Purbright’s smile seemed to imply agreement that the notion was an odd one, but he asked nevertheless: “Do you possess, or have you ever worn, the sort of clothing which motor-cyclists usually adopt?”
Julia felt a small tremor—not quite of fright, perhaps, but certainly of sharp apprehension. She tried to consider how she could most safely frame a reply, but as the moments passed it became more and more difficult to think. In the end, she had to content herself with a bald negative.
“You’re happy, are you, with that answer, Mrs Harton? You did seem to be having some doubts.” Purbright’s concern sounded kindly enough. It did not, however, pass the guard of pensive Mr Scorpe.
“My client,” he declared, “is perfectly entitled to give the framing of her answers due consideration, inspector, however long that takes.”
“Oh, perfectly entitled, Mr Scorpe,” the inspector agreed. “I was only anxious that subsequent questions of mine, touching the same matters, should not sound wilfully obtuse.”
“I don’t think I quite take your point,” rumbled Mr Scorpe, sweeping off his great spectacles and peering at them, suspiciously.
“For example”—Purbright leaned down and took from the floor by his feet a loosely wrapped parcel—“I was going to ask Mrs Harton how these articles came to be in a cupboard in her kitchen.” He disclosed the jacket, breeches and boots.
“You do see my difficulty, Mr Scorpe? In view of her last reply?”
The solicitor said nothing. He looked at Julia.
She stared sullenly at the clothing, said she had never seen it before, and asked why she should take the inspector’s word for its having been found in her kitchen.
“Do you travel much, Mrs Harton?” Purbright asked.
“No more than other people, I suppose.”
“Are you a bad traveller? Does it upset you?”
“No. Why?”
“About three weeks ago, did you buy two tubes of ‘Karmz’ anti-sickness pills at Parkinsons, in East Street?”
“I did not.”
“Have you ever bought such tablets?”
“Never.”
Purbright glanced aside to see how Sergeant Love’s shorthand was coping, then took an envelope from the folder before him.
“Mrs Harton, I am about to show you a photograph and to ask you some questions concerning it. If you wish your solicitor or your father to see the photograph, you must say so. At this stage, I am prepared to respect your wishes.”
Julia watched him turn the envelope over in his hand, untuck the flap and extract a print. She was pale and looked, for the first time in the interview, deeply anxious.
Purbright passed the photograph across the table, face down. Julia picked it up with a little difficulty. She made no attempt to shield it from Mr Scorpe, who was now looking at her across the top of his spectacles as if, by that means, he might render their relationship totally impervious to embarrassment.
After staring at the picture for some seconds in what Love unhesitatingly decided to be horror, Julia addressed Purbright.
“Who the hell is this supposed to be?”
The inspector leaned forward to see what she was indicating with a tremulous forefinger.
“That, to the best of my knowledge, is Robert Tring.”
Julia half opened her mouth. She shook her head, looked about her with an expression of utter bewilderment, then scowled furiously at the photograph.
“Hey, this is some kind of very sick joke. Where the hell did you get it, anyway? It’s a fake, a trick. Honestly, it really is. It’s a filthy bloody fake!”
Mr Clay did not for an instant shift his gaze, which was fixed upon a point about three feet above his daughter’s head. He was in urgent communication with his colleague, GOD, M.A. Let not this reach the ears of the boys, and especially not those of McCorquadale and Le Brun J.
The inspector gently took back the print.
“The boots you are wearing—I beg your pardon—appear to be wearing, in the photograph have been compared very carefully with those I showed you just now,” he said. “And there are enough points of resemblance to convince me that they are the same. Do you want to say anything about that?”
Julia stared stonily down at the table. Then she glanced at the solicitor, at her father and back to Purbright.
“Would it be all right,” she asked, “if I had a word with Mr Scorpe in private?”
“Of course.”
The lawyer rose to his feet and followed Julia out of the room. He walked with a forward stoop and parted the tails of his long, old-fashioned black coat in order to scratch his bottom.
When they returned a few minutes later, Julia looked subdued but less distressed.
She nodded towards the parcel that still lay where Purbright had put it on the table. “I want to tell you about those,” she said.
“They aren’t mine, but I have seen them before. And I was wearing some of them when a photograph was taken of me. Not the photograph you showed me. I know nothing about that. It started as a sort of a joke to annoy my husband. No, not a joke. It was part of a plan, actually. Our marriage has been pretty dreadful for a long time. I wanted—I still want—a divorce. Then when this agency wrote to me I got in touch with them and...”
“Agency?” the inspector interrupted.
“It calls itself ‘Happy Endings’.”
Sergeant Love looked up, delight dawning on his face, but at once stooped again to note-taking, warned off by a nicker in Purbright’s eye.
“Go on, Mrs Harton.”
“Well, the idea was for them to negotiate a reasonable settlement with my husband on my behalf. I posed for a picture as a sort of good faith guarantee—so that I shouldn’t go back on the divorce once proceedings had been started.”
“If this photograph is not the one for which you posed, can you explain how the man Tring came to be on it?”
Mr Scorpe intervened. “My client has said already, inspector, that she considers the photograph to have been faked.”
“That is so, Mr Scorpe; but she has since had a private consultation with you. I simply wondered if she might now like to modify the earlier reply.”
Julia shook her head vigorously.
“Very well,” said Purbright. “In that case, I should like to ask you how the photograph came to be in a drawer at your home—one of the drawers of the dressing table in your bedroom—in which I am told you are in the habit of keeping personal property, and to which you possess the key.”
“Do you,” inquired Mr Scorpe majestically, “mean to tell us, inspector, that the police searched Mrs Harton’s house when she was not present and had not given permission?”