“I suppose none of them has made mention at any time of having been in a convent?”
Janice/Daisy suspended for a moment an effort to make her left breast more comfortable by probing around inside brassiere with two fingers of the opposite hand.
“A what?”
“A convent. A nunnery.”
She squirmed, frowning; then withdrew the hand, examined it, and flicked away a retrieved cracker crumb.
“I shouldn’t think so. I mean, what would they be doing in place like that?”
When the girl had gone—dismissed with a degree of respectful courtesy that left her wondering if she should not go a-hostessing in aeroplanes instead of clubs—the chief constable told Purbright that he feared there was a side to the late Mr Hatch that was far from creditable.
Purbright unblushingly said that he was coming round to Mr Chubb’s view.
“A dreadful end, though, Mr Purbright, just the same. What a savage thing to do.”
“Savage, indeed, sir. Or desperate.”
Chub made no comment but he had marked the alternative. He raised his brow.
“Taking a shotgun to a man,” said the inspector, “is an especially violent and brutal act. I have been trying to think of all the situations in which it might be considered characteristic. There really are very few.”
“It cannot be justified in any situation.”
“No, sir, but I am talking about likelihood, not justification. For instance, the use of a shotgun in a robbery involving a great deal of money no longer surprises us, however reprehensible we consider it.”
Mr Chubb conceded the point with regret.
“One hears of shotgun weddings,” continued Purbright, “but there are shotgun divorces, too. That appalling blast would be peculiarly appropriate to a crime of passion or vengefulness.
“It is also a weapon of terror, sir. That is why it is so much favoured by gangsters on the one hand and by those of strong religious convictions on the other.”
“I do not think,” said the chief constable, in the very centre of whose smooth, churchwarden’s cheek a tiny flush had suddenly appeared, “that you need go any further with these speculations, Mr Purbright. As you somewhat superfluously point out, the shotgun is traditionally associated with gangsters. A known gangster was in this place tonight. His associates had earlier given warning of an intended crime. You know your own business best, no doubt, but I must say I expected to see more obvious effort being made to trace this man before he can do any more damage.”
The inspector looked not repentant, but bewildered.
“I’m sorry, sir. I hadn’t realised that you thought Tudor was responsible for the shooting.”
“Well, damn it all, of course I do. What else did you expect?”
The revealing forthrightness of this response was instantly regretted by Mr Chubb, but Purbright’s store of magnanimity had not been entirely exhausted by a night of boring interviews. He smiled broadly, as if to acknowledge a shaft of cunning irony.
“You are perfectly right,” he said, “to challenge my perhaps too ready acceptance of Tudor’s innocence. Now then, sir—reasons...” He placed fingertips together and for a moment, lightly touched his chin in a contemplative gesture.
“This Tudor, or Turidu, is undeniably a very wicked fellow, as you say, sir. In the days of Prohibition, he was a professional murderer—so professional, indeed, that he succeeded in avoiding indictment, let alone conviction, during the whole of the bootlegging era. He has no record, only a history. And the fact that it is tinged with mythology—he is believed, for instance, to have had a hand in the St Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago—is testimony to the high regard in which Mr Tudor is held in his own country.
“However, he no longer is a criminal in an executive sense, having moved, like so many of his successful colleagues, into the fields of administration and patronage. Our information is that Mr Tudor’s political influence is considerable, though not overt. He is listed, for example, as one of the vice-presidents of the Nixonian Institute of Public Welfare.
“You may well be wondering” (Mr Chubb most certainly was) “what such a man is doing here at all. We shall have the opportunity of asking him in person before much longer. I had word half an hour ago that the officer who had been keeping him under observation was waiting for him to regain consciousness.”
Sudden alarm showed in the chief constable’s face. “I trust there’s no question of force hav...”
“No, no, sir,” Purbright interrupted. “The man’s simply asleep, that’s all. Quite a number of the people in the big dining-hall over there were being encouraged to drink rather injudiciously earlier in the evening. I shall tell you about that in a moment. The submission I wanted to make, though, is that no one in Tudor’s position, with all his achievements and advantages, is going to be so mad as to come all this way and risk exchanging Miami or San Clemente, or wherever these people live their good life, for our Lincoln Gaol.”
For a long while, the chief constable pondered. At intervals over the past twenty years or so, he had been visited with a fleeting but alarming fantasy. It took the form of an impression that crime (which was a simple equation of sin in Mr Chubb’s philosophy) was being smuggled over those social borders that once had effectively contained it, and was being taken up and cultivated as a sort of fashionable demonic hobby by a whole range of highly respectable persons, his own erstwhile peers and superiors. At such moments of terrible suspicion, it would not have surprised him overmuch to learn that a lord lieutenant had burgled a neighbouring manor house, nor that a Conservative Member of Parliament had turned tax swindler.
And now, at last, it was beginning to occur to Mr Chubb’s mind that his lapses into apostasy, however brief and infrequent, were invariably shadowed by the lanky, benign, gentle-mannered figure of Purbright. A good policeman, not a doubt of it. But he possessed what Mr Chubb would have called “odd streaks” in his nature. No ambition. A reluctance to apply straightforward moral rules. A strange deficiency of indignation. And always that scepticism... What was the use of a man showing humility if he never for a moment surrendered the sovereignty of his opinions?
“Very well, then,” said the chief constable, in a no-nonsense tone that signified a sudden determination to be Svengalied, so to speak, no longer by his inspector, “if this Sicilian fellow didn’t shoot Hatch, perhaps you can tell me who did.”
“No, sir.”
“Ah.” Mr Chubb looked satisfied and challenging at the same time.
“Mrs Hatch,” said Purbright, carelessly, “says that Councillor Henry Crispin shot her husband.”
“Good grief!”
The inspector waited a moment.
“There has been a good deal of acrimony between them for some time, sir,” he went on. “Almost a feud, in fact.”
“Yes, but murder...”