Dear Chas, it began. Purbright looked up. “Chas?”
“One of our man’s spare names,” Bradley explained. “Chas—Charlie—Charles Chubb. The envelope was correctly addressed to his place in Goldhawk Road, anyway.”
Purbright grinned. “You realize, of course, that my chief constable...”
“Heavens, yes. What a felicitous coincidence for him.”
Purbright resumed his reading.
Dear Chas, I have to tell you that my old friend and yours of course Mr Arnold passed on a couple of weeks back it was very peaceful they tell me although I was not with him at the end worse luck. That is not the only thing I had got to tell you though because there is this promise I made to Mr Arnold when I first come aboard here. It is about his gear. He said you know about it and of course I never asked him what was not my business but he said if anything was to happen to him sudden I was to see you got it. Well I have kept an eye on what they were doing to poor Mr Arnolds gear and everything is going to be sold that I do know. So you want to be at the auction room at what they call the Volunteers Hall here in Flax on Thursday July 21th before half past ten am. I have not said anything to them here as they dont take notice of anybody least of all the poor residents thats a good one residents we are just prisoners in irons. Yours very faithfully—Mr Anderson.
Bradley rose and took their glasses to the bar, where the manager had been furtively examining his spirit measures. Mr Maddox smiled winningly at his guest and asked what was his pleasure—two similar, would it be?
“I shouldn’t have been offended, you know,” Bradley told him, “had you used the phrase ‘same again’. It has been legitimized by custom.”
Mr Maddox threw back his head and dosed his eyes as if in the throes of huge amusement. “Oh, very good, sir!” He selected two fresh glasses, held them to the light and filled them meticulously to the brim. “There we are, sir. Two similar.”
When Bradley returned, Purbright had read the letter through again.
“Where did you get this?” he asked.
“From Edna. With his usual carelessness, Frankie had left it behind. Not that it would appear incriminating in any other context, although I suppose it could be construed an enticement to steal. Anyway, Edna was too worried to withhold what she regards as a species of death warrant.”
“From another world?”
Bradley gave a little shrug. “You must not underestimate,” he said, “the Londoner’s native simplicity. The commercial traveller who returns from Luton is treated like Marco Polo.”
“I’m pretty sure I know the source of the letter—the place, if not the writer, and he should be fairly easily identifiable.”
“Some kind of an institution, I should have thought,” said Bradley. “One notices the jaundiced tone. A hospital, perhaps?”
Purbright shook his head. “Twilight Close.”
“Good heavens,” said Bradley, very quietly. He drank some beer.
Purbright looked pensive. “Anderson...I’m wondering if it could be the same Anderson we were always trying to knock off in the old days for taking bets. 2 It would be helpful if it were; he was an observant old villain.”
2 Reported in Hopjoy Was Here
“Had your friend been to sea, by any chance?”
“Ah, of course...” Purbright skimmed quickly back through the letter. “Yes—‘when I first come aboard’—that certainly sounds like old Crutchy. The age would be about right, too. Late seventies by now.”
“This is quite a district for soubriquets, I notice. Would it be too much to hope that Mr Anderson is a one-legged sailorman?”
“By no means. That is exactly what he is. Or was. Welfare authorities consider wooden legs antipathetic to a well-run establishment. They have probably fitted Crutchy with a plastic imitation one.”
“In simulated flesh tones,” Bradley added, grimly.
The bar was beginning to be crowded: not with farmers, corn chandlers and auctioneers who in former years would have shoved and bellowed in contentious good humour about the fireplace, serious only when they counted change, their faces like red lanterns swinging in the smoke cloud; but with younger men very conscious of new moustaches but never looking at the paper money they pulled from tight hip pockets to buy lager and lime which they bore to wives left perched on guard over plastic carriers containing three-minute-meals for a week.
“I hope you will take lunch as my guest,” Bradley said. “Then we can give thought to the possible whereabouts of O’Dwyer’s body.”
“You must not be pessimistic.”
“About lunch?”
“No, that would be understandable. About O’Dwyer, I mean.”
Rather to their surprise, the two inspectors found in the dining-room that they were to be waited upon by the manager himself, who somehow had arrived before them.
“Not on duty, I trust, gentlemen?” whispered the ubiquitous Mr Maddox in a rasp that could have been heard in the street.
Bradley placed one finger against the side of his nose and swivelled his eyes. “Does that door lock?” he asked, softly. Mr Maddox regarded the sole means of communication with the kitchen. He looked very alarmed and said nothing else.
They ordered something called Beef Wellington, on the strength of Purbright’s attractive theory that it was cooked in a boot. A bottle of Burgundy was also called for.
“Do you mind if I telephone my wife?” Purbright asked. “She is not expecting me to lunch, but I do not like to indulge in these sybaritic interludes without letting her know. I expect she would also appreciate notice before the shops shut that you are joining us for a meal tomorrow.”
When he returned, he described to Bradley in some detail the sequence of events since Love’s encounter with their present quarry.
Bradley listened attentively, chin on chest, while he gazed at the patterns in the linen tablecloth between them, as if they represented for him an impromptu map of Flaxborough.
“Cherrytree Avenue—do you attach any significance to it in relation to whatever O’Dwyer came here to do, or to find?” he asked when Purbright had told his story.
“I know of no one living there who would qualify as a burglar’s confederate. They mostly are people who either were born here or have lived in the town for a good many years. It is the kind of neighbourhood that used to be called respectable.”
“Nothing suggestive at all?” Bradley asked. He had moved a pepper pot to the side of the table and looked anxious to participate in something tactically demonstrative.
“Only,” said Purbright, picking up the salt, “that Cherrytree Avenue is very near the old people’s home in which Mr Anderson considers himself to be incarcerated.” He set the salt next to the pepper.
“And where, in relation to that area, is the stately home you suspect O’Dwyer of breaking into?” Bradley had the mustard pot in his hand.