“Mr Bollinger, are you acquainted with Mrs Julia Harton?”
“No, of course not. Why should I be?”
The inspector smiled. “No, it would be a long shot, wouldn’t it, Wimbledon to Flaxborough? Don’t worry, sir; we shall make full use of what you’ve told us. Thank you for coming forward.”
When he had gone, Mr Bollinger ventured the opinion that Mr Purbright seemed rather a decent chap, and Love said yes, but he was sometimes a bit too soft for his own good, whereupon the security man from Cultox reflected that if the sergeant believed that, he still had much to learn about his superior officer.
Chapter Twenty
The arrest took place very quietly the afternoon of Friday, September 19th, at the defendant’s home. Neighbours were given no inkling of drama. Three people arrived by motor-car, gained admittance in a polite but casual manner, and departed, augmented by one, a few minutes later in a style no less friendly and informal. Anyone fortuitously on the watch would have concluded that here was a party embarking on a holiday weekend, for strapped to the suitcase carried from the house by one of the callers was a tennis racquet.
The brief proceedings at the special court convened in the magistrates’ retiring room were similarly undramatic. Councillor Mrs Bella Purdy, JP, who had been requisitioned for the occasion from the counter of her husband’s flower and garden furniture shop in Hooper Rise, listened with enormous gravity to the charge, to Purbright’s evidence of arrest, and to his application for a remand in custody for medical reports. “That will be granted,” announced Mrs Purdy, doing her best to sound as if the decision had been worked out by herself.
When the accused, whose habit of staring at Purbright with a sort of hungry devotion surprised the magistrate considerably, had been gently marshalled away, Mrs Purdy pronounced the affair “very sad”. She was privately hopeful that the inspector would divulge what lay behind the sensational-sounding charge, but he merely thanked her courteously for her attendance and returned her to the care of the patrolman who had been waiting to take her back to the shop.
There, Mr Purdy became the first member of the general public to learn that pretty Bobby-May Lintz, of Queen’s Road, had been put away and would soon be tried on the charge that she “did unlawfully endanger life by the administration of a drug or drugs; and that further she did unlawfully cause the death of Robert Digby Tring by the administration of the said drug or drugs in a moving vehicle, namely, part of an apparatus known as ‘Moon Shot’, in a public place, namely, Market Place, Flaxborough, contrary to the Queen’s Peace.”
After the hearing, the chief constable held in his office what Sergeant Love would have termed a de-briefing session, but what Mr Chubb, less familiar with the terminology of dynamism, described simply as “clearing up a few points about this very regrettable business”.
It was attended by Purbright and his detective sergeant and by Bill Malley, the coroner’s officer.
Malley set things off by squinting into the bowl of his short, black pipe and commenting that it was just as well that cases of that kind had never come to light in The Old Man’s Time. “Hated women, did poor old Albert. Lawyers do, mostly. Wonder why.”
“Mrs Harton will be relieved,” said the chief constable to Purbright.
“She will indeed, sir. She was in a singularly unpleasant position at one time.”
“Partly through her own fault, Mr Purbright.”
The inspector conceded that Julia Harton had behaved foolishly. “But not more so,” he added, “than a great number of people who allow themselves to be impressed by the claims of advertisers.” She had been lucky, of course; the seemingly damning evidence of the photograph of her with an unscarred Tring might never have been proved a fake had not Grandma Tring mentioned Digger’s “poor little good eye”.
“Have we had any success in tracing this so-called Rothermere person?” asked Mr Chubb.
“No, sir. Harton persists in denying that he ever had anything to do with him.”
“Which makes Harton as big a liar as his dad used to be,” put in Malley.
The chief constable looked pained at this slighting reference to a member of the medical profession, albeit one who had deserted to California, a place where, he understood, doctors had “offices” and handled money between operations.
“There’s no point, I suppose,” said Mr Chubb to Purbright, “in taking the Harton business further? Not that I have any sympathy for the fellow, you understand; he did try his damnedest to make his wife seem a criminal. But so did she, you say?”
“Oh, yes, sir. She’s been perfectly frank about it. Always with the provision, though, that she wanted no more than to frighten him into giving her reasonable divorce terms.”
“Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander—something of that about it, by the look of things,” said Mr Chubb, looking not at Purbright, whose appreciation of homely aphorisms he had reason not to trust, but at Sergeant Love. Love obliged with a great nodding of concurrence.
“Did the girl’s father have no idea of what had been going on?” asked the chief constable.
“None whatever, sir,” Purbright replied. “Harton was a regular visitor to the house, but only as a fellow tennis enthusiast, so far as the parents were aware. Not that her intention to be the second Mrs Harton would have met with their disapproval. They have a highly developed sense of class.”
“It was she who set her cap at him, was it—not the other way round?”
“She took the initiative, certainly: she is that kind of girl. We don’t know, but the probability is that she also made all the running at the start of her affair with Tring. The difference between their social backgrounds might well have slowed him up in the first place.”
“Not for long,” put in Malley. “Not the Trings. She’ll have been put to the bull inside a week, take it from me.”
“I wouldn’t argue that point,” said the inspector, “but what is quite clear now is the girl’s readiness to discard a lover who had become socially embarrassing. That Hell’s Angel gear was a good enough disguise for the odd jaunt—and doubtless exciting sexually, as you’ll appreciate, sir—but it wasn’t going to get her far with the Tennis Club set.”
“That girl was educated at a convent,” said Mr Chubb, as if deploring the modern unreliability of brand names.
“For which,” Purbright informed him, “her great uncle made specific provision in his will. Did you know that, sir?”
“Old Marcus Gwill?”
“Yes. Apparently he considered his nephew’s family unlikely ever to acquire polish from George Lintz.”
Sergeant Love had been following the conversation with cheerful, sparrow-like attention. “Do you suppose,” he now put in, “that he left them his fancy whisky with the same idea?
Purbright said he doubted if any man—Gwill least of all—would carry altruism so far as that. It would have been to no avail, anyway: the half-dozen whole bottles and three or four quarterns of Glenmurren had stood neglected at the back of a shelf in Gladys Lintz’s larder until the moment when they caught the eye of Bobby-May, on the forage for some palatable solvent of “Karmz” tablets.