The girl was about to suggest that perhaps she should go home now and call at the police station the next day, when she heard the mellifluous chimes of the Meadows’ three-tone front door bell.
No one made a move. Then Mrs Meadow murmured something over her shoulder about being Elizabeth’s night off. The doctor, still reading, strolled slowly out of the room.
He returned with two men.
One was Inspector Purbright.
The other was an individual whose patently mature bodily development was quite disconcertingly at odds with the face of a fourteen-year-old choir boy. This was Detective Sergeant Love, sometimes playfully referred to by his superiors as ‘whited-sepulchre Sid’.
Mrs Meadow acknowledged introductions with only the slightest tilt of the boulder of her face. The ordained role of the police, she considered, was the protection of private property; if young women insisted on indulging in the frivolity of getting raped, then that was no good reason for the diversion of the constabulary from its proper duties.
It was with Brenda, now pale and weary-looking, that Purbright concerned himself at once.
He glanced at the table beside her.
“Have you had something to drink?”
“I have given her a sedative,” Meadow said.
“Oh, but a hot drink...” The inspector looked across at Mrs Meadow. “Do you think something in that line could be managed? Tea, perhaps?”
Mrs Meadow was too surprised to produce indignation commensurate with the audacity of the request. “Well, it is rather awkward, actually. The maid...”
“No, no,” Purbright protested cheerfully. “The sergeant is awfully good at making tea. He’d be pleased to do it.”
Love beamed like a boy scout unexpectedly invited to demonstrate fire-craft in the middle of the sitting-room carpet.
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” said Mrs Meadow, already on her way to the door.
The sergeant took out his notebook and Purbright began asking Brenda quiet, gently phrased questions.
Dr Meadow listened.
Chapter Three
The inspector and the sergeant discussed the ordeal of Miss Sweeting.
It was the following morning.
As in the case of the attack upon the resourceful librarian, the search for the man responsible had been undertaken more as a gesture of helpfulness than with any hope of success. It had been quite fruitless. Heston Lane could have been as uninhabited as Gorry Wood for all the notice its sequestered residents had taken of the drama in their midst.
One thing was clear. Both incidents displayed common features. And the most striking of these was the curious crab-like flight of the women’s assailant.
“He’s not one of the regulars, you know, Sid,” Purbright observed thoughtfully. He had been perusing the Flaxborough version of that list kept by every police force of its sexually enterprising locals, both the convicted and the so far lucky.
Love agreed.
“And yet,” the inspector went on, “the girl and the Butters woman both speak of his being fairly old. Unless he’s a new arrival in the district, it’s queer that he should suddenly break out like this so late in life. These people are usually pretty well set in their ways.”
“Maybe it’s the weather,” suggested the sergeant. “They tell me they’ve had quite a bit of awkwardness over at Twilight Court during the past couple of weeks. They’ve cut out stout at supper on the men’s wards.”
“They blamed water fluoridization last time.”
Love thought some more, then said: “It’s a pity the doctor didn’t get a look at the bloke’s face.”
“It’s an even greater pity that he didn’t hang on to him. If we are to believe the girl, he actually had hold of his arm when she saw them together under the lamp.”
Love looked at his notes. “That’s right,” he said. “He did.”
“Meadow strikes me as being a reasonably fit man. I gather he goes in for winter sports. He used to row, too. I should have thought he’d have enough muscle to stop that old goat getting away, particularly when he was already winded through struggling with the girl.”
The sergeant was not so sure in his own mind of the validity of this argument. He had been brought up to hold the medical profession in awe, with the possible exception of pathologists (a queer, jokey lot) and police surgeons, who tended to be shabby and remote. A family practitioner, of all people, could not fairly be expected to put his dignity at hazard by tussling with felons.
“And why,” persisted Purbright, “did Meadow claim not to have seen the man’s face? The girl said he must have done. They were close together, directly under a lamp.”
“She couldn’t have been certain that the doctor actually looked at him.”
“I’m inclined to think that he simply didn’t want to become involved. That’s why he let the fellow go, and that’s why he now says he can’t identify him. Another thing...”
Love waited stiffly to hear what new heresy had occurred to the inspector.
“Why did he wait so long before ringing us up? He let ten minutes or quarter of an hour go by. To say, as he did, that his first concern was for his patient just isn’t good enough. Anyway, it was only on her insistence that he telephoned in the end.”
There was a pause. Then the sergeant inquired what was proposed to be done next. He sounded sulky. Late nights did not suit him, especially when his being summoned to an extra turn of duty conflicted with his landlady’s almost religious observance of the household bath rota.
“Nothing we can do,” said Purbright. “Our only hope is that next time this character performs there’ll be on hand some less circumspect citizen than Dr Meadow.”
Three days went by before this hope was put to the test.
The victim, a Mrs Pasquith, was more fortunate than the previous two in as much as the assault was vocal and not physical. She was sufficiently distressed by it, however, to call at the police station twelve hours later and volunteer an account—on condition that the listener was a woman.
Mrs Pasquith was thereupon closeted with a brawny but soft-hearted policewoman called Sadie Bellweather.
“Well, you see, love,” Mrs Pasquith cozily began, “I’m on vases and brasses this week at St Hilda’s and last night I thought, well, I’ve got time before Harry comes back for his supper to go down and see to the flowers and bring the altar cloth home ready for taking to the launderette, well, I’d made a nice show of the gladioli on that side near the vestry door and I was just getting some fern together to go with the carnations from Harry’s allotment when I hear this voice from somewhere at the back, well, I nearly jumped out of my skin but then straight away I thought it must be the vicar or Mr Hardy perhaps and I said hello, you know, without turning round, well...and then in a little while the voice came again, and this time I knew it wasn’t the vicar because he said, ‘I’m a bee’. Yes, that’s what he said—‘I’m a bee’—quite loud, well...I turned round and looked but I couldn’t see anybody, of course it’s very dark at the back there, well, I called out ‘Who’s there?’ and whoever it was called back, ‘I want to pollinate you’. Well, what a funny thing to say. I didn’t know what to make of it—well, you wouldn’t, would you?—but then he made his voice go quite nasty and he said, ‘I’d like to lift your petals’. Well! I knew then the sort of thing he was hinting at—wouldn’t you have done?—and I thought, right, don’t you come any nearer...”