Naked as on the day she was born, save for a
double-looped string of amber beads and a pair of harlequin-framed
spectacles, Mrs Flora Pentatuke, of 33 Partney Avenue,
Flaxborough, leaped nimbly over the embers of the fire.
As she danced into the deep darkness beyond, there arose
small yellow flames, stimulated by the not inconsiderable
draught of her passing. Briefly they were reflected from Mrs
Pentatuke’s well developed but still handsome buttocks. They
illumined too the backs of weighty thighs and calf muscles.
The thighs were dimpled and lacked the tautness of the calves,
which looked as if they had been hardened by much exercise.
As, indeed, they had; for Mrs Pentatuke was a zestful member of
Flaxborough Ladies’ Golf Club.
She pranced towards the edge of the clearing, swerved and
came back for another fire vault. Her hands moved in gestures
of sinuous supplication. Now and again they would stretch to
become rigid extensions of the strong, white, plump arms.
Then Mrs Pentatuke would halt on tiptoe, shut tight her eyes
behind the bejewelled glasses, and cry in a rich tenor: “O mighty
spirit! We are thine! Amen evil from us deliver but!”
Other figures appeared in turn at the fire. Several jumped
over it with something of the expertise of Mrs Pentatuke. Some
skipped up to it resolutely enough but then seemed to find
themselves wrongly footed for take-off. They went into a quick
shuffle and leaped with such determination that they were
winded on landing. One or two shirked the ordeal altogether
by making a last-minute switch of direction and hop-skipping
round the perimeter of cold ash. Among these were a portly
middle-aged man with a small beard and two women who held
hands and occasionally glanced at each other’s feet as if to seek
reassurance that they had not lost step.
The bearded man wore a mask over the upper part of his
face. The mask was made of a soft velvety material neatly
hemmed around the contours of nose and cheeks. A bag
of the same material was slung under his belly, with the
purpose, presumably, of preserving modesty rather than
anonymity.
A watcher would not have found it easy to make a tally of the
number of people taking part in the ritual. Somewhere in the
sky was a third-quarter moon, but rifts in the heavy, slow-moving
cloud were thin and infrequent. The street lamps on
Orchard Road were at least a hundred yards distant, on the
other side of a double row of black poplars and a thorn hedge
more than eight feet high. The glow and fitful flaming of what
was left of the wood fire showed sometimes three or four,
sometimes as many as eight figures at once. The total number
of dancers was greater than a dozen but probably fewer than
twenty.
Women outnumbered men and seemed less inhibited in their
choice of costume. Even so, the example of Mrs Pentatuke’s
virtually complete nudity was emulated by only two others.
Most had retained one or more articles of underclothing. One
somewhat diffident-looking participant wore a black one-piece
bathing costume, the skirt of which she kept tugging down over
errant segments of her bottom.
“O master! Give us the power of thine unlight!” The cry
came from a tall, scraggy man in khaki shorts. He had halted
so suddenly to make this supplication that those behind
bunched up like holiday makers thwarted by the closing of an
ice-cream kiosk.
Somewhere in the outer darkness there sounded off the
response of Mrs Pentatuke.
“Seven times and seven times and Yah-loo-hally!”
The jam resolved itself and the round went on. Perhaps the
tempo had slackened a little. Some feet dragged for a step or
two; but then the stubbing of a naked toe against a stone or a
root would restore vigour.
Between the dancers and a bank of foliaged shrubbery—possibly
laurel or rhododendron—that screened them from the
gardens of the nearest houses stood a woman who gently beat a
drum with one hand while in the other she held a treble
recorder. The tune was a somewhat stilted version of Percy Grainger’s
“Handkerchief Dance”. The woman’s lack of height—she
was not much more than four feet tall—was emphasized
by her wearing a broad, square-cut cape of thick tweed and,
at the end of sturdy, unstockinged legs, a pair of rock climber’s
shoes. Her hair was mannishly cropped. She was, as nearly as
might be judged in the near-darkness, of a stern and chunky
countenance, well weathered and inclined to whiskeriness. If
ecstasy possessed her, she did not show it. She was quite
grotesquely cross-eyed.
Mrs Pentatuke completed two more circuits, then skipped
off towards a point where three small, steady lights gleamed.
She halted and drew several deep breaths, her head thrown
back, her neck taut and throbbing still from the exertion of the
dance. Her spectacles had slid a little down her sweat-dewed
nose. She pushed them back with two fingers.
The lights were the flames of three candles, each set within a
large glass jar to shield it from the night breeze. The wax of the
candles appeared to be black. The jars were suspended from a
branch overhanging a pair of card tables that had been set up
together and spread with a sheet of black polythene.
“Behold that which is and is not and is again!” declared
Mrs Pentatuke when she had got her wind back. “Yah-loo-hally!”
“Nema!” gasped a fat, grey-permed woman in woollen
drawers and heavily-armoured brassiere who had just arrived
at the tables.
“It is almost time,” cried Mrs Pentatuke. “I feel Him near!”
The fat woman grasped her bosom in both hands, as if to
help contain any explosion that its violent heaving might
portend, and nodded eagerly. Her face was much flushed.
Mrs Pentatuke selected one of a number of assorted drinking
vessels that littered the tables. It was a china mug fashioned in
the likeness of a can-can dancer’s be-frilled rump and over-printed:
Ooo, la-la! Bottoms Up! She dipped the mug into a
green plastic bucket that was more than half full of a pale
amber-coloured fluid—the aggregate, presumably, of the
contents of a number of bottles that had been heaped on the
ground near by—and drank with a sort of dedicatory ferocity.
“Take me, Abaddon!” called Mrs Pentatuke into the upper air.
“Ashtoreth, strike off my seals!”
She searched among the glasses, cups and mugs until she
found a squat jar, the lid of which she unscrewed. With
some of the contents of the jar—something oleaginous that
smelled not unlike sage and onion stuffing—she anointed her
hips and thighs. Then she replaced the lid on the jar and
stood it back where it could be seen readily in the light of the
candle.
The woman in the woollen drawers was drinking quickly,
and with eyes tightly shut, from a goblet that she had filled at
the plastic bucket. Her breathing had subsided a little but her
face was still dark with blood pressure and pricked with little
beads of sweat. Having drained the last of the liquor, she held
the goblet a few inches in front of her face, squinted at it
critically, and broke wind. “Baboon blood,” she remarked to
Mrs Pentatuke, then dropped the goblet into the bucket, where it sank.
“You ladies enjoying yourselves?”
The inquirer, who had silently manifested himself beside
them, was a bald-headed man with inquisitive, restless eyes, an
expression of bland solicitude and a church porch voice. He
wore scouting stockings rolled down to the tops of a pair of
brogues. Round his waist was a string of pennons of the kind
collected and displayed on windscreens by motorists anxious to
be deemed hardy travellers.
Mrs Pentatuke ignored him. She was listening intently as if
to some far distant but immensely significant sound. The other
woman made one of her hands into a claw and cackled a little
self-consciously.
The man moved nearer to Mrs Pentatuke. She remained preoccupied,
her head half-turned away, absolutely still. He leaned
forward and sniffed carefully once, twice, three times, then
looked at the woman in the woollen drawers and nodded over
his shoulder to indicate Mrs Pentatuke.
“Flying tonight, is she?”
The fat woman scowled. “Don’t be sarcastic,” she said. She
waddled away towards the fire.
The man shrugged and helped himself to a drink. Mrs
Pentatuke remained in an attitude of entranced abstraction. The
man raised the family-sized coffee cup in which he had ladled
up his liquor.
“Hell fetch the Synod,” he murmured with the rapidity of
established habit, then, more feelingly: “And boil the
Unreverend William Harness in cat vomit and give Bertha
Pollock the whistling piles!”
“Hush!” whispered Mrs Pentatuke, snatching off her glasses
to hear better.
There reached them, above the panting of the fire-leaping
celebrants and the flat, monotonous accompaniment of the
“Handkerchief Dance”, a strange lowing noise. It was rather like
the plaint of a great bull, far off but full of menace.
The sound ceased for several seconds, then came again.
This time, seemingly, from a slightly nearer point. It was hot
quite a bellow, yet more urgent than a moan.
Mrs Pentatuke replaced her spectacles and pressed her hands
together.
“The Master!”
Adjudging her now almost cataleptic with expectancy, the
man beside her reached out with his free hand and, without
interrupting the steady downing of his drink, amiably patted
and lifted those parts of her person that seemed to him most
deserving of commendation. Mrs Pentatuke offered no objection;
but nor did she in the slightest degree respond. After a
while, he turned his back on her and took another cupful of
liquor. This he drank in large, hurried swallows as if in
anticipation of imminent drought. He did not appear to enjoy it
much.
Three or four others staggered up to the improvised bar.
They leaned hands on knees long enough to regain their breath
and then, chattering and giggling in admiration of the novelties
among the cups, jugs and goblets, snatched their own choices
and filled them at the bucket.
One was a Toby jug in the likeness of a winking clergyman
with an enormous strawberry nose. Another represented a huge
frog; a third, a lady with one breast too many and a head too
few. At the bottom of a fourth there lurked to astound the
unaware toper a beautifully executed glazed earthenware dog’s
turd, very lifelike.
“A hundred and sixty-nine!” Mrs Pentatuke suddenly called out.
“Thirteen and thirteen and thirteen!” cried a man with a
pernickety, high-pitched voice. He wore a deep helmet of
dark felt, rather like a woman’s cloche hat, to which small horns
had been stitched. The helmet was pulled down to mask the
upper part of his face and was pierced with eye holes.
“And ten thirteens again!” added a bouncy, chinless woman
with pince-nez and a habit of good-humouredly emphasizing
everything she said by hugging whoever happened to be
nearest to hand. Her sole garment, a short fur coat, undulated
glossily over several gallons of friendly bosom.
“A coven of covens!”
This neatly expressed summary of their arithmetic was
contributed by the woman who had sorted out the pot frog.
Whilst not underdressed so radically as her companions, she
presented an appearance that in its own special way was much
more alarming. Buttoned boots protruded from beneath a
black skirt that draped the narrow, bony-looking figure from
waist to ankles. The upper part of her body was encased in an
archaic black corset, from which the thin, very white shoulders
and arms emerged like potato shoots. A black straw toque hat
of the kind considered de rigueur by Victorian widows, was
perched upon her head. Of her face, nothing could be seen, for
drawn down all round the toque and knotted beneath the
woman’s chin was a black veil of so close and opaque a weave
that only where it was stretched tightly against the skin could
an underlying pallor be discerned. The most curious, and disconcerting,
thing about this veil was the woman’s election to
drink directly through it, rather than raise it above her mouth.
There resulted the impression of a frog trying to nuzzle its way
into a black tent.
Some more dancers arrived for refreshment. There now was a
decidedly festive air about the assembly.
A woman with a big, loose straw hat tipped over one eye and
a pullover tied about her middle seized the bearded and masked
man and charged him round and round in a private, frantic waltz.
Mrs Pentatuke’s earlier companion, the woman who had
taken amiss the remark about flying, was back again; she and
the recorder player, now partly undressed and presumably
enjoying an intermission, had the pot of savoury-smelling
ointment between them and were rubbing each other vigorously
and with squeals of gratification.
A series of painfully ruptured harmonics, repeated persistently,
proclaimed that the recorder had fallen into less
instructed hands. The drum, too, was being much abused
somewhere.
Mrs Pentatuke helped herself to more drink. The level in the
bucket had fallen by several inches. She drained the mug in two
eager gulps and pushed away the scraggy man in shorts who
had blundered into her and was short-sightedly scrutinizing her
beads, which he fed through his fingers like ticker-tape.
From much nearer than before and at greater volume came
repetition of the bellowing sound.
Mrs Pentatuke stared into the dark and thrust out her arms.
“Master! Apollyon!”
Those near her fell silent. All looked towards the source of
the noise, which, a few seconds later, was repeated. It sounded
very like a foghorn.
One of the other women called tipsily: “Coo-ee!”
The bearded man frowned at her and made a quick gesture
of prohibition with his hand. Then he got down on his knees.
So did the woman with the squint. She swayed slightly and
steadied herself by squatting back on the heels of her thick
shoes.
The horn boomed again. Somewhere a woman was weeping
and laughing in turns. The dancing had stopped altogether.
Every now and then the glow of the fire embers was blotted out
as somebody moved cautiously past. Men and women seemed
to be feeling their way to form a crescent-shaped assembly with
the invisible horn blower at its focal point.
“Asmodeus!” A man’s voice, loud but plummily genteel like
that of a bank manager playing a robber in amateur dramatics.
“Asmodeus!” “Asmodeus!” Some of the chorus sounded
uncomfortably self-conscious, but others—mostly women—vied
in the expression of fervour.
Once more the deep bull-cry welled up from the dark centre
of the arc of watchers. It was palpable, a sound that actually
had body; they could feel it pushing against their flesh. It
repelled, yet summoned. From some of the women escaped
whimpers of fright.
Mrs Pentatuke was the first to descry the point of dusky red,
no bigger than a firework fuse, that had winked into being in
the patch of darkness at which they all had been staring.
She breathed a long, hoarse, ecstatic “Ahhh!”
Very slowly, the spark grew in size until it looked like the
end of a strongly-drawn cigar. It became bigger still and started
to elongate. The shape the light assumed was that of a flame,
but it was a strangely steady, very red flame, as if it burned in a
closed and vitiated room instead of the open air. It was three or
four feet above the ground.
As the power of the flame increased, it become more and
more angrily crimson. Now there could be seen on each side of
it something erect and curved and tapering. And below, limned
in red, the lumpish outline of a vast cranium.
What the assembly saw was a beast, or a man masked in the
semblance of one, with that sullenly burning candle set between
its horns.
The spectacle set off a medley of cries, groans and liturgical
recitals, with Mrs Pentatuke’s constantly reiterated “Take me,
Master!” beating the others by several decibels.
The name Asmodeus was called out most often, but Apollyon
could be heard occasionally, while one discriminating diabolist—a
spindly, meek-looking young man who affected the curious
sartorial conceit of a brassiere worn as buttock-sling—piped
“Angra Mainyu!” whenever he got a chance.
The ex-recorder player sturdily rooted, vide St John the
Divine, for “Abaddon Six Six Six!” It sounded as if she were
trying to acquaint the horned figure with her telephone
number.
Whoever had taken possession of the drum began now to
beat it with steady, businesslike rhythm and the dance was
resumed. This time the circle was tighter, with the impassive
and sinister bulk of the Master at its centre.
After a round or two, some of the celebrants became
afflicted with giddiness and either fell over or staggered out of
orbit.
Near the abandoned scene of the fire, someone gave a long,
raking cough. Then another coughed, and another. A stench
of burning sulphur drifted about the circle. Mrs Pentatuke’s
eyes were watering. She took no notice. She contrived to pass
nearer and nearer the horned man with every circuit.
The ignition of the sulphur had induced a heap of half-charred
branches and dry twigs to burst into flame. For several
seconds the object of tribute could be clearly seen.
His head, surmounted by the great horns with the red flame
between them, was black but gleamed wetly, as if it had just
been dredged from ancient and noisome pickle. The face was a
fairly even compromise between bovine and human, save that
the teeth were characteristic of neither; they were small,
needle-like, and bright green. The huge eyes were suggestive
of a pair of hard-boiled eggs that had been jammed into raw
wounds.
The Master’s body seemed small at first, a mere appendage to
the great head, but it was actually that of a plump, heavily built
man of average or a little over average height. The skin was of
light cinnamon colour and greasy as if it had been rubbed with
a cosmetic tanning oil. A pelt, possibly of a goat or a dog, was
tied round the lower part of his paunch. His chest hair was
black, thick and curly. He was sitting with legs apart in a
folding canvas chair of the kind favoured by film directors.
There lay on the ground close by his right foot a conical object,
presumably the instrument that had produced the bellowing
noise.
Before the renewed blaze spent itself, three of the women
broke, one after another, from the ring of dancers and rushed
up to the Master.
The wearer of the black bathing costume was one; her
demeanour was a good deal bolder than it had been earlier, the
costume had a long split in one side and a shoulder strap had
parted. Kneeling, she shut her eyes and held out her arms
unsteadily.
With a swirl of black cloth, there landed like a raven at her
side the woman in boots and widow’s veil.
The third arrival was the best preserved-looking member of
the nude extremists. She made a few sensuous pirouettes, then
curled herself neatly into the Asmodean lap and entwined
determined fingers in the goatskin.
There were cries of encouragement. Whoever had captured
the recorder forced from it a succession of strangled shrieks.
The pace of the drumming increased. Those who were still
dancing tried at first to keep step, then either switched into
spasmodic individual leaps and jigs or surrendered to exhaustion
and dropped to the ground.
The veiled woman and the one in the bathing costume moved
off in attitudes of mutual commiseration towards what remained
of the liquor supply.
The fire flickered and died.
For a while the satanic candle continued to glow. Its rays
falling on the limbs of the woman contentedly grappled to the
torso of the Master rendered them the colour of pottery. Then,
startlingly, the light was snuffed out.
It seemed that a great door of darkness had closed upon the
focal drama of the rites. No one moved. The only sound was the
intoning, deep in the throat of Mrs Pentatuke, of the Lord’s
Prayer in reverse.
The orison was correct in form, but her heart was not in it.
By the time she got to “...bread daily our day...” the words
were being delivered hastily and without thought. She had not
yet reached the beginning when her voice was drowned by
another.
“I HAVE CHOSEN!”
The words boomed out with a more than human amplitude.
There were murmurs of excitement, accompanied by some
thwacks on the drum. A woman in a nightdress looked about
her nervously and then after some hesitation, called out: “O
mighty Pan!” She pronounced it “Pen”.
Some way off, a car engine started. Headlamp beams swung
among trees and disappeared round the end of a driveway. The
doors of another car slammed. Small shrieks and giggles were
squeezed here and there out of the dark. A bottle splintered
musically against stone. In the glimmer of the sole surviving
candle, the woman in the bathing costume was dancing dolefully
with the empty liquor bucket up-ended over her head.
It was clear that the ceremony, although not yet at an end,
had entered the phase of independent interpretation.
Mrs Pentatuke stood alone, statuesque, indifferent to the
slight chill borne now in the breeze from the east. She stared
at the point in the distance where she knew to be a small grove
of ash trees, the trees of the Old Religion whose magic was still
respected by those otherwise hard-headed farmers who left
them undisturbed even in the middle of ploughland. She waited.
Ten minutes had passed when a pinhead of dusky red
appeared exactly in the line of Mrs Pentatuke’s steady gaze.
Quickly it bloomed to incandescence. Stems and branches of
trees stood out in scarlet tracery against the blackness beyond.
Up and down and about, the devil’s candle moved. A squeal, as
of shocked discovery, rose from the grove. Soon another
followed, but this second cry was succeeded by a series of short
whoops not at all indicative of distress.
The hour bell in the tower of Flaxborough Parish Church
began to strike twelve. It was no longer the eve of Saint
Walburga, but the morning of May Day.
The red flame in the ash grove waved erratically once or
twice, then went out.
Mrs Pentatuke slowly unclenched her hands. Only later did
she discover that the strong, carefully manicured nails had
engraved in each palm four little blood-filled crescents.
The following account appeared half-way down the third column of page five of the Flaxborough Citizen dated Friday, 2 May.
FOLK AND FUN: OLD CEREMONIES RECALLED
The quarterly “Revel” of the Flaxborough, Chalmsbury and Brocklestone Folklore Society attracted a good attendance when it was held on Wednesday in the grounds of Aleister Lodge, by kind permission of Mrs G. Gloss, OBE.
Study subject for the evening was “The Survival of Roodmas”, Roodmas being the ancient festival associated with the last day of April. A number of members brought masks and decorative articles, made by themselves, modelled on traditional examples.
The very successful dance session was led by Mr and Mrs H. Pearce, Mr and Mrs H. Hall, and Mesdames G. Gooding and F. Pentatuke. The caller was Mrs Pentatuke, who also agreed to take charge of the Devotional Half-Hour, in the absence through indisposition of Mrs H. K. Framlington, JP.
Mr G. Gooding was responsible for the erection of a tastefully decorated “quaffing bench”. Faggot-master was Mr J. Cowdrey.
The music was provided by Miss A. Parkin, who rendered selections on recorder and tabor.
Refreshment organizers: Mrs Pearce and Mr J. Bottomley.
Winner of the President’s Maypole Trophy for best living custom demonstration: Miss Edna Hillyard.
The Flaxborough Citizen was a weekly newspaper and it went
to press on Thursday afternoon. Anything that happened later
than lunch time but before tea on a Thursday might, if it were
sensational enough, be accommodated by special dispensation
of the editor and at the price of great gloom and recrimination
in the machine room. Five o’clock, though, was the absolute
limit. At five, the last page of metal would be locked with its
fellow in their forme and trundled off to the mangle for the
matrix to be pressed.
Thus it was that the paper containing the report of Miss
Hillyard’s success in the Revel competition made no mention
of her subsequent disappearance. For although it would not be
true to say that no one missed Edna throughout Thursday, she
was known to be unpredictable and quite liable to take a trip
on impulse or to present herself at the home of a friend, with an
off-hand yet perfectly confident request for hospitality. In the
offices of her employers, Flaxborough Corporation, her
periodic absences were noted with irritation but not alarm. Her
landlady in Cheviot Road was used to knocking at Edna’s
bedroom door without response on two or three mornings a
month.
On Thursday evening, however, shortly after six, a discovery
was made that could be disregarded only by the most phlegmatic
among Miss Hillyard’s acquaintances.
Two boys who had climbed through a break in the hedge
enclosing private woods and meadowland on the north side of
Orchard Road were intrigued to see that a small, bright red
car had somehow come to be parked beneath some trees. They
approached it cautiously, encouraged by the remoteness of its
resting place to hope for glimpsed indiscretions. But the car
proved to be empty.
The older boy tried the door on the driver’s side. It opened.
Something white and flimsy slipped off the seat and fell to the
ground among wet dead leaves. The other pounced, trying to
save what had fallen from getting dirty. He brushed it clumsily,
leaving brown streaks.
“Look out, clot. You’ll have it absolutely filthy.”
The older boy snatched. He looked at what he held, then at
the neat pile on the seat.
“Christ, they’re a bird’s.”
Flushing, he draped the muddied slip on the seat back. It
flowed down into a heap beside the other things. He tried to
make it look neat, undisturbed, by giving it a few nervous
tweaks and pats, but had no success. His companion looked on
impassively.
“Come on. Let’s scarpa.”
The older boy stepped back, ready to shut the car door.
The other put out a restraining hand; he was staring now at
the clothing with keener interest.
“Hey, do you know what? She’s taken the flippin’ lot off. Jersey,
skirt... Look, that’s her what-d’you-call it. Stockings, an’
all.” A small hesitation. “And them.” He pointed, awed.
“So what?” The older boy pushed him aside and closed the
door as quietly as he could. “Come on.”
Neither, in his need to seem worldly, wanted to admit to the
other the feeling of unease that the incident had roused in him.
But as they walked back to the road, the younger perplexed,
the older pretending nonchalance, there grew between them the
unvoiced acceptance that somebody else would have to be told.
There was a telephone box near the junction of Orchard Road and Marshside
Road. The older boy regarded it doubtfully, then swung the door open.
“I suppose we ought, really,” he said. “I mean, we don’t have
to say who we are.”
He wiped his hands down the seams of his trousers, picked
up the receiver and with great deliberation dialled nine-nine-nine.
Three minutes later, he rejoined his companion.
“Right thick one, that,” he complained. “Kept asking my
name and address.”
“You didn’t tell him?”
“Course not.”
“What’s he going to do about the car and that?”
“How would I know? Expect they’ll come over and take a
look round. We’d better not be hanging about.”
The boys hurried round the corner and slipped into the
shelter of an alley a few yards along Marshside Road. For
nearly half an hour they kept watch and listened for the
two-note bray of a police car. Then, hungry and disillusioned,
they went their separate ways home.
They were not to know that a patrol car had happened to be
at the far end of Orchard Road, beyond the crematorium, at
the time of their call to police headquarters in Fen Street, and
that a radio message had long since sent its crew to investigate.
The driver of the car was Constable Palethorp, a reticent,
phlegmatic officer whose eyes were as expressive as holes in a
blanket.
He was accompanied by a lean, restless man. Constable
Brevitt always rode as passenger in the patrol car. This was a
precaution ordained by his superiors. Fully aware of Flaxborough’s
distinction in having on its Force an officer who
would have managed splendidly and perhaps even single-handed
the suppression of the Indian Mutiny, they had no wish
to test the compatibility of his panache with the requirements of
the Road Traffic Acts.
“Go on, Fred—clip the stupid bugger into the ditch!” urged
Constable Brevitt. He glared at Palethorp, who had braked and
was watching patiently an old man who had dismounted from
his cycle opposite the crematorium gates and now waited,
directly in their path, for an oncoming car to pass.
“His road as much as ours,” Palethorp murmured.
Brevitt smote his own forehead with the flat of his hand and
turned up his eyes. He suddenly reached over and held down the
horn button. The old man jumped so violently that the bicycle
slewed from his grip and fell over. It rocked once or twice and
the handlebars quivered. Palethorp was put in mind of a horned
animal, fatally shot but trying to get up again.
Brevitt grinned.
Palethorp said nothing. When the other car had gone, he
pulled out to give the old man plenty of room and drove on.
In his mirror he saw the old man heaving the cycle upright—wearily,
yet with a sort of solicitude as if it were indeed a
creature and not a machine.
Brevitt leaned forward against his safety belt and scrutinized
the road ahead. In time with some tune within his own head,
his right fist hammered gently into his left palm.
“Hang on.” He pointed. “There’s a break there, just before
the bend.”
The car stopped. In the high thorn hedge a gap had been torn
near the ground.
Palethorp spared it no more than a glance, but Brevitt
jumped out and squatted to peer through. Experimentally, he
squeezed head and some chest into the hole.
“No point,” Palethorp called. “It’s perfectly easy to get in the
proper way. Past the house.”
“House?” Brevitt looked disappointed but he got back into
his seat.
“Mrs Gloss. This is all part of her place. It’s open ground
past those trees. And if there is a car there, either somebody
sneaked it up the drive during the night or it belongs to a friend
of hers. Simply enough settled by asking.”
The house was a 1928 Tudor mansion, with half-timber
facings over roughened white concrete. The steel-framed
casement windows had criss-crossed lead strip appliqué with
here and there a bottle-glass inset. A complete set of shutters
had been grafted in 1937. There was a round dovecot on a pole
in the centre of the broad gravel forecourt. The drive from
Orchard Road was flanked, where it opened into the forecourt,
by two old-style street lamps. One carried the sign “Drury
Lane”, the other, “Ye Strande“.
The patrol car crunched to a halt beside the porch, a creosoted
half-barn that gave deep shelter to the big white-painted
front door. Beside the door, and matching its heavy, ornamental
hinges was a wrought-iron bell pull. Palethorp took firm hold
of its handle and drew it down. Inside the house there sounded
the unctuous double-boyng of an electric chime.
Almost at once they heard footsteps approach across a hard
surface. They were brisk and spiky. Palethorp diagnosed a
plump woman, short in the leg, busy. Mrs Gloss herself. Not
one of the days for hired help. She was not going to relish silly
inquiries by policemen.
“Yes?” The door stood open. Mrs Gertrude Gloss, OBE,
had the slightly drawn look over one eye that betokened a
struggle with hangover that was not yet quite won. Otherwise,
she appeared alert, well groomed and not unobliging.
“We are police officers, ma’am.” The superfluous introduction
was Brevitt’s. “We’ve had reports concerning an abandoned
vehicle.” He looked accusingly at Mrs Gloss’s bosom, as if
prompted by association of ideas.
“I don’t think I understand, officer. But perhaps you both
had better come in.”
Palethorp noted the return play of the word “officer”. He
recognized a gentle warning. Only those whose social or
official status allowed them to strew other people’s paths of
duty with the flints of criticism employed that form of address
in quite so confident yet off-hand a manner.
The entrance hall was tiled in bright terra-cotta. In one
corner stood a big stone jar from which splayed tropical
grasses. A Tudor arch led to a white staircase laid with new-looking,
flower patterned carpet. Each of four doorways, all
similarly arched, had a little coloured plaster shield at its apex.
Through one half-open door Brevitt glimpsed white porcelain.
Downstairs lav, he ruminated, sensing need to be respectful.
Mrs Gloss led them to the lounge. They saw a wide bow-fronted
china cabinet packed densely with pieces of porcelain,
glasses, miniature jugs and warming pans in varnished copper,
little ivory monkeys and elephants, a pair of cigarette cases
decorated with designs contrived out of butterfly wings, and
a set of model cowbells in six sizes, souvenirs of Chamonix.
Against the opposite wall stood a mahogany-cased grandfather
clock with a brass face and a moon phase indicator. The
clock was not working. Four oil paintings, all seascapes in
heavy gilt frames, had been hung in line and exactly equidistantly
from one another across a third wall. The room also
contained a large oval rosewood table, a combined radiogram
and television set camouflaged as a Jacobean sideboard, and a
coterie of armchairs, obese and befrilled.
Across the back of one of the armchairs had been tossed a
short fur coat.
Mrs Gloss did not sit down. Nor did she invite the policemen
to do so.
“According to this message”—Palethorp made their errand
sound an altogether unreasonable affair that he personally
much regretted—“the so-called abandoned car is on your
property, Mrs Gloss.”
She turned with a faint smile from Palethorp to Brevitt as if
inviting him to supply the second half of the joke.
“Red sports car,” Brevitt said. “Under some trees.”
“According to the message,” insisted Palethorp.
“Abandoned?”
“Well—parked. As I say, under some trees. And there was
some clothing in it.”
“Female apparel.” Brevitt sniffed, looked away, and probed
one ear-hole with a piece of match which he had taken from an
inner pocket of his tunic.
“How do you know the car isn’t mine, constable?”
“A sports car, madam?” Palethorp’s tone conveyed reproof.
“No, it isn’t, as a matter of fact. But I’ve a fair idea who the
owner might be.”
“You do, madam?” Palethorp, looking suddenly pleased,
glanced at Brevitt. Brevitt thriftily put away his match end and
from another pocket produced a notebook.
“If we could just have his name, then, madam...”
“Her name,” Mrs Gloss corrected. She frowned. “Look,
how did this nonsense start, anyway? Who sent you people
here?”
Brevitt’s instinct was to tell her that questions were for
policemen to ask and that what he wanted from her was answers
and look sharp about it or else, but he managed to keep silent
and let Palethorp mumble something about a nine-nine-nine
call from someone who had looked inside the car.
“A trespasser, you mean,” said Mrs Gloss.
“It would seem so,” Palethorp agreed uncomfortably.
Mrs Gloss shook her head over the sad ineptitude of
authority and said well, they’d better all go together and have a
look and get the matter settled.
They followed a path round the side of the house and crossed
a lawn that lay within an irregular embankment set with rocks
and covered by masses of tiny white and yellow and purple
flowers. Beyond the bank, a smaller lawn flanked an open-fronted
summer-house made of boarding covered with bark
strips. Hanging within from its roof on three fine chains was a
round metal bowl, decoratively pierced. Brevitt supposed it to
be some kind of colander for growing bulbs. Palethorp had
once inadvertently attended Benediction at St Joseph’s Roman
Catholic Church in Southgate while trailing an indecent
exposure suspect; he recognised a censer.
“It’s quicker this way,” Mrs Gloss explained, as they rounded
the summer house and filed through a small wicket gate into a
field. “The drive goes on past the house on the other side. They
can get a tractor in when the grass needs mowing.” She pointed.
“There you are—there’s the car you’re making all the fuss
about.”
Scarlet glinted against the darkness of closely set trees about
a hundred yards away on their right. They walked towards it,
Mrs Gloss watching the ground as she stepped carefully in her
high-heeled shoes.
Once or twice she tripped and would have fallen but for the
ready and strong arm of Constable Brevitt. No corsets, he
reflected after the most nearly democratic of these encounters
had impressed him not unpleasurably with the warmth, scent
and volume of her person. That evening and on several subsequent
occasions before the memory faded, he was vicariously to
award himself that privileged relationship with Mrs Gloss
which he called “having a tit in each ear”.
Palethorp noticed, but did not remark upon, a circular patch
of calcined earth, a couple of yards in diameter, where evidently
there had been a wood fire within the last day or two. The
evening breeze stirred pale, flocculent ash and blackened twig
fragments.
The field was of perhaps six acres. It showed no signs of
recent cultivation. Palethorp guessed it would be poor growing
land. There was a shallow declivity near the centre where stood
a group of tall ash trees; drainage probably was not too good.
And the ranks of trees that enclosed the field on three sides
would deprive crops of much light and nutriment.
Palethorp peered again at the grove in the middle of the
field; it was now directly on their left and about thirty yards
distant.
“What’s that thing in between the trees?” he asked.
“I’ve really no idea,” Mrs Gloss replied cheerily. “It seems to
be some kind of old monument but I don’t think there’s an
inscription or anything.”
“Looks a bit like a vault from here,” Palethorp said. “You
know—like in churchyards.”
Brevitt, too, was staring now towards the table-like structure
of greenish stone standing crookedly among the trees. He
looked quickly back at Mrs Gloss when he heard her laugh.
Were churchyards comical, then? Brevitt wouldn’t thought so.
“As a matter of fact,” said the amused Mrs Gloss, “we’ve
always called it the altar.”
Palethorp smiled politely and they walked the rest of the
way to the red sports car in silence.
The two policemen padded round the car, giving it a preliminary
scrutiny. They looked judiciously at each wheel in
turn, examined the licence holder, eyed both number plates
and gently kicked a front tyre that seemed softer than the others.
“Whose did you say it was, madam?” Brevitt had his notebook
out again.
“I didn’t say,” Mrs Gloss corrected, “but I think it belongs to a
lady called Miss Hillyard.” She watched Brevitt’s labouring
pencil for a moment and added: “Miss Edna Hillyard.” He
crossed out what he had written and began again.
Palethorp put a hand on the driver’s door. “Address?” he
prompted, very quietly, then shook his head. “No, never mind.
We can soon check if it’s really necessary. If she’s the Miss
Hillyard I’m thinking of, she works in the Corporation Offices.”
“That’s right: she does.”
Brevitt wrote down some more. Then he asked: “Did Miss
Hillyard have your permission to leave her car here?”
Mrs Gloss raised her brows, pouted. “Yes, in a general way.
All my friends know they can park round here if they wish.
There’s not a lot of room in front of the house.”
“I suppose you had company yesterday, did you, Mrs Gloss?
I was wondering about all these wheel marks, as a matter of
fact.” Palethorp indicated a complex of tyre tracks across the
grass. “Ah...” His face brightened with sudden comprehension.
“Of course. It will have been those folk song people.
Right?”
Mrs Gloss challenged neither the appellation nor the plain
hint in Palethorp’s tone that the sort of citizens who went
hey-ding-a-ding-ing round a wet field when they could be
watching television like everybody else were more to be pitied
than harassed by the law. She simply confirmed that there had
been a little social function the previous evening and suggested
that Miss Hillyard might have had trouble in starting her motor
afterwards and had been given a lift home by one of the others.
Palethorp opened the door on which he had been lightly
leaning.
He looked around the inside of the car, then stretched across
and gathered in his capacious hand the clothing on the passenger
seat.
“The party who phoned said something about these,” he
said.
Mrs Gloss looked annoyed for the first time in the interview.
“Well, I think they had a nerve. Not content with trespassing
and breaking into somebody else’s car...”
“No sign of breaking,” Palethorp interrupted.
“All right. Opening it without permission, then. Anyway,
after all that, they have the impertinence to interfere with
personal property and then, if you please, to bring you people
over on a...” Mrs Gloss nearly said “fool’s errand”,
but diplomatically substituted “wasted journey”.
Brevitt watched the other policeman sort through the clothing
and lay it, one article at a time, on the car bonnet. It consisted
of a bright orange sweater, a short skirt in dark green
corded velvet, white nylon slip, tights, a pair of black lace
briefs and a matching brassière.
“And what do you make of those, madam?” asked Brevitt.
He sounded rather pleased with himself.
“What do you mean, make of them? I suppose they’re the
girl’s laundry. She’ll not thank you for getting them dirty again
on there.”
Obediently, Palethorp gathered up the clothes. But instead of
putting them back in the car, he looked them over again with a
dubious expression.
“Funny that they should be an exact set,” he said. “If they’re
laundry, that is. I’d have thought there’d be more than just the
one each of some of them.”
“What my colleague means,” Brevitt explained, “is that it
looks more as if the lady in question had stripped off.” As used
by Brevitt, the word “stripped” was so evocative that Palethorp
had to thrust his head inside the car and pretend further search
in order to conceal his embarrassment.
Mrs Gloss stared sternly at Brevitt. “That is the most
preposterous suggestion, constable. You seem to have forgotten
that I am the owner of this property. People who come here do
so at my invitation and for perfectly respectable purposes.
What on earth do you think goes on here? Nudist conventions?”
Flustered and contrite, Brevitt mumbled scraps of a formula
about “routine inquiries”. He was relieved—and not a little
surprised—when Mrs Gloss’s tightly-set lips twitched and then
parted in mischievous amusement.
“Pulling your leg, laddie,” she confided gently, leaning very
close and giving his thigh a playful tap with the backs of her
fingers. At once she stepped away again to watch Palethorp’s
exploration of the back seat of the car, but not before Brevitt
had caught a whiff of liquor of one of the more boudoir-ish
kinds. Sherry, he thought. Or maybe raisin wine.
“I think,” Palethorp said when he had emerged from the car,
“that we had better leave everything as it is, Mrs Gloss. We’ll
have to make a report, of course...” He paused. “The lady’s
shoes, by the way—they don’t seem to be here.”
“Why should they be? People don’t take shoes to the laundry.”
“No, of course not.” He left it at that.
They walked back to the house, where the policemen
declined Mrs Gloss’s offer of a cup of tea “or something”. She
promised to telephone as soon as the car was collected by its
owner, and stood between them at the porch to give the arm of
each a parting squeeze.
