“I should have described her buy as something more than extravagance, sir. It smacks of either extreme eccentricity or of special knowledge. And Mrs Moldham-Clegg is, by all accounts, a very level-headed lady.”
“What do you mean by special knowledge, inspector?” The voice was good-humoured as ever, the white brows a little lowered in friendly concern.
“I mean awareness of something valuable in lot thirty-four, something that would escape notice in the ordinary way. Something concealed, even.”
“Ah, the painted-over Van Dyke.” Mr Loughbury laughed, but not derisively. “No, no, I do see what you mean, Purbright—but Mrs Moldham-Clegg? Hardly a hunter of masterpieces.”
“She is your client, sir...”
A finger rose in polite correction. “The family, inspector—the family is my client.”
“Very well, sir; from your knowledge of the family, including Mrs Moldham-Clegg, can you suggest what significance she saw in those seemingly worthless objects that persuaded her to part with nearly 400?”
“Do you intend to put that question to her?”
“As part of my general inquiries? Yes, if necessary.”
“But inquiries into what, inspector? Buying at auction is not a felonious act, surely.”
“I have not suggested that it is.”
The solicitor remained silent for some seconds, as though slightly discomfited and regretful that the policeman had introduced a note of asperity into his last reply. Then he brightened.
“May I make this suggestion, inspector—that I have a word myself with the good lady. It happens that I am going over to Moldham tomorrow morning to discuss some estate matters with the colonel. I’m sure that Mrs Moldham-Clegg will be as frank with me as the circumstances warrant—perhaps even a little more so, who knows?” A glint of good-fellowship in the clear, pale blue eyes, and a reassuring tightening of jaw that puckered the smooth chin.
Mr Loughbury watched the very faint, sad smile the inspector had assumed and mistook it for a sign of assent. He rose and held forth his hand.
Purbright took the hand, which was large, warm, smooth and confident.
He had said nothing about the presence at the sale of Loughbury’s confidential clerk, George Robert Buxton.
Chapter Four
Inspector Purbright did not doubt that Mrs Moldham-Clegg’s man of business would telephone her long before he, Purbright, could call upon her in person. That could not be helped. He set off towards Moldham village at such speed as was still possible in his ageing official car.
The Hall was in open country a little west of the village, which the shrinkage of the agricultural population during the past twenty years had reduced to a handful of houses now refashioned to the taste of commuting businessmen and shopkeepers from Flaxborough who had acquired them. There was no store in the village, no post office, no inn. The tiny church, fussily restored by a Victorian architect with the money of farmers whose personal piety embraced a desire to see the virtue of humility inculcated in their labourers, was open for services only half a dozen times a year, when the dank and dim little stone box held all too easily a congregation garnered by bus from ten square miles of indifferent countryside.
As Purbright drove by, he saw sheep grazing in the churchyard. One, framed against the black hollow of the porch, held itself very erect and gave Purbright a direct stare of disapproval and challenge. He thought of Mrs Moldham-Clegg.
The Hall’s surrounding parkland had a common boundary with the church, to which a private path still led. The inspector could just discern the glimmer of the white wicket gate between two yew trees. The house was invisible from the road until he reached the entrance to a drive flanked with chestnuts and sycamores, at the end of which and looking much smaller than such an approach promised, was a square, two-storeyed building in dark, rusticated stone. It could have been a moorland farmhouse, save for its battlemented parapet—an addition conceived by a nineteenth century Moldham whom a hunting accident had led to a brief but influential incursion into the works of Sir Walter Scott.
A pair of tall wrought-iron gates stood across the drive. Mainly rusty now, they bore vestiges of black and gold paint. Purbright decided that to leave the car outside them and walk to the Hall would be easier than involvement with bolts and catches of dubious efficacy. He also decided that a painted notice, Private—tradesmen next entrance, was not intended to apply to him.
He took his time to walk the length of the avenue, savouring the scents of cow parsley and meadowsweet and the underlying spiciness of mouldering leaves. Greenery had made broad inroads across the gravel, so that his steps were carpeted almost to silence. Thus he was only a few yards short of the corner of the house when an old man busy at a window in the side wall heard him and peered round over his shoulder.
“Ah,” said the old man. He had short, grizzled thatch on his nearly flat head, a little more around his chin. He wore blue knitted mittens, with the back of which he wiped from time to time a nose of considerable size and bulbosity.
Purbright Ah’d a return greeting. The old man resumed his task, but not dismissively. After a while he said that it looked like being a nice day.
Purbright watched him running a knife around the edge of a window pane and catching the snake of surplus putty in his other hand. On a sheet of newspaper spread beside him were shards of glass.
“Terrible price, now, glass,” offered the inspector.
There came from the old man a husky blowing noise, signifying unqualified agreement.
Purbright waited a while. Then, with immense casualness: “Not in a place you’d expect it to get broken.”
The old man licked his little finger and carefully smoothed away a blemish in the new putty.
“Didn’t,” he said.
“Didn’t get broken?”
“They niwer brok it. I brok it. They cut it.”
The old man spoke without a halt in the slow, patient perfecting of the setting of the new pane. Purbright looked at the pile of glass on the ground. He saw one piece whose edge conformed to the arc of a circle.
“You mean,” he said, “that you had to smash the glass because there was a hole in it?”
“Ah.”
“I see.”
“It was the burglars as cut it.”
With which slow, matter-of-fact statement of the obvious, the old man returned his knife to a tool-bag, an open leather pouch, and squatted back to survey his work.
“When was that, then?” Purbright asked.
“What, the burglars?”
“Aye.”
“In the night, they reckon.”
“Anyone told the police?” The inspector sounded as if the question was of but the slightest interest.
“Bound to ’ave. Well, he’s a magistrate, an’t ’ee?”