do you know Mrs Harton, sir?”
Mr Chubb blew upon some imaginary porridge. “Not to say know her exactly.” He perked up one eyebrow. “Of course, you know who her father is?”
“Clay. Headmaster at the Grammar School“.
“Not very nice for him,” said Mr Chubb, ruminatively.
The inspector said no, he supposed it wasn’t. Then he handed to the chief constable the photograph that had been found in the dressing-table drawer at Oakland.
Four or five seconds went by.
“Goodness gracious me!” breathed Mr Chubb at last. He gave the picture further scrutiny, holding it for a while upside down.
When he finally handed it back, it was with a slow shake of the head.
“I simply do not understand,” he said, “how a young woman of good family and decent schooling, who has married well and lives in a beautiful house, could sink to behaviour like this. I sometimes am tempted to despair of human nature, Mr Purbright, I really am.”
The inspector said: “The implication of a blackmail attempt is very strong, sir. That message could mean nothing else. So Mrs Harton’s reaction—assuming that she did engineer the death of her lover—might almost be construed as a reason for you not to feel too pessimistic.”
Mr Chubb frowned. “I don’t quite see what you mean.”
“Well, sir, she must have been sensitive to the value of her respectability, after all. Otherwise, she would not have sought to protect it.”
Mr Chubb was a far from unintelligent man. But in his long and, on the whole, amicable relationship with his detective inspector, he had never been able to decide to his own satisfaction whether Purbright’s observations were intended to flatter or to bewilder him. He therefore had evolved a specially pliable defensive shield which could take, as seemed apposite at the moment, the shape of wisdom absolute, of a democratic willingness to learn, of the remembrance of an important engagement elsewhere, or even of a good-humoured and altogether spurious stupidity.
On this particular occasion, still winded perhaps by what he had just seen, he contented himself with: “Be that as it may, Mr Purbright,” and asked what progress there had been towards tracing Mrs Harton.
“None so far, sir. She has some distant relations in the West Country, according to her husband, but he thinks they are virtually strangers so far as she is concerned. Such friends as we have been able to interview up to now profess themselves completely ignorant.”
“Why should she have taken it into her head to run away when she did, instead of straight away after that fellow’s death? She waited four or five days.”
“I put that point to her husband, sir. He believes she went off with a man. But of course he’s been seeing lovers under the bed ever since he found that photograph. Her having waited for some specific acquaintance—accomplice, even—might explain the delay in leaving. I’m not convinced, though.”
“You’re not?”
“No, sir. There was no reason, so far as she could have known, to run off. Her association with Tring had been kept reasonably secret. She had gone to a lot of trouble to disguise herself as just another motor-cycling pal of his. And there was a very fair chance that the coroner would record a misadventure verdict. The most likely explanation is that she panicked because of something she learned that evening at her husband’s works. There may even have been a row; he’d not admit it, of course. He says he didn’t actually see his wife when she came to the factory.”
“She must have gone for some purpose, though.”
“You would think so, wouldn’t you.”
“Tell me, Mr Purbright”—the chief constable shifted his position slightly—“what do you make of this tale that’s going around the club tonight?”
Purbright knew that Mr Chubb would not make such a crassly enigmatic reference just to annoy him or to sustain some sort of “old buffer” act. It was a sign of his being worried about something. Purbright patiently awaited enlightenment.
“It is being suggested,”said Mr Chubb, very carefully, “that... no, no, not suggested—hinted—it is being hinted that Mrs Harton has not left Flaxborough at all. That she is still—you take my point, don’t you?—still at her husband’s factory. In, ah, one form or another.” And the chief constable looked down at his impeccably polished brogues with an expression of grave distaste.
“A very attractive theory,” said the inspector, with a cheerfulness that earned him a sharp glance from Mr Chubb, “and one that was bound to be put forward sooner or later, bearing in mind the nature of the factory’s product.”
“You don’t think there might be something in it?”
“No, sir. Not unless Harton is incredibly devious—and lucky enough to have had what they call the ingredient intake section of the plant to himself long enough to butcher his wife—and I’m afraid I mean that literally, sir, in this context—clean up, and dispose of clothing and so on. The machinery is very sophisticated, apparently. It rejects manufactured substances such as cloth and also anything harder than bone—teeth, for instance, and metal objects.”
Mr Chubb looked impressed. “You’re extremely well-informed, Mr Purbright.”
“I thought it would do no harm to learn something of the mechanics of the thing. Harton’s works manager was at the plant when I went to look round earlier this afternoon. He was very helpful. He was also insistent that there is a rule that the intake section should never be unattended while the machinery is running, so that would seem to preclude any attempt by Harton to dispose of a body. Incidentally, it was at the intake that Tring used to be employed.”
“Indeed,” said the chief constable. He turned and retrieved his cap and gloves. “Should you require any further help, Mr Purbright....”
“That is very generous of you, sir, but I propose to run the thing down now until tomorrow. Our main hope of a development lies in efforts which doubtless are being made elsewhere to find our fugitive. There should be a story of sorts in some of the papers tomorrow. The Press is a great turner over of stones.”
Purbright’s confidence proved not to be misplaced. No fewer than five national Sunday newspapers carried accounts the following morning. They ranged from the Express’s concern for a missing heiress to the revelation in the Graphic that a fun-loving housewife was being sought by the police following the death of a local Hell’s Angel in a Tunnel of Love.