“Funny,” ruminated Palethorp on their way back to the
station, “how you can be wrong about somebody. I thought
at first she was going to be very upstage. ‘Orficer’, he
mimicked, remembering. “Yet she turned out quite nice,
really.”
Brevitt loudly sucked air between his lip and a couple of
teeth in an attempt to dislodge a remnant of breakfast bacon.
“I know what she wants...” He explored the teeth with the tip
of his tongue while he reached for the pocket in which his
match end was kept. “...and I don’t reckon I’d mind giving it
her, either.”
Palethorpe took his eyes off the road long enough to give
Brevitt a look of wondering disapproval.
In the lounge of Aleister Lodge, Mrs Gloss poured herself a
tumbler of wine, drank a quarter of it and carried the rest to
where a plum-coloured telephone stood in a window embrasure.
She dialled a Flaxborough number.
“Have you,” she asked someone she addressed as Amy, “any
idea of where our prize-winner got to last night? After the
presentation, I mean.”
Amy said she personally had been too busy searching for a
lost recorder to notice the comings and goings of others, but
why the concern?
“She has not collected her motor-car and some policemen
have called about it.”
This evinced an awed echo of the word “policemen”. Mrs
Gloss described the visit in greater detail.
“Of course I remember she was there at roll-call,” Amy said
slowly after a pause, “and I did see her taking part in the last
dance before my instrument was mislaid but... Oh, dear, I
wish I could be more helpful. I suppose she could not have...”
“Yes?” prompted Mrs Gloss.
“Well, gone home with... You know—afterwards, I
mean...”
“Now that is out of the question. Completely and utterly.”
Amy had to agree. She suggested two or three alternative
escorts. Mrs Gloss said she would call them. She did not sound
enthusiastic.
When she had rung off, she poured more wine and propped
herself against a pile of cushions in the largest armchair. Soon
there entered the room a cinnamon-coloured cat so plump that
it appeared to be wearing an extra fur. It crossed the carpet
with a condescending waddle and heaved itself up beside Mrs
Gloss.
“Hello, Hecate,” said Mrs Gloss. She rubbed the cat’s chin
and gazed at its all but closed eyes.
“And where the devil has Sister Edna flown off to, eh?”
For a second, Hecate opened topaz eyes wide and stopped
purring. Then it settled again into somnolent contemplation of
Mrs Gloss.
“If Lucillite is in your home, I’ve brough good news from
Dixon-Frome!”
Detective Inspector Purbright looked at the apparition on his
doorstep and tried to relate it to the more familiar aspects of life
in Tetford Drive at a quarter to nine on a Friday morning.
Standing before him was a young woman dressed in a
costume of what appeared to be white plastic. Basically a doublet,
tightly belted and flaring below the waist, the garment was
stiffened at the shoulders into what Purbright could only
compare to aeroplane engine cowlings. From these a short cape
hung at the girl’s back. She wore white tights and white plastic
boots and carried a white plastic satchel.
“You’re not Supergirl?” inquired the inspector, with what he
judged to be the appropriate blend of humility and hopefulness.
For reply, the girl pointed to her chest. The name LUCILLITE
in pale blue lettering was surrounded by a representation of golden rays.
“Have you got the three packets like the advert said on telly?”
asked the girl. Her large, very earnest eyes made the question
sound extremely important.
Purbright abashedly shook his head.
“You sure? I mean, you’ll not get the Gift, unless. Hadn’t
you better ask the wife?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t think that would do any good. We don’t
happen to have bought any”—he glanced again at her
name-plate—“Lucillite”.
“What, not the Introductory Offer?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Don’t you want the Gift?”
“Perhaps the opportunity will come again one day.” Purbright
smiled and edged back in preparation for shutting the door.
“But the Lucies are only here for today. We go on to some
other roads tomorrow.”
“Lucies?”
“Yes—us.” The girl gestured towards the road. Purbright
stepped out from the doorway and saw with something of a
shock that his caller was but one unit of a whole cadre. Girls in
exactly similar garments were standing at doors, opening and
shutting gates, or staring up at windows from one end of
Tetford Drive to the other. The scene had something about it
comparable with the discovery of the overnight infestation of
one’s garden by a colony of cabbage whites, creatures individually
engaging but collectively intimidating.
“I tell you what,” said the girl. “Never mind about the packets—see
if you can get the answer to one of the Simple Questions.”
Purbright looked at his watch. “I think I’d rather finish my
breakfast, if it’s all the same to you.”
The girl treated this observation with the indifference it
deserved. She glanced at a card she had taken from her tunic
pocket and recited carefully:
“What is the secret of Lucillite’s power to give your wash the
sort of lightness and brightness and whiteness that will set all
your neighbours talking?”
Purbright adopted an expression of intense mental effort.
“Only...” prompted the girl, watching him.
“...Lucillite...” she added, a few moments later.
Purbright shook his head. “I’m being really very stupid.”
“..has...”
“No, it’s no use. I’m sorry.”
“...sa...saponi...saponif...” The girl mouthed the
syllables with all the patience of a teacher of deaf Hottentots.
Purbright felt the burden of his obligation becoming too
much to be borne much longer.
“It’s no good, really it isn’t,” he said firmly. “Why don’t you
try the lady next door? She’s more intelligent, and she gets
around more than I do.”
The girl sighed. She looked up and down the road, then
came close.
“Only Lucillite has saponified granules.”
Purbright snapped his fingers. “Of course!” He knuckled his
brow in self-reproach. “The things one can forget!”
For the first time in the interview the girl’s solemn expression
thawed. She gave him a little chin-up smile that wrinkled her nose.
“You can have the Gift now.”
Opening the satchel at her side, she took out and handed
to Purbright first a sample packet of Lucillite Family Wash
Granules, then—reverently—a yellow plastic frame made in
the form of a spoked wheel, the spaces between the spokes
containing polythene windows of graded degrees of smokiness.
“The Gift?” Purbright asked softly.
She nodded. “It’s a Scintillometer. You see...” She took it
from him. “You turn these little windows against your shirt or
whatever you want to wash until you get one that matches, then
it says here”—she indicated the rim of the wheel—“how much
Lucillite you have to use to get it white.”
“And bright.”
“That’s right.” She handed him back the Scintillometer and
began re-fastening the strap of her satchel. “Pity you didn’t have
those packets, though. You could have gone in for the Paradise
Island competition.”
“Gosh,” said Purbright.
“It’s a special promotion for Dixon-Frome and it’s because
there’s been a lot of consumer-resistance in places like...”
She broke off, looked up from her satchel-strapping. “What’s
this place called again?”
“Flaxborough.”
“Yeah, Flaxborough. But I can’t give you the invite, not
without the packet tops. I only wish I could.”
“Never mind,” said Purbright. “I’ve always got these,
haven’t I?” He cheerily waved the packet of Lucillite and the
Scintillometer and withdrew.
Half an hour later, in an office that would not even have
made bottom reading on the Scintillometer, Inspector Purbright
began to read a report in the laboured but legible handwriting
of Constable Palethorp. He was less than half-way through
when he heard the sound of scrap iron in epilepsy that signified
that somebody was climbing the spiral staircase from the
ground floor.
“I thought you might like some tea.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you, Sid.”
Purbright cleared a space on the desk top to accommodate
the two large mugs borne by Detective Sergeant Love. He
cautiously sipped at the steaming rim of one of them without
taking his eyes from Palethorp’s report.
“What,” he asked, “is all this about an abandoned car and folk
singers and laundry, for God’s sake?”
Love’s face, pink and patient like a boy martyr’s, held in
addition something of the innocent pleasure of the preinformed.
“You mean the Edna Hillyard business?”
“If it’s her car that’s over at Orchard Road, yes. Although
why we should assume that it’s been abandoned I really cannot see.”
“Funny place to leave a car,” Love said.
“It would have been at one time. What you call funny places
are the only ones where you can leave a car nowadays.”
The inspector read to the end of the report. He shrugged.
“Well, unless this girl has been reported missing...”
“She hasn’t,” Love assured him. “Not as per the present. But
she’s not a girl. She’s thirty-four.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, you know who she is, don’t you?”
Purbright looked blank.
“Niece of old Rupert Hillyard,” Love supplied. “She came
here from Glasgow with her mother in 1954 and went to the
High School for a year. She was seventeen.” The sergeant
smiled sadly, as if at some fragrant memory.
Purbright good-naturedly gave him a glance of inquiry.
“I remember the age, actually,” Love said, “because she came
into the station to ask if one of us would sign her passport
application. It was the year Flaxborough was knocked out of
the Eastern League. She would have been, wait a minute...yes,
twenty-four when Doctor Hillyard died in prison. Did I
say twenty-four—no, twenty-five, it must have been. Good
lord, nine years...”
“Sid. Please.” The inspector had raised his hand. “We’ve
established the woman’s age. All we want to know now is
whether or not she’s come to any harm. I’ve yet to be convinced
that whoever made that nine-nine-nine call wasn’t
trying to be funny.”
“Would you like somebody to ask around? She works for the
Council. They might know something in her department.”
“Tomorrow, Sid. Wait until tomorrow. If she hasn’t turned
up by then, we’ll take some action.”
Love nodded, then rubbed his chin. “Of course they do
reckon,” he said, “that she’s a bit...” His lips pouted, seeking
le mot injuste.
“Oh, naturally,” said the inspector. He measured with lacklustre
eye what was left of his tea, then quickly drank it down.
The telephone rang just as Love was about to leave the room.
The inspector motioned him to stay.
“All right. Bring him along.”
Purbright put back the phone. He straightened some papers,
half rose to glance at the condition of the only other chair, sat
back, sniffed.
“Guess who’s coming to see us.”
Love co-operatively took the empty mugs off the desk and
put them on top of the filing cabinet.
“The vicar,” said Purbright. He joined fingertips and smiled
tightly in parody of pastoral solicitude.
For an instant, Love looked alarmed. Then he frowned and
made rapid survey of the office as if expecting that something
particularly unseemly had been left about.
The door opened with the suddenness of a sprung trap.
“Christ!” said Love, spinning to face it.
He found himself regarded fixedly by the small, angry eyes
of a man not much more than five feet tall but of considerable
shoulder breadth. The man, whose complexion was like an
open stove, wore a suit of the peculiarly apposite colour of
coke.
“Do you habitually blaspheme, young man, or was that a
genuine case of mistaken identity?”
The Reverend Clement James Grewyear, MA, D D, Vicar of
Flaxborough, continued to stare at the speechless Love until
the sergeant took refuge in urgent exploration of one of the
drawers of the filing cabinet. He then turned to the inspector,
but did not abate the gravity of his scowl.
“Do take a seat, vicar.” Purbright had stood up behind his
desk and was indicating the visitor’s chair.
Mr Grewyear hitched up his coke-coloured trouser legs and
lowered himself into the chair without taking his eyes off the
inspector. Purbright reflected that the vicar seemed to
take literally the definition of his calling as that of a fisher
of men: his gaze had all the tenacity of a two-hundred-pound line.
“You must come with me immediately to the church,
Purbright.”
The inspector waited for amplification, but Mr Grewyear
added nothing. He clearly expected Purbright to respond
forthwith. Several seconds went by.
“Something has happened at the church, has it, sir?”
“That,” snapped Mr Grewyear, “is putting it very mildly
indeed. Come along, man.” He stood up.
“I’m sorry, vicar, but you really must be more explicit. Are
you referring to an accident? A crime? I have to know the
kind of assistance you want me to give.”
Mr Grewyear said coldly and quietly: “You are not one of my
communicants, I believe, Purbright.”
Purbright shrugged in apology for recusance.
The vicar nodded. “No, well, you will probably be none the
wiser when I tell you that somebody—or something—has been
perpetrating abominations.”
“That certainly sounds serious.”
“It is serious. You do not suppose I should be here otherwise,
do you?” There was a smokiness in the vicar’s eye that warned
Purbright not to dispute the point: even though he was not a
churchgoer, the Chief Constable was, and Mr Grewyear was
obviously sufficiently stoked up to carry his complaints a good
deal further than Fen Street.
“Sergeant.”
“Sir?” Love disinterred himself from the filing cabinet.
“The vicar believes that there has been a case of sacrilege
at the Parish Church. Will you accompany him there and let
him show you what has been going on. You’d better
pick up Harper on the way. Tell him to take his bag and a
camera.”
Mr Grewyear looked at Love as a wealthy hospital patient
might have regarded an apprentice plumber co-opted to
remove his prostate.
“The sergeant will make a note of the details,” Purbright
explained, “and if he thinks it necessary I shall come over
myself a little later. But I am sure you will find him a most
experienced and capable officer.”
Saying nothing more, but dark with doubt, the vicar rose
and walked to the door. Love scurried to open it and followed him out.
The vicar’s car was at the police station entrance. It was an
American-built Ford of about the same floor area as the Lady
Chapel in the parish church.
Love and Harper sat in the back and wondered how the
five-foot vicar was going to pilot the machine from a driving
position that obliged him actually to reach upward in order to
grasp the wheel. He showed no hesitation, however, and soon
the vast car was sweeping along East Street towards the
Market Place.
From the rear, Mr Grewyear’s upstretched arms gave him
the appearance of administering extreme unction to those
pedestrians who had stepped or been jostled from the narrow
pavement and were now leaping out of the way of the car’s
elephantine fenders.
Love drew Harper’s attention to the tinted windows. “Like
being under water,” he whispered.
Harper nudged him and whispered back, indicating their
driver: “No wonder the little bugger needs a periscope, then.”
He laughed noiselessly.
Love, a little shocked, quickly looked the other way.
The vicar drove across the Market Place, passed the wrong
side of a traffic bollard into Spoongate and parked beneath a
“Funerals Only” sign near a gateway in the church railings.
Without waiting to see the policemen evacuate the rear hall
of his car, he strutted along a path and disappeared through
the wicket in the south door.
Love and Harper found him standing by the font. They
walked up to him. Speechlessly, he pointed.
The heavy, elaborately carved stone cover was in its usual
raised position and a plain wooden lid, padlocked, lay on the
font ready for removal at baptismal services. To the very
centre of this lid something had been transfixed by a butcher’s
metal skewer.
The policemen stepped up on the plinth for a closer view.
The skewered object was a dead frog. Between its out-stretched
rear legs, there had been drawn a cross. A black
felt-tipped pen seemed to have been used. Farther down were
words, printed by the same means.
Ad te omnis caro veniet.
Harper wrinkled his nose in distaste, but Love leaned nearer
and examined the frog with considerable interest. Then he
peered at the inscription and turned towards the vicar.
“What’s the French all about, then, padre?”
“French?”
“This bit of writing.”
Mr Grewyear, who hated being called “padre” perhaps more
than anything else in the world, wrestled for some time with
his anger before he trusted himself to reply.
Very quietly, and with eyes closed, he said at last: “Those
words, sergeant, are Latin. I construe: ‘Unto Thee shall all
flesh come’.”
Love gazed at the frog with innocent amiability. “Quite
neat, really,” he said, “when you come to think about it.”
Harper had opened his case and was busily assembling
camera and tripod. He held a light-meter at arm’s length and
regarded it gloomily. Then he stared in turn at the roof, the
great West window and the rood screen, as if debating which
one of those obstacles he would ask the vicar to have removed.
“You will record the scoundrel’s fingerprints, of course,
officer,” said Mr Grewyear.
Harper shook his head and sucked breath through his teeth
in noisy denial. “Never in this world, padre. What, from wood
like that?” He rummaged in his case, drew out a flash bulb, and
began screwing it into an attachment to the camera.
When the frog had been photographed from several angles
the vicar set off towards the nave altar, imperiously beckoning
the policemen to follow.
With outstretched arm, he indicated the lectern.
This was fashioned in brass in the likeness of a huge and
fierce-visaged eagle. At first, neither noticed anything odd
about it. Then Love spotted something suspended just beneath
the bird’s neck.
It was a dead mouse and it had been hung from its tail with
the aid of a piece of wire in such a way that the great brass bird
appeared to be about to eat it.
“Well, I never,” Love said, hoping to please.
The vicar muttered something about satanic rites.
Harper took four more photographs after brushing the
eagle’s neck with some fine grey powder and saying “Nix”
to himself.
By now, several visitors to the church had begun to show
interest in the proceedings.
An elderly couple, having discovered the sacrificial frog,
were casting indignant glances in the direction of the vicar and
his companions, whom they apparently assumed to be vivisectionists.
A woman holding two small girls by the hand pretended to
read a ledger stone while awaiting her opportunity to see what
had been done to the lectern.
The boldest approach was made by an American, who
cordially invited Harper to advise what shutter speed and
aperture would do justice to that wonderful old church. He
was pretty old himself—a lean, brown, sinewy vine of a
man, hung with cameras like a crop of leather-podded
fruit.
Mr Grewyear coldly but courteously told him that he
had—unintentionally, no doubt—interrupted a canonical
investigation of the most serious kind. Was that so, exclaimed
the onlooker, much gratified. Well, if the Reverend
said so—and he withdrew to the North aisle.
The vicar proceeded to the revelation of the third and most
startling piece of iniquity.
This was nothing less than a lifelike image in modelling clay
of Mr Grewyear himself, dressed in miniature vestments and
suspended in a string noose from the pulpit canopy.
Into the model had been pushed half a dozen long pins.
The area promotion director of Dixon-Frome (Domestic Detergents Division)
stared at the Deputy Chief Brand Visualizer of Thornton-Edwards, Arnold and
Konstatin, Dixon-Frome’s consultancy in charge of the Lucillite account,
and inquired: “Now what the bloody hell do we do?”
Both men were between thirty and thirty-five years old.
Their suits looked soft yet impossible to crease. So did their
faces. Black shoes, carefully cleaned to a degree just short of
shine, encased restless yet always precisely poised feet. About
the persons of these men hung, faint but unmistakable, the
odour of deodorant.
The name of D-F’s APD (DDD) was Gordon. TEAK’s
DCBV was called Richard. None of the friends and colleagues
of either man ever used his second name or abbreviated his
first.
“If he hasn’t turned up by this afternoon, Gordon, we shall
have to go ahead without him.”
“Yes, but Richard, look at it this way. Persimmon has the
how-pull when it comes to maximan venue participation.
“Right?”
“Right.”
“So he’s absolutely integral—but integral—so far as local
product acceptance is concerned.”
“In an above-the-line situation, Gordon.”
“Above the line. Sure. I’m with you on that. But what is it
we’re really aiming for, Richard? D-F is short on Folk-fond—and
I mean short. So...”
“Folk-fond we can get, for God’s sake, Gordon. You are
talking image now. Folk-fond—that’s an image situation. But
first things first. Before product acceptance, product presentation,
right?”
“If you want to co-ordinate visuals, Richard, by all means coordinate visuals, and we’re with you a hundred per cent, but
this is Friday, May the second, and Persimmon has bloody well
disappeared.”
“Hang on. We’ll just kick that one around a bit, shall we?
One—have we really lost him, disappearancewise? Or is he just
temporarily snarled up in a bottle situation?”
“No, no. Drinkwise, he’s absolutely neg. Eastern Super rate
him clear on that.”
“Fine. O.K. So Persimmon might not be back in time for the
campaign film. We need to reckon with that—but seriously.
Right?”
“But seriously, Richard. Right. Now you’re in mesh.”
“Right. Now, we just kick this around a bit more, do we?
Point number two. Reserve customer participation—that we
have not got. No, I admit we should have thought about
RCP.”
“Oh, but timewise...”
“Timewise nothing, Gordon. Forgetting to provide RCP
was plain ad-bad. I beat my breast, I really do. However—next
case. Persimmon had forty, fifty washwives handpicked and
primed. But we don’t have his list. Therefore selected wash-wives
are strictly non-viable material. Remedy?”
“D-F would probably sanction reasonable loading with
pro-extras.”
“Flown in? Time’s short, Gordon. It would cost.”
“No more than to cancel filming.”
“Another thing, Gordon. Exposure factor. Washwife pro-extras
are certified resistant to detergent dermatitis. You know
as well as I do that’s why there aren’t many of them. So their
faces are familiar screenwise. You’d be absolutely right to tell
me D-F don’t want shadow image coming through in Lucillite
promotion.”
The Deputy Chief Brand Visualizer of Thornton-Edwards, Arnold and Konstatin
rose from the padded swing-and-spin think-chair in front of the great rear
window of the forty-foot campaign cruiser and helped himself to another vodka
and celery juice at the hospitality locker. He enlivened the drink with a
short burst of soda from a receptacle labelled: ZING-POD
by Dixon-Frome (Northern Nutritionals Division) and resumed his seat.
The Area Promotion Director of Dixon-Frome (Domestic
Detergents Division) made two slow revolutions in his own
think-chair while he tapped one knee with a pair of spectacles
that had enormously thick, square, black frames. The first time
round, he said: “I don’t want to angle this question to get an
over-responseful reaction, Richard...” and the second time
round, he said: “...so I’ll put it this way, right?
“Right. Now, Richard, you are the Product. Put yourself
right there. The Product. I say this to you. Fifty consuming
washwives recruited at the local supermarket want to use you,
but they can’t because the supermarket manager is their
identity key and no one knows where he is. O.K. Hold on to
that. Now, then—fifty pro-extras could be slotted in, but film
of them would look like a re-issue and very non-fresh, so they
do not get slotted in. Hold on to that, too. Right. So who do
you want to use you? A Product in a Dilemma is how I see
this, Richard. Just by asking these questions, just by personalizing
the Product, something starts to jel. No, wait a minute.
Don’t say anything yet. There’s a sort of sex thing here. I’m
almost certain there is. Now, what? Rejection fantasy? No,
no—too linear. I know-call it Use-Wish. Use-Wish, Richard—how
does that roll you as a bit of motivational structurizing?”
“Use-Wish...”
“Remember you’re Lucillite. Identify. That’s all I want you
to do. Identify. Now—get rolled up. Like a spring. Fine.
Tight with Use-Wish. I really think we’ve got something here,
Richard. O.K. Now let it come.”
“Sex-thing, it is, by God...”
“Great. Great.”
“No, you’re dead right, Gordon. I’m really with you on this.
Christ, but Use-Wish—it’s brilliant. But brilliant. A sort of
Product-soul—that’s how you read?”
“That’s how I read. Right. So be Lucillite. Come on, give
OUT, Lucillite.”
“I’m granules. I’m a lonely lover made of granules...”
“Great. Come on, come on, come on...”
“I’m in a box. Imprisoned in a box.”
“Yes.”
“But there are women all round me. And they say, what is
this? What does this do?”
“Women?”
“Washwives.”
“Great.”
“And I tell them: I don’t do anything. I want to be used is
used up—turned into foam and sluiced away.”
“Guilt eradication.”
“And I shout out: Darlings, feel my granules. They are for you...”
“Spermatozoa image! Marvellous.”
“Open my box...”
“Pandora complex!”
“Fly fixation, actually.”
“Oh, this is four-star, Richard. Bloody four-star. Christ, wait
until I tell them at D-F.”
“Wait a minute, though. I’m still Lucillite. Still the Product.
And I know what I want these women to do. I want to be delved
into. Grabbed. Emasculated. De-granuled. The final orgasm of
being de-organed!”
The climactic six words were delivered by a man suddenly
wide-eyed and holding aloft a fan of tensed fingers.
D-F’s Area Promotion Director released pent-up breath. “My
God,” he said softly. “Mantis motivation!”
The other watched him, alert but silent.
“You see what this means, Richard!”
TEAK’s DCBV nodded. He blew gently upon the nail of
his left thumb.
“An ad-clens revolution. A turn round of the whole concept.
Everything up to now has been slanted on women wanting to
please men. But do they?”
“Exactly. Do they? We’ve been hammering away for years on
this whiteness thing. And why? Because Motivational Research
said whiteness represented lost virginity.”
“Every washday the woman got her hymen back so she
could offer it again to her mate. Sure, sure. You remember the
Vurj campaign, Richard? Always a shot of washwife handing
the Vurj pack to man in white hubbyshirt.”
“God! How off-beam can one get? Listen, this is how I see
it, Gordon. Copulation equals children equals drudgegrudge.
Right?”
“Right.”
“What colour drudgegrudge? White. Because of millions
spent on washimage, right? Now, then. White equals the
Product. Lucillite equals white equals copulation, equals
drudgegrudge.”
“A multidirectional equation...”
“Sure. Now you see where everybody’s been going wrong,
Gordon. They’ve tried to make the Product a love-object.”
“Instead of...”
“Exactly. A hate-focus. Or castration substitute, if you like.”
“The implications are pretty terrific, Richard.”
“Policywise, my God, yes! Dynamite.”
“Maybe we should have had Antony in on this.”
“He’s getting cameras set up. In any case, we’ll have to stick
to format until D-F and TEAK can conferencize.”
“I suppose so.”
“Pity.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Gordon...”
“Yes?”
“You realize we haven’t any consumer-participation laid on
yet?”
“God, I’d forgotten. No use waiting for Persimmon. Look,
what about getting Hughie to organize this. He’s done CP
organizing before.”
The adman went into the interior of the campaign cruiser.
He called back: “Which mobile is Hughie on?”
“Number two.”
“Roger.”
The prodman heard a murmur of conversation in the talkout stall.
When he returned, the adman said that Hughie would brief
his Lucy-team and issue them with extra giftbait.
The first women recruited by the Lucies arrived shortly after
twelve o’clock. They were from the Council estate off Burton
Lane. A party of three from Windsor Close had linked with the
Simpson Road and Abdication Avenue contingents. They were
closely followed by a straggling dozen from Edward Crescent.
Some had brought sandwiches and flasks of tea. Almost all
wore their best clothes and more than their usual amount of
make-up. Several of the younger ones had packed swimsuits in
their shopping bags, but none admitted having done so.
The campaign cruiser was easily enough identified. It carried the word
LUCILLITE in letters two feet high along each side.
There rose from the roof on supporting brackets the representation of an
attractive female clutching a packet of Lucillite and gazing up, like a
saint contemplating her own halo, at a thinks-balloon inscribed “For
Stains that Defy—Saponify!”
The cruiser was parked on a half-acre of uncultivated land
that lay between the river and the northern end of Jubilee
Park Crescent. The area was low lying and its liability to be
flooded each spring gave it a grey and streaky appearance;
what grass grew there was short, sparse and wirelike.
On this impoverished terrain had been set a broad, white-painted
platform surmounted by an arch of trellis over which
two drumfuls of “Bowermaster” plastic vine had been unwound.
At each side of the platform was an imitation medieval fair
booth. That on the left bore a notice in Gothic type: Ye
Towns-people’s fouled cloutes taken here. The notice on the right-hand
booth read: Collect ye fayre and sweete cloutes here.
An outsize washing-machine occupied the centre of the
platform.
By one o’clock, more than thirty women had collected
around the great caravan. Two Lucies emerged from their
rest-room amidships and began to check names and describe
in simple terms what was going to happen. More detailed
directions, they said, would be given by the gentlemen from
The Company and The Film People.
The crowd grew to fifty or more. Instinctive segregation was
beginning to be noticeable. The more animated elements, those
from the Burton Lane estate, kept close to the cruiser, ready to
profit from neighbourhood solidarity should anything be
offered from its doors on a first-come-first-served principle.
Less voluble, but no less vigilant ladies, whose homes lay in
the avenues and closes south of Pawson’s Lane, moved slowly
in small groups around the platform. This not only enabled
them to avoid a social admixture which, they were considerate
enough to realize, would have embarrassed their less fortunately
placed fellow townswomen, but it was calculated to give them a
head start if the platform and not the caravan should prove to
be the focus of the afternoon’s activities.
A third group, the smallest, loitered on the river bank in
graceful contemplation of the upper air. Every now and then
they peeked at tiny gold watches, glistening amidst the fur of
coatsleeves like the eyes of little animals. These women were
residents of Stanstead Gardens and its tributaries, Brompton,
Mather and Darlington Gardens, and they were on hand partly
out of curiosity and partly on account of the rumour that a
ten-guinea fee was to be paid everyone selected for actual screen
appearance.
Precisely at one-thirty, the Assistant Environmental Research
and Liaison Executive in charge of the number two mobile and
called Hugh by his peers, leaped briskly up the three steps to
the platform and held up his arms.
“Ladies...”
The factions began to draw together to form a single
audience. Even the Gardens-dwellers ventured within listening
distance. They turned to one another, trying out smiles.
“Ladies,” cried the AERALE, “as you know, this is a big
day for”—he frowned for a second, snapped his fingers—“for
Flaxborough. With your kind assistance and”—he glanced at
the sky—“that of the beautiful weather you seem to enjoy in
this part of the country”—good-humoured groans—“we intend
to put this town on a million television screens. Right, everyone?
Right. Now you know what that means, don’t you? It means
that some of you lovely ladies—no, don’t laugh, I can safely
say that seldom have I seen so high a proportion of attractive
women in all the crowds that have come to testify to the power
of our Product—it means, I say, that some of you luscious
ladies will have the chance you have been waiting for—and
which, believe me, you so richly deserve—the chance of being a
real film star! What do you think of that, eh? Fabulous?
Fabulous, right. So we’ll get right along with all the wonderful
things that are in store for Flaxborough while this fabulous
weather holds and while all you lovely ladies are still smiling.
Smile, smile, smile, that’s the style, right? First of all, there’s a
fabulous young man I want you all to meet. He’s our Location
Visual Kinetics Executive—and anyone who can say that gets a free packet of
Lucillite here and now, I promise you, ladies—can you
say that, madam?—no, never mind, we’ll just call him
Antony, shall we? Antony, come up here and meet all these
lovely ladies...”
And soon they were all friends: the ladies both of humble
station and high degree; Hugh, with his chubby chops, a nose
like an aubergine, and eyes restless as riot police, darting
always here and there in the crowd to see that the quips and
sallies were being properly acknowledged; black-bearded
Antony, who wore heavy gold ear-rings and manipulated his
camera like a harpooneer; and the four Lucies on herd control
and powder-room whisper duty.
Neither the Area Promotion Director of Dixon-Frome nor
their consultancy’s Deputy Chief Brand Visualizer had yet put
in an appearance. They were taking a working lunch at the
Roebuck in order to discuss in depth the new concept of Mantis
Motivation in the domestic detergent field.
No such advanced theory lay behind the programme of
filming and interviews from which a two-minute commercial
would eventually be sculpted by the Tele-kinetics Division of
TEAK. The idea to be promoted was simply that Lucillite
was of such remarkable cleansing potential that it would
enable clothes to be washed even in the polluted water of a
modern river.
The treatment of the finished film was to be in a style
combining historico-fantastical and chemo-whimsical elements.
Some shots had been taken the previous day. Polystyrene
rocks had been set in the mud at the water’s edge, and Lucies
in seventeenth-century gowns filmed while they dunked
seventeenth-century shifts in the river, slapped them on to
the polystyrene rocks and belaboured them with plastic
paddles. This performance would be condensed into the few
seconds’ screen time sufficient for viewers to be told that in
Good King Charles’s days rivers ran pure—pure enough for
washing the family’s clothes. There would follow the interpolation
of some stock library shots of industrial effluent to
point the question, “But would you put your husband’s shirt
into this?”
Hugh, held all the time at close range by Antony’s lenses,
moved among the women like a faith-healer with a full head of
steam. He halted before a benign-looking woman on whose
coat was pinned the tiny “L” monogram that showed she had
been interviewed by a Lucy, found reasonably articulate and
co-operative, and coached in the art of giving prescribed
answers with apparent conviction.
“Would you like to try doing your weekly wash in that river,
madam, as they did in Good King Charles’s golden days?”
“Ha, ha,” said the woman with great care and solemnity.
“You must be joking of course.”
Hugh shook his head, put one arm round the woman’s
shoulders and smiled into the middle distance. “My dear, you
won’t think I’m joking when I tell you what I’m going to do.
You’ve brought your weekly wash along here today?”
“Yes I have. I don’t know what my hubby will say I’m
sure.” The woman stared steadfastly at the microphone and
waited.
“Fabulous. Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going
to tell one of those young ladies to take your things and—no, wait for
it—and WASH them in that dirty old river water. Now
what do you say to that?” He gave her shoulders a squeeze and
grinned round at the assembly.
“Well all I can say is good luck to Lucillite and its sapo-ni-fied
gra-nules but I must say you are taking something on this time.”
Hugh released the woman from his evangelical embrace and
without sparing her another glance he began to wind up a few
yards of slack in the microphone cable.
“Lovely,” said Antony. “Marvellous.” He made cabbalistic
motions with a light-meter. “I want the river shots now. That
lovely boatman. Before the light goes.”
“We’ll have some more of these little personal chats later,
shall we, ladies?” Hugh was addressing the women in general.
“That will be fabulous, and I’m looking forward to it, I truly am.
But for the moment I want you all to gather over there by the
river and stand—yes, that’s right, just stand there—and look
out over the water at the boat. Like you were waiting for
Bonnie Prince Charlie. You all know who Bonnie Prince
Charlie was? Of course you do. That’s marvellous. Just stay
like that a minute. Fabulous...”
Into Antony’s ear he inquired: “Where’s that prick who’s
supposed to be taking the bloody boat out?”
The boatman was eventually discovered asleep in his craft,
moored a hundred yards up river. He was a Flaxborough man
(“a genuine local”, in Antony’s enthusiastic phrase) and the
admen had recruited him the previous evening on the strength
of his assurance, given with a wealth of circumstantial detail in
the bar parlour of the Three Crowns, that he was a ferryman of
long experience and wide renown. His name was Heath.
“Aye, aye, cap’n!” he responded with great presence of mind,
on being jolted from sleep by an angry shout from Hugh. He
scrambled to the stern of the rowboat, unknowingly loaned by
a drinking acquaintance, and cut the rope that secured it to a
baulk of timber. The boat began to drift offshore, slowly
revolving.
Heath searched for whatever means of locomotion the boat
possessed. There were no oars. He managed to pull out a seat-board.
Using this as a paddle, he got the craft near enough to the
bank to make himself heard by his patrons.
“Ahoy, there...I’ll belay her down wind a point and get her
to where you said. You go and hoist your film gear and she’ll be
there before you can spit.”
Heath had been punctilious in one respect: he had donned
the costume devised by the TEAK Tele-kinetics Division for
his role—indeed it had so taken his fancy that he had been
wearing it continuously since the previous evening. It consisted
of a scarlet and gold waterman’s doublet, Nelsonian breeches
and a highwayman’s hat left over from a stillborn campaign on
behalf of Dick Turpin Y-fronts (The B-I-G Holdup).
The plan was for this picturesque figure to row out to mid-stream,
mime a baling action to make it seem he was filling the
antique brass-bound plastic tub in the prow, and return to the
shore. A series of brief clips would convey an impression of the
operation and of its sequels: the transfer of the supposed river
water into the washing machine ashore and the supposed
addition of the miraculously saponifying Product, in order, that
a collection of the town’s most gruesomely stained articles of
apparel might supposedly be cleansed to the astonishment,
edification and high delight of the beholders.
Heath’s intended course was marked by three poles that had
been driven at low tide into the river bed at twenty-yard
intervals. These rose some ten feet above the present water
level and served the primary purpose of supporting a banner
that read: BRIGHT, BRIGHT—NEW LUCILLITE.
Having with difficulty brought his boat to the bank close by
the first pole, and exchanged his extemporized paddle for the
oars that Hugh had commandeered from a beached dinghy
near by, Heath spat on his hands and struck a nautical attitude.
“Everything shipshape, cap’n?” he inquired of Antony,
already clamped to his viewfinder.
“Lovely. Lovely. Carry on. Marvellous. Now the rowing.
Lovely. Pull. Try and keep both together. You’re Captain
Bligh. Yes, lovely. You’re Bligh, duckie. Intrepid. Obsessed.
Yes, yes—marvellous. Knot your neck muscles. Now a teeny
bit of agony. You’re being lashed. Ooo...lash, lash, lash.
Lovely...”
When he had been for some time out of range of these
murmured exhortations, Heath judged the moment appropriate
to stop rowing and to go through the baling routine. The third
pole, he noticed, was only a yard or two away. He picked up the
reproduction eighteenth century grog pannikin that had been
supplied with his costume and dipped it in the river, then
emptied its contents into the tub. He repeated the operation
half a dozen times.
A shout came from the shore. Heath looked back to see
Hugh waving and pointing meaningfully at the boat. Antony
had stopped filming and seemed to be making gestures indicative
of impending self-destruction. Heath, much puzzled,
cupped his hand to one ear.
“Get the bloody thing off!” came over the water from Hugh.
“It’s right in the bloody picture!”
Heath frowned, shrugged and inquiringly doffed his three-cornered hat.
“No!” bellowed Hugh. “Not that.”
Heath put his hat on again.
“In the water,” Hugh shouted. “There. Just by the stern.”
Heath peered over the prow.
“Stern! Stern!”
“The back!” screamed Antony. Heath gave a great quarter-deck
salute of comprehension and clambered aft.
What he saw was enough to disconcert more seasoned
mariners than Heath. Waterborne just below the gunwale and
staring up at him with bulbous, bloodshot eyes was the head of
some monstrous animal. Strips of hide floating from the
severed neck had caught on the farthest banner-supporting
pole.
Heath stared for nearly half a minute at the creature’s chaps,
blackened as if by mummification, at its bull-like nostrils and
partly submerged horns.
Then, quite suddenly, it dawned on him that the thing was
too buoyant to be real. He poked it with an oar. It bobbed,
sending an impression of wood, of hollowness, up the oar.
He leaned out and tugged the leather strapping free from the
pole. Heaving the head into the boat took scarcely any effort
at all.
“Beg to report sea monster in the scuppers, cap’n!”
The homeward-bound Heath, delighted with the discovery
so late in life that he could row, grinned over his shoulder at
the assembly on the bank.
A few of the women smiled back. The others, who had heard
some of the things which Hugh and Antony had been saying
to each other about Heath’s odyssey, remained grave-faced.
As soon as the boat touched ground, Hugh yanked out the
head and swung it on to the turf behind him. In a terribly
audible whisper he ordered Heath to turn the boat round and
go through his whole routine again but not like a piss-boiling
twat this time or God help him he’d stitch his ears to his
arsehole and please but please to remember this whole thing
was more serious than the Holy Ghost so no more bloody jokes...
