Lewcock regarded the torn-off leaf in bewilderment.
“I think you had better tell him at once,” the inspector said. “Confidentially, though. Don’t give any impression of alarm.”
Across the clerk’s face spread the sunshine of a guess that something was up. “Ah—not to stop the fish biting,” he remarked, with a maddeningly knowing lift of one eyebrow.
Purbight gave him as much of a smile as he could summon: a thin, neuralgic wince.
Lewcock rose. He touched Harrap’s sleeve. The auctioneer looked anxious and angry, but he bent to listen. What he heard seemed to intensify both the anxiety and the anger. He addressed Purbright in a whisper that could be heard all over the hall.
“These items are the property of private clients. You cannot interfere with a correctly conducted sale. I am in the middle of taking bids, inspector. You must excuse me.”
And he gazed out over the heads of the, by now, much intrigued audience.
“Oh, God!” breathed Purbright to himself. “Tell him,” he said to Lewcock, “that nobody’s stopping his sale, but that I can and will if he’s going to be awkward. A policeman has been hurt here this morning. And now there is this very odd bidding. Somebody has to explain it. I am not being unreasonable.”
The intermediary went aloft again. This time Harrap paused before delivering a reply and then it was for the hearing of Lewcock alone.
“He says,” Lewcock reported to the inspector, “that you can do as you like as long as you take responsibility, but can he finish taking bids first. It’s the commission, of course,” Lewcock confided. “He wants the old man to feel inferior.”
“I shall want the names of bidders,” Purbright said. “Every person who has put in a bid for this lot number, I mean. Also the name of the owner. Can you do that for me?”
The clerk nodded. “I can jot them down now, actually. Well, all but one.” He sat straight and peered into the hall. “Oh...”
Purbright saw the frown of puzzlement. He knew, before Lewcock spoke, what had happened.
The stranger who had seemed so keen to acquire lot thirty-four against the opposition of Mrs Moldham-Clegg and Mr Buxton was no longer in his seat.
So far as Purbright could make out in a quick, sweeping scrutiny, the man had departed altogether.
“Don’t let anyone shift that stuff. I’ll be back for the names in half a minute.”
Careless now of obtrusiveness, Purbright strode to the back of the hall. There he was assured by PC Phillips and Detective Harper that no one had left the hall by the main doors. Perhaps one of the three emergency exits...? Helpful.
“Ask people,” he told them. “Particularly near the doors. Man in dark clothing, probably a quiet stepper. Receding chin. Rather friendly face, actually.”
Mr Harrap, all too aware that his brief and fantastic transposition into a Sotheby’s-like world was about to come to an end, was announcing for a second time that the bidding stood at three hundred and seventy pounds and was with the lady on his right. He watched without interest Purbright’s return to the clerk’s table.
“At three hundred and seventy pounds...” Mr Harrap rolled the words around his mouth with valedictory relish. “For the third time...” The gavel was held high.
Four more seconds went by. Mr Harrap stared invitingly but quite without avail at Mr Clapper Buxton, who appeared suddenly to have gone into a state of deep inner contemplation.
The gavel descended and was held out to indicate the victor. Mr Harrap gave Mrs Moldham-Clegg a respectful, tight-mouthed smile. She did not look at him, but instead crooked one finger to summon the porter while she reached down with her other hand for a huge square shopping-bag of plaited leather.
The auctioneer coughed apologetically and leaned out of his stand to make a counter-gesture to the porter.
Mrs Moldham-Clegg paused, looked up sharply at Harrap.
Again he tried out a smile. “With respect to lot thirty-four...”
“Well?” She regarded him with chilly discouragement.
“The items cannot be released immediately, I’m afraid. There are certain formalities.” He added in a whisper, “Police routine, nothing more.”
If Purbright was dismayed by the ineptness of Mr Harrap as a soother of customers, he was even less prepared for Mrs Moldham-Clegg’s reaction.
Allowing her head to roll back, she opened her mouth, turned up her eyes, assumed the colour of wallpaper paste, and half-slid, half-rolled in a dead faint to the floor.
Chapter Three
The silver-haired chief constable of Flaxborough, Mr Harcourt Chubb, was sufficiently old-fashioned to hold fainting to be a natural prerogative of womankind. It was “rather nice”, he considered, for sensitivity to be so highly developed. Dogs were much the same: the better the pedigree, the greater the propensity to have fits.
Even Mr Chubb, though, was incredulous on hearing of the collapse of Mrs Moldham-Clegg.
“Tough as boots, I would have thought, Mr Purbright. A bit of a thruster in her time.”
“How old is she now, sir?”
Mr Chubb gave the question unhurried thought. He was standing by the window in his cool, white-painted office at the Fen Street police headquarters, calmly but systematically examining, leaf by leaf, a very healthy-looking potted geranium.
“Seventy-eight, I should say,” he said at last. A little later, and with a trace of a smile that Purbright suspected was meant to be roguish for his benefit, “I expect you wonder how I know that?”
“Sir?”
Mr Chubb flicked an alien insect from one of the leaves of his plant. “Nicky Moldham had her coming-of-age party in the same year that my father returned from India. In 1921. We were at Strawbridge then, as you know.”
The inspector knew no such thing. One of Mr Chubb’s devices for implanting in his subordinates a healthy sense of inadequacy was to drop into the conversation from time to time an apparently innocent presumption of the other person’s familiarity with some matter of which he could have known nothing.
“Strawbridge,” Purbright echoed without hint of hesitancy. “Of course. It must have been quite a party for it to be so memorable.”
Mr Chubb regarded him carefully. “So my parents told me in somewhat later years. It was remembered by their generation as one of the last of the big occasions at the Hall.”
“The Moldhams seem to be considered a rather unlucky family, sir.”
“Indeed? Yes, well, I suppose they have had their troubles.”
“If they were financial troubles, it seems a little strange that one of them can now afford to pay nearly four hundred pounds for a few worthless bits and pieces at a sale.”
“Worthless?” Mr Chubb repeated, reflectively. “On the face of it, yes. But sentiment will exact a very high price, you know.”