“The only facts—or reasonable assumptions—about X,” the inspector continued blithely, “are that he is a criminal and an American citizen and bound for Flaxborough. Not much to work on. And, at first sight, we have even less information about Y. Only that he lives here.
“But now let me see if I can spot some of the conclusions you have reached by cross-fertilising, so to speak, these two unpromising sets of data.
“Firstly, sir, you will say that Y is almost certainly a criminal himself. Not in the sense of being a gangster, as the man hired to kill him is a gangster. But you would rightly be surprised if there were no criminality in his dealings, in his associations.”
The chief constable was frowning deeply. “Perhaps you should explain your reasoning on that point, Mr Purbright.”
“Of course, sir. It is simply that the professional criminal does not resort lightly to murder. It is a solution reserved for the rival, the traitor, or the incorrigible non-returner of favours. No honest man ever gets himself into any of these categories.”
“I see,” said Mr Chubb.
“I should guess that your second deduction,” Purbright went on, “is that Y is, or has been, fairly successful financially. No petty profiteer would qualify for such an expensive execution. Also, we find in the warning letter the term ‘wheel’, which, if I am not mistaken, is American vernacular for a person of substance and influence.”
“Indeed,” said the chief constable.
“The third point that will have struck you is the nationality of X’s employers. They are almost certainly American. So if we decide to narrow our field of search to include only prosperous or recently prosperous people whom we think capable of using questionable business methods, and then look among them for somebody who has visited or had dealings with America, we might, I agree, be lucky and reach Y before X does.”
The chief constable remained in silent consideration for a while. Then he looked at his watch.
“I really must be getting along now, Mr Purbright; there’s a meeting I have to attend at eleven. You’ll do your best with this affair, won’t you? It would not exactly redound to our credit if some scoundrel were able to walk into the town and calmly do away with one of our residents.”
At the door, he turned upon Purbright a faint, wintry smile. “After all,” he said, “this is not Dodge City.”
As if suddenly released from bondage by Mr Chubb’s departure, Sergeant Love rose and crossed the office. “Where,” he asked, “did he hear about Dodge City?”
“Do not underestimate our chief constable, Sid. He is a good deal better informed than he pretends.”
“So what was all that about?” Love jerked his head in the direction of the door.
“A task for us.” Purbright picked up from his desk the copy of the New York message. “If this is to be taken seriously.”
Love read. He emerged from behind the paper, shiny with boyish enthusiasm.
“It’s the Mafia!”
“Well, it’s certainly not the Federation of Women’s Institutes.”
“I couldn’t follow all that guff you were giving old Chubb,” Love said.
“It was rather confusing,” Purbright admitted, “but shorn of the spurious mathematics I think it stands up. All I meant was that it may be easier to guess the intended victim and then try and protect him than to sift through a bunch of tourists for a would-be executioner.”
“Torpedo,” Love emended.
The inspector nodded. “Good. I see you can be relied upon to cut through any linguistic difficulties. Wheels, now. Could you compile a list of wheels, Sid?”
“Grafters, too?” inquired the sergeant.
Purbright gazed at polyglot Love with undisguised admiration.
“Bill Malley has a membership list of the Chamber of Commerce,” he said. He rummaged through a desk drawer. “And here’s a town council diary: names are in the front section. From those two you ought to be able to produce a bag of notables. Money-makers are those we want, especially the dodgy ones, the fast fortune experts. Never mind the OBE queue and the third generation grocers; the people who get themselves into this sort of trouble usually call what they do either promoting or developing.”
Love’s initial eagerness had begun to fade. “I’m not sure that we have anybody in Flax you could call a big wheel. There are plenty of grafters, but it’s just Cons Club back-scratching, most of it.”
“Where’s that breadth of vision of yours, Sid? Lenny Palgrove didn’t collect three cars and his own plane simply by scratching backs. Hall, the estate agent, left £180,000 in February. Old Scorpe’s brother-in-law paid a quarter of a million for that pig farm at Gosby and he wouldn’t know the difference between a mash trough and a combine harvester. Oh, come on! What about Councillor Crispin—Happy Harry? And whatsisname, the coroner’s nephew, with his fifteen hair-dressing saloons? These are good times, Sid. All I ask is that you record the chief beneficiaries. I’ll do the short-listing.”
Love said he would do his best.
“Sergeant Malley will help you,” said the inspector. “He can tell you things about this town that even I don’t want to know.”
Chapter Twelve
In a corner of a first-class compartment of the nine thirty-five train from King’s Cross to Brocklestone-on-Sea, calling at Flaxborough, sat a heavily-built man in a lightly-built suit.
The suit was coffee-coloured but when the man moved in his seat as he did occasionally to ease himself or to shift his view of the landscape, a faint violet sheen was noticeable. The material seemed to contain a lot of silk: it looked slippery and inclined to drape.
The man’s face was melancholy, plump-jowled, shinily-shaven yet with a residual darkness round cheek and chin that twenty shaves a day would not cure. His eyes, though slowed by tiredness, were watchful and very bright between lids that looked like rolls of uncooked pastry. He sniffed gently every few seconds. The sniff seemed somehow more than a mannerism, an unconscious habit. It was regularly timed and quite deliberate, as if the man had cultivated his sense of smell until it was a reliable monitoring device of self-preservation.
On the rack above the man’s head was a medium-sized suitcase in blue figured hide with the monogram J.F.T. embossed in gold. A light-weight raincoat lay folded next to the case and on top of the raincoat was a black homburg.
The passenger’s only other visible equipment was a sturdy, silver-mounted walking stick propped against the side of the carriage, and an unopened copy of the Reader’s Digest on the seat beside him.
His invisible equipment included a United States passport in the inside breast pocket of his silky-looking suit. It proclaimed its carrier to be Joseph Fortescue Tudor, olive oil importer, born in 1906 in Syracuse, N.Y.
When the train drew into Flaxborough station, Mr Tudor seemed uncertain whether to alight or not. He had taken down his case and donned his coat and hat some time before, but now he stood at the carriage door and looked up and down the platform.