Heath embarked on his second voyage to the accompaniment
of another stream of those delirous little cries of encouragement
which seemed to issue from Antony quite automatically
whenever he aimed a camera at anybody.
Hugh, his solicitous affability restored to full pressure,
marshalled the washwives into new positions for interviews and
amazement shots.
The Area Promotion Director of Dixon-Frome and the
Deputy Chief Brand Visualizer of Thornton-Edwards, Arnold
and Konstatin arrived back from their working lunch in the
APD’s Sholto-Clore Mark III Retaliator. They watched the
filming for a few minutes from the observation window of the
campaign cruiser, then closed their eyes in order to internalize
a few of the day’s ideas.
Only two people seemed disposed to take notice of the great
mask that lay on the grass, the spring sunshine drawing from
it faint wraiths of steam.
One was Mrs Flora Pentatuke, who had been watching from
the opposite bank during Heath’s first excursion.
The other also was a woman. Her name was Miss Amy
Parkin and although she was of exceptionally short stature, she
somehow had contrived that afternoon to get her face on to
more than half the footage of Antony’s film.
Saturday morning in Flaxborough is normally an
undemanding, leisurely interlude between five days of labour
and the athletic, alcoholic or concupiscent demands of the
week-end. There is an open street market at one end of the
town and at the other an auction of such various objects as
henhouses, bags of onions, fishing rods, rolls of wire, saplings,
tortoises and second-hand hearing aids. The shops in between
are packed with citizens exchanging news and opinions and
occasionally buying something. Inns do a moderate trade, but
the availability of their liquor is of secondary importance to
the comfort and seclusion of their bar parlours. The drivers of
the cars wedged irrevocably in narrow streets do not engage in
the empurpling bouts of mutual recrimination that are the sole
enlivening indulgence open to the city motorist; they sensibly
go in search of talk and refreshment until such time as the
situation be resolved by the Flaxborough equivalent of natural
selection. Even policemen, from Chief Constable Harcourt
Chubb to the rawest cadet in Fen Street, subscribe—in normal
times—to the preservation of Saturday morning as a strictly
social amenity which could be blighted by the slightest excess
of zeal on their part. “Let it mulch until Monday”, is one of the
favourite advisory metaphors of Mr Chubb, a keen gardener in
his considerable spare time.
But the day that followed the opening of the Lucillite
promotion campaign was not normal—or certainly not to a
degree that would have permitted Inspector Purbright and his
colleagues to remain inoperative.
For one thing, Edna Hillyard had not yet made a reappearance
at her lodgings or her place of work or, as far as the police
were aware, anywhere else in the town.
For another, the wife of Mr Bertram Persimmon, of 3 The
Riding, Flaxborough, had reported her husband missing since
Wednesday.
A third thoroughly disconcerting circumstance was the
arrival at the police station of five journalists from London
papers anxious to know about a Black Magic Cult which had
turned Flaxborough into a Town of Fear.
Purbright sent word to the duty sergeant that if the five
gentlemen would be good enough to await him in the station
recreation room they would be rewarded with a press
conference.
Sergeant Love expressed apprehension but Purbright
brushed aside his doubts with the observation that the newspaperman
of the present day was no longer all hip flask and
trespass but a civilized practitioner who would respect
confidences and reciprocate helpfulness. Thus whistling in the
dark, so to speak, he led Love downstairs to the recreation room.
Purbright took stock of the waiting five and was a little
surprised to find that they did, indeed, look different in type
and temperament from national pressmen as he supposed Love
would recall them. The dirty raincoats with epaulettes and
leather buttons had gone; as had the scuffed brown brogue
shoes, the underarm clutches of early editions, the blue ribbon
of smoke ascending from the mouth-cornered cigarette past the
permanently closed eye that gave the face its abiding expression
of quizzical world-weariness. These men looked less abusive
and less abused. Purbright guessed that they ate more expense-account
lunches than their predecessors and fewer railway pies.
For a moment, he wondered if the old habits of thought had
been jettisoned with the shabby coats and the chain-smoking.
“Inspector, what are the police doing about all these black
masses that are going on down here?”
Purbright sighed. Plus ça change... “Ah,” he said brightly,
“I’m glad you asked me that...”
To the home of Mrs Gloss on Orchard Road went Detective
Constable Pook, primed by Purbright to ask further questions
about Edna Hillyard and to bring her car back to police headquarters.
Mrs Gloss did not look particularly pleased to see him but
she invited him into the lounge. “Another cup, Edie,” Mrs
Gloss called through the kitchen door as they passed.
A very short, plainly dressed woman was sitting beside the
table on which coffee and a plate of biscuits were already set
out. Pook recognised her as a teacher from the Dorley Road
junior school.
“Morning, Miss Parkin,” he said.
Amy Parkin’s convergent eyes were trained at points in space
a little beyond and to each side of his head. She wished him
good morning.
“Mr Pook is a policeman,” explained Mrs Gloss, “and he has
come to take Edna’s car away.”
She held out her hand for the cup and saucer which a sallow,
straight-haired young girl wearing an apron had brought in.
“Help yourself to a biscuit, officer.”
He did so.
“I understand,” Pook said, regarding the KreemiKrunch
Kookie that would release the real taste of the country at the
first bite, “that Miss Hillyard was last seen on Wednesday night.”
“Well, that was when I personally last saw her. I cannot
speak for other people, naturally.”
“You saw her then as well, did you, Miss Parkin?”
“I?” Miss Parkin sounded surprised. Then she noticed the
folded copy of the Flaxboroagh Citizen which Pook had taken
from his pocket and was smoothing, napkin-like, across his
knee. “Oh, yes. Certainly I saw her. At our little function. But
only very briefly.”
Pook nibbled the KreemiKrunch Kookie and allowed his
taste buds to be beguiled by a country-style combination of
dehydrated milk solids, soya rusk, sodium monostearate and
saccharin.
“I see she won some sort of a prize,” he said.
“A title only,” Mrs Gloss said quickly. “Nothing tangible.”
“Not a cup, then? It says here ‘Maypole trophy’.”
“You shouldn’t take things in newspapers too literally,” Miss
Parkin said.
“That’s true,” added Mrs Gloss. “ ‘Trophy’ in this
case isn’t used in a material sense, you know. It’s a sort of honour,
that’s all.”
“The members know what it means, and that’s what matters,
isn’t it?”
Pook nodded at Miss Parkin’s sapience and looked again at
the Citizen report while he drank some coffee and demolished
the rest of the KreemiKrunch.
“What’s a faggot-master?” he inquired.
Mrs Gloss frowned. “If you must know, we generally have a
little bonfire to brighten up our outdoor meetings, and Mr
Cowdrey looks after it. He has had experience with the
Scouts.”
“I know,” Pook said, without looking up from the paper.
He somehow made the acknowledgement sound like a notice of
impending prosecution. The two women glanced at each other.
“What time was it when you last noticed Miss Hillyard?” Pook
asked Mrs Gloss.
“I really couldn’t tell you. It was towards the end of the
meeting. Elevenish, perhaps.”
Pook looked at Miss Parkin.
She waved a hand vaguely. “About then, yes.”
“Dancing, was she?” asked Pook, having referred again to the
newspaper report.
“I believe she was.”
Miss Parkin nodded agreement.
“It says here,” the policeman went on, “that there were
refreshments. What sort of refreshments, Mrs Gloss?”
Mrs Gloss’s expression hardened. “Is that relevant, officer?”
“It could be, madam.”
“How?”
“Well, it’s not for me to speculate, but the lady did leave her
car here. Perhaps she had reason to think that it was the wisest
thing to do.”
Mrs Gloss was silent for a moment. She shrugged. “You
could be right. But it is not for me to speculate, either. I only
know that the bar...”
“The ‘quaffing bench’?”
“If you prefer to call it that.”
“It’s what the paper calls it.”
“I see. The point is, though, if I may return to it, that any
notion of unregulated drinking on anybody’s part can be dismissed
from your mind at once. The refreshment was the one
customarily served at our meetings—a very wholesome drink
made to an old country punch recipe.”
“Chiefly home-made wine,” averred Miss Parkin.
“Ah,” Pook said. (Purbright once had observed that one of what he
called Pook’s “rancid monosyllables” was as intimidating
as a search warrant.)
“About Miss Hillyard,” Pook said. “Has either of you ladies
any idea at all where she might have gone after you last had
sight of her?”
Miss Parkin replied first. “One would have expected her to
return to her apartment.”
“Apartment?”
“She has rooms in Cheviot Road,” said Mrs Gloss.
“That’s rather a long way from here, isn’t it? If she walked, I
mean. And late at night.”
“There were others here with cars. She probably got a lift
home.”
“In that case, there might be somebody who could tell us
what happened to her on the way. Because she certainly didn’t
arrive at her lodgings.”
Pook brought out this piece of reasoning with the air of
having forced some wily miscreant into a corner.
Mrs Gloss made no comment. She poured more coffee for
Miss Parkin, refilled her own cup, and moved the remaining
biscuits to the side of the table farthest from Detective-Constable
Pook.
Miss Parkin took small but audible sips from her cup and
gazed unsympathetically past the head of coffeeless Pook.
Although the room was warm, she was dressed in the same
thick, stiff cape which she had been wearing the previous
Wednesday night. Her hat, in matching material, was round and
hard-crowned and of broad brim, like a lifeboatman’s. When
she put down her cup and wiped her lips with a handkerchief
produced from beneath the cape, there was a faint scrubbing
noise.
“Just one more question, I think, Mrs Gloss.” Pook
consulted some notes he had made in the margin of his copy of the
Citizen. “Could you tell me if Mr Persimmon, the supermarket
manager, is a member of your society?”
“Persimmon?”
“That’s right. Mr Bertram Persimmon. Lives off Partney
Drive.”
Mrs Gloss shook her head dubiously. “I very much doubt it.
Do you know, Amy?”
“We do not have a Mr Persimmon. That is for sure.”
“There you are, then, officer. Your final question is answered.”
Mrs Gloss made as if to rise.
“Was Miss Hillyard an acquaintance of Mr Persimmon, do
you happen to know?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. And now, if you wouldn’t
mind....”
“Can you answer that, Miss Parkin?”
“No.”
Pook stood up.
“I understand my colleague left the key of Miss Hillyard’s
car in your safe keeping, madam.”
Mrs Gloss stepped to the Jacobean television sideboard and
pulled open a drawer.
“Do be careful how you drive it round the side of the house,
won’t you, officer. We don’t want to lose any of the bedding
plants.”
For a moment she kept the keys in her hand, ignoring his
outstretched palm.
“You do have a driving licence, I take it?”
When the policeman had gone, both women waited in
silence until they heard the distant grind of a starter succeeded
by the bursting into spasmodic life of the sports car’s engine.
“I don’t think I liked him very much. Did you, Amy?”
Miss Parkin grunted and thoughtfully tugged at a whiskered
mole under her right ear.
“I wonder,” she said very quietly, “where he lives.”
The five pressmen, Purbright soon found, had been commendably
busy since their arrival in Flaxborough the previous evening.
They had sought out the Vicar, pierced his hostile reticence,
and flattered him into providing a colourful account of the
discoveries in the Parish Church.
They had found several shopkeepers willing to testify to
disturbing but unaccountable interference with trade by what
they called “rum goings on”.
A Miss Lucilla Teatime, secretary and treasurer of the
Edith Cavell Psychical Research Foundation, had been prevailed
upon to describe the level of poltergeist activity in the
area as “well above that which we investigators of paranormal
phenomena would expect to find in the circumstances”.
And the unknown lady whose telephone call to a London
newsagency had aroused Fleet Street’s interest in the first
place had since asserted—again anonymously, but this time in a
letter addressed to “The Gentlemen of the Press’ and left on the
reception counter at the Roebuck Hotel—that she had personally
attended more Black Masses in Flaxborough than she cared to
remember.
“Even making allowance for exaggeration,” said the representative of
the Sunday Dispatch, a young man with the beginnings of a Fu Manchu
moustache, “I would have thought there was enough in this story to have
worried the police. Are the police worried, inspector?”
Purbright smiled apologetically.
“If I say yes, it will mean that the constabulary doesn’t feel
confident to deal with the powers of evil. If I say no, I’m
inviting the criticism that we don’t believe in them. I would
prefer to be allowed the middle course of benevolent agnosticism:
tell me where a black mass is going on—or likely to take
place—and I’ll see if there’s anything we can or ought to do
about it.”
“What you’ve said,” quickly observed a girl with a pretty but
worried face and a shaggy motoring coat, “strikes me as sort
of...oh, I don’t know, sort of uninvolved. I mean, like you had
a lot of permissiveness around out here in the country—you
know, the Provinces—and sort of wanted to turn a blind eye. I
mean, I’m not criticizing you, or anything, but...” All the
time she was talking, the girl kept capping and uncapping a
fountain pen and fixedly staring at it.
“Would you say you had a permissive society here, inspector?”
This question was issued on behalf of the readers of the
Empire News, whose representative, a plump youth in Victorian
style trousers, flowered shirt and velvet jacket, was clearly
devout in desiring the answer to be yes.
The girl with the pen, a Sunday Pictorial feature writer,
looked up and gave her colleague a grateful smile.
“I’m not sure that I know what you mean by permissive,”
Purbright said. “The police certainly don’t go around harassing
people in deference to the morally pretentious. We don’t
believe that citizens can be sorted back into the right beds by
rule of truncheon. We do, on the other hand, try to dissuade
them from raping one another—galloping their maggots in
public—that sort of thing. Or is it something else you have in
mind? Something more sophisticated, perhaps?”
A constable, dispatched earlier to fetch coffee from the
canteen, appeared with a tray. Cups were distributed. One of
the two journalists who declined, the Daily Herald man, put
another question.
“Is it true that people are afraid to go out after dark because
of black magic rites?”
“Not as far as I’m aware.”
“But we have been told”—the Herald man glanced round at
the others—“by four or five people in the town that they’ve
either been bewitched themselves at some time or they know of
others who have.”
There were murmurs of agreement, although a lanky grizzle-haired
man from the News Chronicle, older than the rest,
interposed the remark that free drinks would buy testimony to
anything.
Purbright, who saw that direct confirmation of the truth of
this opinion would not be popular, observed instead that
strangers might be forgiven if they mistook for veracity that
eagerness to please which was so notable a canon of Flaxborough hospitality.
“I’m very sorry,” he went on, “if it seems to you that I
could be a little more eager to please in this matter, but I’m sure that
such experienced journalists as yourselves would prefer me to
be absolutely prosaic and factual. Policemen who make conjectures,
however attractive they may be from a news editor’s
standpoint, are really of no more use to you than those who sit
on facts.”
The reporter from the Dispatch had begun to put a question
about pin-stuck images when there came through the door a
man of about sixty wearing a light grey overcoat and carrying a
walking stick and yellow washleather gloves. His bearing was
careful, his expression one of courteous inquisitiveness.
Purbright greeted and introduced him as Mr Harcourt Chubb,
the chief constable of Flaxborough.
“This lady and these gentlemen,” the inspector explained, “are
journalists”—Mr Chubb raised one eyebrow—“and they are
here to ask questions about witchcraft.” Mr Chubb’s second
eyebrow went up and he gazed disbelievingly at the girl from
the Sunday Pictorial.
Purbright turned to the pressmen. “Is there anything you’d
care to put to the chief constable while he’s here?”
Mr Chubb instantly pursed his lips and shook his head. “My
dear Mr Purbright, I wouldn’t dream of interfering with your
prerogatives.” He took a step towards the door. “Just you
carry...” Sudden comprehension of the enormity of what
the inspector had said pulled him short. “Questions about
what?”
“Witchcraft, sir. Black magic. Necromancy.”
“Good gracious me. Where?”
“Here, sir. In Flaxborough.”
There was silence. Then the chief constable said “I see.” He
gave the pressmen a bleak, puzzled little smile of farewell and
departed.
The man from the News Chronicle said it appeared that anxiety
about the alleged instances of satanism had not spread to the
upper ranks of the police force.
“It hasn’t, actually,” said Purbright.
“Not even when they know that a girl has disappeared and
may have been used as a human sacrifice?”
Four journalists snapped attention to the fifth. He was the
floridly attired Empire News reporter and he was blushing partly
with triumph, partly with annoyance at the impetuous discard
of his own advantage.
Purbright knew that nothing excites deeper suspicion and
resentment in a newspaperman than the countering of an
awkward question with the retort: Who told you that? He
considered, then replied carefully:
“It is true that a young woman of thirty-four has been missing—in
the sense of being absent from both her work and her
lodgings—for the past two days. We have no reason to suppose
that she has come to any harm, although, naturally enough, we
shall feel easier when she reappears.
“The suggestion by your colleague that this woman has been
the victim of, what, a ritual murder—is that your meaning,
sir?”—the Empire News man nodded—“Yes, well,
that suggestion is unsupported by any evidence known to me.”
There was a rattle of conversation, from which, after a few
moments, intelligible questions separated.
“What’s the girl’s name, inspector?”
“Edna Hillyard.”
“Married?”
“We don’t think so.”
“Address?”
“Cheviot Road. Number eighteen. Incidentally, if you do
wish to question her landlady, who is inoffensive and knows
singularly little, I rely on you not to embarrass her.”
In reply to another question, Purbright added that the landlady
was called Mrs Lanchester.
“Has the girl no family?”
“Not in this area. She moved here with her mother some years
ago, but the mother is now dead. There are relations in
Scotland, I believe, and we are trying to get in touch with
them.”
The Sunday Pictorial girl spoke. “Look, if you don’t think
anything’s happened to this Hillyard person—I mean, you
don’t sound terribly concerned—not that one expects policemen
to wax hysterical or anything...but after all she is missing,
and one can’t help wondering why the sangfroid, as it were.
You do see what I mean?”
“Oh, certainly. And there is a reason, as you’ve obviously
guessed already. Miss Hillyard is an independent sort of young
woman. She gets around. Her reputation is one of unpredictability.”
“You mean she’s disappeared before?” asked the Dispatch.
“I mean she gets around, as I said. Disappear is a rather
Gothic way of putting it.”
“A good-time girl?” brightly suggested the Herald.
Purbright gave a worldly shrug.
“And you don’t think she takes part in this Voodoo Cult
you’ve got here?”
“Miss Hillyard,” Purbright said patiently, “is employed in the
department of the Medical Officer of Health. She is also, I
understand, a member of the Presbyterian Church. Of
those facts, gentlemen, you are at liberty to make what you
will.”
After the press conference, Purbright made his way to the
chief constable’s office, where Mr Chubb was in recuperative
retreat in the interval between exercising six of his Yorkshire
terriers and attending a Rotary lunch.
“What’s all this nonsense about witches, for heaven’s sake? I
thought you were pulling those fellows’ legs just now, but they
all looked very serious.”
Purbright explained. Mr Chubb looked more dubious than
ever.
“You mean they’ve been going round the town listening to a
lot of silly gossip. That’s what it boils down to.”
“To be fair, sir, it isn’t a subject they’re likely to learn
anything about without listening to gossip. We don’t normally
issue official bulletins or Wanted-for-Witchcraft posters.”
“Yes, but you don’t believe this ridiculous story about Miss
Whatsername, do you?”
“Miss Hillyard. No, sir. Nor do they. But it’s not a question of
belief. Newspapers are a branch of the entertainment industry,
not a research foundation.”
“You say you are not worried about this woman, Mr Purbright.”
“Not unduly. As I told the press just now, she has something
of a reputation for unconventional behaviour. But there’s
another thing—and this I didn’t tell the press. We learned this
morning that a man called Persimmon has also been missing
since Wednesday. The possibility of their having gone off
together is well worth considering.”
“Not Bert Persimmon, surely?”
“Bertram. Yes, sir. Middle-aged. Store manager.”
“But he’s...” Mr Chubb was about to say “vice-chairman of
the Conservative Club” when he remembered his inspector’s
perverse inclination to disregard the relevance of social lustre
to a presumption of innocence. “But he’s married,” he said
instead.
“He is indeed,” the inspector confirmed. Almost zestfully,
he added: “Isn’t he vice-chairman of that club of yours, sir?”
“Possibly. I don’t know all the officials’ names.” Mr Chubb
was examining his shirt cuff. “By the way...” He looked up.
“Yes, sir?”
“About this unpleasantness at St Lawrence’s. You’ll do what
you can to get to the bottom of it, won’t you? Old Grewyear
isn’t the easiest chap in the world to deal with, but he means
well. It’s not nice to have a lot of dead animals left around
in one’s church.”
“I think it was the effigy that annoyed him most. It was an
exceedingly good likeness. I’ve asked Policewoman Bellweather
to make a few very discreet inquiries among the Arts and Crafts
people. There may be a lead there.”
“You say there were pins stuck into the thing?”
“Yes, sir.”
The chief constable shook his head. “Childish tricks some of
these people get up to. One wonders sometimes how their
minds work.”
The inspector decided that it would only add to Mr Chubb’s
perplexity if he were to detail the disposition of the pins. He
took his leave and prepared to drive out to The Riding and the
home of Mr Bertram Persimmon.
He was going out of the building into the central yard where
the cars were kept when the duty sergeant intercepted him.
“That thing, sir...”
The inspector halted and listened courteously.
“Roberts collected it after that woman rang up yesterday and
I didn’t know whether you’d want it put among the lost
property or what. Not,”, the sergeant added with ponderous
drollery, “that I can imagine anybody wanting to get it back
again.”
“Perhaps I’d better have a look.”
The sergeant crossed the office and opened one of the doors
of the row of cupboards that extended along the opposite wall.
There rolled forth, as if from the blade of a concealed guillotine,
the great horned head that boatman Heath had retrieved from
the river.
Purbright gave an involuntary start, then moved nearer.
The sergeant shifted the head with his boot so that it confronted
his superior officer in full face if not with due respect.
“That’s not lost property,” Purbright declared almost at once.
“How do you mean, sir?”
“It was pinched.”
Kneeling, the inspector turned the head about and explored
its texture.
“Two or three years ago. From the museum.”
“Oh.” The sergeant looked abashed. The burglarious entering
of the Heritage Room of the Municipal Museum in Fish
Street by some over-eager legatee had caused much local indignation
at the time. It was most remiss of any police officer to
have failed to recognise the stolen article.
“Never mind,” Purbright told him. “You can’t be expected to
remember every fertility rite outfit that gets lifted from a
museum.”
“Is that what it is, sir?”
“So they tell me.”
Purbright turned the head over and peered inside it, then
righted it again.
“Good lord, the things people choose to turn into table
lamps.”
The sergeant saw that Purbright was looking at an electric
bulb holder, set between the two horns. The metal stem of a
bulb, still screwed into its socket, held fragments of glass,
ruby-coloured.
“I think,” the inspector said, “that we should have this locked
up carefully until someone from the museum can come over
and see what damage has been done. Can I leave you to arrange
that?”
The sergeant grasped the chance of self-redemption. “Oh,
yes, sir. Certainly you can.” He sprang for the telephone.
“Incidentally...”
“Sir?”
“Who was the woman who telephoned about that thing?”
“We don’t know that, sir. She wouldn’t give her name.”
Purbright frowned. “Odd. Why shouldn’t she, I wonder?
There’s an awful lot of anonymity about just now—had you
noticed?”
“I think it’s because of not wanting to get into the papers,
sir,” suggested the now desperately helpful sergeant.
“That,” said Purbright, making for the door, “I can well
understand.”
“Oh, God, yes,” said Mrs Persimmon when Purbright
spoke her name interrogatively at the front door. “Oh,
God, yes,” she said again when he announced his own.
Then, “Oh God, come in,” she said, and raised her eyes so that
he could see their whites as he stepped past her into a hall
perfumed with the lavender of Croon, the only furniture cream
containing ionised beeswax. Purbright feared that the interview
was going to be a harrowing experience.
On her silent invitation, he entered a room whose big bay
window commanded a view of the front lawn and the tall hedge
that hid it from the road. Mrs Persimmon closed the door by
leaning her back against it. She remained in that position for
several seconds, breathing deeply. She put one hand on her
breast.
“Oh, God, you’ve found him.”
“No. No, we haven’t actually. But you really mustn’t
distress yourself, Mrs Persimmon. There’s no certainty that
your husband has come to any harm.”
Purbright’s words appeared to have gone unheard. She
continued to stare into space. The hand edged slowly off her
breast and under her arm. She abstractedly scratched herself.
“Of course, you don’t know what I’ve been through.”
She launched her body away from the door and walked
across the room. Pausing by a semi-circular table set against
the wall, she adjusted the position of two china figures that
stood upon it. “Oh, God!” She impetuously passed a hand over
her hair without disarranging it.
“Perhaps it would be better if you sat down, Mrs Persimmon.”
Purbright indicated a square-cut sofa covered in orange
plastic. She hesitated, then lowered herself into diagonal
occupation of the sofa, one thin white arm along its back (like
toothpaste, Purbright reflected).
The inspector found a chair for himself and sat opposite her.
He felt in his pockets and produced a ball-point pen and an old
sales receipt, blank on one side.
“I understand you last saw your husband on Wednesday.”
She put a hand over her eyes. Purbright took the gesture to
be affirmative.
“At what time, would you say? Approximately.”
The shield of ringers remained over the pale, back-tilted
face. “When he left for business. About ten o’clock.”
“But the store opens at eight-thirty, surely?”
“My husband is not a counter hand, Mr, er...”
The correction, Purbright fancied, had been delivered with a
trace more acerbity than he would have expected from a
putative widow.
“Did he not return home that day for a meal?”
“No.”
“He usually has lunch in town, does he?”
“Always. He eats at the Roebuck. They reserve a special
table for him.”
“In the evening, though—weren’t you surprised when he
didn’t come home on Wednesday evening?”
“Oh, no. It was his ‘samaritan’ night.”
“I’m sorry—his...?” Purbright turned his head slightly, as
if to present his keener ear.
“His ‘samaritan’ night. Mr Persimmon does social work. I
thought you would have known that, Mr, er...”
“Purbright.”
“Mr Purbright. Yes, he received his OBE for that. He’s on
lots of committees.” Mrs Persimmon had removed the hand
from her face. She was looking a little stronger now.
“I’m not sure that I quite understand what you mean by
‘samaritan’ night, Mrs Persimmon. There is an organization
called The Samaritans. Do I take it that your husband is a
member?”
“Oh, no, not that organization but it’s just what I’ve always
called, that’s all—his ‘samaritan’ night. It’s to help
people. I expect one of the other gentlemen can tell you more
about it if you really want to know.”
Purbright nodded with every appearance of having understood.
“Of course. The other gentlemen.” He held his pen
poised.
“Well, there’s Harry,” said Mrs Persimmon. “You know—Sir Henry Bird.”
“Ah, yes.”
“He’s a particular friend of my husband, and I should say they’ve
done this social whatever-it-is, this ‘samaritan’ business,
as I call it, oh, for a couple of years at least, ever since...oh,
God”—she hoisted herself forward and opened her eyes—“but
you won’t go and ask him a lot of questions, will you? You’ll
not do that? I don’t think my husband would like Harry to be
bothered unnecessarily.”
“We try not to bother anybody unnecessarily, Mrs
Persimmon.”
There was a pause. Mrs Persimmon straightened her posture
and sat facing forward.
“Perhaps,” she said quietly, “I’ve been rather hasty in sending
for the police.”
Purbright watched her face. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. It seems silly, though. To panic. I mean, I
would have heard if anything had happened to him. Don’t
you think so?”
“Almost certainly you would have done, yes.” The inspector
was wondering why dramatic expletives and gestures had
given way first to social defensiveness, then to this unhappy
deflation.
“Well, then,” she said at last, “we’d better just forget about it
for the time being, shall we?”
She stood. Purbright motioned her to sit down again. He
sighed gently.
“Look, Mrs Persimmon. Today is Saturday. You have told
me that you last saw your husband on Wednesday. His absence
during that night did not surprise you because you knew
he was doing some kind of social welfare work. Very well.
But he did not come home on Thursday night either. Nor last
night. So you telephoned us this morning and reported him
missing.”
“Yes, I’m sorry, I...”
“No, don’t apologise, Mrs Persimmon. I don’t at all consider
your phone call to have been hasty, as you put it. What I do
find difficult to understand is why you waited so long before
making it.”
She considered.
“We don’t live in each other’s pockets, you know,” she said
coldly. “Me and my husband, I mean.”
“I don’t suppose you do.”
“Well, then—what are you making all the fuss about?”
“I came because you asked for help.”
“All right. Well, now you can go because I don’t want any
after all.”
The childishly crude retort Purbright recognized as a
symptom of deep unease. He could not quite decide whether
Mrs Persimmon was aware of the possibility of her husband’s
having decamped with another woman. Was it scandal she
feared? She clearly was the kind of person who rated neighbourhood
opinion very highly. And yet he doubted if this was the
only or even the main reason for her distress.
“Mrs Persimmon, you must forgive my asking this, but are
you perhaps just a little afraid of your husband?”
A reflex frown of annoyance faded quickly. The tall,
thin, angular, expensively-dressed woman seemed suddenly
to suffer a kind of interior unstarching. Very softly, she said:
“He’s not always the easiest man in the world to get along
with.”
“Is this the first time he’s stayed away from home for more
than the one night?”
“No, it’s happened two or three times before. But always
over a week-end. He didn’t lose any time at the shop.”
“And did he tell you where he’d been?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you ask him?”
“Not directly. He doesn’t like being what he calls quizzed.”
“But did you find out? From somebody else, perhaps?”
She shook her head. “I think it was in Brocklestone he stayed
during one of the weekends. A friend of mine mentioned
afterwards that she’d seen him there. But he never said, and I
didn’t ask.”
Purbright considered whether he should take further advantage
of Mrs Persimmon’s meekness of mood by sounding out
what knowledge or suspicions she might have concerning Edna
Hillyard. He decided against. He asked instead if she could
give the name of anyone else associated with her husband’s
“samaritan” activities—just in case, he said, it proved
necessary to widen inquiries into his whereabouts and movements on the
night of his disappearance.
Mr Persimmon, she replied, had spoken from time to time of
three colleagues in that particular branch of his social work.
They were Sir Henry Bird, mentioned already, and also Dr
Cropper, the Borough Medical Officer, and the Vicar, Mr Grewyear.
The inspector said he was sure that three such distinguished
gentlemen would be not only reliable but discreet informants
should the need for their co-operation arise. For the time
being, though, he counselled patience and faith in the likelihood
of Mr Persimmon’s having taken himself off somewhere
simply to think out the perplexities of life. It did happen with
people of his age, and, as Mrs Persimmon had herself acknowledged,
her husband seemingly was not a man to share his
problems.
Not the problem of Miss Hillyard, anyway, Purbright added
in a personal aside to himself as he smiled encouragingly at
Mrs Persimmon and rose to take his leave. At the door, he put
his final question.
“Is your husband interested in folk singing or anything in that
line?”
Mrs Persimmon’s immediate “Not that I know of—why?” was
distinctly derogatory in tone.
“Oh, no reason,” said Purbright. “I just wondered.”
Sergeant Love was combining with business the pleasure that
any healthy, youngish, innocently good-looking policeman is
almost bound to feel in the company of totties, Flaxborough’s
generic term for all presentable and responsive females. Totties
were predominant among the employees in the Town Hall and
in no department could there be a more pleasing selection, Love
decided, than in the offices of Dr Halcyon Cropper, Medical
Officer of Health.
The doctor was absent at a conference in Ipswich, but the
chief clerk—whose function seemed to be mainly that of a sort
of girl-herd—told the sergeant that he was welcome to interview
whom he pleased. Love looked round the room with as
nearly blank an expression as he could manage in face of such
largesse and said he would “try that one”.
The clerk beckoned his choice, a girl called Sylvia Lintz, who
had straight, short, straw-coloured hair, long but plump legs,
and what Love’s mother would have called a fine, strong chest.
“The sergeant,” the clerk said to her, “wishes to ask some
questions. About Miss Hillyard.”
Sylvia glanced quickly at Love, alarmed.
“Oh, no, nothing, er—well, not as far as we know,” the
clerk soothed without conviction. His eye covertly ranged the
other girls in the room. What’s he worried about, Love
wondered.
“Perhaps,” the clerk said to Sylvia, “you’d better take him
into the stock room.” He rubbed his chin dubiously. “Unless
you can think of anywhere better.”
The stock room was about eight feet square, windowless and
lined on three sides with shelves loaded with packets of forms,
stationery, and other kinds of office equipment. It contained a
small table and chair. Love fetched another chair. He left the
door wide open. They sat, Love stiffly, the girl demurely, the
table between them.
“You do know Miss Hillyard’s missing, don’t you?” said
Love.
“Well, I know she hasn’t been to work. Not since Wednesday.”
“Has there been any talk about her being away?”
“Not really. Not at first, anyway. She often has a day off.”
“More often than other people?”
“I don’t know that I’d say that.”
“Has she ever told you why she had these days off?”
“I haven’t asked.” The reply was made with slight hesitation.
Love tried to look extra kind. The effort somehow resembled
a wind-repressing discipline.
“What you say won’t get her into trouble, you know,” he
said. “We just want to be given some idea of where she might
have got to.”
The girl was silent a moment. She traced a spiral pattern
with a finger tip on the table top. “I think Edna’s a bit...well,
you know...”
“Promiscuous?” dared the sergeant, feeling the unfamiliar
word bring something of the satisfaction of boldly squeezing
Miss Lintz’s thigh.
She considered the question without sign of embarrassment
then said simply, “Of course, she’s a lot older than most of us.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
The girl smiled. Ooo, but you’re scrumptious, the sergeant
silently told her. Aloud, he asked if Miss Hillyard had ever
confided to her the names of such admirers as had seduced her
from service in the public health sector.
“Not to me, she didn’t. She was thicker with Mavis and Vi
than anybody else. They might tell you. Shall I see if Mr House
can spare them?”
“Mr House?”
“He’s the gentleman you’ve seen already. The head clerk.”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
“No trouble,” said Miss Lintz sweetly. She got up.
Love rose as well, partly out of politeness but mainly because
he felt that otherwise the girl might be left with the regrettable
impression that decrepitude rather than authority dictated his
remaining seated.
There were times when the sergeant wondered whether his
long and loyal courtship of the person still optimistically
described by his mother as “your young lady” had not been
attenuated by mutual passivity; a probationary period of fourteen
years did seem adequate to forestall any charge of fool-hardiness.
As he watched the departure of Miss Lintz’s splendidly
untrammelled legs and lively bottom, oscillating within its brief
tourniquet of skirt, he recalled with a sense almost of awe that
this nineteen-year-old daughter of the one-time editor of
the Flaxborough Citizen was a child of six when he, Love, had
worked on his first murder case, the slaying of old Marcus
Gwill in Heston Lane.1 He would buy his
Agnes a dinky nylon nightie that very afternoon. If he could get away,
of course. And if the store wasn’t too crowded, as it well might be
on a Saturday...
1 Reported in Coffin Scarcely Used
Mavis O’Conlon and Violet Beach arrived together.
Violet was tall, with thin arms and shoulders but paradoxically
heavy legs. She looked as if she would be difficult to
knock over. Her cool, pale-lashed eyes were steady but
mistrustful. She had a habit of caressing her left shoulder with
her right hand, the forearm resting protectively across her
small bosom. Love thought her pretty in a rather delicate way
which he attributed vaguely to her having been sired by the
manager of the Field Street branch of the Provinces and
Maritime Bank, a notably pussy-footed gentleman.
Miss O’Conlon presented a contrast as startling in its way as
the disparity between the profession of her companion’s
father and that of Mr O’Conlon, bookmaker. Mavis had a
mouth wide enough to be kissed with moderate satisfaction by
two men at a time, and, if Love was any judge, which at that
moment he thought he was, hers was the disposition to let
them. Generosity was implicit in brown, questing but not
calculating eyes, a slightly side-tilted head and a throat, plump
and uncreased by habitual affectation of modesty, that channelled
regard at once to its confluence with breasts of astonishing
amplitude. There, after some seconds, the sergeant discerned a
little gold cross, suspended upon a fine chain.
“Got it for my first communion,” confided Miss O’Conlon in a
deliciously husky voice, tinged with brogue.
Love gave a start and turned a brighter than usual pink. He
went in search of an extra chair.
“Did the other young lady,” he asked when the two new
arrivals were settled, “tell you what I wanted you for?”
They looked at each other doubtfully, then back at. the
sergeant.
“Well, it’s about Edna, isn’t it?” said Mavis O’Conlon.
“Miss Hillyard,” her companion amplified.
“That’s right.” Love tried to keep his gaze away from the
environment of Mavis’s crucifix (her “Christ of the Andes’, as
Dr Cropper once had dubbed it). “You’re both friends of hers,
I understand.”
“Sort of.” Violet did not sound eager to commit herself.
“Oh, but sure we’re friends,” said Mavis quickly and with
emphasis, taking no notice of Violet’s nervous side glance.
Love went straight to the point. “Does either of you know
where she is? Today, I mean. Right now at this moment.”
“No idea,” said Violet. Mavis, suddenly solemn, shook her
head.
“This really could be important. I don’t want you to cover up
for her because of her job. You’re not doing that, are you?”
This time it was Violet who shook her head. Mavis said Jesus
no, she’d not dream of doing any such thing but what did the
pollis think had happened to the poor woman for God’s sake?
Love hastily assured her that there was no reason so far to
suspect that Miss Hillyard had come to harm. The fact remained
that no one seemed to know where she was, so it was only right
and sensible to make a few inquiries.
Yes, the girls agreed. So it was.
“That little car of hers, now. Does she normally use it a good
deal?”
Every day, they said. Edna was very fond of driving around in her car.
“So you wouldn’t expect her to go off anywhere without it?”
They certainly wouldn’t. Not unless something had gone
wrong with the works, of course.
“Laundry,” said Love. “Does either of you know what she
does about laundry? Dresses, undies—that sort of thing.”
Mavis gave a good-natured shrug in acknowledgment of the sergeant’s
innocence. “Washes them, darlin’—what else.” She
was, Love noticed again as she made herself more comfortable
in the chair, a well-nourished girl and she undulated very
pleasingly within her own undies and that sort of thing.
