Miss Teatime regretfully declined. There had been reaching her for some minutes the sounds of gnawing at wood.
It did not strike Mrs Copley until much later that the lady from the Charities Alliance had forgotten to give the reason for her call.
Miss Teatime drove back into town the way she had come. Her next destination was Four Foot Haven, boarding kennels and lost pets’ pound, off Heston Lane.
The fair was over. The rides and sideshows had been dismantled during the weekend, and the last of the great steam engines was panting and snorting its way over the town bridge into Northgate. Its canopy, borne aloft on six gleaming twists of brass, could be seen swaying above the mass of cars and lorries which it held to a crawl in the glutted Market Place.
Once across the bridge, Miss Teatime turned left into Burton Place and entered Heston Lane at the opposite corner.
The Four Foot Haven consisted of a small huddle of sheds and Nissen huts within a perimeter fence. It was reached by way of a narrow track between fields at the back of the big Edwardian villas on the north side of Heston Lane.
Miss Teatime’s car drew up on a patch of cinder by the most imposing of the sheds. It had WARDEN on the door, which was a little open.
She stood for a moment, gazing across the open fields. The nearest buildings were those of Twilight Close, toy-like amongst neat shrubs and hedges. To the left was something bigger, newer-looking, more stark: the brick and asbestos gable of the main bay of Northern Nutritionals.
Miss Teatime considered. No, too far. A nice idea, but really too far.
She moved to the other side of her car and looked in other directions. Ah, that was more promising. A shed she had not noticed before, set apart from the rest, thirty or forty yards from the fence gate. She began walking towards it.
“Hey!”
Miss Teatime halted and looked back.
In the now open doorway of the Warden’s hut stood a tall, angular, loosely strung-together sort of man, lank-haired and pale, whose most immediately noticeable feature was a nose like an inflamed spike.
“You can’t go over there,” the man shouted. “That’s private property.”
“My dear Mr Leaper, if I were to restrict my movements to public property, I should spend the rest of my life in police stations, town halls and lavatories. Is that what you wish for me?”
The Warden wiped his spike on his sleeve and said he hadn’t noticed it was her, but over there was private all the same.
Leonard Leaper, even at the relatively early age of 35, had a lot of former about him. He was a former newspaper reporter, a former minister of religion, a former gas fitter, a former valet. Having failed from his earliest years to develop any sense of relationship between ambition and capability, he had from time to time offered himself as candidate for jobs ranging from cinema projectionist to licentiate in dental surgery, and had actually landed some of them. His self-confidence was vast, but it was based upon nothing but peasant-like simplicity of mind and the central indestructible conviction that he would one day be king of England.
Miss Teatime had decided to risk one quick audacious bid to trap this heir unapparent into an indiscretion from which he could not retreat.
She drew close, glanced about her secretively, and confided: “Mr Leaper, a couple of R.I.P. commissions are arriving today. Do I take it that there will be”—she indicated with a nod the solitary shed—“accommodation ready?”
The Warden’s small but protuberant eyes regarded her with what she feared was blank incomprehension. Several seconds passed. Then, just when she was about to try and laugh off what she had said (and what a grim exercise, she reflected, that would be), Leonard Leaper spoke: .
“Here,” he said, “was that you on the phone this morning?”
She thought quickly. Was she to go a little further in? Or to start laughing? Audacity won.
“Yes, I’m sorry I was not able to speak freely. People kept coming in.”
Mr Leaper’s manner eased slightly. It became leavened with a sort of gawky bravado. He looked Miss Teatime up and down. “Fancy you being in it as well, and you on all them committees and everything.”
Miss Teatime bore this slander with fortitude. She tried to look roguish.
“Mind you,” said the Warden, “you’re unlucky. Pro tem, anyway.”
“Unlucky?”
“Well, it’s stopped for now because of that slip-up and then Digger’s accident and everything. Nar-poo—finish.”
“Oh. Indeed. Because of the slip-up. Yes, of course.” Miss Teatime nodded wisely while she devised another piece of bait. Leaper clearly was susceptible to what he believed to be criminal’s argot.
“In my opinion, Mr Leaper,” she said, leaning even closer towards him, “it was Digger’s intention to blow the whistle.”
Surprise, dismay, alarm, invested Leaper’s countenance in rapid succession.
“Stone me!”
He made a brief twitchy survey of the scenery, then ushered Miss Teatime into his hut.
It smelled of sacking and strong tea, but was reasonably clean. She sat, uninvited, in the old-fashioned swing chair that was the only furniture it contained other than a deal table and a couple of shelves.
Leaper propped himself up against the wall. “Stone me!” he said again (What a curiously biblical plea, thought Miss Teatime) and then, “Digger, eh? If anybody’d asked me, I’d have said it was that bint of his who was poison.”
“Mrs Harton?” ventured Miss Teatime.
“Nar!” exclaimed the Warden, contemptuously. “Digger’s bint. His fancy piece. That kennel maid that used to be here.”
“You did not trust the kennel maid?”
“She was creepy. She said she wanted to be a vet so as she could open up veins, and all the time she was playing at ball like some little kid.”
Miss Teatime did not need entirely to rely on pretence in order to appear keenly interested.
“You know, you really are a most perceptive observer, Mr Leaper,” she told him. “Digger’s breach of trust—his double-cross, rather—is beginning to be understandable. But, of course, you already have worked that out for yourself.”
Leaper nodded carelessly. He was doing something to his thumb-nail with a jack knife.
“What was the girl’s name again? I can never remember it for long.” Miss Teatime hoped that this bit of crude skating. would not bring her to grief.
The thick ice of Leaper’s self-esteem held.
Without looking up, he said: “Lintz. Bobby-May Lintz.” His lip curled. “Bobby-May! I ask you! Her old man’s editor of the local rag.” Ex-journalist Leaper would never have referred to the Flaxborough Citizen in such derogatory terms had he not once applied for, and been summarily denied, the post of its assistant editor.