“You don’t know when he died,” retorted Gule.
Purbright regarded him sharply. “Do you, sir?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Do you own a shotgun, sir?”
“Why? Am I supposed to have used one on the fellow?”
“I am only asking you if you own a gun, doctor. You will be able to attend your appointment much more promptly if you simply answer these questions. You are not the only person to whom they are being put, I assure you.”
Gule, a little mollified, conceded that he did own a gun. As they would know if they consulted their licence list. And yes, he did shoot occasionally. Where?—here and there. Moldham?—no, not at Moldham. Did he know Colonel Moldham?—only in connection with hospital administration.
Once Dr Gule had surrendered himself, so to speak, to the disagreeable formalities of inquisition, the encounter lost much of the entertainment engendered by mutual bloody-mindedness. He continued stolidly to disclaim knowledge of O’Dwyer’s identity or aims; and to parry every question concerning the late Mr Arnold with a reference to medical ethics. His answers were beginning to sound wearily disdainful like those of an ambassador defending his diplomatic bag against the importunities of a couple of native policemen.
At the end of quarter of an hour or so the two natives departed, but not before one of them—it was Bradley—observed with a ghastly jolly copper condescension that their going would doubtless be appreciated by Mrs Gule, who henceforth would “be able to have her music on again”.
Purbright stopped the car at the first telephone kiosk and rang Fen Street. After giving Love instructions, he put a call through to the superintendent of Twilight Close.
Mr Wellbeloved, ravished from enjoyment of a programme of hymn singing on television, was not in charitable mood. This somehow made it easier for Purbright to tell him, without equivocation, that a police surgeon, accompanied by an officer, was on his way to examine one of his, Mr Wellbeloved’s, charges, and that under no circumstances was the man in question to be given any medication in the meantime.
Rejoining Bradley in the car, Purbright shook his head. “There is,” he said, “a terrible deal of righteous indignation around at the moment. I am beginning to feel like Admiral Byng.”
“You can always put the blame on me,” suggested Bradley. “I am manifestly uncouth and provocative.”
“What did you think of Dr Gule?”
Bradley smiled to himself. “An inordinately vain fellow, certainly. But anxious. Personally disorganized. Probably unhappy. Has he a drink record?”
“He would have had, I think, but for a blind eye or two in the right quarter.”
“A womanizer?”
“Reputedly. His patients don’t mind; they seem to regard that sort of thing as conferring cachet.”
“Odd, isn’t it,” said Bradley, “that a drunken and disreputable physician has only to avoid actually killing somebody to acquire a popular reputation for outstanding professional brilliance.”
“Doctors inspire quite different attitudes from those we adopt towards other kinds of specialist,” Purbright suggested. “We aren’t filled with gratitude and admiration for a service engineer just because the washing machine he’s mended fails to electrocute us.”
“No, our expectations of the more mundane tradesmen are paradoxically higher. If Gule were a plumber, he’d be out of business in a fortnight. One does not wish one’s tap water to be renewed by a libertine.”
“If Gule were a plumber,” said Purbright, “I fancy he would be in trouble over the plumber’s mate. I much doubt if that girl is yet sixteen.”
“In that case, she has a precocious taste in jewellery.”
“The necklace thing?” Purbright was frowning, as if at some missed point.
“Those were no worry beads,” said Bradley, “unless we’re talking about the worry of paying for them.”
“Expensive?”
Bradley did not reply at once. Purbright glanced at him and saw that he was smiling. He looked again at the road ahead and said: “Oh, dear.”
“Never mind; we couldn’t have done much about it. Not on the spur of the moment.”
Purbright was not consoled. “He’ll get rid of the damn thing.”
“Only if he panics,” said Bradley. “Disposing of it would force him into a blank denial of something that he must know very well would then be construed as a motive for killing O’Dwyer. Anyway, the girl won’t let him. She isn’t living with Gule for the sake of his bedside manners.”
Purbright’s “They’re not emeralds, are they?” sounded like a not very hopeful plea to be spared the worst.
“Oh, no,” Bradley assured him. “Not emeralds.”
“As a matter of fact, I thought they looked rather too gaudy to be valuable—especially as they’d been strung together in that rather home-made way.”
“The girl probably did that. The original setting will have been unpinned and broken up.”
“In order,” said Purbright, gloomily, “to make it easier to hide the bits in a plaster cast called ‘At the End of Life’s Lane’.”
“What a nice name for a pension fund.”
The road now was taking a wide sweep through parkland bordered by giant chestnut trees. The low evening sun gilded their branches and picked out in shadow the grassed-over ribs of ancient strip farming.
“Some of the Moldham acres,” Purbright remarked.
“They smell very pleasant.” Bradley had wound down the window and was sniffing the scents of roadside meadowsweet and cow parsley mixed with the breeze-borne redolence of a distant field of bean flowers.
“Perhaps our odour will be more acceptable at the Hall when we bear tidings of rediscovered family treasure.”
“Treasure?” Bradley looked dubious. “Hardly. Nice stones, quite richly set, but we’re talking in terms of some hundreds perhaps—certainly not thousands.” He paused, as Purbright thought, uncomfortably, then said: “You mustn’t mind this odious knowledgeability. I belonged for a while to what journals of the lower sort like to term the Sparklers Squad.”
“Ah, so you’re not so ignorant—which I am—as to suppose anything green and shining to be an emerald.”
“No, green glass is always my first bet. But Arnold’s hoard—if that is what the girl is wearing—looks to me like Russian chrysoberyl. Did you notice the green colour change to purple when she went out of the hall into a passage under artificial light?”
Purbright took his attention from the road long enough to give Bradley a sidelong stare of admiration.
“Alexandrite, they call it,” added Bradley effortlessly. “Found in the Urals and Ceylon.”