“Washes them herself, you mean? At home?”
“That’s right,” said Violet. “She always does her ironing on
Tuesday night. That I do know.”
“So you wouldn’t expect her to take a pile of clothes to a
laundry in the town.”
“I’ve certainly never known her to do that. Have you,
Mavis?”
“Not on our sort of money,” said Mavis.
Violet glanced at her with prim reproof. “It’s not a question
of affording. One likes the fabric to be treated properly.”
“Has Miss Hillyard a lot of friends?”
Violet turned in consultation to Mavis. “Would you say that
she’s a lot of friends? In numbers, perhaps. But not that many
really staunch friends. Would you say she has many staunch
friends?”
“She gets sniffed around after plenty.” Miss O’Conlon sounded
amiably matter-of-fact.
“That’s not a nice thing to say,” exclaimed Miss Beach. “Not
a bit nice.”
“It’s true. And it’s truth the pollis’ll be wanting,
surely?”
Love confirmed this supposition. “You mean she has men
friends—several men friends?”
“Jesus, she’s every right to have made a bit of a collection at
her age. I mean, you get the liking. Y’know? You’d not be
blaming her?”
“Not in the least,” declared Toleration Love. He pondered a
moment. “It would help, though, if you could tell me if she has
any particular preferences at the moment.”
“Particular’s not the word I’d have used meself, but maybe it’s
special you mean. In the sense of extra keen, like. Hungry.
Y’know? Now wait a bit. Do you know, Vi?”
Miss Beach, whose face clearly indicated that she found all
such speculation offensive, gave a tight little headshake.
“Hey, that fellow from the garage—whatsisname—Blossom.
Has she finished with that one?”
Miss Beach remained silent.
Miss O’Conlon snapped her fingers—an accomplishment that
Love found endearingly raffish in so feminine a witness.
“Len Palgrove... Now she was having it with that one.
That I do know. Definitely.”
“Don’t be horrible, Mavis. I don’t know how you could say
that about Mr Palgrove so soon after his bereavement.”
“Bereaved, was it?” Miss O’Conlon’s eyes enlarged mightily
for the benefit of the sergeant. “Listen, he wasn’t so eaten up with
grief that he couldn’t lay twenty quid in cross doubles with my
old man on the morning of the funeral. Da nearly refused it out
of respect for the dead but he knew the bets wouldn’t have a
snowflake in hell chance. Anyway...”
“The point is,” Love broke in, “that we’d like to know where
Miss Hillyard is likely to be now. It’s at least two years since
Mrs Palgrove was...since she died.2 Are you
saying for certain that the friendship between Mr Palgrove and Miss Hillyard
is something that’s going on at the moment?”
2 Reported in Charity Ends At Home
“You know very well it isn’t,” Miss Beach said reprovingly to
Miss O’Conlon, who pursed her lips, reflected a little while,
and then admitted that perhaps her information was out of
date, but not by many weeks.
Further questions were put by Love, simply because the
longer the interview went on, the longer he would be able to
gaze with official justification at two good-looking girls. Their
answers gave no lead at all to the person in whose company
Edna Hillyard had been content—or obliged—to abandon her
job, her lodgings and her car.
Neither girl could say that she had actually seen Edna with a
man during her spare time since before Christmas. She had
made oblique references to a “friend”, certainly, but he had not
been produced and she had not mentioned anyone specifically
by name.
Love thanked his informants and followed them back into
the main office in order to tell the head clerk that he would not
require the co-operation of any more members of staff that
morning.
Mr House cast an eye quickly over Miss Beach and Miss
O’Conlon, as if to satisfy himself that no parts of them had
been damaged or abstracted as souvenirs, and said that it was
just as well because the department closed at noon on Saturdays
and it was then 11.53.
Purbright seemed to find Love’s account of his interviews
less disappointing than the sergeant thought it sounded.
“At least we know two things now that we didn’t know
before. One is that although Edna Hillyard is over thirty and
unmarried she’s considered by people who know her fairly
intimately to be far from frigid. The other is that she’s taken
some trouble—uncharacteristically—to keep her current affair
secret.”
That, Love said, had been his impression.
“And why should she do that?”
“Reputation, I suppose.”
“Yes, but whose? What you were told by Miss O’Conlon
doesn’t suggest much reticence on Edna’s part in the past.”
“She’d have had her work cut out to be reticent about
Pally Palgrove. They reckon he leaves footprints on his girl
friends.”
“And Alf Blossom?”
“He runs the South Circuit Garage.”
“Yes, I know that,” said Purbright, a little tetchily. “I mean he’s
no great conquest, is he? Not socially. I’m leading up to something.
You’ll see in a minute.”
Love resolved to make no more irrelevant observations.
“Stud-wise,” he said with dignity, “Alf Blossom isn’t even in the
book.”
The inspector nodded. “So we can assume that Edna’s
present consort is someone she values more than she would
value Palgrove, say, or Blossom, or any of those she told her
office friends about. The probability is that he is married—which
would explain their care not to be seen together—also
respectable, and reasonably well-heeled. I’d put his age at a bit
above fifty.”
“Job?”
“Profession,” Purbright corrected. He pretended to consider.
“Store manager, I should say. A fairly big store.”
Love, suspecting a leg pull, looked cheerily sceptical. “You
wouldn’t know his address, I suppose?”
“My guess would be somewhere in Debtors’ Retreat or up by
Jubilee Park. How likely does The Riding strike you?”
Love frowned and remained silent. Then, suddenly, “Oh,
Christ! Of course...”
“Mr Persimmon, of the Bridge Street supermarket.”
“You really think they’ve skipped off together?”
“Their simultaneous disappearance does rather suggest it.”
“It could be coincidence.” Love’s slowness to catch the
inspector’s drift of thought had left him feeling less than generous.
“In London or New York, perhaps,” said Purbright. “But
there’s not much random duplication in a town of fifteen
thousand inhabitants.”
“What about her car, though?” Love protested.
“Well, they don’t need two. It isn’t usual to elope in a
convoy.”
“Then there’s her job. His, too, for that matter.”
“I gather his head office is giving the books a good looking
over.”
Again the sergeant was visited with a sense of having missed
a significant possibility. “Oh,” he said, gloomily.
Purbright relented. “Of course, there’s no evidence at the
moment of anything crooked having gone on. We’ll have to
wait for the audit.”
“Perhaps,” said Love, “it was just a case of irresistible passion.”
“You could be right, Sid. How nice it would be if you were.”
On the evening of Saturday, 3 May, there was
held an emergency meeting of the Flaxborough Branch of the
Sabbath Conservation Society at the elegant home in Mather
Gardens of Mrs H. L. Framlington, JP. There was a good
attendance, despite the brevity of notice that circumstances had
dictated, and the tastefully decorated drawing room contained
not one empty chair.
Mrs Framlington presided. She sat behind a dark mahogany
table on whose polished surface lay a thick, black-bound
book, a black candle in a squat holder of polished brass
designed like a bishop’s mitre, a small enamelled incense bowl on a
trivet, and a tumbler of water.
By her side was the secretary, Mrs Pentatuke. Her alert,
slightly bronzed face wore a grim half-smile as she peered
through her harlequin-framed glasses round the room and
ticked names on a list she had taken from between the leaves of
the book. Pausing in this task, she leaned forward to light an
ochre-coloured cigarette at the candle flame. The smoke she
blew forth aggressively over the hat feathers of the nearest
members smelled of sulphur.
Mrs Pentatuke was fully dressed. She wore an outfit in
bottle-green woollen fabric. On the floor by her sturdy,
nylon encased calves lay a large handbag, a stumpy, furled
umbrella and a pair of gloves of the same shade of violet as her
shoes.
When she had finished putting ticks on her list, Mrs
Pentatuke nudged Mrs Framlington, who had been contemplating
dreamily the cornices of her elegant drawing room, and
indicated with a nod the incense bowl.
Mrs Framlington smiled vaguely, patted her grey, wispy,
untidy hair, and accepted the box of matches that Mrs Pentatuke
handed to her. She managed with the third match to ignite the
tip of the small heap of material in the bowl. There rose a grey
fume, thin at first but then broadening and becoming laden
with sooty motes. There was a smell of singed poultry. Mrs
Framlington glanced apprehensively at her ivory-faced wallpaper.
“Amen, evil from us deliver but temptation into not...”
Mrs Pentatuke’s ringing tones brought to a sudden end the
murmur of witchly small-talk. The Coven was in session.
Mrs Framlington half rose from her chair and bobbed a
welcome to the assembly. Then she sat again, leaning slightly
forward and resting a hand against the right side of her neck in
readiness for its being cupped as a hearing aid.
“Ladies...ah, sisters, sisters and warlocks... It’s most
gratifying to see such a good turn-out this evening. This, of
course, is not the regular meeting, as you all know. Our next
little get-together was not due until the end of this month, but
we did feel—that is, the ladies, the sisters, rather—the sisters
and Warlock Gooding of the Sabbath sub-committee, did feel
that in the circumstances...”
“Point of order, madam chairman!”
The interruption came from the bald-headed man who had
taken part in the Walpurgis-night Revel in rolled-down
stockings and motoring pennons. His costume now was
considerably more formal but there was still noticeable in his
eye a certain wildness that contrasted with a countenance
which one might have thought expressly designed to hover
over hymn-books.
“Yes, Warlock Parkin?” Mrs Framlington’s hand rose behind
her ear.
“Shouldn’t Maiden Pentatuke have read the minutes first?”
Maiden Pentatuke did not wait for Mrs Framlington to
consult her.
“Certainly not,” she called. “This is an emergency meeting and
there hasn’t been time for minutes to be copied into the book.
They’ll be read next time.”
“Emergency meeting,” Mrs Framlington echoed, nodding
her head very decisively at Mr Paracelsus Parkin. “No time to
be copied.” She was a little afraid of Mr Parkin, brother of
evil-eyed Amy. He was a former Baptist lay preacher who had been
drummed out of the Church on account of his too liberal
interpretation of the word “lay”. He was reputedly addicted to
muscle culture and stamp collecting, and more than one
member of the Coven suspected that his adherence to wizardry
was less for love of the black art for its own sake than in the
selfish hope that he might become sufficiently skilled in its
practice to wreak personal vengeance upon his late accusers, in
particular the Rev. William Harness and Miss Bertha Pollock
of the Flaxborough Borough Welfare Department.
“I was saying,” resumed Mrs Framlington, “that the Sabbath
Sub-committee thinks that certain events of the last few days
could be of great importance to...to our little gathering, and
that they ought to be discussed.”
She looked inquiringly at Mrs Pentatuke, who thereupon
barked “Without delay“.
“Without delay,” said Mrs Framlington. She assumed a
straighter posture and took a few sips of water.
“Unfortunately, as some of you may be aware, I was prevented
by sickness from attending the Sabbath in person at Roodmas,
so I hope that you, Madam Maiden”—she turned to Mrs
Pentatuke—“will correct me if I betray ignorance on any
particular point.”
Mrs Pentatuke drummed her long fingers on the black
minutes book and stared stonily out of the window.
“Of course,” Mrs Framlington went on with a fond, reflective
smile, “I was really amongst you all in a sense that night.” She
looked up. “Through my Familiar, you know. Did any of you
see my little Billy Boy—no, Belial—my little Belial flying about?
I did let him out of his cage, you know, and he flew around for
quite a while looking for the keyhole in the bedroom door,
bless him, and when I woke in the morning there he was, back
on his perch again, and I knew—I knew—well, because I’d
dreamed, you see, and anyway he was chattering away thirteen
to the dozen—‘Looo-cifer, Looo-cifer, Bicky for Billy,
Looo-cifer...’ ”
“Point of order, Sister chairman!”
A plump hand was held aloft by a man with a neatly trimmed
beard. His conventional shopkeeper’s suit of dark serge hid
and constrained the pale belly that had bounced and flopped
above a velvet loincloth three nights before.
He was Henry Pearce: draper, toxophilite and husband of
Mrs Tossie Pearce, whose choice of widow’s weeds as her orgy
costume had been prompted solely by sensual eccentricity and
in no degree by wishful thinking. Indeed, Henry himself had
provided the outfit from his discovery in a corner of the
stockroom of a cache of apparel hidden away by some long dead,
thrifty predecessor in the corsetry trade.
Mrs Framlington did not at once see the raised hand. She
peered nervously round the room. Mrs Pentatuke leaned
across and tapped her shoulder, then pointed out the interrupter.
“Just half a minute, Sister chairman,” said Warlock Pearce,
in the tone of a long-suffering shop steward. “With all due
respect, I think I can say that we did not come here today to
hear about the doings of your little Belial.”
He paused and smiled thinly at a mutter of approval that
came from some half-dozen members of the Coven.
“I think I can fairly say that. I mean to say, the Familiars do get
a fair crack of the whip. There’s the annual tricks competition
for one thing. But I don’t think I need go on about that. Time and
place for everything. What we do want to know, and what my good
friend Warlock George Gooding and the sub-committee want to know, is
this...”
Mrs Framlington, goaded by digs from Mrs Pentatuke into
asserting her authority, quaveringly demanded: “Isn’t that
rather a lengthy point of order, Warlock Pearce?”
“Never you mind about length, Sister chairman,” retorted Mr
Pearce. “I’ve got the floor and I’m going to put my question.
It’s about the police...”
“Black blisters and the scalding weeps be on ’em!” shouted a
stout, red-faced woman from her seat at the back of the room.
She was Mrs Margaret Gooding, the Sabbath participant who
had worn woollen drawers and claimed to be a drinker of
baboon blood.
“...the police, I said,” repeated Warlock Pearce, “and if
Sister Gooding wants to move a curse as an amendment, that’s
up to her, but what I’m asking is in regard to a point of
order, Sister chairman, which is, and I put it to you fair and
square—Who called them in when Sister Hillyard took off, as is
her right as a witch, I don’t think anyone will quarrel with
that.”
Mrs Framlington looked perplexed. Not sharing with Mr
Pearce the privilege of membership of Pennick Rural District
Council, she was unaccustomed to the somewhat dislocated
language in which the affairs of that and similar authorities
habitually are conducted. She turned to make mute appeal of
Mrs Pentatuke.
“All Warlock Pearce means,” ruled Mrs Pentatuke brusquely,
“is that you should get straight to the point about police
inquiries into whatever’s happened to Edna Hillyard. He
suggests, if I understand him aright, that there was a tip-off of
some kind.”
“Who says that anything has happened to Sister Edna?” called
out Warlock Parkin.
One or two others made noises of support.
“The police want to take their long noses out of what
doesn’t concern them or they might find the same thing
happening to those said noses as I had the pleasure of seeing
happen last Lammas to the nose of a certain party in the Post
Office who steamed open a certain letter.”
The reference seemed a familiar one—at least to Mrs
Pentatuke, who raised her eyes and sighed “Lucifer all-bloody-mighty!
Not again!”
Mrs Framlington tapped the table with a pencil.
“If we can just have a little order, I will ask our Sister who
has actually been visited by the police to tell you what she thinks
it is all about.”
Mrs Gloss stood up and gave a brief account of her questioning
by Detective-Constables Palethorp, Brevitt and Pook. She
said it was her opinion that the interrogation had been of an
unnecessarily importunate kind. Why, one might ask, had no
fewer than three policemen been sent to her house? None had
offered any good reason to suppose that Sister Edna had come
to harm. She believed her so-called disappearance was being
used as an excuse for police persecution. Small wonder that
ratepayers resented having to find huge sums of money for the
maintenance of law and order. Was this what they were to
understand by law and order? She for one could think of other
names for it.
Immediate warm applause was punctuated by cries of
“Witch-hunt!”
Mrs Gloss, who appeared no less surprised by her own
oratory than gratified by her audience’s reception of it, sat
down in a glow and pretended to have lost her gloves among
the cushions of her arm-chair.
“That,” said Henry Pearce as soon as he could make himself
heard, “is all very well, but the question with me, Sister
chairman, and with respect, is this. There wouldn’t be hordes of
these policemen pushing into all our homes now if somebody
hadn’t carried information. I think that the...”
Among several conflicting shouts of protest was one from
Miss Amy Parkin.
“They found her car, didn’t they? And her clothes. It was only
to be expected that they’d go round asking questions. I very
much resent the insinuation of...of subversion that’s been
made by Probationary Warlock Pearce.”
There were calls of “Hear, hear!” and “Withdraw!”
The object of the derogatory reference to rank, purple with
fury, began to recite a curse, but his wife pulled him to his
seat.
Mrs Framlington, finding appeals by pencil-tapping ineffective,
opened a small metal box that stood beside the incense
bowl and tried to tip a little of the greenish powder it contained
upon the almost dead embers. In her agitation she
cascaded a good ounce of powder into the bowl.
The resultant upsurge of thick, greasy smoke would have
done credit to a burning tyre dump.
“Suppurating Satan!” muttered tall, scraggy Warlock
Gooding as he shambled past the chairman’s table to fling open
the french windows. None was so ungrateful as to rebuke him
for blasphemy.
The debate was adjourned so that members might take advantage of Mrs
Framlington’s invitation to stroll in the garden for a few minutes
“in order”, as she phrased it, “to renew our store of Life
Force from the great Pan“.
It was remarks of this kind which had done much to render
invidious Mrs Framlington’s position as Coven chairman. The
less tolerant members called her an old folksie, a white witch,
and other uncomplimentary names. She was not what Thornton-Edwards,
Arnold and Konstatin would have termed “orgy-orientated”
and although she never voiced criticism of those
channels in which self-expression tended to flow at the quarterly
Sabbath, her early retirement from the ceremony or, on
occasion, failure to attend at all, left no one in doubt of her
lukewarm attitude.
The truth was that Bertha Framlington had drifted into
witchcraft for no better reason than that it lay in much the same
latitude as other and earlier interests of hers. This lofty,
raw-boned, untidy-looking woman, with her round, steel-rimmed
glasses; thick stockings, always rumpled; woollen garments
that gave the impression of having been tossed upon her as
upon a chair-back, by their true owners; her expression of
troubled but kindly anticipation as she listened to others,
which she did with mouth a little open, for she was inclined to
deafness; this woman who walked with long, uncertain strides
as if bolts had worked loose in her leg joints, was the widow of
the one-time proprietor of a small wines and spirits business
which now had been merged into the Bride Street supermarket.
She was a vegetarian whenever she remembered to be. She had
once stood for the Borough Council as an anti-fluoride candidate
and polled fifty-eight votes. A dedicated reversionist, she
considered Arthur to have been the last British monarch worthy
of the crown. She would have re-instituted the maypole and the
setting out of bowls of cream for goblins—despite lack of
response to a saucer of Carnation Milk she three times thrice
had left on the elegant porch of 3 Mather Gardens. Witchcraft,
to Mrs Framlington, was a Robin Goodfellow affair, a branch of
home arts and crafts. She found it more sociable than Primitive
Methodism, her late husband’s hobby; less bloodthirsty than
whist drives; and not so damp as Spiritualism, which she had
tried also, but briefly.
On its re-assembly, the Coven was served with refreshments.
There were cups of tea brewed with what Sister Pearce, who
had brought it, asserted to be font water. The tea certainly
tasted odd (“like mildewed vestments”, Warlock Parkin
appreciatively pronounced it, to the benefit of his reputation
as a cognoscente) and Mrs Framlington swallowed only enough
to carry down one of the biscuits contributed by Sister
Gooding. These were grey and gritty with pink flecks and were
handed round by their creator with the gloomy but insistent
generosity of a distributor of the means of fulfilling a suicide
pact. Sister Gooding had never divulged the recipe for her
confection, which Mrs Gloss flippantly called her Crypt
Crumble, and the curious had to make what they could of her
husband’s enigmatic “She’s got a cousin who works at the
hospital, you know.”
The discussion was resumed. Sister Henrietta Hall, the wife
of the manager of a car-hire firm in St Anne’s Place, said that
her husband had spoken of newspapermen arriving in the town
from London. They had been asking questions about the Craft,
and there was talk of photographs.
“Photographs? What photographs?” Warlock Parkin had
swung round in some alarm.
“In the church, he says.”
“Photographs of what?” asked Amy Parkin.
“Things,” darkly replied Sister Hall, at the end of her seam of
information.
“That’s quite true, actually,” confirmed Sister Gloss. “One
of my cleaning women has a son in the police, and she came in
this morning with a tale about the vicar having been found
hanged in his own pulpit...”
“No!” exclaimed Warlock Parkin, eyes a-glitter.
“...not that he had, of course. It was an effigy of old
Grewyear and he called the police in to see it. That and a
couple of other little arrangements, as a matter of fact.”
Mrs Framlington peeked anxiously at Maiden Pentatuke.
“That was never authorized, was it? Doing Mr Grewyear!”
The black minutes book was consulted. “Not in this month’s
programme, certainly,” said Mrs Pentatuke. “Could Sister
Gertrude be more specific about the other things the police are
supposed to have been shown?”
“ ‘A mouse that was hanged and a toad impaled.’ ”
Significant glances were exchanged around the room. Mrs
Gloss had spoken quietly but with a rhythmic intonation that
she had not used in speaking of the effigy.
Silence was broken by Tossie Pearce.
“ ‘With this spell be your coffin nailed’,” she recited
eflectively.
Some of the others nodded. The mouse and toad combination
seemed to be an old favourite.
Mrs Framlington, though, looked anxious. “Those little
creatures hadn’t suffered, had they?” she inquired of Sister
Gloss.
“Well, how would I know? I didn’t put them there.”
“Has anyone seen the vicar today?” Mrs Framlington asked,
with rather less concern.
“He looked all right at four o’clock, wolfing cakes in Brown
and Derehams.” This information came from Sister Parkin.
“Ah,” observed the more sanguine Mrs Pearce, “but we
mustn’t forget that cramps don’t usually come on until the third
day and it’s not before the seventh that they vomit nails.” She
turned to Mrs Gloss. “Did you say one toad or two?”
“According to my cleaning wo...”
The slamming of the minutes book on the table signalled
Mrs Pentatuke’s wrathful rise to her feet.
She glanced down contemptuously at Mrs Framlington, then
addressed the meeting.
“This is all absolutely out of order. I do not think that
anybody fully realizes the seriousness of what has been going
on. The secrets of our society are threatened. One of our
sisterhood has been taken and none knows where. Meddlers
and inquisitors will use her vanishing as an excuse to harass us
and seek the source of our power and chain our spirits. Thus I
tell. Thus I warn. We are all in great peril. There is but one
course to take, and that without delay.”
Slowly and with every muscle and tendon from wrists to
shoulders tensed, Mrs Pentatuke raised her arms until both long,
outstretched forefingers pointed horizontally ahead.
“We must raise the Grand Master!”
For nearly a minute, they all stared in shocked silence at the
statuesque figure.
Then an almost incoherent whisper came from Mrs
Framlington. “Yes, but...”
She cleared her throat very delicately, and tried again.
“But we don’t...we don’t know who he is.”
Silence descended again.
So, gradually, did Mrs Pentatuke’s arms.
“He is the Grand Master,” she stated hollowly, as if from
sleep. “If we call, He will come.”
“Do you really think we ought to?” asked Mrs Hall, looking
round at her neighbours.
None offered an opinion.
Then a smooth-faced, chinless man with thin hair and
protuberant eyes, who had said nothing up to then, shuffled to
the edge of his chair and spoke. He was Jack Bottomley,
landlord of the Freemasons’ Arms, and leading singer in
perpetuity of the Flaxborough Amateur Operatic Society.
“This lady who’s missing,” rasped Mr Bottomley, in a voice
whose original fruitiness had long since been dehydrated by
perennial performance of The Desert Song. “I wonder if I could
make a suggestion.”
“By all means,” said Mrs Framlington, eager for an excuse to
put off the mess and trouble of a conjuration.
“Well, it might not work, of course, but I was reading just
the other day in ‘B and C’ that if you can get hold of some
hair of anybody you want to find and burn it in front of a
mirror, that person will appear. I thought I’d better, you know,
sort of mention it.”
Mr Bottomley cast down his glance. Off-stage and away from
his pub counter, he was a shy and nervous man; necromancy
was for him a refuge from fears of inadequacy—or so Mrs Gloss
had said more than once.
“What edition?” Mrs Pentatuke snappily inquired. She had
left the table and was standing before a tall, glass-fronted
bookcase.
“Well, er, that one, actually.”
“Seventeen forty-three,” Mrs Pentatuke spoke with a brusqueness
that reproached Mr Bottomley’s lack of precision. She
opened the case and pulled out a book whose leather binding
looked dry and powdery, as if it had been stored in cocoa. It
was one of the most frequently consulted volumes in the Coven
library, and known simply as ‘B and C’ in abbreviation of its
full title: With Broom and Cauldron, Being The True Confessions
of Goody Nixon.
Mrs Pentatuke licked a finger and sought first a place in the
index and then a specified page. They watched the alert,
oscillating eye behind the spectacle lens quickly devour print.
She slammed the book shut.
“Exactly as I thought. It’s one of the virgin things. Out.”
She squeezed Goody Nixon back between A Chronicle of
Demonology in the Eastern Counties, 1587-1694, by Albert and
Theresa Home, and Partick’s Dictionary of Herbs and Tinctures.
“How do you mean?” asked Amy Parkin. She sounded not
very friendly.
“I mean,” said Mrs Pentatuke, walking back to her seat, “that
it only works with virgins. Anyway, we’d have to find the
woman first to cut some of her bloody hair off, wouldn’t we?”
With the ill-advised persistence of a self-doubter, Mr
Bottomley coughed and said: “But I don’t quite see how our
lady secretary can be so sure that this won’t work, madame
chairman. I mean, Miss Hillyard isn’t married, is she?”
Before Mrs Pentatuke could raise steam for a fitting retort,
Mrs Framlington said kindly: “No, of course not, Mr Bottomley;
but that is rather a good point about our not having any of
her hair for the experiment. Don’t you think?”
Mr Bottomley shrugged and lapsed into despondency.
An impatient tapping was heard. It was being made by Mrs
Pentatuke’s shoe against the leg of the table.
“We’re wasting time, you know,” she said, without looking at
anyone in particular. “The sooner we have the protection of the
Master’s power, the sooner we can be sure that our terrestial
existence will not be harassed by policemen and newspaper
spies. I have warned once, I have warned twice. Split the
mandrake with grattle and grice!”
“Stew their balls in badger bile,” yelled Mrs Gooding, with
alliterative fervour.
Mrs Pentatuke turned up her eyes.
“O Master, come soon among us!”
Mrs Gooding nodded violently.
“He is like a ramrod of fire! Go-orrrh!”
She let out her breath with a noise like a winded horse and
gave an ecstatic shuffle with her posteriors. Mr Gooding
bestowed on her a sidelong glance of mild proprietary curiosity.
Amy Parkin and Mrs Pearce were having an argument about
pentagrams, which the latter insisted on calling pentagons.
Mrs Gloss had discovered a hand casually laid upon her
shoulder from behind. It was that of Paracelsus Parkin and, as
Mr Parkin leaned forward to pay closer attention to something
the chairman was murmuring, the hand slid through the neck
of her dress. Mrs Gloss kept very still and dignified.
So, too, did Mrs Hall, who now regretted having spoken
about the happenings in the church—partly because her
sparsity of information had made her look ineffectual in relation
to Mrs Gloss, proud claimant to not merely one cleaning woman
but a plurality; and partly because she feared that the conjuring
of the Master, so forcefully advocated by Sister Pentatuke,
would almost certainly entail a general casting off of garments,
which she, Mrs Hall, did not much fancy in broad daylight.
“Sisters and warlocks,” cried Mrs Framlington, aware at last
that no one had been taking any notice of her for the past five
minutes, “I really must ask you to preserve a little order in this
discussion...”
Mr Parkin’s hand contracted playfully within Mrs Gloss’s
brassiere. “Honk, honk!” he whispered into her ear.
“...which, after all, is concerned with a most serious matter.
It would be most unfortunate if our little group were to find
itself involved in a police investigation—particularly at a
time when, as you have heard, some representatives of the
national Press are in the town. We do not want any misunderstandings,
do we? They could, if publicized, do some of us great
harm.”
Mrs Gloss, OBE, Chairman of the Standing Conference of
Conservative Ladies, looked grave. So did Mrs Pearce,
Honorary Secretary of the Flaxborough Society of Mead
Makers; Mrs Hall, vice-president of the Ladies’ Branch of the
British Legion; and Mr Gooding, who for years had been
trying to get into the Masons by sending gifts of his fretwork
to members of the Royal Family.
“What I do think is regrettable,” continued Mrs Framlington,
“is this quite unauthorized piece of spell-casting in the parish
church. Sister Pentatuke is right to warn us of the possible
consequences of, er, tactlessness in the exercise of our arts...”
“That,” Mrs Pentatuke broke in, “is not what I said. I warned
and warned thrice of harm intended by spies and strangers. I
have never sought to stay the hand of sister or brother in mal
or moil, in dark or light.”
“I beg your pardon, Maiden Pentatuke.”
“Granted, Sister chairman.”
There was a long pause. Mrs Framlington looked expectantly
at several members in turn. Mrs Gooding spoke.
“Couldn’t Warlock Bottomley get all these newspaper
people or whatever they are into his pub? It would be easy
enough then for him to...” She began to laugh wheezily—“to
put a few drops of...of...”
This was as much of the suggestion that Mrs Gooding was
able to offer before the palsy of her amusement rendered her
altogether inarticulate.
“No, he jolly well couldn’t,” declared the horrified licensee of
the Freemasons’ Arms.
“Let us be practical,” Mrs Framlington urged. She noticed
that Henry Pearce had stood up and was looking at a piece of
paper on which he had been writing a few notes. “Yes, Warlock
Pearce?”
“To test the feelings of the meeting,” Pearce said slowly, “I
am going to propose the following motion from the floor in
regard to matters arising from what was said by madam
secretary. That this assembly hereby authorizes the officers of
the organization, known for security reasons as the Flaxborough
Branch of the Sabbath Day Conservation Society, to
conjure or otherwise obtain the presence—no, the attendance—the
attendance for advice purposes of the Being we call for
security reasons the President of the said Branch. And that we
agree”—Mr Pearce glanced about him, then looked down at the
paper again—“to co-operate in any ceremony or other activity
deemed necessary by the said officers in order to raise the said
President.”
Mr Pearce folded the paper twice, put it into his pocket and
sat down.
“I second that proposition,” called Mr Parkin, withdrawing
and raising his right, warmer, hand.
“Me, too!” Mrs Gooding was fumbling with a button at the
side of her skirt.
Mrs Framlington searched with hopeful eye for evidence of
contrary counsel. She looked for a moment at the unenthusiastic
face of Mrs Hall but it remained averted. No one else
seemed to wish to say anything.
“Carried unanimously,” announced Mrs Pentatuke, before
Mrs Framlington could call for a vote. “I think,” she added,
rising energetically to her feet, “that the curtains had better be
drawn just in case anyone wanders by.”
Mr Parkin hastened to respond.
From within the tent of her tortuously uprising inside-out
skirt Mrs Gooding was making little growling noises of
pleasurable anticipation.
Her husband moved to the other side of the room and began
slowly to unknot his tie in front of a gilt-framed wall mirror in
which he could watch the reflected disrobing of Mrs Gloss. It
looked, he thought, very artistic in the greenish gloaming
produced by the closing of the curtains.
“Potions, everybody!”
This rallying cry came from Mrs Tossie Pearce on her return
from a brief excursion to the kitchen. She shut the door behind
her with her foot. On the tray she carried were five big black
bottles.
“Do you mind using your cups?” she inquired cheerily.
To Mrs Pentatuke, ecstatically unbuttoning her dress, the
question seemed to be a reminder. She came out of her trance.
“Gosh, I must just ring home,” she said to Mrs Framlington,
and hurried to the door. “I left Lionel some liver in the oven.
Mind if I use the phone?”
She disappeared before the owner of the house and telephone
could reply. Mrs Framlington reflected that Mrs Pentatuke’s
forcefulness of character could be a little trying on occasion.
She looked about her. Everyone seemed preoccupied and
rather excited. Tossie Pearce’s home-made wine—this particular
crue, she believed, was Sage and Blood Orange—had no rival
in the county as an aphrodisiac. Would they take offence if she
were to put newspapers over the furniture? Perhaps. Feeling
apprehensive but quite impotent, she edged unobtrusively to
the door, slipped through, and closed it behind her. She had
decided to spend an hour weeding the herb garden.
On her way to the kitchen and the back door, she heard the
voice of Mrs Pentatuke telephoning in the hall. She did not
consciously listen to what Mrs Pentatuke was saying. Later,
though, it was to occur to her that there had been something
odd about the call—about the tone of voice which Mrs Pentatuke
had used.
Why, Mrs Framlington was to ask herself, should a homely
conversation about braised liver have sounded so threatening?
The following morning, Mrs Framlington drove
her sedate, seven-year-old motor-car into the Market Place and
parked it with three wheels in the roadway and the fourth half-way
across the pavement. This untidiness did not matter much,
for it was Sunday and the streets were deserted except for an
occasional blear-eyed wanderer in quest of cigarettes or milk or
the News of the World. Mrs Framlington wanted none of these
things. Nor did she join the thin straggle of citizens making
their way to the south door of St Lawrence’s in response to the
great waves of bell-music that had been assaulting the town
since before eight o’clock. She took the perimeter path round
the Church Close and halted before the door of a tall, narrow,
Georgian house that looked as if it would have one or, at the
most, two rooms on each of its three floors.
Mrs Framlington remarked expansively to the woman who
opened the door—a woman slightly younger, perhaps, than
herself but of gracious manner and a pleasing mildness of
countenance—that she had never heard the parish bells in
better voice.
“What a lovely peal and how splendidly it seems to sing out
right over one’s head,” she exclaimed, clasping her hands and
gazing up at the vast honey-coloured cliff of the tower.
The other woman smiled and shook her head. She took Mrs
Framlington’s arm and drew her inside the house, then closed
the door.
“Now, dear,” she said sweetly, “what was it you said? I could
not hear a word for those bloody bells.”
“I said,” replied Mrs Framlington after the smallest of pauses,
“that I would give anything for a nice cup of coffee.”
“You shall have one. Immediately.” And Miss Lucilla Edith
Cavell Teatime waved her guest to ascend the twist of narrow,
white-painted stairs.
Miss Teatime’s sitting-room on the first floor had a much
more spacious air than might have been deduced from looking
at the outside of the house. It was light, with big areas of
polished wooden floor, a few heavy rugs and a minimum of
slender-legged furniture that seemed to stand about in attitudes
of well-bred deference. The two armchairs, that now were
facing the window and its view of the church and the laburnum
trees by the west porch, were small but dumpily hospitable in
their petticoats of flowered chintz. Mrs Framlington sat in one
of them and began sorting out in her mind the reasons for her
visit while Miss Teatime busied herself with the preparation of
coffee in the tiny adjoining kitchen.
Just as the laden tray was arriving through the doorway, the
pealing of the bells abruptly ceased.
“Thank God for that,” said Miss Teatime. She glanced at her
guest. “If you’ll pardon the allusion.”
She put the tray down on a low table and settled herself into
the other armchair.
There was a whisky bottle beside the coffee jug. Miss Teatime
indicated it as she took up Mrs Framlington’s cup.
“Hemlock?” she inquired waggishly.
Mrs Framlington shook her head. Her earlier ebullience
seemed to have evaporated.
Miss Teatime poured straight coffee for her, then dispensed
her own fifty-fifty formula.
It was several minutes before Mrs Framlington gave a little
shudder, blinked away her dreamy expression and put down her
cup.
“There are times,” she said carefully, “when I find myself just
the teeniest bit out of sympathy with...you know.”
“Really?” Miss Teatime’s tone implied nothing but a desire to
help.
“Well, some of them do go on rather. I am a keen Pagan
person myself, but I feel that one cannot be always flying in the
face of so-called civilization. There must be give and take in all
things, don’t you think?”
“You are so right,” assented Miss Teatime solemnly. “Although
it does seem at times that the take tends to predominate
somewhat grossly.”
“The trouble with our little group,” went on Mrs Framlington,
“is what begins to look like a division of attitudes. I had hoped
that a common consciousness of the Universal Spirit—the
Earth Force, as I like to call it—would unite us in purpose. But
I’m afraid it hasn’t. There is no use in denying that there are
factions. And some of us fear that serious trouble will result.”
Miss Teatime thoughtfully uncapped the whisky bottle.
“I did warn you, my dear, did I not, that unwelcome attention
would be attracted to your organization if some of the members
persisted in their more malodorous practices.”
“Yes, but how can I stop them? They are very much under
the influence of Mrs Pentatuke. As you know, she is a strong
Brockenist. I remember on one occasion I had to advise some
friends of mine privately against accepting her offer of help as a
baby-sitter. It was most embarrassing, but one has to draw the
line somewhere.”
“An intimidating woman.”
“Oh, yes. And terribly carnal. I think she must have something
wrong with her glands.”
Miss Teatime poured more coffee.
“Am I to understand, then, that your being Coven chairman
gives you no real authority over these more wayward
spirits?”
“Oh, I do not delude myself in that respect, Lucy. I know why
I have been favoured with the chairmanship. I happen to have a
large, pleasant and secluded house where our meetings can
conveniently be held. That I don’t mind so long as there are no
rites. Mrs Gloss is welcome to accommodate them. She has more
domestic help to clear up the mess.”
“Forgive me, but I cannot quite free myself from the impression
that witchcraft is not strictly your thing, as I believe
they say nowadays. Cannot you send Mrs Pentatuke and her
cronies packing if you see danger in continued association?”
Mrs Framlington stared into her cup.
“When one is a Justice of the Peace, a marriage guidance
counsellor and a member of the boards of governors of two
schools,” she said quietly, “one has to be careful with whom one
associates—but a good deal more careful from whom one then
dissociates.”
There was a pause.
“Yes, I do see what you mean.” With a pair of embroidery
scissors, Miss Teatime probed the end of a cheroot before
lighting it. “Yours is not the happiest of positions.”
