“I suppose, then, that it was you and not Hatch who mailed that packet of letters to New York for Oxonia to give them first-day post under the new presidential commemorative issue.”
At the end of some seconds’ silence, Amis said merely: “First I’ve heard of it.” He did not sound as if he expected to be believed.
“I have to admire the quickness of thinking it displayed,” Purbright said. “The descent upon the club of the gentlemen from Mackintosh-Brooke must have left you very little time to prepare for the somewhat drastic measure that their inquisitiveness was going to force you to take. From an ordinary audit, you had nothing to fear. The books showed no payments that hadn’t received Hatch’s authority or were outside the normal scope of his business. But an efficiency investigation—that was something different. It was bound to bring into question a catering system that required as big an outlay on beef cubes as on whisky.”
Amis, half rising from his chair, began to say something. Purbright gestured him to silence. As Amis hung in an immobile crouch between sitting and standing, the inspector began to recite, quite softly as if it were designed to give comfort, the formal warning that he was soon to be charged with murder.
Before he had quite finished, the door was opened brusquely and Fergusson was back: spry, bustling, between trains.
“Right, then,” Fergusson said, immediately the caution had been delivered. He glanced rapidly from one to another of those in the room, as if they were contestants in a race who had been waiting for him to return with the starting pistol.
Purbright frowned at him. “Just a moment, doctor, if you don’t mind.” He turned again to Amis. “Do you wish to say anything at this stage?”
“Is it...” Amis, whose fingers had been straying restlessly about the flesh of neck and jaw, had discovered a long whisker in isolation just below his left ear and was pulling it so that the skin there rose in a little peak—“Is that usual?” He was sitting again, but slumped forward slightly. To look at Purbright, while not relinquishing the whisker, he had to twist his head upward and sideways. It gave him a curiously submissive, almost cringing air. Is that usual? The näivete of the question, the unhappy deference it implied, released in Purbright a sudden loathing for what was going on.
“You must decide for yourself, Mr Amis,” he said, flatly. “The charge will be made formally at the police station, to which you will be taken now. You may confer with your solicitor as soon as you wish. Every facility will be given you.”
Amis departed, without another word, in the cheerful custody of Sergeant Love. He was listless, grey-faced, flabby. He did not look at all like a private secretary. He did not look like a murderer, either. His errant single hair was still bothering him, and his preoccupation with it made him stumble at the door.
“And now what, for Christ’s sake?” demanded Doctor Fergusson of the inspector and Mr Chubb in an indignant sweep from one to the other. His voice had a bagpipe-ish squeak.
Purbright apologised and explained.
“I didn’t expect him to cave in. In a sense, I didn’t want him to. It somehow makes the affair that much more squalid. If he hadn’t, of course, he would have been asked to submit to a simple medical examination. There’s almost certainly a deep bruise on his right shoulder. It should still be obvious at remand reception, though.”
Fergusson was mollified by the mention of a bruise. “Ah. The gun. Aye.” He paused. “Aye, but if everybody who fired a shot gun got bruised by the recoil, half my patients would be out of commission by the end of the first week of the pheasant season. It’s long odds, Purbright.”
“Not all that long. Amis is a townsman, a Londoner. And not in the tweedy week-ending set, either. A twelve-bore would kick him like a cannon.”
“That’s perfectly true, doctor,” the chief constable confirmed, in order to get into a conversation from which he suspected Fergusson aimed to extract credit. “It is also true, as Mr Purbright observed to me earlier, that the man stank of liniment. A shrewd point, I thought.” Mr Chubb smirked frostily. “But one that might escape the notice of someone always using the stuff in the course of his trade, perhaps?”
“Ah, detection! Detection!”
With which sardonic cry, the doctor abruptly departed.
For perhaps a minute, Mr Chubb stood in silent and motionless effort to conquer the outrageous impression that Fergusson had slapped him on the back. But he did not prevail.
Purbright spoke to him.
“I must get over to Fen Street now, sir. Do you wish to come?”
“I think not, Mr Purbright. Unless there is something that cannot wait until morning.”
“No, sir.”
“What about a warrant, by the way? You’ll be searching the fellow’s flat, I take it.”
“Tomorrow.”
“For the stamps?”
Purbright shrugged. “He may tell us where they are. If not, I doubt if we shall ever find them. Five small scraps of paper.”
The chief constable looked concerned.
“Oh, the case doesn’t depend on them, sir,” Purbright said. “Oxonia’s London manager told me over the phone that Hatch collected his buys in person and always had the cheque ready. The manager says he can identify Hatch whenever we want him to. He described him to me just to prove it.”
“Amis, I suppose.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I wonder,” said Mr Chubb a little later, “how the man consistently kept his employer ignorant of these dealings. There must have been letters sometimes, and they would have been addressed to Hatch.”
“At his club, sir. Where Amis was a conscientious early starter, whose job it was to open the mail, anyway. Telegrams might have been more tricky; my guess is that he told Oxonia to curb their agents’ exuberance after he’d received that wire from Philadelphia that gave our Miss Ryland nightmares about white slaving.”
Purbright gathered his papers and put them in a case. This and the tape recorder he carried to the door. He looked, the chief constable regretfully reflected, rather more like a traveller checking out of an hotel room than an inspector of police.
The constable on duty in the corridor jerked out of some gloomy reverie and saluted. Purbright made a face at him and told him to go and get himself a meal.
On their way to the car park, the chief constable stopped and looked back. Purbright turned, too. Among the windows of the single-storey building they had just left, there had been nailed a square of hardboard, like an eye-patch.
“You haven’t told me, you know,” said Mr Chubb, “why you were so confident that an outsider couldn’t have shot that poor fellow. The gangster person, for instance. Or even Crispin—yes, I know he’s a councillor, but he gets up to some pretty queer tricks, they tell me.”
Purbright pointed. “Hatch’s gun was kept in that room, the one next to the office. It would have to be brought out and hidden—behind the pile of planks there, for instance—before too many customers were milling around the club. I can’t see how either Tudor or Crispin could have done that. And whoever subsequently rammed the gun barrel through the window and pulled the trigger must have known for an absolute certainty who was inside that washroom. It must have been someone who had been with Hatch up to that moment, and actually seen him go in to have a wash.”