“No, I don’t think I have.”
“Har.” For several seconds, Mr Benton gazed into the distance nostalgically, before meeting Purbright’s eye again with his own, which he then slowly closed.
“What would you say, mester, if somebody wuz to tell you that there wunce wuz a time when Nicky Moldham wuz a thruster an’ a cum-onner? A lot o’ yeers, mind. When they still ’ad munny. Aye, b’God, that ’un liked ’er stick, nivver you fret.”
Allowing his eyes to grow large, Purbright nodded, lips compressed, in token both of his belief and his discretion. He hoped, though, that Benton had not forgotten about the burglary.
“Mind you don’t get any of that blood on your jacket,” he said as a reminder.
Benton shook his head. “Dry,” he said. “Must ’a bin there all night a’most.”
“You heard the shots fairly early on, then,” remarked the inspector.
Round about one o’clock, Benton reckoned. And who had fired the shotgun?—why, Squire, of course, who else?—but a bloody terrible shot was the coloneclass="underline" his having drawn blood with only two barrels was nothing short of a miracle.
“It would have been dark,” the inspector pointed out, in fairness to the absent marksman.
“Dark? Niwer dark in the country, onny in towns.”
“True.”
Purbright waited for Benton to open the melon house door. The old man bent to examine a place where it was sticking against the frame.
“I suppose,” Purbright said, “that you didn’t actually see the bloke get shot, did you?”
Mr Benton blew noisily to signify denial. “Heerd ’im pelt off, though. Up the old carridge road as you cum in on. Heerd ’is motor start, an’ all.”
“From the road?”
“No—down in the yard.”
“He’d driven right up to the house, then?”
“Yis. Must’ve done, cheeky bugger.”
“Ah,” said the inspector. A pause. “Funny thing, that he didn’t hang on to that piece of cloth if he was trying to stop the bleeding. Where did you find it?”
“In the yard. Just by the garridge there.”
“May I see?”
Benton handed him the cloth. It was a piece of thin towelling, grubby as well as bloodstained. Purbright examined it closely. Near one corner, initials had been chain-stitched in red cotton. FSSC. Flaxborough Social Services Committee.
The inspector sighed. “I really ought to have told you before, Mr Benton, that I am a policeman.”
“Har, thought so,” said the old man, with neither surprise nor rancour. He nodded in the direction of the house. “Anythin’ took?”
“They seem a bit uncertain at the moment. It would be as well if you didn’t bother them with questions for a while.”
“You’ll be wantin’ that.” The old man pointed to the towel, then sorted out a plastic bag from several on a shelf. Purbright thanked him.
Again Benton’s head jerked towards the house. “Not much woth burglarizing in there, y’know. Not nowadays. Tim wuz when there wuz jools.”
“Really?”
“Oh, ar. Knickers had jools up to ’er goin’ to London. Green ’uns in a little string. Woth god knows how much, they reckoned.”
“Went to London, did she? When was that?”
The old man pondered. “Forty yeer...no, more—she’d be in ’er early thutties, would Veronica. She went off to live with relations of ’er mam’s. Titled lot, they wuz. Had the Queen’s cousin to dinner wunce. Then back she cum ’ome when ’er mam died in nineteen ’n fifty.”
“Wasn’t she married by then, though?”
Benton took a chisel and began to pare thin shavings from the edge of the door. “Yip, but she didn’t bring ’im. O’ course, ’ee wuzn’t quality. Chap called Clegg. Dead now. She might ’a got some of ’is munny, but they don’t reckon ’ee ’ad all that much.”
The inspector was beginning to feel his role to be that of gossip rather than interrogator. He changed the subject.
“Tell me, Mr Benton, have you ever seen a picture of a cottage over at the house? Quite a small picture—modelled—made to stand out in the frame, if you see what I mean.”
The old man shook his head. The only pictures he’d ever noticed were old dark things in those great gold frames. Why—was that what the burglar had pinched?
No, said the inspector, it was just a thought. And, at once, he had another thought: would Mr Benton mind fishing out the bits of broken window from where he had put them?
“Har, fingerprints,” responded the old man with knowledgeable relish. He at once abandoned carpentry, selected another plastic bag from his store and trotted off towards a bin.
Sergeant William Malley, a ponderous man of indestructible good humour, was well equipped for his duties as coroner’s officer. He was kindly in manner and intent, and would rather leave a few holes in forensic orthodoxy than add officiousness to the ordeals of the bereaved. At the same time, he was shrewd and diligent to a degree that might have been thought surprising in one so fat and seemingly promotion-proof (Malley had been a sergeant for twenty-three years). These qualities, together with a certain inborn and quite inoffensive curiosity, had brought so many people within his circles of acquaintance that the sergeant served at Fen Street as a live Who’s Who for Flaxborough and district.
Purbright was hopeful that he might have something Debrettish to offer as well.
“Bill, what do you know about the Moldham family?”
Malley rubbed the side of his nose with the stem of a squat, toxic-looking pipe.
“Pretty clunch lot,” he said, after deliberation.
“Yes, I got the impression they’d not give much away. And they seem to have equally reticent friends.”
Malley smiled understandingly.
“There was a break-in at the Hall during the night,” said Purbright. “They’ve a hole in a window, damage to furniture, a bloodstained rag and a gardener who heard a couple of shots—but nobody knows anything—except the gardener—he loves talking.”
The sergeant nodded. “Old Benton. Aye, he’ll talk, all right. You’ll get nothing out of the others, though.”
“I gather the colonel isn’t married.”
“No, him and his aunt are the only ones left, apart from cousins and things. Old Moldy, the colonel’s father, died some time in the sixties, and his mother about thirty years ago. You remember old Moldy, though, don’t you?”
The inspector did. The old squire had succumbed to a splendidly characteristic apoplexy on discovering that his more timid son had been paying secretly the bills which his father (“They have my custom, don’t they—what more do they want?”) for years had been throwing into the ancestral fireplace.