“Oh, but you must not misunderstand me,” said Mrs Framlington
more brightly. “I would not for the world be anything other
than a witch. ‘A witch am I in blood and bone, a steadfast
daughter of the moon.’ ”
“I take it, though,” remarked Miss Teatime, drily, “that your
enthusiasm would not extend to riding into the magistrates’
court on your broomstick.”
“Well, precisely. Even witches must be discreet. I wish
Pentatuke and Parkin and old Mrs Gooding could see that.”
“And Miss Edna Hillyard?” Miss Teatime regarded her guest
as blandly as if she had just asked her the time.
“You know about that?”
“I certainly have heard that the girl is considered by the police
to be a missing person. I know, of course, as well as you do,
that she is a member of the Flaxborough Folklore Society, in
the midst of one of whose little revels she is supposed to have
disappeared.”
“That is quite true,” acknowledged Mrs Framlington. She
sounded tired.
“Is there anything you think I can do?”
“I really don’t know. In any case, I don’t see why you should
be plagued with our worries.”
“My dear Hetty, that is nonsense. I owe you and your band of
helpers a great deal. We work professionally to considerable
mutual advantage, as you know well.”
“The Coven doesn’t know, though,” said Mrs Framlington,
uncomfortably.
“It is better,” replied Miss Teatime, “that we should remain
unaware of our own virtues; otherwise, we might be tempted to
set a price upon them.”
“What do you suppose you can do? It is the possible publicity
that I dread, of course. That we all dread. All but”—Mrs
Framlington smiled mirthlessly—“the baby blood brigade.”
Miss Teatime watched an expelled stream of cheroot smoke
decelerate and form a sun-creamed vortex above a bowl of
wallflowers in the window recess.
“Has it occurred to you,” she asked, “that publicity is exactly
what some person or other seems determined to attract? I am
thinking, in particular, of the not very savoury exhibition in
the church over there.”
“Poor little things,” said Mrs Framlington absently. She gave a
start. “But how did you know about that? I only heard myself
yesterday.”
“Have you not read a newspaper this morning?”
“The Sunday Times. But not all of it, of course.”
Miss Teatime put down her cup and rose to cross the room.
“An elevated taste in reading matter can be a disadvantage
sometimes.”
She handed Mrs Framlington a copy of the Sunday Pictorial
that had been folded back to display the headlines: “PETS
EXECUTED IN CHURCH OF BLACK MASS TOWN: ‘END NUDE RITES’ DEMAND
MUMS.”
“Good God!” exclaimed Mrs Framlington. She fumbled for
glasses to read the smaller print.
A quarter of a mile away in the police headquarters in Fen
Street, Inspector Purbright was sampling and comparing a
number of newspaper stories, of which the account in the
Pictorial was one. They were highly diversified in terms of
reported fact, but a reader as attentive as the inspector could
scarcely avoid the conclusion that all had originated in the
one town of Flaxborough and purported to describe similar
events.
Common to every report was the use of the words witchcraft, black, magic,
mass, sacrifice and cult. In three cases, nude and orgy had been incorporated
as well. Satanism was offered by the Dispatch, while the Express
daringly added necromancy (“say it neck-romancee”.)
Purbright decided that the piece in the Empire News promised
to be, if not the most enlightening, at any rate the most
imaginative and morally pop-eyed of that morning’s contributions
to what he once had heard aphoristically defined as the
Anals of Journalism.
Flaxborough, Saturday.
These were the questions on everyone’s lips today in this sleepy little market town...
Does the Devil ride out to claim dupes and victims amongst their neighbours?
Who, or what, offers sacrifices of animals in their ancient parish church at dead of night and in hideous parody of Christian ritual?
Are the flitting figures that have been glimpsed in near-by woodland those of members of a witch cult taking part in the bestialities of their “Sabbath”?
And what has happened to pretty, fun-loving typist, Edna Hillyard, who has not been seen since she said goodnight to friends at a folk-dance festival on Wednesday?
Seeking answers to these questions, I have discovered that facts even more disturbing—facts that might be connected with a Voo-doo type kidnapping—have been reported to the police.
The informants have not dared give their names.
For fear stalks this quiet country town, where apple-cheeked farmers—usually ready with a friendly word or a rural quip—now turn away at the sight of a stranger and touch the silver coins in their pockets to ward off evil.
One man not afraid to talk, however, is bluff river-boatman “Yormer” Heath. Mr Heath it was whose gruesome discovery of a devil mask in the river set off police inquiries into the disappearance of attractive, vivacious folk-dancer Edna.
“Yormer” told me: “We have been stalked by fear for some time in this quiet old town. I cannot rightly put a name to what troubles us, but it is evil, evil—like that unspeakable object which I hauled out of the water.”
I asked “Yormer” Heath if he had heard any reports of the notorious Black Mass being celebrated in Flaxborough. “Definitely,” he replied.
Did he personally know of any witches in the locality?
Certainly, he did, and so did many of his friends.
Yes, there had been sacrificial rites in the parish church and other places, and he would definitely describe those responsible as fiends in human form.
And the missing girl?
“Everybody in this town loved Edna Hillyard,” declared “Yormer” Heath as he went into the dusk after answering my questions in the quaint old Three Crowns inn, “and we shall not rest until we find her.”
Purbright, pleasantly intrigued thus far, was sorry to find that the story deteriorated in the next few paragraphs to a repetitious chronicle of assertions by “a local shopkeeper”, “a clergyman”, “housewives shopping in the old Market Place” and other traditional fictions of the thwarted or bar-bound journalist. But then his interest quickened anew.
In charge of the hunt for Edna Hillyard is Detective-Superintendent R. Parbright, golden-haired seven-footer known by the criminal fraternity of this remote area of rural England as “Apollo”.
Superintendent Parbright talked to me in the Operations Room of Flaxborough Police H.Q. He said he was unaware of the townspeople’s reluctance to go out after dark because of black magic rites.
“I’m an agnostic,” the superintendent declared. He added that he did not know what was meant by the word “permissive” and said he would like to take the opportunity to deny allegations that his men went round the town breaking up adulterous associations with their truncheons.
I asked him what progress had been made in the search for Edna Hillyard.
“We are still looking for the evidence that this thirty-four-year-old good-time girl has been used as a human sacrifice,” replied Superintendent Parbright.
As he spoke, I heard somewhere in the distance the screech of an owl.
In this town of fear, even the night-birds are edgy.
The chief constable made a diversion on his way home from church in order to
call at the police station. He found Purbright sitting with Sergeant Love in
the general office on the ground floor. They were drinking coffee. A small
avalanche of newspapers covered a desk.
Mr Chubb slowly drew off his gloves. His expression was
that of a surgeon at the end of an unsuccessful operation on a
particularly rich patient.
“You know, Mr Purbright, I seriously doubted at the time
your wisdom in entertaining those newspaper people.”
The gloves were deposited in Mr Chubb’s bowler hat, which,
with his walking stick, he placed carefully on the top of a filing
cabinet. He motioned Purbright and Love to resume their
seats.
“I didn’t entertain them half as lavishly as they have
entertained me, sir.” Purbright nodded towards the pile of
newspapers. He wondered how far down the social scale was
the journal that Mr Chubb would confess to having read.
“Do not let us play with words,” admonished the chief
constable. “What I mean is that all this inflammatory nonsense
would never have got into print if you had refused to be interviewed.
Whatever possessed you to bring up the subject of
human sacrifices? My paper actually quoted you as saying
something about my men going round the town with
truncheons and stopping adultery. Really, Mr Purbright!”
The inspector looked shocked. “But surely, sir, The Observer
hasn’t...”
Mr Chubb hastily made correction.
“No, I’m wrong. It was a paper the vicar showed me. But
that doesn’t make the matter less serious.”
Purbright debated the likelihood of the chief constable’s
appreciating an explanation of the tactics of the newspaper
interview but decided against.
“I’m sorry about this, of course, sir, but I think you’ll find
that where information is refused altogether the press can be
very vindictive—as one might argue it has a right to be.”
For a moment, Mr Chubb turned upon the inspector that
gaze of sad and perplexed reproof with which he habitually
reacted to outlandish opinion. Then he examined the buttons
on the cuff of his coat.
“Mrs Chubb tells me,” he said, almost casually, “that she was
taking some of the boys for a walk yesterday” (the “boys” were a
swarm of Scotch terriers bred and fostered by the Chubbs)—“when
one of them was attacked by a beast belonging to a
woman named Gooding...” He raised his eyes. “Do you know
of a Mrs Gooding?”
Purbright shook his head and glanced questioningly at
Love, who said at once: “Could be Mrs Margaret Gooding,
sir. Beatrice Avenue. Husband, George. We’ve had complaints
about him shooting arrows in the garden. I believe he writes to
the Queen a lot.”
The inspector looked proudly at Mr Chubb, as if to solicit
reward there and then for omniscient Love, but the chief
constable merely nodded.
“That’s her. The dog is black and very vicious. Mrs Chubb
naturally remonstrated with the woman. Now here’s the
significant thing—at least, it could be significant. This Gooding
person was rather offensive and she ended up by saying (now
just let me get this right) yes, by saying: ‘You’ll be getting a
call from my Meffie later and he’ll wind your bowels round and
round the bed post.’ ”
“Good lord,” said Purbright. He tried to look more surprised
then he felt at this fairly ordinary example of dog owners’
rhetoric. “Who’s Meffie, though—the husband? I thought he
was called George.”
“She was referring,” the chief constable said very deliberately,
“to her dog.”
“Her dog?”
“Certainly. Mrs Chubb had no doubt whatever about that.
The woman indicated the beast while she was talking. My
Meffie, she called it. Several times.”
The inspector, at a loss to see the relevance of this incident
to the earlier subject of Mr Chubb’s complaint, waited for a hint.
“No smoke without fire, Mr Purbright.”
“I suppose not, sir.”
There was another silence.
“No, I didn’t understand either,” conceded the chief constable
at last. “It was Mrs Chubb who opened my eyes, so to speak.
The dog, you see—Meffie. Well, Meffie’s not a dog’s name. I
mean, no one would call a decent self-respecting animal
Meffie, would he?”
“Certainly not,” agreed Purbright, anxious not to protract
what seemed to him an idiotic excursion into Fetology.
“But Mrs Chubb realized straight away that the name was
short for something else. Now are you with me?”
The chief constable’s face was as nearly expressive of excitement
as either of his officers had ever seen it. Love said “Ah!”
loudly, out of sheer nervousness.
“The sergeant’s got it,” said Chubb, almost jocularly, to
Purbright. “What about you?”
“I’m afraid I’m rather dense this morning, sir.”
“I’m afraid you are, Mr Purbright. Perhaps the shock of”—he
glanced at the pile of newspapers—“so much notoriety has
not yet worn off. When it does, you might reflect that Meffie is
an abbreviated form of Mephistopheles.”
There was a pause.
“You think, then, do you, sir, that Mrs Gooding may be
associated with the kind of activities described—or hinted at,
rather—in these newspaper stories?”
“I leave you to draw what inference you care to.”
Purbright consulted his own Familiar. “Has Mrs Gooding
ever been in trouble of any kind, sergeant?”
Love answered without hesitation.
“Only for not having a dog licence. I think that was two years
ago. And we were called once to a bit of disturbance with
neighbours. They reckoned she’d got into their garden during
the night and sprinkled everything with battery acid, but there
was never anything proved.”
“Beatrice Avenue,” observed Mr Chubb, “went down badly after that dreadful
business a few years ago at number fourteen.3
There were some very nice people living there at one time.”
3 Reported in Hopjoy Was Here
Purbright reflected, not for the first time, that the chief
constable was inclined to regard vice and violence as systemic
infections, mysterious as dry rot, that might be checked but
never completely eradicated from the neighbourhood corpus
in which they once had manifested themselves. Their spores, it
seemed, were secreted in local property values which thereafter
steadily and irrevocably shrank, the process being known by
Mr Chubb as “going down”.
“Would you like me to have Mrs Gooding questioned?”
Purbright asked. “What she said to Mrs Chubb might well be
construed as a threat. And then there is the possibility of her
dog coming within the definition of a dangerous animal, not
under proper control.”
The chief constable vetoed this suggestion at once. Mrs
Chubb did not bear a grudge and would not, in any case, care
to be involved.
Purbright began to tidy up the newspapers.
“I expect you will have noticed that there is no mention of Mr
Persimmon’s disappearance in any of these stories, sir.”
Mr Chubb’s tone was still chilly.
“Let us be thankful for small mercies.”
“His wife, I think, is less worried than she would like us to
believe. His spending a night away from home and without
warning is no novelty, apparently. She may or may not suspect
that he has gone off with another woman—my impression
after talking to her is that her husband’s fidelity is not the most
important thing in life for Mrs Persimmon.”
“She is very interested in flower arrangement,” volunteered
Mr Chubb. “The Club committee room is beautifully done out
sometimes. Tell me, though, Mr Purbright—why are you so
sure that Bert Persimmon is carrying on with this Hillyard girl?
There’s been no whisper at the Club.”
“Coincidence, mainly, sir. I agree there has been an absence of
gossip, but that in itself would tend to confirm that Miss
Hillyard’s lover is a person of some local consequence. Both
would be careful to keep the affair quiet.”
“You’re guessing, you know.”
“Yes, sir. I am.”
“But the girl’s clothes that were found in her car—how do
you explain those?”
“She had been attending this folk dancing thing and I should
think the arrangement was for him to pick her up there when it
finished, or when she could slip away. She was probably hot
and sweaty, so she changed into a fresh outfit there by the car.
She wouldn’t want to go back to her lodgings so late in the
evening and possibly draw her landlady’s attention to the man
she was going off with.
“There was absolutely no sign,” the inspector added, “of a
disturbance in or near the girl’s car. The clothing was not
damaged in any way and it had been left in a neatly folded pile,
except for a slip that looked as if it had been dropped on the
ground and picked up again.”
Mr Chubb pouted thoughtfully. “All terribly speculative,” he
complained. “It seems to me that there is nothing whatever to
connect these two people.”
“Other than their simultaneous disappearance, sir.”
“Well, yes; that’s a pretty negative argument, after all.”
Purbright hesitated. The chief constable’s disputatious mood
was out of character. Either he was spinning out the interview
in order to absent himself from some kind of domestic unpleasantness,
or he was genuinely apprehensive lest the Edna
Hillyard affair provide the press with even more dastardly
material.
“There is,” the inspector said, “one link that I haven’t
mentioned yet. It may come under your heading of speculation, but
I’ll tell you what it is, if you like.”
“Please do.”
“According to Mrs Persimmon—and I have not yet confirmed
what she said—her husband works in some welfare capacity in
partnership with three other well-known people. One, as we
might expect, is the vicar. Sir Harry Bird is another. And the
third is the Medical Officer, Dr Cropper, in whose office Miss
Hillyard is employed.”
Mr Chubb wrinkled his nose. “A bit thin, Mr Purbright, isn’t
it?”
An incoming call set off the buzzer of the unattended switchboard.
Constable Braine clattered into the office and stared
vaguely about him. Purbright waited until Braine had picked
up the receiver before he spoke again.
“Tenuous perhaps at first sight, yes, sir. But an introduction
might easily have resulted. I don’t know yet the nature of what
Persimmon’s wife called his ‘samaritan’ activities, but they
could be something to do with moral guidance.”
“You mean that is what the girl was in need of?”
“I mean nothing of the kind, sir. But women of generous and
uninhibited temperament do have the misfortune to attract the
attention of well-meaning people. That could...”
“Excuse me a moment, sir.”
Constable Braine had appeared at Purbright’s elbow.
A dignified nod from Mr Chubb conferred permission to
speak. Braine straightened his shoulders.
“That was Henry Cutlock on the phone, sir. The fisherman.
He was ringing from the staging at Five Mile Bar to say they’d
picked up a body, sir. He thinks they’ll be berthing in just over
an hour.”
Purbright looked up at the clock.
“Tell the ambulance station to have someone at the harbour
by a quarter to one. You’d better warn them that the body’s
been in the sea. Then get on to the hospital. Where’s Bill
Malley?”
The Coroner’s Officer was likely, according to Braine, to be
either at choir practice or playing darts in the Railway Hotel.
“Leave a message with his wife, then, will you? And I’d be
obliged if you’d raise Harper in case we need pictures.”
Mr Chubb witnessed all this ordering of affairs with grave
approval. It was not until Constable Braine had completed the
commissions so far entrusted to him, however, that Purbright
put the question which the chief constable had been waiting to
hear answered.
“Did Henry say whether it was a man or a woman?”
“Man, sir.”
“Any hope of its being identifiable, did he think?”
“Oh, but he knows who it is, sir. It’s the manager of that
supermarket at the corner of Bride Street. Mr Persimmon.”
The mortuary at Flaxborough General Hospital
was set distinctly apart from the main group of buildings, as
though the relationship was an embarrassment. It probably was,
for whereas the hospital presented in 1912 brick baroque the
florid and self-confident face of a doer of Good Works, the
mean-visaged concrete and asbestos mortuary lurked like some
necessary but resented menial, bearing mute witness to the
philanthropist’s fallibility.
It was not the failure of hospital treatment, charitable or
otherwise, that accounted for the latest occupancy of the
mortuary, however. Bertram Persimmon had died either by
drowning or—and the police surgeon inclined to this opinion
after a preliminary examination of the body—from a deep
wound in his neck.
“How long would you say he’d been in the water?”
Purbright was looking down at the white, boneless-seeming
body of what the pathologist’s report was to describe as a
“well-nourished male, aged 45-50, with some excess of adipose
tissue but otherwise generally healthy apart from a degree of
arterial deterioration consistent with age and sedentary occupation...”
To the flaccid flesh of arms and legs, black hairs,
still wet, clung like draggles of weed. The thick patch in the
middle of the chest was less dark. Around the head, damp
strands of grey were tangled. They, more than anything else
about the corpse, suggested defeat and helplessness. Purbright
discovered that he had the foolish desire to comb them into order.
“Difficult to tell. Two days. Three days. Ay-ay-ay-ay...”
This last sound was a favourite comment of Doctor
Fergusson; it was a kind of brisk keening for human frailty.
Purbright watched the sun-burned poll of the little Scotsman
as he short-sightedly peered and probed, turning over folds of
skin, exploring bone structure and tracing with delicate fingers
the lip of the great wound in the side of the neck.
Fergusson shook his head and tut-tutted.
“And what, my lad, were you doing to get this great hole dug
in you?”
He straightened and said, this time to Purbright: “It’s one
hell of a jab, is that.”
“Could it have happened while he was in the river? A chop
from a propeller—something of that sort?”
“Not in a hundred years, laddie. Dearie me, no.” Fergusson
bent again. “I’m not making any bets but I’ll be surprised if we
don’t find that this was what put paid to him.”
“Have you any idea how a wound like that might have been
caused?”
“I have not.”
“A knife?”
“No, no—not a knife. I’d say not a blade of any kind.”
“A spike, then?”
Fergusson did not refute this suggestion quite so promptly,
but on reflection he thought a spike, in the sense of a spiked
railing, say, was not the most likely weapon.
“What about a sharpened stake?”
“Ah...” The doctor raised a finger to the side of his nose and
considered. He took a close look at the wound.
“Could be. Aye. Something at least two inches in diameter at
the thick end. A stake—you might be right.”
He looked suddenly over his shoulder at the inspector.
“Why? Have you found one?”
“Heavens, no.”
The doctor sighed and busied himself with his bag. The
catch snapped shut. He walked to a sink and began washing his
hands.
“As a matter of fact,” he called, “I once saw a wound very
similar to that one. The fellow hadn’t been in a river, though.
They’d pulled him out of a stockyard.”
He turned off the tap and glanced around. “Hell, isn’t there
even a towel in this place?”
Purbright pointed to a paper towel-dispenser farther along
the white-tiled wall. “Stockyard?” he repeated.
“Aye, he’d been gored,” said Fergusson. “By an Aberdeen
Angus.”
The inspector stared ruminatively at the corpse. He bent
down and examined an area of the throat a few inches to the
left of the main wound. The flesh was bruised and close
scrutiny revealed a number of small, irregular gashes.
“What do you make of that, doctor?”
Fergusson thrust his head into partnership with Purbright’s.
He pouted, unimpressed.
“Superficial cuts and abrasions. Bodies do get knocked about
on their travels, you know.” He straightened, reached for his bag.
“No, wait a minute.”
The inspector took a pencil from his pocket and indicated
with its point what appeared to be a bright red incision at the
edge of the damaged area.
“I took that to be blood, but of course, it can’t be—not after
a longish immersion in water. Try tweezers.”
“Hey, this isn’t the PM yet, laddie. You’ll get me shot.” But
Fergusson, intrigued himself, produced a small pair of forceps
and investigated.
The scarlet line proved to be the edge of a hard object
embedded in the flesh. The forceps gripped and began to
withdraw it.
Fergusson dropped the find into a small porcelain dish. It
was a curved fragment, about half an inch long, of very thin
ruby-coloured glass.
The bells of St Lawrence’s had just begun to make their
second major assault of the day upon the ears and vestigial
consciences of Flaxborough when six policemen, accompanied
by a policewoman, sat down to consider plans for the investigation
of the death of Bertram Persimmon. It was six o’clock.
A big rectangular table had been pulled into the middle of
the CID room. At its head sat the chief constable, wearing
half-moon spectacles that gave him an air of school-masterly
sapience. Purbright was at the opposite end of the table. The
two longer sides were occupied by Detective-Sergeant Love,
Detective-Constables Harper and Pook, and Sergeant William
Malley, the Coroner’s Officer.
The policewoman was Sadie Bellweather, and she sat a little
apart from the others, with a shorthand notebook on her knee.
On the farther side of the room a tea chest had been up-ended
to serve as a display plinth. It bore the bull’s-head mask
which Purbright had retrieved for the occasion from a locked
compartment in the lost property cupboard.
The chief constable spoke first.
“There are just a couple of points I think we should be clear
about before we go any further, gentlemen. Firstly, there is no
doubt, I take it, that the body is that of Mr Persimmon?”
“That’s so, sir,” confirmed Malley, a very large man indeed,
whose matching store of amiability had not been noticeably
diminished even by the disruption of his Sunday evening.
“Mrs Persimmon has been down to the hospital already and
identified him.”
“And the inquest?”
“Formal opening and adjournment in the morning, sir.”
Mr Chubb looked straight down the table to Purbright.
“You’ve seen the body, of course—as I have—and your
opinion is that Persimmon could not possibly have received
that injury by accident. Am I right?”
“Let me put it this way, sir. I find it quite impossible to
visualize an accident that would have had precisely the results
that we’ve seen here. The wound is consistent with the man
having been gored. But it would be asking a lot from coincidence
to suppose that he had happened to be on the brink of the
river at the time. There are other factors which I shall mention
shortly, and they do fit in with a picture of deliberate violence
on somebody’s part.”
“In short,” said Mr Chubb, “we are faced with a case of
murder.”
“Murder or manslaughter, sir. The distinction need not
trouble us at this stage, as you rightly point out.”
The chief constable was still pondering this mysterious
compliment when Purbright got up and walked over to the
tea chest.
All looked towards the bull’s head, Mr Chubb with cold
appraisal, Malley stolidly, Love and Harper craning like
tourists anxious to get their money’s worth, Pook indifferently,
and Policewoman Bellweather with that rigidity of mien with
which she had trained herself to confront all things unusual or
distasteful, from a motor accident to a rashly proffered penis.
Purbright stationed himself by the mask like a lecturer.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to tell you what I can about this
thing without your coming any nearer. Forensic are sending
someone over, and there will be hard words if we are caught
handing it around.
“The curator of the Fish Street Museum, from which you’ll
remember it was stolen a couple of years ago, says that it was
used—or rather that others, of which this is an eighteenth- or
nineteenth-century copy, were used—in religious celebrations
of a kind that the press likes to call fertility rites. You could say
it had associations with paganism—magic—witchcraft, if you
prefer—but my main concern at the moment is with its physical
properties.
“You can take it from me that this is an extremely durable
article. Webster, the curator, thinks it is oak under all the
varnish. The horns are actual bull’s horns, but they have been
set in the wood at an upward rather than a forward angle. The
carpentry is excellent: neither horn has worked loose even after
God knows how many years. Both horns are sharp.
“This harness”—Purbright pointed to the broad leather
straps—“would cross round the chest and keep the thing on
pretty firmly.
“The mask would float with the help of a little trapped air.
Which is why it is here now and not at the bottom of the river
where I suspect someone either excessively optimistic or
simply in a hurry thought it would end up.”
Sergeant Malley took from his mouth the empty pipe he had
been sucking and signalled with it his desire to ask a question.
“You feel confident, do you, inspector, that Persimmon was
killed with that thing?”
“Absolutely.”
Malley nodded and blew, like a gentle whale, while he
formulated his next question.
“Do you have that opinion because both the body and the
mask were found in the river within a fairly short time of each
other?”
“No, not just because of that. Doctor Fergusson will be
assisting at the PM a little later this evening, but I might as well
mention one of the more interesting discoveries that he’s made
already.
“Now, here”—the inspector pointed delicately with a
pencil—“there has been fixed fairly recently to the top of the mask,
exactly halfway between the horns, a small electric bulb
holder. The bulb is smashed, but its base is still screwed into the
holder and there is enough glass left to be compared with
fragments of the same bulb that might turn up elsewhere.”
“As they have, presumably,” said Mr Chubb.
“In the neck of the corpse, actually. And the glass is rather
distinctive. One would call it ruby, I think. The bulb is of the
kind that is hung on Christmas trees. Forensic will be able to
say for certain if the glass matches, but I have no reason to
doubt that it does—nor that we have here the weapon that
killed Persimmon.”
“I quite agree with you,” said the chief constable.
The inspector gave a small bow.
“What I cannot understand,” went on Mr Chubb, “is why the
fellow, whoever he is, went to all that trouble. It’s a terrible
enough thing to kill somebody, God knows, but to dress up
as a cow with all that electric paraphernalia in order to do it...
We’re obviously dealing here with a diseased mind, gentlemen.”
The others observed silence of a duration suitable to the
profundity of the chief constable’s conclusion. Love was the
first to let curiosity off the leash again.
“Where’s the battery?” he inquired, pertly.
“Inside,” said Purbright. He pointed again with his pencil.
“Under some padding. The wiring is quite neat. It comes
out at the side—just here—and connects with this rheostat
switch.”
“Rheostat?”
To the aid of perplexed Malley came Harper. “It’s a dimmer.
You know. Like a car’s dashboard light.”
“Ah,” Malley’s own elderly vehicle all but lacked a dashboard,
let alone a rheostat, but he thought he understood.
Constable Pook, who was frowning a good deal, asked what
the inspector supposed the idea of the switch and so on had been.
Purbright shrugged. “Your guess would be as good as mine.
According to Webster, this kind of mask sometimes had a
candle set between the horns. It was lighted during the
ceremony to add to the general impressiveness of the occasion.”
“But whoever wore that thing,” Love said, “wouldn’t get
much dancing done. Not with a lighted candle on his bonce. It
would blow out.”
“As I understand it, he wasn’t expected to dance, sergeant.
All he had to do was to sit and be worshipped.”
Harper spoke. “I think I get the idea of the rheostat, sir.
If there’s been any worshipping or that sort of thing going on,
that is. The fellow inside that mask would want the thing to be
artistic, wouldn’t he? A gradual fading in and out. I mean, it
would look stupid if it just went on and off like a traffic light.”
Mr Chubb, looking a little exasperated by the disquisition on
electric circuits, suggested that it was time to consider other
lines of investigation and how best they might be followed.
Purbright returned to his place at the table. He straightened
two sheets of notes that lay before him.
“Because Persimmon appears to have been killed in so bizarre
a fashion,” the inspector began after a pause, “the temptation is
to concentrate on that aspect of the crime. To try and trace, for
instance, the person who originally stole or later came into
possession of that mask. Inquiries will need to be made, certainly,
but we shall be lucky if they are productive; it’s amazing
how invisible things become once they have been pinched from
a museum or an art gallery.
“We also shall need to treat seriously, though not with
credulity, the stories of witchcraft that have been going the
rounds in the last few days. It would be foolish to ignore the
ritual associations of the mask. Again, though, I’m sure the
chief constable will wish me to stress the importance of sifting
concrete and relevant evidence from all the portentous rumour
which so readily froths up during investigations of this kind.
“More in the nature of conventional inquiries will be the
effort needed to find out what sort of person the dead man was
and how he spent his time—particularly, of course, during
Wednesday, when he was last seen alive. Persimmon was well
known and there should be no lack of information concerning
his open activities...”
“Open?” Mr Chubb had raised one eyebrow.
“Yes, sir. There could have been others, of which direct
evidence is unlikely to be forthcoming.”
The chief constable glanced apprehensively in the direction
of Policewoman Bellweather.
“Be that as it may,” he murmured.
“Which brings me,” resumed the inspector, relentlessly, “to
the matter of Edna Hillyard’s disappearance. When it was first
known that Persimmon, too, had vanished, Mr Chubb rightly
described as guesswork my connecting the two events. It was,
at that time, conjecture—though not, I think, wild conjecture.
Less than half an hour ago, however, I received a telephone call
from the manager of the Neptune Hotel at Brocklestone. He
confirmed, with dates, what he had told me when I rang him
earlier in the afternoon. Persimmon and Miss Hillyard stayed
together at the hotel on three occasions during March and
twice in April.”
“The manager told you that?”
Mr Chubb’s involuntary emphasis on “Manager” suggested
that even in murder investigations there existed areas of
confidential dealing that were not lightly to be exploited.
“Yes, sir. Barraclough. He’s reasonably co-operative
provided he can be convinced that we are not spying on his guests
simply for the sake of being officious.”
“I was not thinking in terms of Mr Barraclough’s willingness
or unwillingness to impart information,” said the chief constable.
“What I find surprising is his ability to furnish you with
the correct names. I had always understood that people who
stay at hotels for immoral purposes are inclined to use pseudonyms.”
“Is that so, sir? Ah, well, Mr Barraclough has a very wide
local acquaintance and a good memory. I suspect he would not
need to rely too heavily upon his hotel register for
identification.”
Sergeant Malley testified that the manager of the Neptune
had not only a memory like a filing system but a particular
talent for recognizing averted faces and even, some said,
fugitive backsides.
“Does the inspector mean that Miss Hillyard could be at
Brocklestone aow?” asked Pook.
“She could be anywhere,” Purbright replied. “But
Brocklestone is one of the less likely places. She certainly is not at the
Neptune, and has not been there since last month. No, in view
of what has happened to her lover, the possibility that
most worries me is that she finished up in the same place as he
did.”
Mr Chubb stared, frowning, at the inspector. Purbright
realized that the man was genuinely grieved by the suggestion.
What he had not expected, though, was Mr Chubb’s patent
surprise. Purbright felt sorry for him.
“After all, sir, no one has had word of this woman for four
days. Persimmon’s death must change radically whatever
theories we might have formed previously. I admit my own
view was decidedly over-complacent.”
Sergeant Love spoke. “We don’t know for certain that she
was still his girl friend. She’d knocked around a good deal
before and the people who talked to me about her didn’t strike
me as thinking that she was likely to settle for anybody in
particular.” Love leaned round Harper to address the chief
constable directly. “She’s not what you might call a
home-loving girl, sir.”
Mr Chubb pouted dubiously. “That may be so, sergeant, but
I’m afraid the only hypothesis we can afford to accept is that
both these unfortunate people were involved in the same
event. We must hope it did not have the same outcome for
both of them.”
“One of my proposals,” Purbright said, “is that apart from
trying to find out what happened on Wednesday night, and where,
we should assume that Miss Hillyard is still alive and make a
special effort to trace her. With your agreement, sir, I should not
rule out door-to-door inquiries. The county people might help
with men.”
Mr Chubb made a note on the pad before him. “I’ll have a
word with Hessledine,” he said.
Harper asked Love something under his breath, then spoke
aloud. “Does anybody know if Mr Persimmon had a car?”
“Yes, Malley said, a big Ford, he thought a Zodiac, was almost
certain a Zodiac.”
“Do we know where it is now?”
Purbright acknowledged the point to be a good one. He
added—but inwardly—that there was no excuse for his having
failed to think of it himself, then sent Love into the next office
with instructions to telephone Mrs Persimmon and ask if her
husband had been using the car on the day of his disappearance.
“Surely,” said Mr Chubb to the inspector when Love had
departed, “she would have mentioned the car to you when you
called on her yesterday if her husband had taken it with him?”
“She was somewhat distraught, sir.”
“Yes, I can understand that. Even so, cars are pretty expensive
items, you know.”
“His probably had been provided by the firm.”
“You think so?”
“It’s customary.”
“Ah.”
Love returned with the information that Persimmon’s car,
the registration number of which he had obtained from the
widow, had not been seen by her since the previous Wednesday
morning. Nor had she thought about it. Was it, perhaps, in the
parking bay behind the supermarket? She had no other
suggestions to offer.
With the air of a generous sportsman leading his second best golf
clubs to a friend who has never played before,
the County Chief Constable acceded to Mr Chubb’s request for
help in the hunt for Edna Hillyard.
Six uniformed men and two detective-constables were
relieved of their duties in Chalmsbury, Brocklestone and some
of the smaller county divisions and told to report at Flaxborough,
where, if the search should prove protracted, they
would be found lodgings.
Purbright awaited the result of his call to Ayrshire, where
lived Edna’s only traceable relatives. If door-to-door inquiries
were to be made, recognizable duplicates of a photograph of the
woman would have to be run off. Neither her landlady nor any
of her friends interviewed so far possessed a picture.
The day before the county men were due to be briefed, a
carefully wrapped, framed portrait arrived at Fen Street. It
was of a five-year-old child with whimsically gappy teeth and
dressed in a gauze fairy costume and ballet shoes.
The inspector showed it to Love.
“Her auntie in Scotland produced it. It’s all they’ve been able
to turn up. You’ve seen the girl. Is this going to be any good?”
“No,” said the sergeant.
“No hint of features? Nothing that might just connect in
people’s minds?”
Love shook his head firmly.
Purbright put the photograph aside. “Could we get a drawing
made, do you think? We’ve got to have something for people
to be shown.”
“Have you tried the Citizen office?”
It was, the inspector reflected, just as well that Love had a
kind of built-in guilelessness that prevented his exploiting or
even gloating over the gaffes and shortcomings of his superior
officers. So gross a lapse as failure to go straight to the local
newspaper file as the most likely source of a picture hardly bore
thinking about.
“My dear Sid, you mean you haven’t been round there yet?”
“I can’t remember that you asked me to.”
Purbright regarded with fond admonishment the pink face
of Love, helpful, unsurprised.
“Never mind,” he said at last. “You’ve had a lot to think about.
It’s often the most obvious things that get overlooked.”
The sergeant nodded, forgiving himself.
Ten minutes later, he was searching through the efficiently
maintained photographic index of the Flaxborough Citizen in
Market Street.
As Purbright, upon reflection, had surmised, Miss Hillyard
was by temperament the sort of woman who might be expected
to have had a history of entering beauty competitions. The most
recent, apparently, had been only five years ago when she was
twenty-nine. Love withdrew and gazed with admiration upon
the print entitled “Miss Arcadia Ballroom, 1966”. It showed a
large but well-proportioned brunette, whose sexual attractions—without
question considerable even in straight presentation,
so to speak—had been lent breath-catching emphasis by a
choice of costume that not only was flagrantly translucent but
seemed to have been shrunk on like the wrapping of a vacuum-packed ham.
“She looks fairly capable of looking after herself,” Purbright
said, trying to feel confident.
He handed the print back to Love. “Get Harper to run off
two or three dozen copies.”
With twelve of the duplicated photographs in his pocket, the
inspector called at the Roebuck Hotel and asked if he might see
one of the gentlemen associated with the detergent advertising
campaign currently mounted in the town.
He was ushered into a small, brown room, papered in
simulation of panelling and hung with as many sporting prints
as could be accommodated in single file around the walls. The
room smelled of gin, with an underlying tang of horseradish sauce.
Three men and two women sat round a mahogany dining
table on which lay a jostle of pamphlets, correspondence and
what Purbright took to be accounts or statistical extracts.
Several bottles and two siphons were grouped in the centre of
the table. On a sideboard were more bottles and a portable film
projector.
The girl who had acted as the inspector’s guide retreated and
shut the door behind her without attempting introductions.
Purbright found himself being eyed sourly by the room’s
five occupants.
“I am an inspector of police and my name is Purbright.”
At first no one moved. The inspector had a momentary impression
that the three expensively dressed, gloomy-looking
men and their languid companions supposed his appearance to
be connected with some puritanical local application of the
liquor laws. Then he realized that their depression was rooted
in some earlier and more serious cause.
“Which of you gentlemen is the Lucillite representative?”
The man called Gordon gave a start and leaped nimbly to his
feet.
“Terribly sorry, inspector. We were rather preoccupied
conference-wise. I’m Dixon-Frome, DD Division. This is
Richard, our consultancy colleague”—a nod and a purr from the
adman—“and Hughie, of course, who is our Assistant Environmental
Research and Liaison Executive.”
“And anyone who can say that gets a free packet of Lucillite
right here and now!”
The man with the aubergine nose was suddenly erect and
grinning. He pumped Purbright’s hand, then stood back and
upped and downed him in an appraising gaze of enormous
geniality.
“Fabulous! Absolutely fabulous!”
To Purbright’s astonishment, he found an arm round his
shoulder and Hugh’s grin bobbing about a couple of inches
from his face.
“Let us,” said Gordon, elbowing Hugh aside like an over-exuberant
dog, “not forget the most important members of the
team. Sheila darling...”
He reached toward but did not touch the hand of a girl
whose most immediately noticeable features were lemon-blonde
hair, tight wash-leather shorts and a butt-end of cigar on which
her mouth worked as tirelessly as a boxing promoter’s.
“Sheila’s our Personnel and Welfare Executive,” Gordon said.
“Detergents Division, Domestic,” squeezed wetly past
Sheila’s cigar butt.
Purbright thought he detected a note of irony and held her
glance a little longer, but the girl’s eyes remained solemn.
