On the announcement of his dreadful vocation, at a pitch that might just have reached the nearest neighbours, Mrs Meadow emerged like a flushed-out stoat and hastened to the front door.
“All right, what is it you want?”
“I wish to speak to your husband. Is he available?”
“Couldn’t you have seen him at the surgery? It is not convenient for him to be disturbed at home.”
“I am not here for a consultation, Mrs Meadow. Not as a patient, anyway. If the doctor would prefer to come and see me, I dare say it could be arranged.”
Mrs Meadow was looking very annoyed indeed, yet curiously impotent, as if at a loss to know how to keep in his place someone with whom there was no financial relationship.
“Perhaps you had better come in. I’ll see if he can spare a minute.”
She stepped back and he came in past her. She shut the door and walked away up the hall.
Invited neither to follow nor to wait in any of the other rooms, Purbright stood patiently and looked around.
He saw a heavy mahogany coat-stand, with mirror and two brushes and a desk-like compartment, presumably for gloves. The hat pegs were antelope horns. No hats hung there; no coats either. The whole affair was kept scrupulously polished, though.
Set against the opposite wall was a semi-circular table. Three letters lay on it. A small tray. Silver?—no, plate, but a good one. For bearing cards, no doubt. A gentleman to see you, sir... Oh, and a gong! Heavens, a nine-inch brass gong, complete with a wash-leather striker, on its own little stand. Sid would love that.
He looked at the pictures. There were a dozen or more, set in a straight line at eye level. The subjects were random: a water-mill, the Haymarket Theatre in 1905, a school tennis group, Degas ballet girls. Yet the frames were uniform. Mrs Meadow’s arrangement, no doubt.
“Inspector! You mustn’t stand around like that. Why haven’t you made yourself comfortable?”
Meadow was twenty or thirty feet away, but his voice filled the hall. He was wearing a suit of oatmeal-coloured tweed. He looked much taller than when Purbright had seen him last, longer in the leg and arm. His face was pinker, his manner more boomingly genial. Purbright thought perhaps he had been alarmed by his wife’s rudeness and was trying to make amends.
A door was being thrust inward. “Come along in, there’s a good chap.”
The room was less spacious than that in which the inspector had seen Brenda Sweeting, but more richly decorated. A Regency couch and four matching chairs were spaced in a precise pattern, like a group in a furniture museum. Their upholstery, a brocade striped in gold and pale blue, was of brochure brightness. The walls were covered in what looked like chamois suede, embossed with a lozenge motif. Stark white moulding encompassed a ceiling of rose-tinted grey. The central chandelier was a cascade of crystal prisms and drops, frozen on golden wires. A small rosewood writing table stood before the tall window. This was fashioned in a single bow of glass, through which Purbright saw smooth lawn and the blue, aseptic gleam of a swimming pool beyond.
Meadow indicated a chair facing the window. Purbright sat. The chair’s padding was much harder than he had expected. Meadow lowered himself carefully upon the couch and leaned forward, clasping his hands, ready to be consulted.
“I am a good deal bothered,” the inspector began, “by a problem which I am coming to think might be as much in your province as in mine. You know what I am talking about, I suppose?”
“I would rather you were more specific. Guesswork is not good medicine.”
“Very well, doctor. Let us start with the young girl who was attacked in the road outside here, although that was not really the beginning—there were earlier cases of a similar kind. You do know that there have been several such attacks. Almost an epidemic, in fact.”
Meadow nodded pleasantly. “So I understand.”
“These cases have certain common features. Let me tell you what they are. Firstly, the attacker invariably is described as elderly. Secondly, he seems to be of middle-class background. What little he has been heard to say suggests that he is not uneducated or inarticulate. Also he dresses fairly soberly and is likely to own a car.
“Thirdly—and this is where we enter your field, doctor—the man has a quite extraordinary propensity for losing his sense of balance. Every witness has remarked on the way he runs. ‘Sideways’ is how they all describe it.”
Meadow shrugged. “Inner ear trouble,” he said. “Not uncommon.”
Purbright regarded him for a moment.
“At the inquest on Steven Winge,” he said, “the pathologist said something about a syndrome—I can’t remember the name he put to it. He talked of a disturbance of the central nervous system, didn’t he?”
“I am not a neurologist, inspector.”
“But that was how he phrased it, was it not?”
“As far as I recall, yes.”
“Thank you. I am going to be perfectly frank with you, doctor. When we learned the circumstances of old Winge’s death, we felt reasonably confident that it was he who had been responsible for all the recent attacks on women in this town. And the medical evidence seemed to confirm that opinion. Yet within hours of his death, a young and intelligent woman reported an incident which tallied in every detail with the sort of thing that had been going on before. She described having watched the man run away. Sideways, of course. You see where that leaves us?”
“I see that you would seem to owe poor old Winge an apology.”
“Well, not quite. It cannot be denied that he made a very determined attack on Miss Pollock. He might well have given in to similar impulses recently. But what is now certain—and very disturbing—is that there is someone else, perhaps several other people, given to the same kind of behaviour. And he, or they, must be found.”
“A very proper sentiment, inspector. I hope you are successful.”
“Oh, we shall be. Eventually.”
“Good.”
Meadow looked at his watch, which was gold, very slim but of large diameter, and worn on the inside of the wrist so that he had to make an elegant gesture with his hand in order to see its face. He half rose.
Purbright was staring gravely out of the window.
“I think you could, if you wished, help to shorten the time it is going to take to clear this business up.”
The doctor sat again and leaned back, frowning.
“In what way?”
“For one thing, I was hoping that you would tell me—in confidence and off the record—what the condition was for which you were treating Alderman Winge.”
“I was asked that question at the inquest.”
“And you declined to answer.”
“A doctor has every right to resist probes into his professional relationship with a patient.”
“An inquest is a public hearing. That did make your position difficult, sir. This is a private—and, I hope, friendly—talk. The patient is dead. Do you not think that ethics might be slightly relaxed?”
Meadow saw the inspector’s faint smile. “Yes, but even so...” He hesitated.