Purbright and Malley met later. With the inspector was Detective Sergeant Love. Purbright indicated him and said to Malley: “Sid here has been much abused by Grandma Tring.”
“Who hasn’t.”
“Quite. But in this case her complaint is specific and a bit odd.”
Love spoke. “She says that somebody’s pinched a photograph of Digger.”
Malley looked up from the short, black pipe he had been probing with a piece of wire. “I’d have thought the only photograph of anybody in that family had been taken by us. Profile and full face.”
“I don’t think she was telling the tale,” Love said. “She said a reporter had called a couple of days ago—at least, he said he was a reporter—and she answered a lot of questions about her grandson. Then he asked for a picture of him so that the picture could be printed with the story. She gave him a framed photograph of Digger with his bike.”
“So?” Malley was busy again with his pipe.
“It’s the frame the old lady’s bothered about,” said Love. “She says it’s silver.”
Malley smiled knowingly, but said nothing.
Love looked at Purbright, as if for support against the unconscionable scepticism of the Coroner’s Officer.
“The point is,” said the inspector, “that nobody from the Citizen office has been anywhere near the Tring household. When the old woman called and demanded to have her photo back, they didn’t know what she was talking about and pushed her on to us.”
“Me, actually,” complained Love.
“What’s the crime—larceny of a picture frame?”
Malley blew down the newly excavated pipe stem. There was a noise like a death rattle and a sudden, overpowering reek of tar.
Purbright looked thoughtfully at Patricia Booker’s deposition. The signature, in painstaking back-sloped script, had a childish flourish at the end.
“Tring’s companion on that ride seems to have been a remarkably self-possessed character,” said the inspector. “I like the way this kid remembers seeing him after the roll—‘sitting straight up like nothing had happened’.”
Malley snorted amiably. “Aye, well, they’re all pretty hard buggers, that lot.”
“Even so, when your mate’s just gone out into a fifty-foot dive on to concrete, I should scarcely suppose your first instinct would be to shut the door after him and sit tight.”
“They aren’t very easy to close, those doors,” Love informed them. “I tried all of them. The latches are very strong.”
“You’ve seen the engineer’s report, have you?” Purbright asked.
Love and Malley said they had. It was mainly a lot of technical bumf but there was no doubt the equipment was in good order. “Better than some public transport,” averred Love, in daring disregard of The Establishment, as represented by the Flaxborough and District Passenger Committee and its eight buses.
“So you’d rule out the possibility of that particular door coming open on its own—or rather being swung open by the motion of the car.”
Love confirmed that he would. He showed in mime the way the latch was secured, then freed.
Having watched, the inspector said: “I’m afraid I had assumed up to now that the door could have been opened quite easily by accident—by a drunk knocking against it, for instance.”
“Oh, no; he’d have to get hold of the latch handle properly and give it those three separate pulls and pushes.” Again Love demonstrated in mid-air.
Malley said: “It doesn’t follow that just because Tring had had a few drinks he couldn’t get a door open.”
“Deliberately, yes,” said Purbright, “but I was talking about his doing it by accident.”
“All those Trings are mad sods,” observed Malley. “Them and the Cutlocks and the O’Shaunessys. Why shouldn’t he have opened it deliberately?”
“Bravado?”
“Showing off. Certainly, why not? There were a couple of totties just behind.”
Purbright glanced quickly down the girl’s deposition in search of a remembered phrase, found it, frowned.
“She says she recognised Digger Tring but not the other one because ‘he kept his lid shut’.” He looked up. “His motor cycling helmet, I presume?”
“That’s right.”
“ ‘Shut’ though—what does that mean?”
Love explained. “She’s talking about the visor. It’s a shield of dark coloured plastic that comes right down over the face.”
“Hinged,” added Malley. “Digger would have to push his up out of the way because he was drinking, remember.”
“Ah, yes. Neat whisky. And a rather superior brand.”
Across Malley’s big moon face flitted good-natured suspicion. He raised his eyebrows.
“It’s all right, Bill; there’s probably no connection. But the conscientious Johnson did find a smashed bottle near the West Row corner when they were collecting Tring. A Glenmurren straight malt, no less.”
“Digger,” said Love, “couldn’t have told the difference between whisky and fly spray.”
The inspector acknowledged his own impression that the Tring family appetites were not noticeably selective.
“He could always have pinched it, of course,” conceded Malley, and with this reasonable hypothesis the matter of the whisky was abandoned.
Which is not to say that Inspector Purbright had gained from his exchange with Malley and Love any substantial degree of assurance that he would be able to conceal, during an impending and unavoidable interview with the Chief Constable, that instinctive unease which Mr Chubb found so irksome a quality in his detective inspector.
Chapter Five
Mortimer Rothermere backed the big lemon coloured Fiat into a space in the centre of a line of cars in a private yard behind the Education Committee offices. He parked it with a single confident sweep, looking back and giving the wheel the precise final three-quarters turn that would just leave him room to open the door without risk to the adjacent Daimler.
A porter limped from a doorway. He leaned a little to one side so that the sleeve of his uniform hung low, concealing his hand. From the end of the sleeve a blue thread of smoke escaped.
Rothermere fished a brief case, a furled umbrella and The Times from the back of the car and swung the door shut. He patted his curly-brimmed, silver-grey homburg and prepared to cross the yard.
“Can’t park there, sir,” announced the porter. “That’s the Director’s place.”
“My good man, you don’t have to tell me, I am the Director.”