He looked away to a plump, sallow-complexioned young
woman who had been examining a sheaf of photographic stills
and making rings upon them with a white crayon
“Hendy,” Gordon announced, extending his hand towards
her. “Assistant Co-ordinator, Visual Kinetics.”
Hendy examined two more stills, marked them, then looked
up at the inspector. She gave him a smile like the movement of
a camera shutter and resumed her task.
“Fabulous,” murmured Hugh, for no reason that Purbright
could determine.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you in conference,” the inspector
began, “but I do think that there are one or two ways in which
you can be especially helpful to us.”
“To the police, you mean?”
“I don’t wish to put it quite as narrowly as that, sir. To the
police, yes; but in the main to the community. There has been
a murder in the town and a woman has disappeared. We are
very anxious to trace her quickly. If she is not already dead,
that is.”
Hugh’s face registered disbelief, then horrified surprise, and
set after a few more modifications into the lineaments of grave
determination to see justice done.
“But that’s terrible, inspector. Really terrible.” He turned to
Richard. “Isn’t that terrible, Richard?” And to Gordon. “Gordon—did
you hear what the inspector said? Isn’t that terrible?
Hendy darling...”
Purbright waited for the equitable distribution of Hugh’s
dismay to be completed.
“You’d heard nothing of this business, then, sir?” he asked
Gordon.
“Not a word. But we aren’t exposed, really, to the neighbourhood
thing. Not in any viable sense, are we, Richard?”
“I wouldn’t say we were, Gordon, no. I mean, we haven’t
personalized communications outside the wash-psychology
thing. There just isn’t...”
“Who’s dead?”
Sheila was looking up at the inspector. The cigar butt,
perilously short now, seemed about to be ingested within her
puckered lips.
“He’s a shopkeeper,” Purbright said. “Or rather, a store
manager.” He saw interest flare suddenly in his audience.
“Not a supermarket manager?” prompted Gordon, hesitantly.
“That’s right, sir. A man called Bertram Persimmon.”
“Christ!” Richard said.
Purbright looked from one to another. “Did any of you know
this man, then?”
“Well, I don’t know that we’d actually met him, had we,
Richard? Not in a social situation.”
“He was a great person,” Hugh interposed fervently.
“I have an idea,” Richard said to Gordon, “that we did see him
once—person-to-personwise, I mean. Wasn’t he at the prepromotion
thing at the Dorchester? Right?”
“Right. Well, probably, anyway.”
“Right.” Richard turned to Purbright. “Persimmon rated with
Dixon-Frome. I know you’d like to know that. You mustn’t think of
Flickborough as right off the map. I’m with Thornton-Edwards—on
the Lucillite account, right?—and I don’t think
I’m breaking our client’s confidence when I tell you this is a
potential zoom-zone. I can tell the inspector that, can’t I,
Gordon?”
“Sure. Anything.”
Hugh, in reverie, shook his head. “A very, very sincere
person. No, I mean really sincere.”
Purbright had been wondering for some time about the talk’s
curious quality of disjointedness. He indicated Hugh with a
nod and asked Gordon very softly: “He knew Persimmon, then,
did he?”
Gordon looked surprised.
“No, no—none of us knew him. Why should we? He was
supposed to have got things laid on, that’s all. And he let us
down. Of course, what you say does explain why. But we’ve
been bleeding blood over the past couple of days, we really
have.”
“Would you like to tell me more about this letting down, as
you term it. Persimmon was supposed to have made certain
arrangements, was he?”
“You could say that. Sure. Richard here will tell you his
consultancy had Persimmon lined up for product co-operation.
Right, Richard?”
“Right.”
“You mean he was going to sell your washing powder in his
shop?”
There was a brief silence. Richard and Gordon looked at
each other.
“Oh, dear,” said Gordon, quietly.
Richard stroked his smooth chin, spicily fragrant with
“Gunroom” after-shave.
“Mr Persimmon,” Richard explained to the inspector, “is—or
was—the manager of a supermarket which is the local unit of
the merchandizing division of Northern Nutritionals, a
subsidiary of Dixon-Frome, which as you know is controlled
by the Wyoming Cement Corporation.”
“The boot and shoe complex?” offered Purbright, unable to
help himself.
Richard’s expression of patient patronage parted to allow a
glint of surprise and admiration.
“Exactly,” he said. “So you will see that Persimmon was but a
cog, a very small cog, in our product promotion machinery.
But one specific task he did undertake—he was to issue private
invitations to forty or fifty local washwives to take part in some
film work for television commercials.”
“I’m sorry—local what?”
“Washwives,” Gordon said. “Women whose life-style depends
for an enhancement element upon the know-how of the
detergent industry. We don’t apologize for a word like that,
inspector. It’s a tell-word, and tell-words are what we like to
use. Right, Richard?”
“Right.”
“Do I understand,” asked Purbright, “that the forty or fifty
invitations were not in fact issued by Persimmon?”
“They were not,” said Gordon. “We had to use our own home-call
operatives to recruit the ladies at the last minute. The day
was not entirely successful.”
“Have you any idea at all of what prevented Mr Persimmon
from doing as you had expected?”
“We were told by his staff on Friday morning that nothing
had been seen of him for two days. Two whole days, for God’s
sake. Richard here practically orgasmed and I can’t blame him.
The location and everything had been set up. Even a marvellous
boatman character. Then, pfft—no washwives. Nary a bloody
one.”
A disgracefully wayward but attractive notion had blown
through the casement of Purbright’s imagination.
“This man’s disappearance,” he said slowly. “Could it have
been of critical importance to the campaign you’d all come here
to launch?”
The Deputy Chief Brand Visualizer of Thornton-Edwards,
Arnold and Konstatin nodded with grave emphasis. It seemed
to Purbright that the adman saw nothing outrageous in the
situation at which he had hinted; perhaps his world really was
one that admitted the nobbling of supermarket managers in the
cause of The Product.
“Oh, but surely,” began Purbright, drawing back from the
brink.
Hendy was on her feet. She stepped in front of the inspector
and thrust at Gordon the photographs she had been marking.
Gordon sorted through them quickly and handed two or
three to Purbright. On each he saw, ringed in white, the
malevolently cross-eyed visage of Miss Amy Parkin.
Hugh’s arm was clamped round Purbright’s shoulder before
he could step clear.
“Can you understand, inspector, what makes people do those
terrible things? I think they must be sick, don’t you? Don’t
you think people who do these things must be sick?”
“All that film,” lamented Richard. “Every last shot.”
“Spoiled?” ventured Purbright.
“My God! Image-wise, anything like that slays, but slays.
Listen, all these are bad-ad—jokes, sarcasm, knocking animals,
politics, death. Right? But worst, worst, worst is deformity.
Limps, squints, leg-irons. They’re bad-ad in profundis.”
“This was fixed,” asserted Gordon, tapping the pile of prints.
Purbright turned. “By?”
“No names.”
“G and P, darling, for a ducat.”
Sheila had stretched herself almost horizontally in her chair
and was holding to her eye, telescope fashion, an empty gin
bottle.
“No names,” repeated Gordon.
Sheila grinned, as at the discovery of an amusing new planet.
“All right, then. E and S. Bet you.”
“No names,” Richard said testily.
Yawning, Sheila scratched long, honey-coloured thighs with
her free hand. Hendy gave her a glance of disapproval, then
crossed to the door.
“I’m going down to the bar for some cigarettes.”
“Just a moment...”
Purbright was drawing from his pocket the envelope of
copies of the photograph of Edna Hillyard.
He handed one to each of them and put the rest on the
table.
“This young woman is in her mid-thirties now, but probably
not much different in looks from when this picture was taken.
She was friendly with the man we have been talking about.
First of all, I want to know if any of you recognize this girl or
remember having seen her at any time.”
All gazed dutifully at the picture, then signified that Miss
Hillyard was absolutely unknown to them. Only Hugh offered
a comment.
“Oh, but fabulous. Absolutely fabulous!”
Extravagant concern flooded his face. “And do you mean to
say, inspector, that this poor girl has been done to death?”
“That I do not say. But, as I mentioned before, she is missing.
In view of what has happened to Persimmon, we have very
good cause to be anxious. The help I am asking from you
people is this. You are running a promotion campaign involving
door-to-door calls. Your canv...”—Purbright caught the look
of pain in the Dixon-Frome man’s eye—“Your home-call
operatives will be covering ground that might well yield useful
information. Could they not slip in a question on the side, so to
speak? You know—Have you seen this girl lately?—that sort
of thing. It might be most valuable.”
Gordon pondered.
“The HCOs aren’t really depth-orientated, are they Richard?
I mean, in what sort of depth do you want this, inspector?
We’ve no M-R people on this one, actually. Not at the moment.”
“M-R?”
“Motivational Research.”
“I don’t really think that would be necessary. Just the straight
question and the picture. We should do all the following up,
naturally.”
After a little more thought, Gordon nodded.
“Sure. Sure. Will do. Sheila—extra special briefing for the
Lucies in the morning, love. Right? OK Richard?”
“OK Gordon. Just one point, Sheila.”
“Point awaited, darl.”
The gin bottle, gripped now in the crutch of the Personnel
and Welfare Executive, was being rocked from side to side by
means of a sort of sedentary belly-dancer’s technique.
“Those girls are not of the brightest. They are practically on
top quiz-load already. Give them the one extra question only.
Absolutely simple. ‘Have you seen?’ And the picture. Roger?”
“Roger and out.”
For a few moments more, Sheila watched with a self-centred
smile the oscillations of her bottle. Then she reached a fresh
cigar from a box on the floor beside her and bit nearly an inch
off its end.
Purbright returned to the subject of Persimmon, but with no
real hope of progress. The manager’s part in the Lucillite
campaign had been settled beforehand by correspondence and a
couple of subsidiary telephone calls from the London office.
None of the team now in Flaxborough had met him personally
or even spoken to him by phone. Apart from the hinted but
quite unsubstantiated involvement of some other powerful
protagonist in the detergent war, no one had been able to
suggest a reason for the man’s violent end.
“We get ourselves op-based on Thursday night. Persimmon
is to rendezvous with us the following morning. He doesn’t.
We contact the store and his home. Negatively. Finalization of
the campaign visuals is deadlined for May 7. Right. So we
out-phase P and proceed. What else can we do, inspector? No
one is so vital he cannot be redundantized.”
Having listened attentively to this summary by Gordon,
Hugh directed upon the inspector a smile infinitely regretful
and shrugged.
Purbright indicated the film stills. “Are you going to have to
do all that again?”
“Tomorrow,” said Richard. He looked as nearly worried as
Purbright had yet seen him.
“Come hell and high water,” added Hugh, jocularly. He
darted approval-seeking glances at everyone else in the room.
Hendy curled her lip at him.
Twenty minutes after Purbright’s departure, another visitor
tapped at the door of the Dixon-Frome op-base and opened it
immediately.
“Anybody home?”
Gordon, sifting disconsolately through the pages of a sales
analysis, looked up to see the benign but alert features of a
woman perhaps twenty years his senior. She was dressed in the
kind of clothes—of excellent cut and quality but with a challenging
touch of frumpishness—that proclaim the well-born who has
managed to hang on to her money.
Gordon rose. He was alone in the room except for Sheila,
who was asleep in her chair and faintly snoring. Hendy and
Richard had gone down to the bar. Hugh, a compulsive body-cleanser,
was locked in a bathroom somewhere for the third time
that day.
The woman advanced into the room and subjected Gordon
to close and friendly scrutiny.
“You are Dixon-Frome, of course,” she said, having nodded
approvingly at the lemon hue of his drip-dry Executon shirt.
Gordon half-opened his mouth, remained motionless for a
second, then snapped his fingers. “You’re TEAK...” He
waited, smiling uncertainly.
“Teak?”
“Thornton-Edwards. One of their M-R execs. Right?”
She pursed her lips teasingly, then looked round for somewhere
to put down her old-fashioned but very costly-looking
blue sealskin handbag. Gordon took the bag and placed it on
the table. She selected a chair for herself and sat down. Her
legs were surprisingly shapely.
“No,” she said at last, “I am not from Thornton-Edwards,
although I do know of them, of course. I was on the board of
an agency for a number of years. Nowadays my interests lie in
a direction different from advertising.”
“Oh, yes?”
“My name is Lucilla Teatime—incidentally, I should much
prefer you to use it without the feudal handle, which may look
well enough on company notepaper but does tend to be painfully
embarrasing in conversation—and I am Operational
Director of ECPRF.”
There was a tiny pause.
“Small world,” said Gordon.
“Indeed it is,” agreed Miss Teatime. She gazed past his
shoulder as if the Antipodes had just swum into view above the
sideboard. Then she said, slowly and deliberately: “Your
promotion film has run into serious difficulties.”
Gordon started. “How do you know about that?”
“Should we say, perhaps, that our lines crossed? What a
pity that Dixon-Frome did not consult us in advance. The site
you chose for filming is quite notorious in PR circles, you
know.”
“Our consultancy was quite happy with it, PR-wise.”
Miss Teatime gave a tinkling, tea-with-the-vicar laugh.
“Public Relations...oh dear, a small misunderstanding I
fear. I was speaking of something rather less mundane. PR
stands also for Psychical Research.”
“I see.” Gordon fingered his tie dubiously.
“Ah, you are embarrassed, are you not. Your idea association
mechanism is in good order. It has given you the print-out.
Psychic—spiritualism—table-turning and cheesecloth-mad old
ladies in dark Peckham parlours...”
He sent a hesitant little smile to meet hers. “Well, actually...”
“Perfectly natural,” declared Miss Teatime. “You can have no
idea of how that image still interferes with the work of purely
scientific agencies. What I dare say you would term respect
potential is something we have worked hard to achieve in the
Edith Cavell Psychical Research Foundation.”
“Edith Cavell?”
Miss Teatime blushed. “My middle names, actually. Rather
shame-making but the Trust insisted. They meant it kindly, I
suppose, but people do not realize how unworthy of them is
this persistent deference to money and aristocratic connection.
However, and be that as it may, you will be wanting to know,
will you not, in what practical manner the Foundation proposes
to assist you and your excellent consultancy.”
“I’m not sure that I see how you...”
“Would you mind?” A little cheroot had appeared between
two of Miss Teatime’s elegantly poised fingers. Gordon looked
about him. He spotted a box of matches that rose and fell on
the stomach of the sleeping Sheila.
Miss Teatime accepted a light with careful concentration, as
if she valued it highly, then indicated the prints on the table.
“Those are some of the stills, are they?”
Gordon obediently handed them to her.
Miss Teatime donned a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles and
scrutinized the first print. It showed a group of washwives, with
Hugh in their midst. Each of the women was displaying a
garment incredibly besmirched with foodstuff or effluent of
some kind. The scene was saved from looking like an incipient
lynching by Hugh’s expression of calm, almost saintly, reassurance.
Over every inch of the print ranged Miss Teatime’s keen eye.
Gordon heard her sudden intake of breath when she came to
the section ringed in Hendy’s white crayon.
“Amazing!”
He looked over her shoulder, but she was already busy upon
the second photograph.
“Absolutely fascinating!”
“You see why all this work has negative use-value,” Gordon
said. “The spoilage rate is terrific.”
She seemed not to hear.
Another print was of the washwives gazing at the river in
which boatman Heath was pretending to fill his medieval
bucket. The floating bull’s-head mask was clearly visible.
“Minoan ectoplasm!” breathed Miss Teatime.
A shot of the line-up of washwives at the display of their
clothing after it supposedly had been immersed in Lucillite
suds bore three of Hendy’s censorship rings.
One framed a woman gazing furiously at a pair of drawers
marred by an enormous black hand-print. Within another, low
on the left of the picture, two dogs were unconcernedly
copulating. The third contained the inevitable camera-ogling
visage of the dwarfish woman with the thirty-degree squint.
Miss Teatime sat back, removed her glasses and tapped them
pensively against her knee. “I would never have believed it,”
she said, half to herself.
“Well,” said Gordon, “you’ve heard about industrial sabotage.
Right?” He pointed at the prints, opened his mouth, shut it
again, and began walking rapidly up and down. He stopped
and pointed once more at the prints. “Right?”
“The lady with the very odd eyes,” Miss Teatime began.
“Agent,” snapped Gordon. “From P and Q probably. Or
C and H. KGB even.”
Miss Teatime looked shocked. “The Russians?”
“Kleen-Gear Biological. Do I have to spell it out for
you?”
Gordon was noticeably less crease-proof than he had seemed
earlier. Miss Teatime patted his sleeve.
“I think you ought to sit down,” she said gently. “Come along.
I have something to tell you which may come as a slight shock.”
He frowned, but followed her advice. There was something
decidedly persuasive about this punctiliously mannered woman.
“That’s better,” she said. “Now, then; I do understand your
reaction to these unfortunate setbacks, but I must tell you that
you are quite wrong in your interpretation of them. You see, I
happen to know the identity of the lady whose physical
affliction has spoiled so much of your film. She is not an agent.
And I am sure that her turning up here was an event quite
uninfluenced by your business rivals.”
“Name. The name’s all I want. Injunction. Right?”
“The name,” said Miss Teatime, “is Mad Meg of Pennick.
And there would be no point in applying for an injunction.”
Gordon stared at her. “You mean she’s a mental patient, or
something?”
“She is dead. She committed suicide four years ago.”
“Good God!”
“Curiously enough,” added Miss Teatime, equably, “there was
nothing wrong with poor Meg’s sight during life. That very
unnerving squint which you may observe in these pictures was
caused—according to medical evidence at the inquest—by the
method she chose to kill herself.”
Miss Teatime leaned forward and spoke softly, after a glance
at the still sleeping Sheila.
“Hanging.”
Her voice fell still further.
“In a chicken coop.”
Gordon began a fresh examination of the film stills, this time
with horrified fascination.
Miss Teatime’s manner became suddenly brisker.
“You must not worry too much about your filming
tomorrow,” she said. “This town has always been the focus for a
good deal of paranormal phenomena. We know now how to
cope with it.”
“You mean you can render this sort of thing non-repetitive?”
“I mean that I shall be happy to place our not inconsiderable
field knowledge of the subject at the disposal of you and your
colleagues. I propose to begin work on the site immediately.
Tele-Radiation clearance should be complete by morning.”
“I’m not certain, Miss Teatime, that I can commit
Dixon-Frome any further budgetwise.”
The finely delineated eyebrows arched a fraction.
“The Foundation, needless to say, does not solicit fees.”
“Oh, well, that’s fine. We’ll just play this one by ear, shall
we?”
Miss Teatime rose and prepared to take her leave.
“Vibrations, as Sir Oliver Lodge used so often to remark to
my father, are our only help and guide.”
She held out her hand.
“Of course, Sir Oliver did not live to see the benefits conferred
upon scientific research by donations from industry.”
Inspector Purbright inverviewed members of the
staff of the Bride Street supermarket in the white-painted closet,
furnished with chair, table and camp bed, that served to
accommodate in their separate seasons travelling salesmen,
ladies taken queer, and shoplifters. On the wall was a first-aid
cabinet. He had peeped inside it and discovered a part roll of
adhesive tape and the heel of a woman’s shoe.
The under-manager, whom the inspector decided to question
first in deference to his seniority, turned out to be a pale but
wiry youth of nineteen or twenty. He looked a pretty good box
heaver. Henry Baxter was his name.
“When was it,” Purbright asked him, “that Mr Persimmon
was last in the store? Take your time and try to be accurate.”
“Half-past eight on Wednesday,” Henry replied without
hesitation.
“What, in the evening, you mean?”
“That’s right.”
“But isn’t it half-day closing on a Wednesday?”
“Most places it is. Not here, though. We get our time off
staggered. If,” Henry added, “there’s any going.”
“I see. So you were here with Mr Persimmon on Wednesday,
were you? Until eight-thirty.”
“That’s right. Well, we had all the Lucillite packets to
overstick, didn’t we?”
“Overstick?”,
“With those little labels. ‘New—Improved’.”
“Ah, you’d had new stock come in.”
“No. But the price had gone up again, hadn’t it?”
Purbright backed out of this conversational cul-de-sac and
asked: “Did you notice anything about Mr Persimmon’s
manner that evening? Anything unusual—strained, excited?”
“Not really. He was a bit mad at having to stay late, especially
at such short notice, but it wasn’t the first time it had happened
and in this trade you get used to being buggered about a bit
by head office.”
“When you say short notice, do you mean he was only asked
that day to stay behind?”
“Yeah. They rang up about three. Of course, there’s a special
push on this week and next. They’ve got girls in space suits and
God knows what all. Proper circus.”
“Did you leave together at half-past eight?”
“More or less. Except that I walked and he got in his car.”
“Did you suppose he would drive straight home?”
“No.”
“You didn’t—why?”
“Well, there was that phone call he made, wasn’t there?”
Henry Baxter’s mode of answering questions was curiously
suggestive of a supposition on his part that the inspector had
been a hidden observer of all his past life.
“Phone call?” repeated Purbright, patiently.
“When he knew about having to do the oversticks. He rang
up this party and said he’d come straight over when he could.”
“Might it not have been his wife he was talking to?”
“Oh no, he never rang her. Not the boss. Not his wife, he
wouldn’t.”
“Who was it, then? Do you know?”
“Me? No, I never heard him. It was Julie who was getting
stuff out of the stockroom to refill one of the special offer bins.
The phone’s in there.”
“You say Mr Persimmon was not in the habit of telephoning
his wife. Do I take it that they weren’t on very good terms?”
The under-manager shrugged. “Well, just sort of average. I
don’t suppose he thought much of her, but they’d been married
ages, hadn’t they?”
“You’d call the relationship unenthusiastic rather than
hostile, then.”
“Yeah, I suppose you could say that.”
“Was anyone—anyone at all—inclined to be hostile to Mr
Persimmon?”
Mr Baxter considered carefully this wider question..
“What, customers, you mean?”
“Not necessarily.”
There was a pause. Then the under-manager shook his head.
“I can’t think of anybody in particular,” he said, “but I
don’t reckon he was liked much. Not by men. You know.”
“I’m not sure that I do know, Mr Baxter. Effeminate, was
he?”
“Far from it. I’d say he was a randy old sod, if he hadn’t been
my boss.”
“I think we can take it that his death absolves you from
professional loyalty, Mr Baxter.”
“Right. Then that’s what he was.”
Julie Bollinger, bin-filler and shelf-recharger, entered
Purbright’s presence with a draggle-tailed awe that argued
years of parental warning of the policeman who would fetch
her away if she didn’t eat her dinner. She was sixteen years old,
sallow and straight-haired, and looked as if the threats had
failed in their purpose.
Purbright got up and gave her his chair. She perched on the
edge of it and covered bony knees with large red hands.
The inspector squatted on the farther end of the camp bed
and waited until she glanced his way, when he gazed admiringly
at a huge buckle of chrome and coloured glass on her belt.
She saw him looking and was pleased and just a little reassured.
“Julie, you know that Mr Persimmon is dead and that we
think somebody killed him. Obviously all this has nothing to do
with you, and I’m not going to bother you with a whole lot of
silly questions. But there’s one thing you might have remembered
from last Wednesday which could be important. Now
listen. When you were working in the stockroom and therefore
happened to hear Mr Persimmon talking on the phone, did
anything of what he said come over clearly to you?”
Julie, whose mother would have prefaced such a catechism
with the observation that “little pigs have big ears” and a blow
on each just to prove it, thought how nice and understanding
this big, yellow-haired policeman was. She closed her eyes and
rummaged conscientiously through the little rag-bag of her memory.
“He said,” she announced at last, nodding slightly at each
word in warranty of its truth, “that he couldn’t make it that
night and that whoever it was he was talking to should be sure
to let Dilly know. I think he said that bit twice. And then there
was another bit where he laughed and said well it was a bit of
luck for whoever was at the other end of the phone because
she’d get an extra turn.”
“She?” queried Purbright. “Do you think it was a woman he
was talking to, Julie?”
She frowned, confused by the complication.
“I don’t know, really. He never called whoever it was by
name. I just...” Her thin shoulders rose and subsided.
Purbright hastened to say, never mind, she’d got a jolly good
memory and the odds were that her first impression was
probably the right one.
“Did you like Mr Persimmon?” he asked casually.
“He was all right. I’m sorry about what’s happened to him.”
Julie’s mouth trembled. Purbright thought she was chiefly
upset by the looming so near of the fearsomeness of death, but
there was some pity there too, some regret.
Of the four other girls who worked at the supermarket, only
one was able, or inclined, to say about her late employer
anything that might be a clue to the circumstances of his death.
She was an eighteen-year-old cashier, Doris Periam, and she
told the inspector of having seen Mr Persimmon’s car being
driven along Priorgate fairly late on the previous Wednesday
night.
“How late?”
“It had gone twelve. A friend was taking me home. I live in
Moss Road and it was half-past when I got in.”
“You know Mr Persimmon’s car, do you?”
“Oh, yes. It’s a big powder-blue thing.”
“Why did you notice it especially that night?”
“Well, there wasn’t much about. And then, this car went by.
It was going ever so fast. I thought it would turn over at that
bend into Marshside Road. It just scraped round, though. And
my friend said look at that something fool. And I said it can’t
be, yes it is, it’s my boss. Because I could see the car and the
colour and everything in the light of that lamp outside
Morrison’s. And my friend said he must be drunk, but I said
no, not Mr Persimmon, he never touches it. I thought it was
ever so funny, though, him driving like that.”
During the few minutes it took him to walk back to the
police station in Fen Street, Purbright pondered the behaviour
and the route of Persimmon. Haste was uncommon enough in
Flaxborough to be noticed at once, even by a courting cashier,
and Persimmon must have been in an uncharacteristically rash
frame of mind that night to use Priorgate as a speedway.
He certainly was not drunk at the time, if, as seemed likely,
he had met his death within the next few hours. No trace
of alcohol had been revealed at autopsy. So why the erratic
driving?
There was no doubt of where he had been going. Marshside
Road, the continuation of Priorgate, led only to Orchard Road,
And there, presumably by arrangement, waited his mistress,
Edna Hillyard, in the privacy of her little tree-screened car.
But even at that time there must have been people about. The
folk-dancing affair had gone on “pretty late” according to Mrs
Gloss. Both Persimmon and Edna had always taken good care—unusual
care, in her case—to keep their meetings secret. Why,
then, choose for an assignation the grounds of a house where
characters had been prancing around at large all evening?
Persimmon’s car, it seemed, was readily identifiable. And as a
local store manager, he himself would be familiar to the sort of
middle-aged, middle-class women likely to join a folklore
society.
Then—and Purbright reproached himself for having
accepted at first an explanation more convenient than convincing—there
was the point about the girl’s neatly stacked
clothes. Had she really had the forethought to set out that
evening equipped with a duplicate set of clothing to put on
after the revels? And if so, what had she carried it in? There was
no suitcase in the car—not even a box or wrapping.
Julie’s evidence concerning the phone call, examined beside
what little was certain about Persimmon’s movements on that
Wednesday, should have suggested some line of inquiry. It
must, after all, have had relevance—perhaps vital relevance—to
whatever course and commitments were to lead Persimmon to
his death. And yet those overheard fragments of conversation
remained, however diligently Purbright sorted and examined
them in his mind, as unilluminating as they must have been to
the girl who had recorded them.
“ ‘Dilly’,” the inspector said to Love the moment he
encountered him emerging from the side entrance of the police
station.
Love halted and looked politely attentive.
“Supposing,” Purbright said, “you had heard somebody
referred to as ‘Dilly’, who would you think was meant?”
The sergeant pondered.
“I think I’ve heard young women called dillies. It’s supposed
to mean that they’re a bit of all right.”
“No, I don’t want the generic application, Sid. What about
nicknames? Is it an abbreviation for something?”
“Ducks are dillies,” announced Love after further consideration.
“Somebody short in the leg, maybe?”
Purbright looked unimpressed. “Never mind.”
Love, brightening as at the recollection of an agreeable piece
of tidings temporarily eclipsed by duller matters, said:
“Harry Bird’s had a spell put on him.”
Purbright closed his eyes for an instant.
“He’s what?”
“It sounds like that parish church business over again. One
of the newspaper people came in looking for you. He said
somebody’s cut a black cockerel in two and nailed both bits to
Bird’s front door. I was just going to drive over and have a
dekko.”
“Which reporter told you this?”
“The one with fangs. I think he said he was from the Daily Sketch.”
“And how did he know what had been nailed to Bird’s front
door?”
“He said they’d had a tip-off.”
Purbright was silent for some moments. Then he motioned
Love to follow him into the yard where his car was parked.
“I think I’ll have a dekko myself while we’re about it.
Incidentally, Sid, have you noticed what a lot of tipping-off
there’s been lately? Anxiety to oblige is something I
don’t much care to see in this town. It’s usually a sign of
conspiracy.”
Sir Henry Bird was the head of a firm of agricultural machinery
manufacturers. His knighthood had been conferred only
the previous autumn. He thereupon had moved out of 14
Birtley Avenue and into a big double-fronted house with pink
stucco walls and false turrets behind one of the high hedges
bordering Oakland, a cul-de-sac that ran parallel to The Riding,
off Partney Drive.
Purbright and Love got out of the police car just in time to
see a kneeling woman in a flowered overall wring out a cloth
and vigorously rub the central panel of the front door. The
water in the bucket beside her was slightly stained. A few black
waterlogged feathers revolved slowly.
The woman glanced over her shoulder and got up,
laboriously.
“Not more of you, surely.”
“Is Sir Henry in?”
“He’s not seeing anybody else.”
Purbright said that they were policemen and that he was sure
Sir Henry would have no objection to their going in to see him.
“I thought you was from the papers,” the woman said,
grudgingly converted. She picked up the bucket and trailed off
round the side of the house.
A little puff of pride distended the cheek of mistaken-for-a-journalist
Love. He stroked the case of the portable tape
recorder that hung from his shoulder.
Purbright bent and examined the step. The woman had
missed two or three spots of blood, now dry and glistening like
black varnish.
The door opened.
“Mr Bird says you can come in. He’s in the front room.”
The chairman of Autocult (Flaxborough) Limited amplified
this instruction by calling out: “In here, Purbright. In the
lounge.” He made the word sound long and squeezy and
expensive. Purbright was prepared for red plush and Renoir
reproductions.
In fact, the atmosphere they entered was cool and at first
seemed restfully dim. But soon the eyes tired of the kind of
light diffused by the long yellow muslin curtains that were
draped and looped and re-looped with fussy precision over the
entire window area, light that after a while made everything in
the room look to be made of butter.
“To what,” asked Sir Henry, “do we owe the pleasure of a
visit from the constabulary?”
The voice, affable and with a pronounced smoker’s rasp, was
in keeping with the florid well-fleshed face. What Purbright
found unfailingly fascinating about the man, though, was his
ears. They were very small—no bigger than dried apricots and
of similar colour—and set so snugly within corresponding
recesses that only at close quarters could they be discerned at
all.
Purbright explained that a report of damage to Sir Henry’s
property had reached him. “Or defacement,” he qualified.
“Aren’t there more serious matters to keep you people busy
just now?”
Sir Henry’s eyebrows, whose conspicuousness more than
made up for his curious auricular deficiency, hunched like
combatant caterpillars, challenging each other across the
bridge of his nose.
“Serious, yes, sir. But not necessarily unrelated.”
Bird watched without comment the adjustments that Love
was making to the tape recorder, which now was switched on.
“This defacement, as you call it. You know what happened,
do you?”
“According to what little information I have, a mutilated
chicken was left hanging on your front door.”
“A cockerel, Purbright. The distinction does matter, you
know. A black cockerel.”
“Exactly, sir.”
“You sound as if you know something about black cockerels.”
“By repute, yes.”
“Ah, by repute, Purbright. Tell me, now, what is your
understanding of this matter of black cockerels?”
The caterpillar-brows of Sir Henry reared to denote a sort of
fierce interrogatory amusement. The inspector saw that
“Knocker” Bird, as he once had been known in the town, and
still was by some of his contemporaries, was in a mood to
make him feel small. The press, no doubt, had been troublesome.
Purbright resolved to make allowances.
“It isn’t a subject I know much about, sir,” he replied, “apart
from stories of black magic and that sort of thing.”
“Voodoo,” prompted Love, with a surreptitious nudge.
“You don’t seem all that impressed, inspector. I did wonder
when I read some of the Sunday newspapers. They depicted
you as tolerant to the point of indifference.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“What are you proposing to do about this bit of foolery at
my front door?”
“In the first place—and with your help, I hope, sir—to
establish whether it was just foolery or something more serious.”
“You didn’t have to come traipsing over here, you know,
Purbright. I didn’t send for you. Now why don’t you be a good
fellow and run along. The mess is cleaned up. If the papers
want to make a silly song and dance about it, that’s their
business. So far as I’m concerned, the incident is over.”
“That is what you told the press, is it, sir?”
Sir Henry laughed. “Yes, but in much more forthright
terms, believe me.”
It was the laugh—a controlled, fruity chuckle which suddenly
skidded into falsetto—that confirmed Purbright’s suspicion.
Bird had been frightened, and quite badly. Was it by the sudden
prospect of publicity? As deputy chairman of the Bench, he had
suffered, or enjoyed more likely, enough newspaper quotes to
have broken his coyness in that respect. In any case, his
reputation both in business and more recently in public life was
that of an extrovert, a pusher.
“Well, we’ll leave that for the moment, Sir Henry. It wasn’t
the only reason for my coming to see you. I’ve been wanting to
ask you about a certain charity organization.”
Bird stared. He half rose from his chair.
“Now, look, Purbright, I realize you’re not a chap who rushes
round with a harassed expression all the time, but aren’t you
supposed to be in charge of this Persimmon business?”
“That is so, sir.”
“Yet you have time to trot over here to investigate a mutilated
chicken—no, your words, Purbright—mutilated chicken—and
when I laugh off that one, as you should have done in the
first place, you start chatting about charities.”
“Perhaps I chose an inapt phrase,” Purbright conceded
patiently. “It was what I judged to have been meant by Mrs
Persimmon when she spoke of her late husband’s ‘samaritan
nights’. She named you, Sir Henry, as one of his associates on
these occasions.”
Bird said nothing for a while. He gazed unseeingly towards
an alabaster nude preening herself on the big, white-painted
overmantel. A sheet of cellophane, strapped round the figure to
protect it from dust, glistened wetly in the room’s ochre
twilight.
“Have you had words with the vicar?”
The quality of Bird’s voice had undergone a radical change.
It was quiet and earnest and free of the half-mocking, half-accusing
tone he had employed before.
“Not on this subject specifically, no, sir. He did call to see me
on Friday, but about something else.”
“About what he’d found in the church, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“That,” Bird said gravely, “wasn’t ‘something else’,
Purbright. All these events have a common cause, as I think you
are beginning to realize. There are forces at work in this town—highly
dangerous forces—which can’t simply be arrested and
locked up. They have been operating under the surface for a
long time.”
Bird got up and crossed to the window. He stood staring out
through the muslin folds. In profile, the chin was virtually
non-existent. His head at that moment seemed to Purbright to
be a round, yellow globe, featureless as a turnip.
“You say you’ve not mentioned the watchnights to the vicar.”
Bird turned and the turnip had a mouth again, and a nose,
and eyes caved beneath those anxiously contracted bundles of
hair.
“Watchnights? I’m sorry, I don’t think I know what you
mean, sir.”
Bird made an abrupt, dismissive gesture. “No, never mind.
I’ll explain. You’ll have to know, obviously. But not until I’ve
spoken to Grewyear. That would be quite wrong.”
He left the room at once, closing the door behind him. The
policemen heard the sharp ting that signalled the lifting of a phone.
On his return, Bird made no reference to his conversation
with the Vicar but his manner suggested that Grewyear had
sanctioned whatever he was about to say.
“About a year or eighteen months ago,” began Bird, “some
rather queer reports started to come in to a little social welfare
set-up that a couple of friends and I had been running in our
spare time. It was a sort of moral advice thing—you know what
I mean? Quite unofficial, but with connections. Cropper, for
instance—he’s in the right job to know about problem families
and so on. I’m on the Bench and a few committees. Grewyear—well,
his value is obvious. And poor old Persimmon had his
Boy Scout and Home Mission contacts.
“The first strange story that came to us was told by a woman
who claimed that an animal of some kind kept clattering about
on the roof at night and pawing at the tiles just above her bed.
When she looked up from the street, there was nothing there.
She was a widow and lived alone. One morning, she woke up
parched with thirst and hardly able to breathe. The space in the
bed beside her was hot, she said—not just warm but hot—and
she saw hairs on the sheet, rough and wiry, like a goat’s hairs.
Know what I mean?
“Then a young girl brought us something she said she kept
finding on the floor in various rooms at home, no matter how
often she threw it away outside or even burned it on the kitchen
fire. It was a rough figure made out of straw. We knew what
it was, but we didn’t tell her. It was a Hugger-doll. The tale
goes that if this thing isn’t discovered during daylight, its
maker will be able to take its place after dark and do what he
wants—you know what I’m getting at, don’t you?—to anyone
in that house—kill them, even—without fear of discovery.
“I could go on, but those two first cases were fairly typical.
Some of the people who came to us were absolutely frantic.
They thought they’d seen the devil, or were dying of some illness
their doctors couldn’t discover, or had been possessed—and I
mean physically possessed, you understand, in the sense of being
ravished, coupled with, inseminated—you know what I mean?—by
creatures not human. There were others who complained of mysterious
infestation of their houses or their bodies— particularly
their secret parts—you know what I mean?—by
hordes of strange insects that disappeared when doctors or
health inspectors were called.”
Bird had been leaning further and further forward in his
chair as his story progressed. Now he paused and sat back.
“You see what we were up against, don’t you? Oh, we didn’t
believe it at first, any more than you would have done. Or a
doctor. Or a lawyer. Of course, Grewyear had to pretend to.
Not that he actually did any interviewing of these people
himself. It was understood from the beginning that the rest of
us would constitute a sort of auxiliary—you know what I
mean?—to leave him free to get on with his regular parish
duties. We passed on the details, though, so that he could
advise. And in the end, none of us had any doubts at all any
more.
“Do you know what we were doing? We were fighting a
battle, Purbright, a battle with evil. Right here in this town.
