Culpepper shrugged.
“The sergeant,” said Miss Teatime, “used the phrase ‘trying to put himself in the clear’. Clear of what, though? I should love to know.”
“Arst ’im,” suggested Culpepper, raspingly humorous.
Miss Teatime smiled. The smile lingered as she stood in thought.
“No, I have a better idea, Joe. We shall see what Bernie can find out.”
“Bernie?”
“Yes. He is, by the grace of God, still a member of the British Medical Association, is he not?”
“If they ain’t rumbled that little old puddin’ club clinic of ’is in ’Ampstead, ’e is.”
“Quite. But I have seen no report of his having fallen from favour. I shall make a few preliminary inquiries locally and then telephone Bernie tonight.”
“Knock an’ it shall be opened t’yer, me old dear,” quoth Brother Culpepper.
He looked at the clock.
“Nah then, wot’s ’appened to that little bugger Florrie this mornin’? We’re bunged up wiv bloody Wort til she gets ’ere.”
Miss Teatime discovered that Blackfriars’ Court was a sort of nodule on one of the narrow lanes between Flaxborough Market Place and the river. Enclosing a cobbled area about fifty yards square were four rows of Georgian and early Victorian houses. The houses were quite tall but mostly of only one room’s breadth. There was no space between them. They looked like a concourse of widowed sisters, much undernourished and huddled together for comfort.
Only at one spot had they parted company. This was to make way for a Baptist Chapel, a self-satisfied, brick interloper with two imitation campaniles and a rectangular stained glass window. The colours of the glass were neither sombre nor gay, but curiously and unpleasandy provocative. Miss Teatime decided that they had surgical connotations: she noted iodine (for cuts), picric acid (burns), and gentian violet (athlete’s foot).
While she was looking, the big imitation gothic doors of the chapel opened and gave birth to a battered sideboard, midwived by two men in white aprons. Miss Teatime recalled that the building was now a second-hand furniture saleroom.
She mounted three steps to the tall, narrow door of number eighteen Blackfriars’ Court and knocked. Almost immediately the yellowing lace curtain at the window on her right was edged cautiously aside. She stared resolutely at the knocker, pretending not to notice. Slow, ponderous footsteps echoed on a stone floor within. A bolt grated, then slammed back against its stop. The door opened.
Jumping Christ! said Miss Teatime to herself.
Looming in the shadowy doorway was a man in the uniform of a lieutenant-general of the late Czar’s Imperial Russian Army.
For some moments, Miss Teatime’s surprise prevented her remembering the formula by which she had planned to gain entrance. But at last she forced her gaze from the ankle-length greatcoat, from the gold braid and the eagle-crested buttons, from the medals and the epaulettes, up to the great grey mournful moon of a face that hung over them. She said:
“Good morning. I am from the Regional Health Insurance Board. Are you Mr Walter Grope?”
The lieutenant-general nodded doubtfully, as if he had not heard the name very often before.
Miss Teatime beamed.
“I wonder if I might come in for a few moments, Mr Grope. A small matter of administrational routine has arisen and I believe you could help us to clear it up.”
“It’s not about the tablets, is it?”
Grope sounded as vague as he looked. He had made no move to admit her.
“Tablets?” she repeated, encouragingly.
“The doctor said he was having to stop them.”
“Would that be Dr Meadow, by any chance?”
“He’s been on to you people about it, has he?”
“Ah, not directly, no...”
Mr Grope absent-mindedly fingered his Order of Vassily (Second Class).
“Perhaps you’d better come through into the room.”
He half-turned, making space for her to pass him, then closed the door.
Miss Teatime paused by the first doorway she came to.
“That’s right—in there,” called Mr Grope. She noticed, not unthankfully, that he had neglected to replace the bolt.
The room contained a great deal of furniture, including two pianos, a carved mahogany cupboard the size of a modest bus shelter, an oval dining table draped in port wine-coloured plush, a pedestal gramophone, and a number of formidable sundries that eluded immediate identification.
Miss Teatime picked her way between a piano stool and what she suspected to be a commode, and perched as gracefully as she could upon the arm of a bloated, tapestry-covered settee.
“Yes, these tablets,” she resumed briskly. “What was it that Dr Meadow told you about them? The fact is that some of our prescription records appear to have gone astray. The question of your tablets might well have a bearing.”
Mr Grope, who had entered the furniture labyrinth by another channel, stared gloomily at her over a bamboo plant stand.
“Doing without them is very wearing,” he declared.
“I am sure it must be, Mr Grope. But what did Dr Meadow say?”
“He didn’t hold out any hope. Not when I called on Wednesday.”
Miss Teatime was by no means the first person to have discovered that having conversation with Walter Grope produced a curious sense of being bombarded with echoes. Was it the pianos? she wondered. Reverberations, perhaps.
“Hope of more tablets, do you mean?”
“Of course. They...” He paused, made several silent lip movements as if trying out words, then brightened and announced in a rush: “They-ran-out-on-Tuesday-at-eleven-fifteen.”
“That,” observed Miss Teatime, having grasped the reason for the echo effect, “does not scan.”
“Not really,” Mr Grope agreed.
“But it is very stimulating, if I may say so, to meet someone with so natural a flair for poetry.”
The nearest approximation to a smile of which Mr Grope was capable stirred momentarily in the feather-bed of his cheek.
“Do you compose much verse, Mr Grope?” Miss Teatime inquired, sensible of the perils of the question, but eager to please still further.
“A fair bit. It doesn’t come so easy now, though. Not since I finished at the pictures.”
“You were an artist?”
“I was a commissionaire.” Mr Grope flicked an imaginary speck of dust from his splendid sleeve. “It’s an occupation that leaves the mind free for a lot of the time. I used to think up most of my In-Memoriams while I was keeping an eye on the queue at the Rialto.”
“Did you, indeed.”
“For the paper, you know. There was one used to go: Of all the mothers she was the best—She’s gone to where she can get a good rest.”