Most of these stories he had only glanced at (though he seemed to have retained the salient facts!). But there was one item he had read with close attention, a lengthy article dealing with the police investigation into the murders at Melling Lodge in Surrey two months earlier.
Biggs had followed the case with interest from the start. It was a talking point in his office and in the Bunch of Grapes where he usually spent his lunch hour. The apparently reasonless crime had caught people's imaginations. Some thought it the work of a maniac — Jimmy Pullman held to this view — but Harold felt there was more behind the murders than met the eye. 'It'll turn out to be the person you least expect,' he had predicted. 'Someone like the postman.'
He'd been disappointed initially when the opening words of the article — Important developments are expected soon in the continuing investigation into the horrific murders at Melling Lodge — were not borne out in succeeding paragraphs. Instead, the report detailed the progress of the inquiry to date. Or lack of progress, since it was plain the police had made little headway. The writer questioned whether the investigation was on the right track. If, indeed, it ever had been.
The shock felt at the killings seemed to have induced a sense of 'panic', he asserted. 'Wild theories' had abounded at the outset and even now, when it was increasingly clear that what they were dealing with was 'an isolated incident of senseless violence', there seemed to be an unwillingness, even among experienced officers, to approach the matter in 'a straightforward way'.
Harold was gratified to discover that he was able to retrieve key words and phrases from the text.
A move to seek the help of 'outside experts' had been checked, thanks to prompt action at the 'highest levels' in the Yard. But the investigation had continued to flounder in the eyes of many, who questioned whether proper attention had been given to 'the most basic areas of crime detection'.
A description of the man sought had been available to the police for some time, but there was doubt whether this area of the inquiry had been pursued with 'sufficient thoroughness'. Another 'solid lead' was the motorcycle and sidecar that the murderer was known to have used. It was rare in police work for a physical clue of this nature to yield no results, the reporter declared, leaving unspoken the implication that the detectives in charge of the case had somehow failed to make the most of it.
Somewhere in England is a man answering to the description who owns a motorcycle. Surely it only requires a methodical approach by the police of this land acting in concert to uncover his identity.
This somewhat dramatic assertion had lodged intact in Harold's newly improved memory. But he was puzzled by the article as a whole. He couldn't determine whether the reporter was giving his own opinions or those of the 'informed circles at Scotland Yard' to whom he referred from time to time. And it was only right at the very end of the report that the 'important developments' heralded in the opening paragraph were finally revealed:
The lack of progress has pointed to the need for a fresh approach. It is understood that the officer at present heading the inquiry, Chief Inspector Sinclair, will shortly be replaced by the man thought best qualified to bring matters to a successful conclusion, Britain's most famous detective, Chief Superintendent Albert Sampson, better known to the public as 'Sampson of the Yard'.
Knowlton was not Biggs's final destination. Mrs Troy lived at a place called Rudd's Cross, which he had been told was in the vicinity. Inquiring at the village pub, where the bus deposited him, he learned that in fact it was more than two miles away and could only be reached by a footpath that ran through the fields.
As he left the outskirts of Knowlton a distant rumble came to his ears. Away to the west the thunderheads of a storm were massing. The air was warm and muggy. Harold took off his glasses and mopped his face with a handkerchief. He'd brought no umbrella with him.
He hurried on through the stubbled fields, keeping an anxious eye on the heavens. Pausing at a stile, he removed his cap and patted dry the two bays of bare scalp on either side of his widow's peak. Thunder boomed again, louder this time. His new shoes were starting to pinch.
The bubble of resentment which had been swelling inside him all morning burst into angry recognition that he had let himself be used. Exploited! He might have minded less if there'd been any mention of compensation when Mr Wolverton gave him his assignment.
His bitterness grew as it fastened on this grievance.
Only last month his request for an increase in salary had been turned down. He'd felt hard done by then.
After years of wartime privation the shops were at last full of goods worth buying. Harold himself had been saving for months to purchase a wireless set — public transmissions by the new British Broadcasting Company were due to start the following year. Further off in his future the mirage of a motor-car shimmered.
Jimmy was right, he thought angrily, as he set off again. It was time he asserted himself.
Biggs was at his wits' end. He could make no sense of the old woman's ramblings. She would start on one thing, skip to another, and then lose the thread of both.
'Edna Babb? She's the girl who "does" for you?
Have I got that right, Mrs Troy?'
Finding his way to the cottage had proved no problem. It was just as Mr Wolverton had described it, standing on its own, separated by an apple orchard and unploughed fields from the rest of the houses grouped around the crossroads that gave the hamlet its name. But it had taken repeated hammerings on the door with the brass knocker before he heard the shuffle of slow footsteps inside and saw the door handle turn.
'Mr Wolverton?'
The figure peering up at him from the shadowy hallway was old and bent. Her thinning white hair was drawn back in an untidy bun. She wore a thick, knitted shawl wrapped about her shoulders over a long, stained skirt of dark bombazine. Wondering how she could possibly mistake him for his employer, he had given her his name. It was only when he went inside — when she led him into the small parlour and seated herself in a high-backed chair beside the window where a bar of sunlight entering through lace-net curtains illuminated her face — that he noticed the milky, cataract-clouded eyes.
He had pulled up a chair beside hers, and now he sat and listened while she talked of people he had never heard of — of 'Edna' and 'Tom Donkin' and 'Mr Grail' — as though they were old acquaintances of his.
While she spoke her hands moved ceaselessly, fondling a cat that had jumped into her lap as soon as she sat down, a large tortoiseshell beast which regarded Biggs steadily through narrow slitted eyelids. Its rasping purr filled the gaps of silence left by the quavering, breathless voice. Listening with half an ear, Harold thought sourly of the likely drenching he was in for later as the thunder rumbled ever closer. The shaft of light filtering through the lace-net curtains had dulled to a leaden beam.
'Tom Donkin took care of the garden?'
The picture was becoming clearer. Donkin was a local man, someone the Babb woman had found to work as a gardener and handyman. It seemed there was something between them, a relationship, but they had fallen out — had a fight in Mrs Troy's words — and Donkin had gone away. He was no longer living in the district and Edna Babb had been trying to discover his whereabouts.
'Looking all over,' Mrs Troy explained. She turned her face towards Harold, milky blue eyes blinking like some blind underground animal's. 'Poor girl. I think she's expecting.'
This had happened some months ago and since then Edna Babb had ceased to be someone Winifred Troy could count on. She still came in to clean, but only intermittently. Once a week, instead of the three times agreed on. Sometimes not at all.