Make no mistake about that.
“Forces had gained hold in Flaxborough that would have
corrupted and then devoured it. You think that’s a melodramatic
way for an experienced business man and a magistrate to talk,
don’t you? All right. But I tell you this. If there’s such a thing
as the mark of the devil, I’ve certainly seen it in Flaxborough.
And not just once or twice.”
Lucy-probationer Barbara “Bubbles” Westmacott
was feeling inspired and ambitious. She had been permitted,
together with four other junior members of the team, to watch
some of the re-making of the Lucillite campaign film and so
splendidly had the occasion gone off—with lots of absolutely
spontaneous Ooo’s from the washwives, quips and grins galore
from Hughie, and a spell-binding imitation by boatman Heath
of Long John Silver—that she had set herself to convert eleven
households (eleven was her lucky number) to whiter, and
therefore more joyous, living that very day.
“If Lucillite is in your home, I’ve brought good news from
Dixon-Frome.”
Miss Westmacott, spruce and plump and engaging in her
fractionally too tight uniform, smiled confidently at the old
lady who had opened the door of the pretty little bungalow.
“Eh?”
Miss Westmacott repeated her incantation.
Nutcracker jaws champed four or five times while the white
plastic tunic was submitted to slow and dubious scrutiny by
eyes like mildewed bilberries.
“You from the chiroppy?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Come to do me feet, ’ave yer?”
“Oh, no, I’m not a chiropodist. I am here to show you how
to get a whiter wash.”
With speed almost incredible in one so frail, the old lady
snaked back behind the shelter of the door and slammed it shut.
“There’s a Gift!” cried Miss Westmacott, as mellifluously as
she could manage in the discouraging circumstances.
From behind the door came an angry and very brusque
retort. It sounded, curiously enough, like Russian. Then, in
English, the girl heard that she was to tell them dratted council
lot to bloody well get a bath themselves and stop bloody
pesterin’.
Barbara sighed and conscientiously put a cross on her
progress analysis chart in one of the squares marked “consumer
resistance”.
She went up the path between the lawns of bright green
not-to-be-walked-on turf, and rang the bell of the next
bungalow.
After some delay, it was opened generously and suddenly by
a woman five feet tall and two feet thick all the way down. The
hat of her butcher-blue uniform looked like a chopping block
with a brim. Sticking out at one side of the hat was a big amber
bead. Diametrically opposite there emerged an inch of steel
point. Barbara tried with some bewilderment to decide whether
the woman had an uncommonly flat head or a cranium insensitive
to the passage of hat pins.
“Yes?”
“If Lucillite is...”
The girl faltered, having grasped belatedly that the woman
was a visiting nurse and not the householder.
“It’s all right,” she said, turning away.
“Here, I hope you’re not selling things,” said the woman,
sternly. “Not in Twilight Close.”
“No. Oh, no.”
Barbara gave the next bungalow a miss, just in case the nurse
was still watching. She turned a corner past a row of symmetrical
tame-looking almond trees, and walked up the path to a
dwelling similar to all the others except that there came from
its half open door waves of pop music from a turned high radio.
The girl felt encouraged. She let her shoulders and hips rock
gently in time with the pop and drummed her fingers on the
white plastic satchel while she awaited a response to her ring.
It was not long in coming.
The prolonged stare of astonishment melting into delight
that the girl received from Mr Herbert Stamper, one-time
farmer of Flaxborough Fen, would have warned a more worldly
caller to make some quick excuse and depart.
But Miss Westmacott’s head was too tightly packed with her
dream of the Dixon-Frome Golden Merit Medal to notice, let
alone interpret, a look that in its time had made even goats bolt
for cover.
“If Lucillite is in your home, I’ve brought good news from
Dixon-Frome!”
“ ’Ave ye, be-Christ!” gruffled Mr Stamper, his regard ranging
appreciatively from hock to haunch.
The Lucy accepted this as a token of understanding.
“Do you have the three packets, then?” she inquired. “They
can be empty or full—it doesn’t matter.”
Mr Stamper scratched one ear (Barbara decided, on thinking
about it later, that it was the only time she had actually heard
anyone do this) and made a remark about “three bags full” at
which he shuddered with merriment for more than half a minute.
Then, abruptly, he indicated with a jerk of his head the
interior of his bungalow.
What vestige of self-preservative instinct had survived a
Dixon-Frome Product Loyalty Course prompted the girl to
hesitate.
“Your wife...shall I find her in the kitchen?”
Mr Stamper made a noise she took to signify assent.
She walked primly past him into a passage-way that smelled
of paraffin and raspberry jam. He left the front door open long
enough to admit daylight while he admired Miss Westmacott’s
hind quarters and calculated the best approach for a serving
throw.
Sir Henry Bird had suspended his narrative while he fetched
whisky for Purbright and himself, and on the sergeant’s
insistence that he would prefer it, a glass of orange cordial for
Love.
“Am I right,” Purbright asked, “in thinking that this small
group that had been formed eventually became concerned
solely with—what shall I say?—with apparently supernatural
occurrences?”
Bird stared into his glass and pouted. “I’d just like to qualify
that a little,” he said. “You make it sound as if we were
investigators. There was nothing detached about our attitude. To help
these people—to rescue them, if we could—that was our object.
“Of course, we didn’t pretend to have any scientific training.
But we discussed and we read and we kept our eyes open. And
by the end of our first year’s working we had noticed something
very peculiar. Do you know what it was? I’ll tell you. It was
something to do with dates.
“We noticed that nearly all the most horrible incidents that
people described to us had taken place about the same time—or
at least during the same period. There would be a whole crop
of these happenings, all within a few hours, all during darkness.
Then nothing—nothing serious, anyway—for weeks. And then,
off it would go again. Another night of poor creatures being
tormented in the most dreadful, filthy ways. You know what I
mean?”
“Not precisely, sir,” said the inspector.
“Beastliness, Purbright. Beastliness. Quite indescribable.”
“Yes, sir. And these dates?”
Bird looked him in the eye. “The second of February, the
last day of April, August the first, and the thirty-first of
October.”
Purbright considered. He shook his head.
“You don’t recognize them?”
“I can’t say that I grasp their special significance.” Purbright
turned to Love. “Do you, sergeant?”
“One’s Mischief Night,” Love declared. “I know that.”
For the first time Bird’s face registered a flicker of amusement.
“That is what children call it. A much older name is the Eve
of Hallowtide. Last day of October. Let me identify the others.
February the second, Candlemas. The first of August, Lammas.
And perhaps the most sinister of all—the thirtieth day of April.
That’s May Day Eve.
“Now then, inspector, you see what I’m getting at, don’t
you?”
“I think so, sir. You mean that these dates are all associated
with a belief in magic.”
Bird regarded him for several seconds.
“No, Purbright, I mean a lot more than that. I mean that the
times of the year when evil is let loose upon this town in a very
special and terrifying way are the ancient festivals of witchcraft.
They are the nights of the great Sabbaths.”
There was a long pause.
“Do you believe in withcraft, sir?”
Another silence, but shorter.
“Let me put it this way. I believe in the belief in witchcraft.
And I believe in the effects it has had. Because”—Bird’s normally
rich-toned voice rose, as it was apt to do either when he was
nervous or when he asserted something with special emphasis,
to a momentary treble—“I have seen them. We have all seen
them, all three of us on this little vigilante committee of ours.
Do you suppose me gullible? Or Dr Cropper? An important
council official? Or a businessman like poor old Persimmon?
I tell you we acted on evidence, Purbright, not on superstition.”
“I accept that, of course, sir. But I cannot yet quite see in
what way you and your colleagues were able to help these
people. I would have thought that exorcism or something in
that line was indicated.”
“It is, sometimes. There is nothing wrong with incantation,
Purbright, provided it works.
“Be that as it may, though, the first thing you have to do if
you want to help people in trouble is to be available. You see
what I mean? So this is what we did. Grewyear let us have a
little room at the back of the church hall. We had the phone put
in and we gave the number of that phone to everyone who knew
about our work and might hear of cases. Cases—that’s what we
called them, you see? In the Middle Ages, they would have been described
simply as ‘bewitched’, of course, but that won’t do now.
“So...” Sir Henry shrugged, spread his hands, and directed a
look of hospitable inquky at the policemen’s drinks. “There you
have the truth about what Mary Persimmon called poor
Bertram’s ‘samaritan’ nights. Watchnights are what they were,
Purbright. Or vigils, if you like.”
The inspector declined a whisky refill, but remained sitting
silent as if in expectation of the climax to the story.
Bird seemed to have nothing more to say.
Purbright prompted him.
“The dates of these watchnights...”
“I told you, inspector. Your man can produce them again on
his machine, can’t he?”
“I know those dates,” said Purbright. “But I presume there
were others.”
“Certainly. Those were the vital ones, though, the productive
ones. We met on other occasions, of course, but not to
remain on call throughout the night.”
“Is that what you did—all three of you—on what you called
the Sabbath nights?”
“Invariably.”
“And if there was a call, sir?”
“We gave what reassurance or advice we could. It seemed
sufficient in some cases. Not in all. Whenever we believed the
caller to be in real and immediate danger, one of us went over
at once.”
“Last Wednesday night, sir...”
Bird looked up, attentive. “Yes?”
“It was the thirtieth of April. What you called May Day
Eve.”
“It was, yes.”
“Did you and the other gentlemen undertake your stand-by
duties at the Church Hall that night?”
“Certainly we did. And I’m well aware of what you’re going
to ask next, Purbright.”
Bird busied himself with the flat silver cigarette box on the
little table by his chair. The lighter he used was yellow,
presumably gold-plated. As an afterthought, he pushed the box
towards the inspector, who shook his head.
“Sir Henry, surely, as a magistrate...”
Bird held up his hand. “All right. I know. Bert’s death. You
think I should have got in touch with you earlier. I did consider
having a word with Chubb, as a matter of fact, but the
situation’s so delicate. Quite frankly, I didn’t think he’d
understand.”
“Why, sir?”
“Well, good heavens—witchcraft! Can you imagine your chief
constable’s reaction to that sort of suggestion?”
Love, who could, turned his face aside and smirked.
“Perhaps,” Purbright said coolly, “we’d better try now to make
up for lost time, sir. First of all, how long did Mr Persimmon
remain with you and Dr Cropper?”
“From about nine o’clock until, oh, shortly after midnight.”
“You were together in the room in the church hall.”
“That’s so.”
“Were there any telephone calls?”
Bird thought. “Three. And then this one just about midnight.”
“Would you care to tell me the names of the first three callers, sir?”
“I’m sorry, that’s quite impossible.”
“You don’t know them?”
“I cannot divulge them. They were people in distress who
had been promised secrecy. You must see that I am in exactly
the same position as a doctor or a priest.”
“Can you tell me what kind of trouble the calls referred to?
Was Mr Persimmon involved in any way?”
“They had nothing to do with him. He didn’t even take one.
Cropper and I dealt with all three. As I remember, they were
similar. Mild cases of possession. A lot of sex mixed in, of
course. You know what I mean?”
“People you knew, sir?”
“Cases I knew, Purbright.”
The inspector nodded, as if satisfied.
“Now maybe you’d be good enough to tell me about the call
that Mr Persimmon did take, sir.”
“I can’t tell you anything about it. I don’t know anything.”
“Look, sir, I’m sorry, but this time I must insist.”
“Insist all you like. I just cannot help you. And this time it is
not a case of respecting confidences. The phone rang—at about
midnight, as I told you—and Persimmon answered it. He
listened, not saying a word himself, and then slammed the
phone down and rushed out straight away. We both heard his
car start off and that was that. He didn’t come back.”
“Did he say nothing when he was leaving? Nothing at all?”
“Not a word.”
“Presumably he knew who the caller was?”
“I suppose so.”
“Was it a man or woman, sir?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“But it would be fairly quiet at that time. And one can
generally catch the tone, at least, of somebody’s voice coming
over a phone in the same room.”
“Not when Bert was listening, poor devil,” Bird said. “He
had an odd habit of holding a telephone tight against his
ear.”
“A secretive man?”
“In some way, yes, decidedly.”
“But not, would you say, sir, a guilt-ridden one?”
Bird took some seconds to reply.
“I have,” he said hesitantly, “wondered sometimes about that.
Only wondered, mind you.” He quickly finished his drink and
set down the glass. “You know what I mean?”
The Lucy-probationer who, in her enthusiasm, had strayed
off scheduled territory into the municipal bungalow settlement
of Twilight Close, made two discoveries in quick succession.
The first was that if Mr Stamper had a wife he kept her
neither in his kitchen nor anywhere else within calling distance.
The second and much more welcome discovery was of the
remarkable elusiveness of her plastic costume in the grip of a
Senior Citizen.
Miss Westmacott backed into a recess between the sink
and the refrigerator. Her hands were behind her, against the wall.
“Whoaa...come up, there!” cried Mr Stamper. He made a
grab for her withers. She bobbed down and at the same time
thrust herself away from the wall. Her head collided with Mr
Stamper’s stomach.
When he had recovered breath, he clicked his teeth good-naturedly
and followed her into the passage. She was trying to
open the front door.
Mr Stamper copiously licked both hands, rubbed them on the
seams of his trousers, and lumbered towards her.
She turned and swung her satchel at the same time.
Against the side of Mr Stamper’s head there landed the combined weight of
450 forms of entry to the Lucillite “Win-a-Paradise-Island”
competition and three one-gross packs of Scintillometers.
For a moment he remained inert, one glazed eye only six
inches from Miss Westmacott’s coveted forequarters. Then he
began to slide down the wall—quite happily, as she judged
from his smile—and subsided in folds upon the floor. She
stepped over him carefully and hurried back to the kitchen.
The key was in the farther door. She turned it.
From the passage came a grunt, then a chuckle. She glanced
back. Already Mr Stamper was hauling himself upright. He
waved cheerily and made groom-like noises of enticement.
The girl pulled open the door and ran into the garden beyond.
“Whooaa there!” cried Mr Stamper. “Coom ’ere and git
mounted, theer’s a good gel!”
Miss Westmacott looked about her. The garden was flanked
on two sides by a high fence of woven osiers. At the bottom
of the garden was a wall. The only way of reaching the road by
which she had arrived was to go back through the house.
“Whooaa-back, gel!”
She sprinted over the patch of lawn and across vegetable
beds neatly staked and strung to keep birds off their rows of
sprouting seeds, plunged through a tangle of spear-grass and
dead thistle, and with a leap and a scramble reached the top of
the wall.
The wall continued for some distance in each direction,
forming part of the boundary to the Close. Below her lay
concrete, cracked and ruptured by weeds growing though it.
The concrete extended for fifty yards or more, as far as a second
wall. There were two buildings within this silent and seemingly
derelict area.
The girl gave a backward glance at her thwarted pursuer and
jumped lightly down.
She walked towards the nearer building.
It was tall but of only one storey, made of cement-faced brick
and quite plain in design. At one corner a plant with long
leaves and little red flowers had sprouted from the edge of the
flat roof. Most of the panes in the big steel-framed windows had
been smashed.
Barbara raised herself on tip-toes and looked in. It was like
peeping into a den filled with petrified mammoths. She
glimpsed vast jaws and beaks of steel, dulling over with rust.
The place was a store for snow-clearing machinery.
As the girl turned away, there registered on the very edge of
her consciousness a slight movement. She looked at once
towards where she could not help fancying that something odd,
something out of place, had happened while her attention had
been on the ploughs and bulldozer blades.
All she could see was the grey wall of the other building in the
depot, blank save for green and brown streaks of moss and
lichen and a small blind-looking window about twenty feet
above the ground.
Towards this window she gave an occasional glance while
she made her way to a gate in the depot wall that rounding the
plough store had revealed.
The gate was padlocked. The wall on either side was a good
foot taller than the one she had climbed to escape from Twilight
Close. From the farther side came the sound of a passing car.
She tugged and rattled the padlock, then brushed her
hands with her handkerchief and patiently turned away. There
would, no doubt, be another way out.
The window, though. Something was hanging from it.
That must be what she had glimpsed before. A white arm,
listlessly swinging from the elbow. Just the arm—forearm,
rather—hand and forearm—swinging limply.
But how extraordinarily white it was.
Impelled partly by a practical intention to ask advice in her
predicament, but chiefly by curiosity tinged with unease,
Barbara crossed the yard and stood beneath the window. She
looked up.
“Excuse me,” she called, and waited.
There came no sign that she had been heard. The hand above
her continued to hang motionless.
Half a minute went by.
“I say!”
The sound echoed from wall to wall. Watching—anxiously
now—Barbara thought she saw the chalk-white fingers twitch.
She called again.
“I say—are you all right?”
This time the hand moved perceptibly. But its motion was
aimless, weary.
Barbara shouted. She hurried round to the second side of the
building.
Almost its entire width was filled by a set of corrugated
shutters. They looked the kind that could be unlocked at the
bottom and rolled up to disclose a garage. The girl stopped
only to pound on them with her fists. Then she ran on, grasping
the next corner to swing herself round.
Level with her head was a window, or at least the rusting
steel latticework that once had held twenty or thirty panes of
glass. Fragments of glass, thickly begrimed, lay amongst
rubble on the ground. They crunched under her feet.
She looked through the lattice and saw that this end of the
ground floor of the building was, as she had supposed, a
garage. What she had not expected to see, though, was the big,
blue, new-looking car that it contained.
The building’s only door was at the top of a flight of five
concrete steps. It was a plain door, painted dark green, and it
had no handle, just a keyhole.
The girl had only to look at it to know that it was locked and
that nothing she was capable of doing would open it, but she
pushed and kicked it nevertheless.
Then she ran as fast as she could towards a part of the border
wall of Twilight Close that she judged to be well clear of Mr
Stamper’s territory.
Inspector Purbright had only just returned to his office when
a message was relayed to him from Constable Palethorp, the
driver of the patrol car which had been sent in response to Miss
Westamcott’s 999 call.
He left again at once.
Joining the sluggish tide of traffic along East Street, he drove
into the Market Place, over the Town Bridge, and diagonally
across Burton Place into Leicester Avenue, at the far end of
which was the old Corporation depot.
The journey took him exactly eighteen minutes, which was
not bad going. Patience had paid off, as usual. No Flaxborough
policeman ever dreamed of using a siren: he knew it would
simply dam up the road ahead with inquisitive citizenry.
The depot gate stood open, its padlock having been levered
off by Constable Palethorp.
With the aid of an ambulance man, he had also breached the
green door that had defeated Miss Westmacott.
Purbright climbed the straight wooden staircase that led
from the room behind the garage—it appeared to have been a
workshop at one time—to the upper floor.
Palethorp awaited him in a bare loft-like chamber, at the far
end of which was a low doorway. Palethorp stooped and went
through. The inspector followed.
There was barely room for the two men in the tiny enclosure.
The air was hot and foetid despite the square unglazed opening
in the wall about a foot above the floor. Paper sacks were
strewn over the boards. Some were streaked with what Purbright
surmised to be dried vomit. A thick glass tumbler had
rolled away into a corner.
Purbright spoke very quietly, as if he was anxious not to be
overheard.
“How do you think she’ll make out?”
Palethorp shrugged, saying nothing.
“What did she look like?”
“Bloody terrible, sir.”
“She hadn’t been attacked, though, had she?”
“No, I don’t think so. Not in any obvious way, that is.”
Purbright looked about the compartment, taking care to
avoid disturbing what little it contained.
“I’ll get over to the hospital. You can leave as soon as Harper
and the others arrive with their stuff.”
Down in the yard, Purbright glanced through the window at
the garaged car before getting into his own.
“Thank you,” he said to Palethorp as he drove off.
Palethorp, watching his departure, looked faintly puzzled.
Against the white linen of the hospital pillow, Edna Hillyard’s
face showed up as yellowish grey. The skin shone with a thin
dew of sweat.
Dr Palmaj, house physician, caressed the girl’s wrist experimentally,
one lean finger seeking the pulse.
“We are fortunate that this is a strong woman. It is her good
fortune, too, of course.”
Purbright said, “She looks very ill.”
“Not fatally, I am sure, inspector. Unless a pneumonia
develops, she should recover in a week or two.”
“Are you able yet to say what is wrong with her?”
Dr Palmaj gently released the girl’s hand and straightened
the coverlet. The letters FGH were embroidered on its edge in
red cotton.
“Exposure effects, mainly.” He looked up at Purbright. “She
was quite naked, you know, when that policeman found her.
Did you know that?”
“Yes. Although in fact there was a blanket there, I understand.
A travelling rug, rather. He put it round her.”
There was a pause. Then Purbright asked: “What had she
been given?”
“That is hard to say, inspector. Barbiturates, I should
imagine. And in quite big quantities. Stupid quantities.”
“By mouth?”
“Oh, yes. There is no sign of injection.”
“There would have had to be persuasion, then. It is very
difficult to force anyone to swallow things, isn’t it, doctor?”
“That is true. But a person who is confused or sleepy or very,
very unhappy seldom offers much resistance.”
“Not even when the object is murder?”
The houseman looked startled.
“So that is what you believe? Oh, but surely, inspector...”
“You didn’t suppose she had been taking drugs herself, did
you?”
“Taking them herself—well, perhaps. But not by herself. I
spoke just now of stupid quantities, did I not. I was thinking
in terms of drug taking for self-gratification. In seclusion
naturally, but in company. The sexual element, you understand—always
that. In my experience. But such people handle these
things absolutely without a normal sense of caution. You
will yourself know how common is the overdose in such cases.”
They had been moving slowly away from the bed in the
small white room with its glass-panelled walls. At the door,
Purbright asked:
“Has she said anything that made sense to you?”
“No, no. Words—half words—quite unintelligible.”
“A policewoman is coming over. You would have no
objection to her sitting here?”
“Certainly not. But I think it rather unlikely that this woman
will have much to tell. Her remembering may be much
damaged.”
Dr Palmaj turned the handle of the door and stood aside in
readiness for the inspector to leave in front of him. Then,
suddenly, he took away his hand and patted his forehead in
self-reproof.
“My remembering, too, is not what it ought to be, inspector.
Come.”
He stepped back to the foot of the bed.
“Something very strange is here. I shall be most interested to
know what you think about it.”
Purbright watched the doctor deftly untuck blankets and
sheet and raise them just sufficiently to disclose the feet of the
unconscious girl.
Tatooed in blueish-black on the sole of the left foot was a
carefully-executed cross.
In an ideal world, it would have been enough for
Purbright to set a couple of men in secret occupation of the
building in which Edna Hillyard had been found, in order to
intercept a return visit by her abductor, who, it seemed
reasonable to suppose, was also the murderer of Bertram
Persimmon, and thus to bring him to justice.
But the success of so simple a plan would have depended on
the continued ignorance of the population at large, murderer
included, of the fact that Miss Hillyard was safely tucked up in
a bed of Flaxborough General Hospital.
And on that Purbright knew better than to place any reliance
whatsoever.
Feeling a little like Macbeth, he called upon the secretary of
the Edith Cavell Psychical Research Foundation.
Miss Teatime welcomed him warmly and said what a long
time it seemed since their last meeting. The loss, Purbright
assured her, had been his entirely.
With which pleasantries they ascended the little staircase in
Church Close and entered Miss Teatime’s sitting room.
“I have come to seek your expert opinion,” said Purbright.
He stretched back in the chair facing the window and gazed
appreciatively at the view of St Lawrence’s.
“How very nice of you.” Miss Teatime dexterously transposed
a bottle of whisky from the mantelpiece into a Victorian
workbasket.
“What does it mean when somebody has a cross tattooed on
the sole of his foot?”
Miss Teatime paused in the action of bringing forward a
cushioned cane chair and glanced sharply at the inspector.
“Dear me...” She sat down. “You have been moving in
peculiar circles, Mr Purbright.”
“So it seems.”
“Tell me, what kind of a cross do you have in mind? Can you
describe its shape?”
“An ordinary, straight-forward cross, I suppose. Not the
sort one votes with. Certainly not a swastika, either. Here...”
He made a quick sketch on an envelope.
“That,” Miss Teatime informed him, “is what is known as a
Latin cross. It is the ecclesiastical variety and if you have found
it upon the sole of someone’s foot the probability is that he or
she is a practitioner of black magic. Or, more likely, a would-be
practitioner.”
“I take it that you are sceptical on the subject.”
“Witchcraft is terribly unscientific, inspector. And very
messy. But simply to dismiss it as superstition is to evade an
important question. What is the nature of the Force that some
dabblers in the so-called black arts have undoubtedly encountered
and afterwards—quite spuriously, let me say—claimed
credit for unleashing?”
“Do you know, Miss Teatime?”
She gave a smile of quiet reserve. “You did not come here, I
am sure, inspector, for a lecture on psycho-thermal kinetics.”
“This cross...”
“Ah, yes. The cross. Let me see if I can tell you more. This is
part of what I term the messy side of witchcraft. The fart-in-the-font
department, I regret my old anthropology professor used
to call it. To walk constantly upon a religious symbol, you see,
is supposed to be very daring and diabolical. Only really
dedicated devil-worshippers have the operation done. Well, it
must tickle unbearably.”
Purbright smiled. He was silent for a moment, then asked:
“Has your research led you to the discovery of any specific
instances of this kind of thing in Flaxborough? I don’t need to
tell you that the press has been almost embarrassingly successful
in turning the town into another Salem.”
“Yes, I had noticed,” Miss Teatime said acidly.
Almost at once her helpful manner returned.
“As for investigation, it is like everything else—a matter of
funds. Some research bodies are fortunate in being retained in
an advisory capacity by public authorities.”
“Indeed?”
There was a slight pause.
“Others, of course, have been able to help on the understanding
that the expense entailed would not need to be met out of
their own funds.”
The inspector pursed his lips. “Not an unreasonable arrangement,
I should have thought.”
Miss Teatime’s prim but friendly smile signalled him to speak
his mind.
“My interest,” he began, “is centred upon what you have
called the messy side of witchcraft and the people in this town
who go in for it. I see no point in trying to conceal from your—what
is the phrase?—extra-sensory perception?—the fact that
there is a distinctly black magic smell about the death of this
supermarket manager...”
“Ah, yes. Poor Mr Persimmon.”
Purbright raised his brow. “You knew him?”
“Not in any very personal sense. Our little organization was
able to help him on one occasion when his store was being
subjected to paranormal activity of quite high polterage. But
please go on, inspector.”
“Another thing you might as well know, although I must
ask you to keep it strictly to yourself at this stage, concerns
the cross I questioned you about earlier. The person who
wears it—if that’s the appropriate verb—is the young woman
who disappeared last Wednesday and who has now been
found.”
“Alive?” The question was urged, rather than asked.
“Oh, yes. Alive.”
Miss Teatime nodded. She looked relieved.
“Furthermore,” Purbright went on, “the story is now being
told us, and not by hysterical or credulous people but by
certain pretty solid citizens, that cases of diabolism were
getting so serious a problem some time ago that a sort of body
and soul rescue service was set up. Did you know that?”
“No, but I am not altogether surprised. Amateurism does
tend to flourish in a place like this.”
“I should rather like to know, Miss Teatime, the names of
some of our amateur satanists. In the strictest confidence,
needless to say.”
Dreamily, Miss Teatime regarded the ancient stone of the
parish church.
“You would be well advised, I think, inspector,” she said, “to
observe the distinction that was so properly drawn in The
Wizard of Oz. ‘Are you a good witch or a bad witch?’
Remember the line? In other words, you will save a good deal of time
if you leave the merely folksy out of your calculations and
concentrate on those whom that nice sergeant of yours would
call the nutters.”
“Are there many of them?”
“Oh, no—remarkably few, considering how fascinating pagan
licentiousness must appear to ladies whose idea of ultimate
degradation is being trapped in their hostess’s lavatory with an
unsinkable turd.”
The inspector looked a little startled, but at once recovered
composure.
“By ‘merely folksy’, would you be referring to the
membership of the Flaxborough Folklore Society?” he asked.
“In general, yes.”
He took from his pocket a folded sheet of paper.
“I’ve a list here of the people who belong to it. All those who
turned up at the meeting last Wednesday night—the one from
which Edna Hillyard disappeared—have been questioned. I
haven’t seen reports of all the interviews yet, but I do know
that they tally in most particulars and that they contain no
suggestion of what might have happened to Miss Hillyard.”
“Do you believe them, inspector?”
“No.”
Miss Teatime leaned forward. “May I?” She took the list
from the inspector’s hand.
After a brief scrutiny, she said: “All very respectable people,
Mr Purbright.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“But you suspect, do you not, that a trained psychical investigator,
with proper equipment, might detect a sepulchre or two
beneath all this whiteness.”
“I have an open mind on the subject, Miss Teatime.”
“How refreshing to encounter an unprejudiced policeman.
You have no idea what a rara avis you are, Mr Purbright.”
She rose.
“If you will make yourself comfortable for a few moments, I
shall see what comes of submitting this list to a few preliminary
psychometrical tests.”
Half-way to the door, she stopped and came back to pick up
the workbasket.
“What is that for?” Purbright asked.
“It contains my resonating orgonoscope,” explained Miss
Teatime.
In her bedroom, she relaxed against stacked-up pillows after
pouring half a tumbler of whisky and lighting one of her little
chocolate-coloured cigars. She read again through Purbright’s
list and underlined in pencil the names of Mrs Gloss, Mrs
Pentatuke, Mrs Gooding and Paracelsus Parkin.
Rejoining Purbright a quarter of an hour later, she handed
him the list.
“Your consort of viles,” she announced.
“You have been quick.”
“Ah, we do not depend upon things like the old Ouija
board nowadays, inspector. With a modern orgonoscope, it is
possible to pre-set the vibrations. Then all one has to do is read
off the radionic dials. Would you care for a cup of tea?”
“That is kind of you, but I think not.” He put the sheet of
paper back in his pocket.
“To be quite fair,” said Miss Teatime, “there are other names
there which produced some reaction on the multi-oscillator
unit. However, I thought you would wish me to keep the field
as narrow as possible. Those I have indicated are the real
off-the-scale ding-dongers.”
Purbright thanked her and prepared to leave.
“Oh, by the way...” She pointed to the pocket in which he
had slipped the list of folklorists. “Had you noticed something
rather interesting about the holders of office in that organization?”
He frowned. “No, I don’t think so.”
“It seemingly has no president.”
“But there is a chairman. Mrs whatsername—Framlington.
Not all these societies have presidents.”
“If you will look in the current issue of the local paper,” said
Miss Teatime, patiently, “you will find in the report of the
quarterly Revel, as they call it, a reference to Miss Hillyard’s
having been the winner of a prize. The name of the prize was the
President’s Maypole Trophy.”
Purbright gazed at her admiringly.
“You are being very perceptive today, Miss Teatime.”
She laid a finger delicately against the side of her small and
nicely shaped nose.
“Exceptive, Mr Purbright,” she corrected. “It is the spirits
that should be given credit, not ourselves.”
Purbright looked with disbelief at the identity of the paper
Love had just handed him. It was none of the national news
organs, but the usually prosaic Eastern Evening Advertiser from
the next county, an early edition of which reached Flaxborough
in mid-afternoon.
“Not more poultry, surely,” murmured the inspector, beginning
to tackle the main text of the story.
“No,” Love said. “Sage.”
Purbright scowled at the page before him. “Jokes, Sid, we
can do without just now.”
“It’s not a joke. Read on a bit. You’ll see.”
According to the Evening Advertiser report, a cleaner in the
department of the Flaxborough Medical Officer of Health had
come across what appeared to be a sort of wreath propped against
the door of Dr Cropper’s private office. Attached to the wreath
was a white card with his name on it. Supposing it to be something
agricultural that had been left for analysis, she laid it on a
sheet of paper on the doctor’s desk.
Only then did the cleaner notice an object twisted amongst
the twigs and leaves that made up the wreath. It was a
snake. She ran screaming out of the office and locked it behind her.
When the department staff arrived, two of the men—a clerk
and a health inspector—went into the office prepared to deal
with the snake. They found it was a grass snake or “slow-worm”
as people in the locality would have called it. It was dead.
There were interviews with the cleaner and the clerk, a man
called Hodgson. Hodgson it was who had identified the snake.
He thought he knew what the wreath had been made from, too,
although it was half rotten and looked as if it had been buried
for some time. Sage, diagnosed Mr Hodgson.
“I beg your pardon, Sid,” said Purbright, and read on.
The paper recapitulated some of the allegedly occult goings-on
which had given Flaxborough recent notoriety; then spread
itself on an interview by telephone with Denise Cornelius,
demonologist and author.
“Common or garden sage,” Miss Cornelius had revealed to
the Advertiser, “was once considered a very powerful
harm-dealing magic when it had been kept in the ground for a certain
period and dug up with prescribed ceremony. English witches
valued its malignant properties highly. The most terrible use of
‘sage-rot’ was in conjunction with a reptile-type charm. The
purpose of that combination invariably was to kill. And I have
no doubt that it worked.”
The Russians, added Miss Cornelius, were known to have
organized the re-establishment of witch covens in England
and America. Their recruitment of evil powers was far advanced.
“It might well be that Flaxborough’s present ordeal is but a
rehearsal for an unimaginably more horrible onslaught upon
the Christian world in the not far distant future,” Miss Cornelius
declared.
In a small final paragraph, the paper noted that the Medical
Officer had not been available for comment.
“I wonder if he’s available now,” remarked Purbright. “Come
on, Sid.”
Sergeant Love’s second appearance at the Municipal Offices
was acknowledged by excited whispering amongst the totties,
surreptitious stares, and even—to his almost unbearable
gratification—a slow and sultry wink from Miss O’Conlon.
Patriarch Purbright, naturally, was ignored.
House, the chief clerk, hastily put himself between the
policemen and his girls. He was a fussy, dusty, ink-stained man,
with creases of chronic suspiciousness about his eyes.
Purbright asked if it would be convenient to see Dr Cropper.
House pouted dubiously and crept to a big oak panelled door
marked Private. He touched it delicately with one knuckle,
listened for ten whole seconds, and went in.
Like opening a safe, Love reflected.
When House re-emerged, his chief could be seen immediately
behind him, one open hand already thrust forward.
“Lovely to see you, inspector!”
There was a vigorous handshake for each of them, an extended
chair, a wave towards a box of cigarettes, a nod of genial
professional approval when they declined. Then the big man
with the pink, handsome face strode back behind his desk and
sat, straight as a company director on audit day.
“And what can I do for you, gentlemen?”
The tiny click of the switch of Love’s recording gear brought
Cropper’s eyes round at once.
“Aha!” he said, roguishly, on seeing the sergeant unwind the
microphone flex. “Bugged, eh?”
“I hope you’ve no objection, sir,” the inspector said. “The
more conventional kind of note-taking does tend to hold things
up rather.”
For a few moments more, Cropper continued to watch the
recorder with amused interest. Then he returned his attention
to the inspector.
“I’m sure you will be aware, doctor,” Purbright began, “that
an investigation is in progress into the death of the Bridge
Street supermarket manager, Mr Bertram Persimmon...”
“Aware?” interrupted Cropper, suddenly grave-faced. “I am
very deeply aware, inspector. He was a friend. In a sense, a
colleague. But you must know this, surely? Sir Henry...” He
waited, his head slightly forward, inviting Purbright to adopt a
franker approach.
“Sir Henry has been in touch with you, has he, sir?”
“But of course. He is as concerned as I am to learn the truth
of this terrible affair. I trust I have not broken a confidence of
some kind?”
“Certainly not, sir. I am glad to think that you’ll be better
prepared to answer some of the questions I shall be putting to
you. For the moment, though, I’m rather interested in the
incident which the Evening Advertiser describes so graphically.”
Purbright began to unfold the newspaper that he had taken
from his pocket.
Dr Cropper waved it aside.
“Don’t bother. I’ve seen it. And really, inspector, of all the
nonsensical fuss...”
“Is the account not accurate?”
“As far as it goes, yes. But, good God, ‘killer
curse’—‘voodoo town’—I ask you! Are you aware, my dear
inspector, of the amount of offensive rubbish dumped by crack-brained
members of the public at this office during the year? We get
rotting fish, underweight sausages, beer with tadpoles in it...
Listen, somebody once actually managed to get in and tether a
sheep to the door handle. Don’t ask me why. One gets used to
it.”
“I appreciate that, doctor. But it seems to me that what was
left here this morning was intended to convey a threat—a threat
to you personally.”
Cropper grinned beamishly. “Oh, I fancy I’m able to look
after myself, inspector.”
“Mr Persimmon wasn’t, though, was he?”
The grin was switched off.
“I don’t think I quite understand.”
“Look sir, four of you gentlemen have been associated in
what I gather is a kind of vigilante committee. Sir Henry Bird
has explained its purpose. And if this reading of the situation is
correct, you all have been running certain risks.”
“But very willingly, inspector. Remember that.”
“I don’t doubt it. At the same time, I have to remind you that
it is the job of the police to run risks, not the ordinary
citizen’s, however public-spirited.”
Cropper leaned forward and spoke very quietly.
“You cannot put handcuffs on Satan, my friend.”
“Perhaps not, sir. But do you contend that it was Satan who
murdered Persimmon?”
“Indirectly. Yes, I do.”
“And then made threats of what I can only call a particularly
vicious and dangerous kind to each in turn of Persimmon’s
collaborators?”
“Through some human agency. Again, yes.”
“You don’t dispute that they were threats, then, doctor
including the so-called spell addressed to you?”
Cropper shrugged. “No, of course I don’t. Perhaps I should
not have tried to impress you with my indifference, but for
anyone in a job like mine publicity is an extremely unwelcome
thing. You must see that.”
“Oh, I do. But I am not a journalist, Dr Cropper. What goes
into that little box the sergeant is holding does not come out
again for public consumption.”
“The press arrived here remarkably promptly this morning. I
find that rather puzzling.”
“Reporters are around in some strength at the moment, sir.
I expect they’ve established their own intelligence system.
Would there, though, be anyone you can think of who might
have let them know?”
“No one in the department, certainly.”
“Talking of the department, doctor, do you happen to have
any idea of Miss Edna Hillyard’s choice of friends?”
There was a pause.
“Inspector...”
