“Could you,” interposed Policewoman Bellweather, “see nothing at all of this man?”
Mrs Pasquith tightened her motherly, quilt-like features and leaned nearer. “Not his face, I couldn’t. He was just a sort of dark shadow, but I think”—her voice switched dramatically to a whisper—“that he was playing with himself!”
The big, sympathetic face of Policewoman Bellweather bobbed slightly in acknowledgement of this not unexpected circumstance. Most of the cases that came her way seemed to be concerned with the more bizarre manifestations of male vanity.
“Anyway,” continued Mrs Pasquith in her normal tone, “I pretended not to have heard—that’s usually the best way to deal with people like that—but I picked up a vase just in case and began moving nearer the vestry door, well, there’s a telephone in there and you can lock the door if the worst comes to the worst, well...up he pipes again. Funny excited sort of voice he had. ‘Lily,’ he shouts. ‘That’s what I’m going to call you—Lily—because you’ve got a lovely white bottom!’ I’m telling you no lies, those were his very words. I could have died with shame. ‘Are you aware,’ I said, ‘that this is a church and that Someone (I said it just like that—Some-one) is listening to what you’re saying?’ ‘Of course she is,’ he shouts, making out he hasn’t understood what I meant, ‘and she’s got a lovely white bottom and I’m going to FERtilize her!’ Well, I saw him start to...”
“Just a minute,” said Policewoman Bellweather, her note-taking defeated by the increased pace of the narrative. “He said he was going to what?”
“FER-tilize me. That’s how he said it, oh, really horribly.” She thrust forward her ordinary demure-looking chin to aid the impression. “FU-U-UR-tilize!”
The policewoman clicked her tongue. “Right, go on, Mrs Pasquith.”
“Well, I was telling you that I saw him start to move. That was enough for me. Right, I thought, this is where I make myself scarce. And I just ran for that vestry door. Oh dear, I can laugh about it now, but I was really frightened. I mean, when somebody says things like that in a church and then starts coming for you, well... So through that door I went double quick and slam! I’d got it locked. And only just in time, I should say.”
“He chased you?”
“He kept banging on the door and shouting, ‘Look—no hands!’ The filthy beast.”
“So then you telephoned for help, did you, Mrs Pasquith?”
“Well, no, I didn’t, actually. I thought I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction—you know, to think that he’d scared me into calling for help. I was scared, oh yes, but after all I knew I was safe where I was. You see? I thought, you won’t want to hang about there much longer and risk getting caught. You’ll get tired of it before I do, I thought. And so he did. I heard him walk away up the aisle and out the back, and soon afterwards the vicar came in and everything was all right. But I thought I ought to report him because you never know what someone like that might do next. Well...”
Policewoman Bellweather frowned. “Don’t you think it would have been wiser to telephone straight away, Mrs Pasquith? It’s rather late for us to do anything about the man now.”
“Yes, but you see I didn’t really like to. I didn’t know, what people might think. I mean, he’d said all those horrible things and I couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t tell lies if somebody came and caught him. Lies about me, I mean. Well, they do, don’t they? And I’m on the flower committee and everything, you see.”
The policewoman did not see. “But if he had told lies, it’s most unlikely that they would have been believed surely?”
Mrs Pasquith puckered her flower committee lips in a smile of forgiveness for Miss Bellweather’s näivete.
“When you were making for the vestry door...”
“Yes, love?”
“Did you get a better view of what the man looked like? He must have been nearer by then.”
“Well, he was, of course, but I didn’t stop to stare, I can tell you. I just sort of caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye, if you see what I mean.”
“You can’t give me a description, then? Not even a rough impression?”
Mrs Pasquith shook her head regretfully, but continued to give the matter thought.
“He certainly wasn’t a young man, that’s all I can tell you.”
“How did he speak?”
“Oh, very impudent, very bold. Well, I told you...”
“No, I mean was he an educated sort of man?”
“You might call him that, yes. Well, ‘pollinate’—I mean that’s not a word that somebody ignorant would think of using, is it?”
“I suppose not,” said the policewoman.
There did not seem to be any other question she might usefully ask. The interview had been a waste of time. It had not produced a single clue to the man’s identity. So far as she could see, he hadn’t even committed a crime. Threatening words and behaviour? Possibly. Conduct likely to lead to a breach of the peace? Well, at a pinch...
“There is just one thing,” Mrs Pasquith said suddenly.
“Yes?”
“I told you I saw the man out of the corner of my eye, well, that’s right, he was just a sort of shape coming nearer, but there was something about him that I must have noticed because I thought about it later and wondered if I couldn’t have been mistaken. You see, he seemed to be coming towards me, well, sideways on, as if he didn’t have proper control over his legs.”
The policewoman took conscientious note.
“I suppose,” Mrs Pasquith concluded regretfully, as if admitting the unlikelihood of her own attractions having sparked off the drama, “that he must have been drinking.”
This explanation did not commend itself to Inspector Purbright. He sat regarding Policewoman Bellweather’s typed report with considerable gloom. A mere drunk might have got away with such behaviour once, or even twice, but it was inconceivable that his luck would have held for three forays against the modesty of Flaxborough womankind. Whoever was responsible had reserves of cunning and energy that were not provided by alcohol.
The most depressing aspect of the business was the probability that the man would continue his exploits until gossip about them induced a public scare out of all proportion to the harm of which he was actually capable.
And yet, who could say what that was? The experience of the Sweeting girl had been a good deal more serious than a brush with a randy old eccentric. And a weaker, less determined woman than Brangwyn Butters could have suffered badly in the isolation of Gorry Wood.