“I wish,” said Peter, “to have a clear picture of the consumption-participation ratio. What items are being pipelined at this moment in time in addition to the chickens?”
“What else are they going to get, d’you mean? Well, there’s the bread, isn’t there? They used to get veg when we started the thing, but the buggers got to chucking them about. Can you imagine what it was like going round afterwards and scraping cold cauliflower off of the bloody wainscotting? So it’s just bread now and like it. Until the Nellies go round with the oranges, of course.”
“Nellies?”
“They’re the hostesses, got up in their Nell Gwyn sets. It’s them who serve the sack before they do the orange round.”
“I’m sorry to ask so much explanation-wise, but sack...?”
His guide plucked Peter’s sleeve and led him to a big, white-enamelled cylindrical vessel, set in a corner of the kitchen. The cylinder had two taps. Next to it were shelves, stacked with metal tankards.
“Twenty gallons of Spanish plonk in there. Kept at eighty degrees till we want it. Thermostat, see?” He pointed. “Run off a pint apiece, bung in a few of them raisins, and bob’s your uncle. Mulled sack. Smashing.” He reached down a tankard. “Here—have a dollop, and see if it doesn’t give you a touch of the old hey nonnies.”
Peter took refuge behind his note clip. “Later perhaps,” he said. “We have to prioritise right now.”
“Suit yourself, squire,” said the man. He replaced the tankard and wiped, with every appearance of cheerful indifference to rebuff, his nose upon the sleeve of his Wassail Master’s coat.
At Fen Street police headquarters, Inspector Purbright was reading through some hastily compiled reports upon recent arrivals from abroad at the town’s hotels. The four plain clothes men entrusted with the task had been instructed to arouse neither resentment nor suspicion, but simply to note names and places of origin, to learn the object of the visit where this could be done tactfully, and to gain from off-hand gossip with proprietors and staff what impression they could of the character and bearing of their guests.
Not a very scientific method, Purbright admitted to himself, but the best that could be devised at short notice and having regard for the tourists’ right to freedom from harrassment.
After noting that seven of the twelve names in the collection were of members of a single delegation from Turkey, all agricultural students, Purbright turned with relief to the more manageable remainder.
The most sinister by repute of this quartet the inspector felt able to eliminate at once. The chamber maid informant of Detective Constable Boggan said that the gentleman, a bearded Australian who wore a clerical collar, had asked her very earnestly if she would help him with his photography. Assassins, Purbright reasoned confidently, were by nature men of severely limited and arid hobbies.
All the other three recently registered travellers were American.
Two, a middle-aged man and wife from Tucson, were hopeful, according to confidences they had very freely and pleasantly dispensed, of establishing Flaxborough as the birthplace of one of their eighteenth-century forebears. Great encouragement in this enterprise had been given, apparently, by a present-day Flaxborough resident, Miss Lucilla E.G. Teatime, director of an organisation named Famtrees.
The Tucson pair seemed, on the face of it, innocent enough. Police Constable Braine had kept an eye on them during the past couple of days and had detected no deviation from the established tourists’ round of harbour, church, guildhall, parish registry, municipal museum, Ann Boleyn Tea Room and Ye Olde Yew Tree Inn (the staircase banisters in which were supposed to have been fashioned from the quarter-staff of Little John), other than a couple of calls at Miss Teatime’s office at 31 St Anne’s Gate.
Consulted on the point, Sergeant Love said that torpedoes, or button men, were not trained in elaborate techniques of deception. His understanding was that a pulled-down hat brim or a mid-day edition of a sporting newspaper was as much cover as most of them would deem sufficient.
“And they don’t bring their wives along, I imagine,” said Purbright, harking back to the earlier expressed theory of his own.
Love agreed, although he felt that it would be rash to rule out the possibility that the lady from Tucson was what he called “another hood in drag”.
“And so,” said the inspector, “we are left with this Mr Tudor, of New York.” He quickly re-read Constable Burke’s notes and added: “Who also appears to be on a hunt for ancestors.”
“Oh?”
“Burke says he followed him round the town yesterday and saw him call at a house in Church Close. Number five. Our Lucilla’s, in fact.”
“The house—not her office?”
“The house, yes. So perhaps he’s a friend, not a client. I must ask her. In the meantime”—Purbright passed Burke’s report to the sergeant—“I’d like you to get the name and description wired to Immigration for checking with the people in America, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Where is he staying?”
“At the Roebuck.”
Love made a mock-posh grimace. He glanced through the report on Tudor while walking to the door.
“Oh, and Sid...”
The sergeant turned.
“If anyone wants me during the next hour or so, put a call through to me at that club of Hatch’s, will you? I’m going to have a look round.”
Love acknowledged this announcement with another piece of face-pulling from his repertoire: a contortion supposedly expressive of horrid knowingness.
Five minutes after the sergeant’s departure, Purbright descended the rickety iron staircase which still, though nearly a century old, was the only connection between the upper offices and the now more-or-less modernised ground floor of the police building. He went out through a side door into the transport yard.
Two cars stood in their bays. For a moment he deliberated which would be less unreliable. Then he changed his mind altogether, walked out into Fen Street and took the opposite direction to that which would have led him past Jubilee Park to the Floradora.
He crossed East Street, turned right, then left into St Anne’s Gate.
The doorway of number 31 was graced with flanking columns and a fine Georgian fanlight, features that had survived oddly but with dignity the construction of a flashy shop window on either side.
The door stood open. Purbright climbed steep, uneven stairs to the first floor.
Three doors faced the broad landing. Their painted panels gleamed in the sunshine that shafted down from a tall, many-paned window set high in the stair well. The middle door was marked Private. On the door to its left was a small metal plate inscribed: Flaxborough and Eastern Counties Charities Alliance, Registered Office. The door on the right bore a polished oak panel, about a foot square, with wording painted in black Gothic script. Purbright went up to it.