“One. Only one. I...I daren’t let on about it. She’d have got mad at me.”
“Do you know which one? Had you seen the address on it?”
“Somewhere in London, I think. It was one of those long envelopes, and it had more stamps on than the others. You won’t let her know, will you?”
“Typewritten?”
The girl nodded miserably.
“Listen,” said Purbright. “Does this sound familiar? The British...” He formed his lips into the pronunciation of an M, and waited.
Suddenly she brightened, her unhappiness dispelled for the moment by a chance to show herself clever.
“British Medical Journal! Yes, that was it. I’m sure it was.”
“Good girl,” said Purbright. He pulled open the door himself and stepped through.
Sergeant Malley, gingerly carrying a brimful mug of tea from the canteen back to his office, raised his head to see Purbright immediately in front of him. He stopped. A little of the tea slopped on the corridor floor. The inspector was looking so cheerful that Malley had to remind himself that Purbright was not by nature a rib-poker before he felt safe to squeeze to one side and give him room to pass.
“Oh, about Meadow...” he began.
“Have they done the autopsy yet?” the inspector interrupted eagerly.
“Autopsy?”
“Certainly. Have you not seen Heineman yet?”
Malley gripped his mug more firmly. “I have, as a matter of fact. Thompson, too. And Dr James. There isn’t going to be any autopsy.”
Purbright stared. “What the hell are they playing at?”
“Thompson’s decided that there’s no need for an inquest. James signed a certificate, so it looks as though that’s that.”
“That is bloody well not that! Come on, Bill—get into your office. I’ll phone from there.”
Dr Thompson had left Sparrow, Sparrow and Amblesby. Purbright tried the deputy coroner’s own home. Mrs Thompson suggested the doctor might have driven over to the hospital. He had his medical duties to perform as well, the inspector would realize. She plainly shared her husband’s opinion that the honour of deputizing for old Amblesby was not worth the trouble involved.
The matron at the General said that Dr Thompson had gone on the wards to visit one of his patients. She would have him called to a telephone.
Purbright waited restlessly, weighing the receiver in his hand.
“I know what it is,” he said to Malley. “Doctors. Mutual protection association.”
The sergeant pushed his tea carefully to one side to make room for a tin of tobacco.
“I think you’ll find Heineman’s the trouble. The G.P.S don’t like pathologists much anyway—they spot the mistakes after the damage has been done—and Heinie’s an outsider. He’s only been here eleven years. You can imagine what the feeling is going to be when it’s not just a patient but one of the fraternity who goes on his slab.”
“Aye, but Meadow was murdered, Bill. I’m absolutely positive now.”
Malley paused in sniffing his newly opened tin.
“How?”
“God knows. That’s the hell of it. But it was done. Somehow or other it was done.”
“And do you know who did it?” Beneath. Malley’s bucolic manner was now a tense seriousness.
“Aye,” said Purbright, and left it at that.
A series of loud clicks came from the phone, followed by a voice, querulous, irritable.
Purbright spoke.
“Dr Thompson? Inspector Purbright... Yes, I realize that. I’m sorry. But this is urgent. I understand from the coroner’s officer that you have decided against holding an inquest on Dr Meadow...”
Four minutes later, Purbright put down the receiver and faced Malley with an expression of stony anger.
The sergeant removed his pipe and glanced with mild curiosity into the bowl.
“No joy?”
“He can see no reason for what he calls impugning the judgment of a competent and highly respected physician. That’s what he thinks his order for a P.M. would amount to.”
Malley took an experimental suck at his pipe and looked again in the bowl. “I was rather afraid you’d not be able to convince him.”
“Evidence—give me evidence, he says, that a crime’s been committed. But, God almighty, the only evidence we can ever hope to find is in that bloke’s belly. So what am I supposed to do?”
“Difficult,” said Malley, between puffs. “Pity there can’t be a little misunderstanding. I mean, Heinie would be in there filleting before anyone could stop him, once he got the word...”
“Oh, no!” Purbright held up his hand. “You can stop thinking along those lines, Bill. Pirate autopsies are definitely out.”
“What are you going to do, then?”
Purbright lay back in his chair and stared disconsolately at the wall. For a long time, he said nothing. What he did murmur at last made sense neither to the sergeant nor to himself.
“ ‘The fur is darker’.”
Chapter Seventeen
“I believe you have a Mr Brennan staying here, I should like to see him, please.”
The girl with the black fringe and a deep absorption in a magazine reached in slow motion for the house phone without looking up. “What name, madam?”
“Mr Brennan.”
“No, madam—your name.”
“My name is Miss Teatime.”
The girl set a plump white finger-end to guard the last word she had read, and peeked suspiciously through her fringe. Then, with the same hand that held the phone, she contrived to push home one of the switchboard plugs.
“There’s a lady in reception to see you, sir. She says her name is Miss Teatime.”
The girl listened, looking fixedly at the visitor.
“Very good, sir.”
She removed the plug, seated the phone, and made rendezvous with the waiting finger.
“Room twenty-seven, madam.”
Miss Teatime walked to the lift.
On the second floor, the door of twenty-seven already stood open.
Brennan, who now wore a brown suit that made him look bulkier than when she had seen him last, was on the threshold. He watched Miss Teatime’s approach along the corridor with an expression of curiosity, interrupted occasionally by a downward glance at the progress of something he was doing with his hands. As she got nearer, she saw that he was peeling an apple. He managed it very expertly so that the peel hung unbroken in a long green and white spiral which gently rose and fell as the apple turned beneath the knife.
“Good evening, Mr Brennan.”
He made a short bow, saying nothing, and stood back from the doorway.
Miss Teatime entered the room.
“We have met, you know.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
He let fall the appleskin coil neatly into an ornamental waste-paper tub beside the fireplace. The pocketing of the penknife was the conclusion of a single sweeping motion that brought the back of the blade against his thigh, snapping it shut. All his actions, Miss Teatime thought, would be like that—accurate, economical.