When Love re-entered the office he was carrying a shot-gun by the handkerchief-enwrapped end of its barrel.
“Propped against the wall outside,” he explained.
Purbright peered at the gun, detail by detail, without touching it. “Very nice,” he murmured at last. “A choice fowling piece. Not the murderer’s of course. He wouldn’t have ditched a thousand quid’s worth of gun.”
Love puffed his shiny, schoolboyish cheeks. “Crikey!”
“It’s probably his own. Hatch’s. His wife should know.” Purbright spread sheets of typing paper on a table. The sergeant carefully lowered the shot-gun to rest upon them, its barrel pointing away into a corner.
“I’ll see her first, Sid, then Fairclough can drive her back home. Tell him to find a neighbour to stay with her.”
When Love had left, Purbright put more sheets of paper on the gun, nearly covering it.
A knock on the door; an inthrust head, perkily solicitous.
“Now, then, squire, where’s the doings?”
Purbright recognised from tone rather than features the man he had last seen toting test tubes twelve years before. The Hopjoy case. 3 And here he was, still eager-beavering. Incredible.
3 Reported in Hopjoy Was Here
“How nice to see you again, Mr...” He rose, trying to disguise in movement his having forgotten the name.
“Warlock.” The man dealt Purbright a vigorous handshake, then punched the palm of his own left hand several times, as though trying out a new knuckleduster. He simultaneously did a little side-skipping dance.
“Of course. How are you?”
“Great, squire.” Mr Warlock (a sergeant still?—surely not) lowered his chin and tucked it into his left shoulder. “Absolutely great.” He made one or two jabs into nothing with his fist. “So where is it, then?”
Purbright was aware suddenly that Warlock was accompanied; he glimpsed boots and blue raincoats and a bundle of polythene sheeting over somebody’s arm.
“Along here.” He led the way. “You won’t all be able to get in at once. Incidentally”—he dropped his voice—“I’d be glad if you’d keep the place closed as much as possible. His wife will be coming by this way in a few moments.”
And soon the widow did come by, escorted by Love, who paused to shield her from the sight of the shut and shattered door. Purbright had asked that someone in the kitchen should maintain supplies of tea and coffee. He gave Mrs Hatch a cup from the tray on the desk.
She seemed fragile, timorous, oddly shrunken. But there were no tears.
“A number of things have been going on here tonight, Mrs Hatch, and I haven’t been able to obtain any explanation. Perhaps you can help me understand.”
She made a faint movement of assent, then stared absently at the carpet. The fingers of one hand fiddled with pleats of dress material near her throat. The meticulous manicure of latter years had failed to disguise housework’s legacy of wrinkles and enlarged knuckles.
“I’m told, for instance,” said Purbright, “that the banquet did not follow the usual course—that events got out of hand, in fact. Can you tell me if your husband knew what was going to happen—or what was supposed to happen, I should say, because I don’t imagine a near riot was what he intended.”
“Oh, no; I’m sure he didn’t.”
“Dressing up, charades, fanciful entertainments of that kind—these were features of the banquets, I believe.”
“Certainly. They are very popular. But always in good taste. Arnie would never...” The restless fingers stole to chin, to mouth.
The inspector waited a moment.
Mrs Hatch looked up. “Eddie—Mr Amis—told me just now that there had been some sort of a raid by people from outside the club. It was very nasty behaviour, he said. Mr Amis is my husband’s private secretary.”
“And he’d seen this affair—this raid—going on, had he?”
“No, no. Mr Hubbard told him about it. Mr Hubbard is staff. He and Mr Amis were discussing it with the young men from my husband’s business consultancy.”
Purbright tilted his head a little to one side. “Who are they, Mrs Hatch?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know their names except as Peter and Bernard and Julian. They are not employees, you understand, but consultants. Very well spoken, although their firm is American, I believe.”
Mrs Hatch was not too shocked or grieved to be trying hard to be well spoken herself, Purbright noticed. One of his dissatisfactions with his calling was the way it seemed to bring out either the worst in people or what they regrettably imagined to be the best.
“Had Mr Hatch any interests, any business interests, in America, do you know?”
She shook her head. “Oh, no, nothing like that.”
“Was he...” Purbright paused, aware of the need to frame this question very carefully. “Did he ever give employment to people from abroad? Through some religious organisation, perhaps? I am thinking of young women, for instance, who might have been glad of work in a club in this country to help them learn the language.”
Mrs Hatch reacted to this probe with a stare of such patent incomprehension that Purbright immediately waved the subject aside. Even if Mrs Hatch had been privy to some or most of her husband’s dealings, he was scarcely likely to have entrusted her with knowledge of so exotic an enterprise as nun-napping.
“I have to tell you,” he went on, gently, “that your husband was killed with a shot gun. He must have died immediately, perhaps quite unaware of what had happened. I have that gun here. I want you to look at it and tell me if you think you have seen it before.”
He drew aside the sheets of typing paper.
Mrs Hatch glanced at the gun and turned away at once. She nodded miserably.
“It’s Arnie’s.”
“You are sure?”
“Oh, quite sure. He bought it last year to go shooting. It’s a very good gun; he had to go to London for it.”
“And he used it last season, did he?”
She hesitated. “Well, not actually, no. He rented what they call a shoot—a bit of land, really—but it wasn’t suitable.”
Purbright fought down a mad impulse to add “Not shootable, in fact,” and asked instead where Hatch had kept his gun. She said she had last noticed it in her husband’s private sitting-room along the corridor.
“Mrs Hatch, did you know that your husband had received a letter threatening his life?”
She stared. “I most certainly did not. Who would do a thing like that?”
“We don’t know, but the letter came from America.”
“America?” Her puzzlement was absolute. The inspector retreated from that dead end.
“Just one more question for now, Mrs Hatch. Forget the letter—just tell me if you know of anyone, anyone at all, whom your husband might have considered an enemy.”