Beckoning Love to accompany him, Purbright left the room and crossed to where a spiral of steep, narrow and noisy iron stairs led to his own office.
“Feeling better now, Sid?”
The sergeant said yes, oh yes, fine. As if to bear witness to his restored physique, the staircase swayed and rattled like a skein of iron plates.
“I didn’t say anything about it downstairs,” Purbright said quietly when Love had finished his climb and stood beside him, “but my belief is that Mr O’Dwyer is very seriously concerned indeed to lay hands on something that was on that tray of rubbish. He stayed with the bidding into the three hundreds.”
Disbelief creased Love’s face. “Three hundred? Pounds?”
“It went to nearly four, actually.”
“Who got it, then?”
Purbright pushed open his office door and stood aside for Love to enter. “I did.”
The tray was on a small deal table close to the desk. The sergeant stared at the cottage so lately coveted by himself, then at Purbright.
“You could say that it is an exhibit in custody,” the inspector explained. “The owner, strictly speaking, is Mrs Moldham-Clegg. Her’s was the top bid.”
“Must be barmy,” declared Love, then, defensively and a little sadly: “I thought I’d go to a couple of quid perhaps. No more.”
“We can’t keep these long. Unless something in this lot can be proved stolen or to have associations of some kind with an actual crime, we shall have to pack it all off to Moldham Hall and tug our forelocks in contrition.”
Love was holding the meat mincer and scraping with a thumb nail the black impacted kitchen grease on its handle. “There was a case once of gold being melted down and cast in some shape that wouldn’t be noticed.”
Purbright picked up the china dish and cover. The dish had inside it a perforated false bottom on which a tablet of soap could drain. He lifted it.
“Drugs?” Irrepressible Love.
“A nice thought, Sid, but I scarcely think so. I must ask around and see if soap dishes are attracting fancy prices. What do you make of the glass stoppers?”
The sergeant considered. “They look as if they’re out of vinegar bottles.” A pause. “Big vinegar bottles.”
The inspector gave the LMS refreshment room tumbler fond but brief regard and prepared to examine carefully the plaster model of the cottage “At the End of Life’s Lane”.
The frame was a simple, mass-produced plastic affair, clipped to the plaster plaque at four places. It was corded for hanging.
The plaque itself was solid—or it seemed so—and the back had the slightly bubbled surface characteristic of a plaster that has set rapidly and freely exposed to air. Purbright could see no marks of identification.
With the handle of a small penknife, he tapped gently over the whole area of the picture’s back, after unclipping and removing the frame. There came the same dull response at every point. If a hollow place existed, it would need to be small and deep-set.
“Micro-film?” Love threw in, heroically.
Purbright turned the plaque over. The cottage was delineated in relief. A mould, probably of rubber, must have been used. The colouring was conventional; neatly executed but nothing more.
“Have you seen this sort of thing before, Sid?”
The sergeant thought he had. At least, he had seen a kit in a shop but had not realized its connection with real art. “Kastaplak” it had been called.
For two or three minutes more, Purbright made close inspection of the plaque. He squeezed it between fingers and thumb, shook it and tapped it close to his ear, made several discreet incisions with the smallest blade of his knife and even pared away one corner that would be concealed by the replacement of the frame.
“We’ll let Forensic play with it for a day,” Purbright said at last. “Perhaps they will find what makes it worth 400.”
Later, he was conveying the same intention in rather different phraseology to Mr Richard Loughbury, solicitor, of Church Close, Flaxborough.
“Rich Dick” Loughbury was the senior, and only generally visible, member of Loughbury, Lovelace and Partners. He occupied a room of such generous size and gracious proportions as to take up the entire first floor of the Georgian terrace house that once had accommodated a succession of clergymen, their large families and retinues of curates. The firm’s offices, in a workaday sense, were on the ground floor. Into them were crammed three desks, two typewriters, a duplicating machine, some dozens of black japanned deed boxes, a sink, kettle, cups and saucers, a wooden filing cupboard, two women wearing woollen jumpers, a box of coal, and Mr Clapper Buxton, Loughbury’s confidential clerk. The two partners, neither of whom was called Lovelace, had rooms on the second floor where they were believed to do conveyancing.
Purbright had summarized for Loughbury’s benefit the events of the previous day. “You do act, I understand, for the Moldham family?”
“I am Colonel Moldham’s man of business.” Loughbury pronounced it busy-ness: the word, like the phrase, bespoke the old-time lawyer (or else, Purbright reflected, somebody anxious to sound like one).
“And Mrs Moldham-Clegg...?”
“Is the colonel’s aunt. She is widowed and lives now at the Hall.” The replies came smoothly and without hesitation in a pleasant voice that had been trained carefully, perhaps self-consciously, on the base of a fairly expensive education. Rich Dick’s was not a big firm even by Flaxborough standards, but Purbright could well understand why it had come to be entrusted with the affairs of most of the county families and big land-owning interests.
“The reason for my coming to you,” the inspector said, “is a hope that we can clear up a little mystery connected with yesterday’s sale without having to bother the lady so soon after her collapse.”
“Collapse?” Mr Loughbury, whose large, square, pink face, with its laundered-looking white moustache and eyebrows, proclaimed his own robust health, clearly assumed a similarly sensible constitution on the part of his clients.
“Oh, yes, she did faint,” Purbright insisted.
“Indeed. And the little mystery?”
“We should like to know why Mrs Moldham-Clegg bid close on four hundred pounds for a very ordinary household picture on plaster-of-Paris, together with three or four odds and ends, the total value of which cannot be more than a few shillings.”
Mr Loughbury smiled. His teeth looked as good as the moustache. “We live in an age of inexplicable prices, inspector. Especially where so-called art is concerned. And who are we men to tell the ladies they are extravagant?”
As Purbright was to observe to Mr Chubb later, jocularity on the part of a solicitor is one of the surest signs of evasiveness. He decided to tighten his questioning at the risk of Mr Loughbury’s displeasure.