His departure was unremarked.
Not so the elevation of his victim, whose attempt to hold himself steady toppled a Benares tray and several smaller articles of percussion. Everyone in the hall turned and stared.
Harrap, the assistant auctioneer, a young man of solemn but scarcely commanding appearance, tried to look outraged. He made what he hoped were authoritative gestures with his pen, indicating Love to the two porters, as if to order his arrest. One of the porters began to move reluctantly in Love’s direction. Then he recognized the sergeant and stopped.
“It’s a policeman,” he said to Harrap.
Harrap peered, scowlingly. “That makes it all the worse.” He raised his voice. “I say...over there...what do you think you’re doing?”
Love swayed and explored the back of his head with one hand.
Others in the hall, seeing his paleness, hurried forward. First to reach him was a middle-aged woman.
“Sergeant, whatever have you been doing?” She grasped his arm and urged him towards a kitchen chair, which she tested first with a dubious little shake.
Love stared at her face for several seconds after sitting down, then smiled suddenly. “I don’t suppose it was you who hit me, was it, Miss Teatime?” The smile died. The sergeant looked very sorry for himself.
Miss Lucilla Teatime, dealer in objets d’art and proprietress of the House of Yesteryear, in Northgate, Flaxborough, gave a frown of concern. She knew that it must have taken a considerable blow to render Mr Love amenable to being led to chairs.
“I think,” she said to the clerk, Lewcock, who had just arrived with others, “that you should send at once for an ambulance. Sergeant Love has suffered an accident. He could be quite poorly.”
Lewcock had never before seen a policeman with a paper-white face. He made for the telephone without question or argument.
Love sat meekly in the chair, which was too low for him, and gazed at what still he held incongruously cradled in his big hands.
Miss Teatime saw it too and decided it was time to make a little conversation before onlookers put an unflattering interpretation upon what had been going on.
“What a charming little model, sergeant. The ideal cottage for your retirement—is that how you see it?” (At least the fools shouldn’t get the idea now that she had pinched it.)
Love’s regard for what he held grew fond, but he did not say anything.
“I very much hope that article was not removed from one of the trays of sale exhibits.” The voice of Harrap; his errand not mercy but supervision.
Miss Teatime looked on with interest. Was it feasible to commit shoplifting in a saleroom? If so, it certainly would be the first case figuring a police officer as defendant.
The porter who had spoken earlier was consulting a bundle of papers. “It’s with thirty-four.” He took the plaster cast from Love and restored it to the company of the glass, the golf balls, decanter stoppers, meat mincer and soap dish.
“Anything else missing?” asked Harrap.
The porter gave him a scowl.
An ambulance arrived in less than five minutes. Love, much embarrassed and growing increasingly resistant as his head cleared, found himself escorted from the hall like a common drunk by two uniformed attendants with bespectacled, rather motherly faces, who smelled of tobacco and disinfectant and kept using wrong names.
Before suffering the final indignity of being thrust into the ambulance, Love managed to twist around and address the dozen or so people who had gathered to watch. He complained that he, an officer of the law, had been attacked, had been knocked out, in fact; that his assailant was still at large; that he—the said assailant—had shown himself by his behaviour to be a cunning and violent character; and that members of the public would do better to report matters to Fen Street police headquarters and help hunt the criminal than to stand idly by and see an officer prevented from doing his duty.
The speech was worthy of Sidney Carton, let alone Sidney Love, whose public utterances until then had been restricted to a comic monologue, “ ’Ere, ’old me ’elmet, says I”, at a charity concert, and the reading of a flood-warning in the market place after the river bank burst in 1972, immobilizing the police loudspeaker van. But whatever effect his words might have had was cancelled by the sight of the two ambulance men slamming shut the rear doors of their vehicle and securing them with a set of levers and bolts that seemed better suited to a bank or a cold store. That, everyone knew, was Authority; so the poor young chap inside must either be drunk or have gone funny.
The spectators went back into the saleroom, to which also returned, in his own good time, the man who had hit the sergeant. He took a seat at the side of the hall, not far from the front.
Harrap, back in his place, spoke quietly to Lewcock. “Did you see anybody hit that policeman?”
“I didn’t see anybody anywhere near him.”
“Nor did I,” said Harrap, meaningfully.
“I don’t think he was on duty,” said Lewcock. “Not that one can tell.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, he’s a detective, isn’t he? Plain clothes man.”
Harrap sniffed. “It’s as well Mr Durham hasn’t arrived yet. He’d not take kindly to policemen coming in here and playing ducks and drakes with the lots, in or out of uniform.”
By the time the ambulance arrived at Flaxborough General Hospital, its unwilling passenger had developed a full-scale headache and was feeling sick. He offered no objection to being transferred, with kindly efficiency, to a wheelchair and having a blanket put about his shoulders. “Sharp’s the word, Roger, old son,” one of his escort informed him. “We’ll have you between sheets in no time, Jack,” declared the other.
Love felt that a joke of some sort was being offered him. He smiled and chuckled to show that he bore these friendly, if misinformed, men no blame for, the ridiculous mistake of which he had been made victim. Or he tried to. The actual result was a sudden lopsidedness of face and a sound suggestive of the death rattle of a sheep.
He was taken up seven floors in a lift and wheeled along a corridor. Droopy men in dressing-gowns stared at him impassively as he was whisked by. His escort seemed now to have embarked upon some kind of race. Eventually the chair was given a sickening half-turn and halted. “Everything all right, Frank?” he was asked.
They were in a small annexe. Love’s chair had been parked in front of a table so that its occupant was squarely presented to a woman in a white coat seated at the opposite side of the table. Before her lay a ledger, some piles of forms and two card-index boxes.
“Name?” The woman’s tone, though kindly, was automatic. Her pen was ready over a clean page of the ledger. Love had the feeling that whatever she now set down would commit him to a process that could never be revoked or modified.