FAMTREES—Genealogical Consultants.
He knocked and after some delay was bidden enter.
“My dear inspector!”
The pleasure his appearance had occasioned in the lady hurrying across the big, almost bare room with hand out-stretched in greeting was patent. He allowed himself to be ushered to a chair beside the large table where Miss Teatime appeared to have been working on a chart of some kind.
“A new departure for you, surely,” said Purbright, looking round the room with what Miss Teatime recognised to be courteous interest, as distinct from officious riosiness.
“One must diversify, as they say nowadays.” She cleared a space among the sheets of paper on the table. “Would you care for a cup of tea?”
“I should, indeed. Thank you.”
Miss Teatime went out through a door labelled ARCHIVES. Purbright supposed it to lead to the room sandwiched between Famtrees and the Charities Alliance. He recalled an occasion a couple of years before when he had sat in the Alliance office and noticed a corresponding door. That door had been marked BOARD ROOM. He listened. There emerged sounds of china being assembled on a tray and the filling of a kettle. A versatile compartment, Purbright reflected.
“Have you,” Miss Teatime asked him when they both had taken a first sip of tea and relaxed, “come here on a professional matter?”
“I have,” replied the inspector.
“Your profession or mine?”
“Put it this way. I have come to consult you.”
“You will not regret it,” declared Miss Teatime. She beamed at him, then began sorting among the papers on the table until she uncovered a pack of cheroots. “Purbright is a splendid old name. We might get you back to the Hospitallers of Saint John, with moderate good fortune. Or have you”—she peered past the flame with which she was lighting a cheroot—“a preference for less piratical antecedents?”
“I should like a drop of whisky in this tea,” Purbright said.
Her laugh was immediate, buttercup-bright. From behind a battered copy of Burke’s Peerage on a shelf beside her she drew a half-bottle of Highland Fling.
The inspector held out his cup.
“Flourishing, is it—your consultancy?” he inquired.
“It does seem that I have brought to light a long-felt want,” Miss Teatime said earnestly. “To be able to give people a sense of belonging is a reward in itself, of course, but I do have to make a nominal charge, alas. As you may imagine, Rouge Dragon would be down on me like a ton of bricks were I to follow natural instinct and waive the fee.”
“Yes, I suppose he would.”
“But in fact people are very happy to pay for what I term the comforting shade of a nice family tree. Mrs Hockley, for instance—ah, and this is in strict confidence, naturally, inspector—Mrs Hockley, from Cadwell Avenue, whose husband was an alderman and a dipsomaniac, I can now only describe as a transfigured woman.”
“Indeed?”
“Oh, yes. I was able to establish a strong trace of Marlborough there. If we all enjoyed our rights, Mrs Hockley would have her feet up at Blenheim at this very moment.”
Purbright said it was a small world.
“She entertains no bitterness, fortunately. A less philosophical lady would be importuning the Churchill Trustees. One has to be so wary in the lineage business. A lady from Snowden Avenue, I remember, whose connection with the House of Hanover seemed a distinct possibility, took it upon herself to write some very disrespectful letters to our dear Queen. I had to veer her line a bit towards the Stuarts in order to persuade her to desist.”
“My errand this afternoon,” observed Purbright, “is to do with the house of Tudor, Miss Teatime. And in no genealogical sense, I’m afraid.”
Her bright, shrewd eyes were still. After a pause, she murmured: “A lamentably disreputable dynasty. Libertines, head-choppers and bigots, one and all. I never advise a client to seek relationship with them.”
“The client I am talking about did not call here, but at your house in the Close. He is an American gentleman and his name is Joseph Tudor. I do not think that he has come all this way to claim kinship with Henry the Eighth.”
Miss Teatime regarded Purbright with a hint of sad reproof. “You have had this man followed, have you not?”
“To anyone but you”—Purbright sniffed the aroma of his laced tea appreciatively—“I would say that he has been kept under surveillance as a matter of routine. But I hope you give me credit for regarding surveillance and routine as mutually exclusive terms.”
“Would that more policemen were of like mind.”
Purbright made the smallest of bows.
“The fact is that we are a little nervous of Americans in Flaxborough at the moment. Ungenerous of us, perhaps, but there has been talk of murder.”
“By someone from the United States?”
“The warning came from New York, certainly. It’s only sensible to heed it.”
“Naturally,” agreed Miss Teatime. She was looking thoughtful.
“This Mr Tudor,” she said after a pause, “is not, as I think you surmised, a client. He is a friend of a friend. More accurately, an acquaintance of an acquaintance.”
Purbright waited a few seconds. “Do you know anything about him?”
“Not a great deal.” She set straight a couple of the papers before her, then looked blandly out of the window.
“Why did he come to Flaxborough?”
“Family business, it seems, inspector. He was not specific on that point and of course I did not press him.”
“Then what was his object in calling upon you, Miss Teatime?”
“In part to pay the respects of a mutual acquaintance, as I have intimated already. Also, to inquire the whereabouts in this locality of a catholic church. It appears that Mr Tudor is of the Popish persuasion.”
Something stirred in Purbright’s memory. “Did he by any chance,” he asked, “seem interested in nunneries?”
Miss Teatime frowned. “I cannot say I received that impression. However, Mr Tudor obviously is a devout man. It well may be that he likes to sample the native cloisters when he travels abroad.”
The inspector tried to decide whether Miss Teatime’s skittishness was intended as compliment or camouflage. Then another explanation occurred to him. If she did have serious misgivings concerning Tudor, she would not be so unsubtle as to express them directly. But she knew how to employ flippancy—a kind of verbal wink—to give warning of something she was too astute to acknowledge.
“This friend of yours who introduced him—I suppose you feel you can depend on his judgment?”