Cropper was regarding Purbright with an expression that
was at once respectful, wily and reproving.
“Sir?”
“You are trying to trap me into pretending that I occupy far
too elevated a position here to be aware of what mere clerks get
up to.”
“And what do they get up to, sir?”
Cropper smiled and shook his head.
“I know perfectly well, Mr Purbright, that Miss Hillyard
associated—that is the word, I believe—with Bertie Persimmon.”
The inspector put another question at once. “Do you know
who made the call last Wednesday night that resulted in
Persimmon going out?”
“I have no idea.”
“What is your recollection of that call, doctor?”
“None, naturally. I didn’t take it.”
“Persimmon did?”
“Yes. We’d had one or two earlier, but they were—well,
relatively trivial. Then this one came through about midnight.”
“Did he not say anything that might suggest who the caller
was?”
“Not a single word. He scarcely looked at me. Just slammed
the receiver down and went straight out. Then I heard his car
start up.”
“That was the last you ever saw of him, in fact?”
Dr Cropper spread the fingers of his right hand on the desk
before him and scrutinized them sadly.
“As things turned out—yes, I’m afraid it was.”
The boot, or trunk, of the late Mr Persimmon’s
car had been crafted with special care to solve for the family
man all those holiday luggage problems; to provide the modern
business executive with space equivalent to a second office; and
to give the sportsman the big, BIG, B-I-G-G-E-S-T rod,
gun or clubs locker he had ever dreamed of.
It was now known to have served a fourth, unscheduled,
purpose—the posthumous transportation of its owner.
The fact had been established quite simply and quickly in a
Nottingham police laboratory by analysis of blood samples and
by comparing fibres recovered from the boot with others taken
from clothing on the corpse.
Of the significance of fragments of hard varnish and aged,
brittle, animal hair, also found in the boot, the forensic scientists
had offered no opinion.
Purbright treated Love to his own confident interpretation.
“They must have chucked that bull’s head mask in with the
body and then dumped them both in the river.”
The sergeant thought about this for a moment. Then,
“Who’s ‘they’?” he asked.
“One, the man who killed Persimmon, whoever he is. Two—and
I’m afraid there seems to be no doubt about this—the
Hillyard girl.”
“You mean she helped him?”
“There are her prints all over the car. Those inside and
round about the boot are bloody. And their position indicates
that she must have been helping to lift. That’s what the report
says, anyway.”
“Perhaps he forced her to.”
“Perhaps.”
“And abducted her afterwards.”
Purbright sighed. “You have a chivalrous disposition Sid.”
He looked at his watch.
“In twenty minutes from now, our colleagues will be paying
simultaneous calls upon three of the folklore enthusiasts we
discussed earlier. I want you at the same time to take four
county men and give Mrs Gloss’s grounds a thorough going
over. What story-fixing there’s been up to now between these
people can’t be helped, but at least we can deny them a chance
to tip one another off today.”
Leaving Love to marshal his squad from the men lent by
County Chief Constable Hessledine, Purbright entered the
office of his own superior, Mr Harcourt Chubb.
“This warrant, Mr Purbright—I’m not altogether happy about
it, you know. Mrs Gloss is not a poor woman. She has the
means to make things awkward for us if it turns out that you’ve
acted hastily.”
“On the contrary, sir. Persimmon was murdered last
Wednesday. I think you can claim to have acted with great
restraint in waiting so long before ordering a search of the
grounds where he almost certainly met his death.”
“But is it your contention that Mrs Gloss was involved in the
crime? I mean, this is just what people are going to think when
they see policemen on the place. You’re using some of the
county fellows, I understand,” added Mr Chubb, with the
slightest wrinkle of distaste.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to...”
“Sit down, my dear chap, do.”
Mr Chubb made no move towards a chair himself but
remained standing by the mantelpiece, on which he supported
one elegantly-extended arm.
“I would not go so far,” repeated the inspector, “as to accuse
Mrs Gloss of actually having a hand in what happened to
Persimmon. But I certainly do believe that she and some of her
friends were aware of it soon afterwards and came to an
agreement among themselves to keep quiet.”
“And why should they do that?”
“Because they did not wish the police, or anyone else for that
matter, to find out what they had been up to that night.”
“You are talking about this folk-singing carry-on, are
you?”
The chief constable sounded disparaging yet intrigued.
“It was something rather more sinister than that, sir.”
Mr Chubb slightly widened his regard of the inspector, but
said nothing. Purbright explained.
“The ground behind Mrs Gloss’s home was being used for
black magic rites of some kind. Possibly fairly harmless.
Possibly not. It rather depends on one’s point of view. But
erotic—that, I fancy, we can safely bet on.
“We don’t know yet how long these things have been going
on, nor at what point did a society genuinely devoted to local
folklore become dominated by its witchcraft lobby. The newspaper
stories are not only extremely unreliable in detail; they
have been deliberately inspired by somebody who knows about
the black magic activities and for some private reason wants to
embarrass their organizers.”
“They’ve certainly embarrassed me,” said Mr Chubb, with
feeling. “That fellow Hessledine was on the phone yesterday,
making what I suppose he thought were jokes about magic
spells. I had to be rather short with him. Never mind about that,
though. What I can’t understand is how a decent sort of chap
like Persimmon got mixed up in all this nastiness.”
“You don’t know, sir?”
“Of course not. Why, do you?”
Purbright pondered how favourably he could present the
manner of the passing of a vice-chairman of the Conservative
Club.
“He was a member of a small but very public-spirited group
of citizens—something on the lines of Rotary, I gather—formed
to try and counteract the influence of the black magic
cult. They had what I believe self-dramatizing politicians like to call
a ‘hot line’. A number that can be rung in an emergency.”
“It sounds rather far-fetched,” observed Mr Chubb.
“So I thought, sir, when I heard about it. But someone called
that number on Wednesday night, and it was Persimmon who
went to the rescue.”
“Rescue of whom?”
“His mistress, actually.”
The chief constable took his arm from the mantelpiece.
“His what?”
“His mistress, sir. Miss Hillyard.”
Purbright waited, in case Chubb should wish to express
shock or disbelief, but the chief constable silently motioned
him to proceed.
“As soon as I learned about that call to Persimmon, other
facts seemed to fit in. At first, I reasoned that the girl had gone
to the affair at Mrs Gloss’s out of curiosity or for a thrill and
was then inveigled or even forced into taking part in the sexual
shenannigins. When these became too violent or too bizarre
for her taste, she took fright and managed to persuade one of
the other women to get out to a telephone and send for
help.”
“How would the Hillyard girl have known the number of
this ‘hot line’, as you call it?”
“Persimmon would have told her. He and his friends unquestionably
took this self-appointed task of theirs very
seriously. Actually, knowing something of Miss Hillyard’s
reputation, I wouldn’t be surprised if the evangelistic attitude
of her lover had put the idea of going to Aleister Lodge into
her head in the first place.”
“Morally unstable, I suppose.”
“That is one way of putting it, sir.”
“And yet you say Bertram Persimmon took up with her.
There are some strange depths in people, you know, Mr
Purbright.”
“Yes, sir. I was saying, though, that the idea of Edna
Hillyard’s taking fright and sending for help was my first
interpretation. I now think quite differently.
“For one thing, it was näive of me to assume that the clothes
in her car were evidence of her having changed into others. She
was naked when found and clearly had stripped that evening
without any compulsion. Which suggests a good deal more
than mere curiosity.
“It is probable also that the girl lost no time in priming herself
with the liquor that undoubtedly was available. I suspect
that modern witches are no different from ancient ones in
having to use potions to get them off the ground.
“Then there is the matter of her complicity in shifting
Persimmon’s body. Forensic are quite convinced of that
because of the grouping of her prints on the car.
“Lastly—and this could be the most significant circumstance
of all—we find that the place chosen as a temporary hiding-place
for the car is a Corporation depot. It is largely derelict,
certainly, and unlikely to be entered by workmen or anybody
until the ploughs are wanted again for snow-clearing, but
normally it is kept locked and the keys hung with others on a
board in the Public Health Department.”
Purbright paused.
“You see the implications, sir.”
“I can see a connection,” said Mr Chubb. “The girl worked in
that department, if I remember rightly.”
“Exactly, sir. She had access to those keys. But not in the
middle of the night. So if she took them—and I can think of no
one more likely—she must have done so in advance and
presumably with full knowledge of what they would be
needed for.”
“In other words, Mr Purbright, the woman was a partner in
a murder conspiracy. Is that what you are saying?”
“It is extremely difficult to put any other construction on the
facts as we know them, sir.”
“But there are facts that we do not know, surely. If that crime
was premeditated, there must have been a motive. What was
it?”
Purbright shrugged regretfully. “That remains to be established,
sir. But I should not expect anything conventional.
There is more than a little madness about this case.”
“Another point bothers me,” said Mr Chubb. “To lure that
poor chap off in the dark to a remote part of the town—yes, I
understand the cunning of that. But what about all those
characters cavorting about on broomsticks or whatever you
say they were doing? Potential witnesses. Very risky.”
“By that time, most of them would have been mutually
preoccupied, I think, sir. And we should remember that they
were much too heavily compromised to be keen on giving
evidence.”
“Do you know the names of the people who were there?”
“Oh, there’s no secret about that, sir. They’re in the local
paper. Or some of them are. I think the bogus publicity must be
felt to add to the thrill. They actually have a press secretary, a
chap called Parkin.”
“Good gracious,” said Mr Chubb, much disgusted.
“Naturally, I am having them very closely questioned,”
Purbright added. “As the girl will be, as soon as she’s
considered fit enough.”
“By the medical staff, presumably.”
“Yes, sir. They’re rather apprehensive of brain damage,
actually. She had barbituric poisoning.”
“You did mention the possibility when you rang from the
hospital. It’s confirmed, is it?”
“They’re pretty sure.”
Purbright thought for a moment.
“Which leads, I’m afraid, to another question I can’t answer.
Why was the wretched girl doped to the eyes and left lying in
that place? It seems an odd way to treat a collaborator.”
“As I understand it,” said the chief constable, “people of that
sort pass dangerous drugs around as you or I might hand
out peppermint lozenges. Hippies. All that.” He wagged his
head gloomily.
Purbright was wondering if Mr Chubb would appreciate his
pointing out the contradiction between a love-in and a black
mass when the telephone rang.
Mr Chubb walked to his desk and picked up the receiver
with cold fastidiousness.
“Sergeant, I did tell you that I would be engaged in conference
for at least half an hour. That half an hour has not yet
elapsed.”
He seemed about to replace the phone, then to change his
mind. The lean, ascetic features sharpened to attention. One
slim hand slipped half-way into the side pocket of his jacket and
rested there delicately.
“Good afternoon, councillor,” said Mr Chubb into the
telephone.
It was a brief and mainly one-sided conversation. The chief
constable made occasional noises of judicious concern and said
that he would certainly... Also that he quite... And finally
that he would be glad to see if...
Purbright meanwhile looked impassively out of the window.
“Hideaway,” said the chief constable after he had put down the
phone. His face was stony. Purbright could sense behind it the
black swirl of private opinion.
“He is the brother-in-law, it seems, of Mrs Persimmon,” said
Mr Chubb.
Ernest Hideaway, estate agent and humorist, was possessed
of a tidy fortune that had been his reward for compounding
the felonies of local jerrybuilders over the years. He was a
member of Flaxborough Town Council and a diligent giver of
advice.
“Hideaway says,” Mr Chubb went on, “that Mrs Persimmon is
very upset indeed, and if what the man alleges is true, she has
some justification. You will have to look into it, I’m afraid,
Mr Purbright.”
“If you’ll tell me what the complaint is, sir...”
“Well of course I’ll tell you,” Mr Chubb retorted irritably.
“That’s what I’m doing now. It’s about the man’s body,
actually. Very distasteful. You’ll remember that after the post-mortem
and the adjournment of the inquest the coroner issued
a burial certificate.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, well the family fixed the funeral for tomorrow. All the
arrangements were made. The undertaker collected the body.
Everything normal, everybody happy. And then, dash me if the
blessed woman doesn’t ask to see the corpse.”
The chief constable shook his head.
“Very ill-advised. Just morbidity, you know, but there you
are. They let her.
“And straight away she played Holy Harry. Wanted to know
what business the hospital had to stamp her husband like
something going through the customs. The hospital people
said post-mortems were the business of the police and nothing
to do with them, so she went along to her brother-in-law.
“He confirms what the woman says. Somebody, at some time,
has stamped a black cross on the bottom of her husband’s foot.
And it won’t come off.”
Sergeant Love and his posse swept up to the door
of Aleister Lodge with something of the panache of a car full
of bootleggers in a mid-1930s film. Mrs Gloss, alarmed and
annoyed by the noise of the displacement of gravel, hurried
from the house. She was in time to see the sergeant glance back
with bland interest at the furrows in the drive while he fished a
paper from his inside pocket.
The search of the grounds was lengthy, thorough, and, in the
subsequently expressed opinion of Inspector Purbright,
undeservedly fruitful.
The finds were distributed mainly in and around the grove of
ash trees which earlier had attracted the attention of Constable
Palethorp.
They included six empty wrappings representative between
them of four different brands of prophylactic. Two of the packs
were so worn and dirty as to be only just identifiable. Of the
rest, one was almost new. It lay behind a tuft of grass in the lee
of one of the four short pillars that supported a stone slab about
eight feet long by two wide.
This slab was damp and green. It looked very old. The
supports had sunk into the ground irregularly, and the slab
leaned a little to one side.
Several dark brown splashes were discernible on the stone, a
group of them at its higher end. A policeman noticed that dead
leaves had been strewn about on the ground near by. He
brushed them aside. Quite a lot of blood had soaked into the
earth.
The policeman scrutinized this area inch by inch. Eventually
he discovered a sliver of ruby glass. Nothing else.
A few yards away, just clear of the trees, one of his colleagues
was busy with cast-making materials. He had seen in a bald
patch of soft ground the impression of a tyre tread. It seemed
identical in pattern with the tread of one of Persimmon’s
tyres, blown-up photographs of which he had been using as
a guide.
Constables three and four took turns-with notebooks and
tape-measures. Painstakingly they charted from heelmarks and
from crushed and stained grass the short haul of a body.
Farther away, incidental finds were made, less dramatic, but
significant in context.
Two bottles, overlooked by a Folklore Society cleaning-up
detachment the previous Thursday morning, contained still the
potent lees of pumpkin champagne laced with rum.
A policeman who zealously, but with misgivings, investigated
a small parcel he had found in the summerhouse censer,
jumped when there fell out the shrivelled corpse of a bat. The
creature’s shroud was a page of the Baptist Bugle embellished
with a photograph of the Rev. William Harniss.
Lastly, high in the branches of a fine yew tree near the house,
the searchers descried what at first appeared to be a great
roosting bird of prey. It proved on closet eradication to be a
black corset.
Sergeant Love himself made it his business to see that Mrs
Gloss was given no opportunity to use the telephone.
He tried to offset the irritation his persistent presence
obviously caused her by making a fuss of the big sleek cat which
had appeared from the kitchen.
The cat walked round him three times, unhurriedly bit him
on the calf, and strolled out.
Mrs Gloss told Love that if she ever saw him ill-treat an
animal again she would have him removed from the Force.
At the home of the Goodings, Constable Brevitt did his best
to cope with fauna of a different kind.
Out in the garden an enormous black dog paced up and
down, baying, while a pair of macaws in a cage high in a corner
of the living room were carrying on a dialogue that sounded
like a continuous rail disaster.
Mrs Gooding appeared to find the uproar not only tolerable
but enlightening. She smiled knowingly and every now and
again glanced at Brevitt’s face as if to confirm some particularly
unpleasant characteristic that the birds had just pointed out to her.
Questioning Mrs Gooding in such circumstances was not
easy. Doggedly and without much imagination, Brevitt
followed his brief.
Had she, on the night of the Folklore Society’s Revel, seen
anything of a man called Bertram Persimmon? No. Or a Miss
Edna Hillyard? Yes. With whom? Lots of different people. Did
she know a Mr Persimmon? No. Had there been a fight at the
Revel? No. Any unnatural practices? What an idea! Who had
dressed up as a bull? She didn’t know what he was talking
about. Who had put offensive articles in the parish church?
Ask somebody else. On the door of Sir Henry Bird? How
would she know. In the office of the Medical Officer of Health?
Likewise.
Brevitt looked grim. He sighed through clenched teeth.
“If my George was here,” Mrs Gooding said, suddenly removing
her regard from the birds and ferociously swinging her big, knobbly
face close to Brevitt’s, “d’you know what we’d do?”
The policeman involuntarily reared back.
Again Mrs Gooding’s features were thrust up to his.
“We’d pray for you,” she growled.
One of the imported officers, a Brocklestone plain clothes
man called Miller, had been assigned to call on Press Secretary
Parkin.
Parkin was not at home. Nor was his sister, Amy. Miller
learned from the woman next door that Miss Parkin did not
normally return from school until nearly five o’clock.
“And Mr Parkin?”
“Isn’t he at the shop, then?”
“What shop?”
A chemist’s shop. Dispensing. Well, no, he’d not know, not
if he was a stranger to Flax. But that’s where Mr Parkin would
be. Amis and Jeffrey, in Eastgate.
Miller asked if the Parkins kept chickens.
The neighbour said that was a funny sort of question and
who was he, anyway?
A buyer of cockerels, replied Miller, with spontaneous
cunning. Black cockerels he was especially interested in.
The neighbour looked him up and down and said:
“That wouldn’t surprise me, either.”
And she shut the door.
Number 33 Partney Avenue was a semi-detached villa with a
bay window, behind one of the five panes of which was displayed
a pink poster advertising the forthcoming performance
of “The Gondoliers” by the Flaxborough Amateur Operatic
Society.
A precisely circular flowerbed had been cut in the centre of
the few square yards of closely-mown lawn. It contained eight
wallflower plants and one standard rose bush.
The concrete approach to the built-on garage was marked in
imitation of crazy-paving. On the garden gate was an enamelled
notice. NO CANVASSERS.
A man and a woman who had entered Partney Avenue from
Arnhem Crescent stopped before the gate and read the
notice. They looked at each other and the man gave a very thin
smile. He opened the gate.
The man and woman stood side by side before the front door,
awaiting response to the man’s double ring. They looked
patient, disciplined, impermeable—a pair of Jehovah’s
Witnesses, perhaps, anticipating with flinty pleasure an hour or
two of apocalyptic interpretation upon Mrs Pentatuke’s doorstep.
Suddenly the door was open and Mrs Pentatuke was revealed,
more than a little Jehovah-like herself.
She looked imperiously from one to the other.
“Well?”
The man said: “We are police officers, ma’am. My name is
Harper, and this is Policewoman Bellweather. May we come
in?”
Mrs Pentatuke’s frown deepened.
“I haven’t sent for the police.”
“No, ma’am. We’ve called. We think you might be able to
help us in our inquiries into certain matters.”
Fill his bowels with hooks, prayed Mrs Pentatuke. O Belial,
make her miscarry in a Woolworths.
Aloud, she demanded to see documents of authorization.
They were produced.
Coldly, Mrs Pentatuke ushered her visitors into the room
containing the Gondoliers poster. It was not a large room.
The settee and its matching pair of armchairs in mustard-coloured
miracle Carfelon had the appearance of having arrived
the previous day, on approval. The fitted carpet, super tough
yet fibre-groomed to give the caress of real lambswool, also had
an unused look. There was one picture, a reproduction of a
portrait of Winston Churchill. It hung above the fireplace, which
had been sealed with a laminated plastic panel before which
stood a chrome-plated, two-bar electric heater. This was not,
and possibly never had been, switched on.
“It will save time, if you agree,” Harper said to Mrs
Pentatuke, “for my colleague to take a quick look round the
house while I put a few questions to you here. Of course, you
may accompany her if you would rather.”
“And if I forbid her to do anything of the kind?”
Harper looked regretful.
“Ah, as to that, madam, I’m afraid there’s the matter of the
warrant. We don’t as a rule expect any trouble over these things.
Not in a nice neighbourhood like this.”
Mrs Pentatuke compressed her lips in angry resignation.
O Astoreth, lead her great cow foot into the hair oil that Lionel spilled
on the bathroom floor this morning. Let her horrid head be wedged
down the poo-box.
Policewoman Bellweather gave her a nervous little smile,
bobbed apologetically, and went out of the room.
A long pause having failed to win Harper an invitation to sit
down, he lowered himself to a chair-edge perch on miracle
Carfelon and started to put his questions.
A quarter of an hour later, he had secured not a single admission
from Mrs Pentatuke that promised to have relevance to the
Persimmon murder, the abduction of Edna Hillyard, or the
persecution of members of the anti-witchcraft committee. Her
answers were curt—often a simple yes or no—but never evasive
in a way that Harper could challenge. And she took so little
time to deliver them that Harper was constantly being left
unprepared with another question and had to look into his
notebook like a schoolboy at a crib.
He was greatly relieved when Policewoman Bellweather
came back into the room. She was holding a large translucent
plastic box fitted with a lid. The box was thinly encrusted with
crystals. It was steaming slightly.
Sadie Bellweather addressed Harper.
“I found this in the deep freeze cabinet in the kitchen,” she
told him. She did not look at Mrs Pentatuke.
“Is that your property, madam?” Harper asked, trying to
appear stern but at the same time scrupulously open-minded.
“And what in hell’s name,” retorted Mrs Pentatuke, “has
that got to do with you?”
Harper signalled the policewoman to proceed.
She clutched the box to her bosom with one arm and levered
off the lid. Out of the box she drew a bird, stiff as a Roman
eagle but black-feathered and unmistakably domestic in origin.
“That your chicken, ma’am?” (In for a penny, in for a pound,
reflected Harper, secretly nervous.)
“Of course it’s my chicken, you idiot.” Mrs Pentatuke made a
grab for it.
“Cockerel,” corrected Policewoman Bellweather, who had
been brought up on a farm.
“It’s for a dinner party tomorrow night,” said Mrs Pentatuke,
“and I’ll thank you not to maul it about.”
Policewoman Bellweather carefully replaced the fowl, which
she had been holding upright by the feet, like a feathered
club. Next, she produced a small metal tray and handed it to
Harper.
Harper gave a start, then peered cautiously at the tray’s
contents before holding them out for Mrs Pentatuke’s
inspection.
“These for dinner as well, are they? Starters, like?”
Mrs Pentatuke gazed, tight-lipped, at the frozen corpses of a
shrew, two frogs, a mouse and another small creature less easy
to identify because of its somewhat chewed condition.
“The cat brings them in from time to time,” she said, after
consideration.
“Would you care to give me an explanation of why you have
put these things into the refrigerator?” Harper asked. He
ignored the policewoman’s whispered “deep freeze” and waited
for Mrs Pentatuke to think up something convincing.
“I don’t consider I need give you anything of the kind.”
“As you wish, madam,” said Harper, handing back the
miniature mortuary to Sadie Bellweather.
The third and last production from the box was a tiny notebook.
The policewoman held it up between finger and thumb.
It measured about two inches by an inch-and-a-half. Harper
reached across and she put it in his hand.
Again the monotonously delivered question.
“This your property, madam?”
Mrs Pentatuke affected silent contempt, but her face had
paled noticeably.
Harper slowly turned the pages of the notebook. After a
while, he raised his eyes.
“Do you wish to offer an explanation of why you keep a
memoranda book in the...” He sent an inquiring glance to the
policewoman.
“It was taped behind a sort of dividing panel in the freezer.”
“...in the position my colleague has described?”
“I intend to say nothing more to you,” declared Mrs Pentatuke.
“Your presence here is preposterous and your behaviour
unspeakable. What your object is, I have no idea, but I warn
you both that unless you can be shown to have had some very
good reason for bursting in on my privacy you and your
superior officers will find yourselves in the most serious
trouble.”
Harper waited patiently for this speech to end. Then he
returned the notebook to Policewoman Bellweather, motioned
her to hang on to the box and its contents, and said to Mrs
Pentatuke:
“I have to tell you that I propose now to take to police
headquarters, Flaxborough, the articles which I have shown to
you and which I believe to be your property. I shall give you a
signed receipt for these articles, and they will be treated with all
reasonable care. Do you wish to make objection to my removing
them?”
But Mrs Pentatuke’s vow of silence seemed to have been put
already into operation. The faint stirring of her lips conveyed
nothing to Harper. Which was just as well, because she was
then placing upon him in yellow, dun and black degrees, the
miring malediction of Saint Gringoire.
Love and Miller nearly collided with each other in the
corridor outside the CID room. Both were in a hurry.
“Conference,” said Miller. “You did know, did you?”
“Twenty minutes yet,” Love said. He dodged into a file closet
and started pulling out drawers. “Tell Harper when you see
him. Oh, and Brevitt, too.”
Purbright appeared at the end of the corridor, then turned
and was gone again. Love heard the clanking of an iron
staircase.
When Harper and Sadie Bellweather came in from the
transport yard, it was Harper who was carrying Mrs Pentatuke’s
deep freeze container. Encountering the bulky obstacle of
Sergeant Mally, Harper halted and invited the coroner’s officer
to take a look.
“Christ, we’re not having inquests on bloody frogs now, are
we?”
“Where’s the inspector?”
“Upstairs.”
They squeezed past each other.
Harper was hailed by Love and told about the conference.
Proudly, he displayed his collection. Love picked up the mouse
by its tail, which had become limp in the warm air, and pretended
to set off in search of Policewoman Bellweather. “No,
don’t piss about,” Harper told him, grabbing back the mouse.
The face of Constable Palethorp appeared round the door.
“Tapes,” he said to Love. “The inspector says don’t forget the
interview tapes. And can you come up straight away, he says.”
“Righty-ho,” said Love.
Palethorp moved closer. “Hey,” he said softly, “they reckon
old Purby’s going to knock off the vicar for that Persimmon
business. Has he said anything to you?
Love, slipped two cassettes in his pocket and started to leave.
He looked happy but said nothing.
Closeted in one of the two small interview rooms with a Mr
George Tozer, Detective-Constable Pook frowned peevishly at
the noise of all the comings and goings in the corridor. He had
been hearing from Mr Tozer—a man of slow speech and
gesture with black cavernous eye-sockets and hairy nostrils—about
certain strange tribulations suffered lately by members of
Flaxborough Chamber of Trade, whose current secretary and
spokesman Mr Tozer was.
“I shall pass on these people’s complaints, sir,” Pook assured
him. “It isn’t nice for that sort of thing to be happening.
Especially in food shops.”
He was ushering his informant out when Sadie Bellweather,
clutching a new notebook and two shiny red pencils, patted his
arm as she bounded by.
“Conference. Now. They asked me to tell you.”
Love reappeared, waving his hand like a shipyard foreman
trying to stop a launch.
“Sorry, slight delay,” he called along the corridor. “Not to
panic, though.”
Purbright, slightly out of breath, joined him. The inspector
was putting on his raincoat. He paused to beckon the two
nearest men. They were Harper and Palethorp. All four
hurried towards the transport yard.
“Quickest way would be by St Anne’s Place and Spindle
Lane, wouldn’t you say, sergeant? Save going through the
Market Place.”
Purbright took the wheel.
At the East Street junction, Palethorp got out, audaciously
held up the cross traffic despite his being in plain clothes, and
climbed back into the car.
“Who rang in?” Love asked the inspector.
“Grewyear. I’d asked him to keep an eye on the place until
someone could be spared to make a search.”
The car travelled two-thirds of the length of Spoongate,
turned sharply left between two stone gate pillars, and drew up
in the lee of a big beige Daimler in the courtyard that separated
the Vicarage from the Church Hall.
Two men were coming out of the hall’s back door.
They carried between them what appeared to be a small
flexible raft. Not until they were within a few feet of the open
boot of the Daimler did they notice the police car.
Purbright got out and strolled towards them.
“Do you need any help, gentlemen?”
Neither Sir Henry Bird nor Dr Cropper appeared to be in the
slightest degree disconcerted.
“That’s extremely obliging of you, inspector,” said Bird,
“but I think we can manage.”
“Unless,” remarked Dr Cropper, “you or one of your colleagues
would be good enough to bring that old box across for us.”
He indicated with a nod something large and brown and
cylindrical that had been left standing beside the hall door.
“It would save us making another journey.”
Purbright made a sign to Palethorp, who set off across the
courtyard.
Love and Harper had moved quietly round the front of the
Daimler. Love stood close to the door on the driver’s side.
Bird and Cropper lowered their burden into the Daimler
boot. It could be seen now to be a narrow mattress, about six
feet long.
Purbright felt it. It was resilient, made probably of foam
rubber. The canvas cover was stained brown here and there.
He bent the mattress over, to examine the other side. Streaks
of green. He touched the streaks with a finger tip and looked
inquiringly at Bird, then at Cropper, but was careful not to put
a question in words.
“Paint,” said Bird. “It’s pretty messy in that hall.” He reached
across as if with the intention of lowering the boot lid.
Purbright stopped him and indicated Palethorp, approaching
with the cylindrical object. It was a huge old-fashioned hat box
made of leather.
“Ah, yes,” said Sir Henry. He called: “In here—there’s a
good chap.”
Again Purbright was ready to intercept. He told Palethorp
to set the hat box down on the ground, then turned to Bird.
“I’d be obliged if you or Dr Cropper would open this, sir.”
“Now look here, Purbright, don’t you think you’re going a
bit...”
“Of course,” Dr Cropper firmly and loudly declared, before
Sir Henry could say any more. He stepped to the box and
unfastened the strap that secured the lid.
“Odds and ends, you see, inspector. They’ve been kicking
about in there for ages. We thought the Scouts might devise a
use for them.”
One by one, Purbright removed and handed to Palethorp the
objects in the box. The biggest was a megaphone about a foot
long, with some kind of detachable reed or vibrator fitted into
the mouthpiece. There were also two small flashlight batteries;
a card that had held three crimson “Santa-lite” electric bulbs, of
which two remained; a pair of pliers; and a partially emptied
Family Size pack of “Safemate” condoms.
“And now, gentlemen, I must ask you to accompany me
and the sergeant while we examine the room from which you
have removed these things. The key, if one of you will be so
kind...”
Sir Henry slowly withdrew his hand from his jacket pocket
and dropped a key into Purbright’s open palm. He was past the
point at which indignation could still be conveyed in words.
He tried instead to look contemptuously unconcerned. But his
face was grey, blotched irregularly with nets of tiny inflamed
veins.
Dr Cropper’s manner, on the other hand, became increasingly
cheerful, almost jocose. He bowed Purbright into the small,
musty-smelling room with a remark about ‘desirable business
premises’.
The room contained a card table, three heavily old-fashioned
dining-room chairs, and a leather-covered couch. There was a
cupboard in one corner. A telephone stood on a shelf near by.
Half the floor area was covered with carpet too badly worn to
give any hint of its original colour or pattern.
The two policemen opened the cupboard, and surveyed what
little it contained. They saw a few cups and saucers, a kettle,
jars of instant coffee and dried milk and sugar, two part
bottles of whisky, another of sherry, nearly full.
“Drink, inspector?” inquired Dr Cropper.
Purbright turned. He was not smiling. Love closed the
cupboard door. With a sad, hardly noticeable tilt of his head,
Purbright ushered them all out of the room.
They walked back along the short passage into the hall and
picked their way between a case of hymn-books and some
stacked chairs towards the door that led into the courtyard.
Just before they reached it, Purbright stopped and spoke.
“Henry Loxley Bird and Halcyon Arthur Marshall Cropper,
I am now taking you into custody. You will be charged,
severally and jointly, that you did, on or about May the first,
this year, at Flaxborough, unlawfully abduct Edna Hillyard and
continue unlawfully to restrain and imprison the said Edna
Hillyard. I have to tell you that you, Henry Loxley Bird, and
you, Halycon Arthur Marshall Cropper, need not say anything
either now or when you are formally charged, but that what
you do say will be taken down in writing and may be given
in evidence. Does either of you wish to say anything at this
stage?”
The ensuing silence was broken only by the click of Love’s
priming his retractable ball-point.
“I am now,” went on Purbright quietly, “going to put another
question to you, but this time without formality.”
He threw a side glance at Love, who pocketed his notebook.
“Which one of you actually did the killing of Bertram
Persimmon?”
Two weeks later, there presented himself at Fen
Street a gentleman wearing a black morning jacket, pin-striped
trousers, highly polished black shoes over silk socks and the
hardest-looking bowler hat that Flaxborough ever had seen.
His furled umbrella was as slim as a wand, his briefcase supple
and well-matured.
“Who’s the pox doctor’s clerk?” Love inquired of Constable
Braine, who had just escorted the visitor to Purbright’s office.
“Solicitor from the D.P.P.” Brain’s tone was airy; he liked
an opportunity of scattering initials about.
“Come to tie it all up, has he?” Harper asked.
“Suppose so.”
Love wandered off, but not out of the building. He hoped
that he would be sent for, and perhaps consulted, by the man in
that super Old Bailey get-up: the representative, no less, of the
Director of Public Prosecutions.
After all, Love reflected, if it hadn’t been for his tapes, they’d
probably be as far up the creek as ever in trying to decide
between Bird and Cropper.
The summons came after only quarter of an hour.
Purbright introduced the man from the Director’s office as
Mr Spratt-Cornforth.
Love’s hand was taken in a quick, cold grip and immediately
released. Less brief was the stare of appraisal from grey eyes in
a long, rather wooden face.
“We’ve heard about you, sergeant,” said the solicitor as he
turned to resume his seat, “and that keen ear of yours. Splendid.”
Love blushed. He fingered his keen ear. Purbright motioned
him to a chair.
Spratt-Cornforth picked up the topmost clip of typescript
from the pile before him.
“The forensic stuff is pretty straightforward. We rather
approve of the forensic stuff. Can you see them shaking us on
that, Purbright?”
“I don’t think so, sir. The chain is clearly established. Hairs
and varnish from the bull mask—found in car boot, hat box and
altar mattress...”
“Strong belief in comfort in these parts,” interjected
Spratt-Cornforth.
“It’s a fairly high-class neighbourhood, sir.”
“Ye-e-e-s...” (It sounded like “years”, long drawn out.) The
solicitor was glancing rapidly through one of the statements.
He slapped it down on the table.
“This Pentatuke woman,” he said. “She sounds to us a bit non
compos. What do you think, inspector?”
“Odd, certainly. But only in this one particular.”
“The weird sister stuff.”
“Yes, sir. As with most of them, it’s a sort of hobby.”
“We are thinking of her in the box, Purbright. We are not
altogether happy. The defence would make short work of a
witness who persisted in calling the accused Master of
Darkness.”
“I do see what you mean. Actually, I have concluded a
bargain with Mrs Pentatuke, who is more shrewd than might
appear from the preliminary statement. In return for our dropping
the sacrilege charge and promising not to mention her
sexual relationship with the defendant, she has undertaken to
make a lucid deposition about that phone call of hers that
brought Persimmon to the Sabbath. That, after all, is the nub of
her evidence so far as you are concerned.”
Three emphatic nods from Spratt-Cornforth.
“Precisely. And may we say how refreshing it is to find a
police officer with a sense of economy in this matter of presenting
a case. More prosecutions are weakened by too much evidence
than by too little.”
Purbright modestly inclined his head.
“Incidentally,” added Spratt-Cornforth, “we must hope that
it will not occur to the defence to try and depict this woman as
too jealous, and subsequently too vengeful, for her testimony
to carry weight. It would not be difficult, you know.”
The inspector agreed.
“She certainly spared no effort to attract the maximum
unwelcome publicity to the Coven and its Masters. We found a
little notebook at her house. It had in it the telephone numbers
of half the national newspapers. In addition, I suspect that she
pestered the defendant himself a good deal by phone.”
“Yes, well, we shall keep clear of all that,” said the solicitor,
selecting another sheaf of typescript. “It would not do for a
crown witness to appear to have known the murderer’s identity
all along.”
For a while he read in silence. Then, “Ah.” He flicked the
corner of the statement with long, white fingers.
“Our old friend. The blank memory. But well enough to go
into court for us? Has she recovered that far?”
“She will have done by the time the case comes on at the
Crown Court, I think, sir.”
“Lucky girl, Miss Hillyard, wouldn’t you say?”
“To be still alive? Extremely.”
“The treatment of her shows ruthlessness. The jury won’t
like that. Good point for us. Provided, of course, the defence
don’t make a song and dance about her promiscuity. That
always works the other way. Or is your society permissive in
this county?”
“That is a question the press appeared to consider of
enormous importance. Certainly, Harry Bird used to talk about it a
good deal on the Bench when he was sentencing people.”
“Really?”
Purbright glanced to see if Love was showing signs of boredom,
but he appeared to be lost in admiration of the London
solicitor’s rapid digestion and arrangement of their paperwork.
Spratt-Cornforth leaned back in his chair, tapped a thumbnail
ruminatively against his lower teeth, and closed his eyes.
“Let us see,” he said, “if we have a general picture of the case.
Stop us at once if we go wrong.
“For some time past, a group of people living in Flaxborough
and its surrounding area had indulged in what may loosely be
termed Pagan religious practices under cover of a pretended
interest in folklore. The central ceremony was a so-called Revel,
held in the grounds of one of the members, witness Gertrude
Gloss, four times a year on dates associated with the witches’
Sabbaths of the Middle Ages.
“The climax of the Revel, or Sabbath, which involved
dancing, drinking and probably a deal of licentiousness, was
the appearance of the President, or Master. He was a sort of
Minotaur figure, believed by some at least of the members to
be the devil, and his prerogative was to summon the female of
his choice from among the company and to possess her in an
altar ritual.
“Whereas it was important for the ordinary members of the
Coven, as we must call it, to shield their respectability behind
the spurious title of Folklore Society; it was of double—indeed,
of three-fold—importance to preserve the anonymity of the
Master.”
Spratt-Cornforth opened one eye with which to regard
Purbright.
“All right so far?”
“Absolutely.”
The eye closed again.
“We now know the clever and extremely confusing device
whereby this was achieved. The Master of the Coven was not
one person at all, but a triumvirate of lecherous worthies
masquerading as—of all things—an anti-witchcraft action group
that enjoyed the innocent patronage of the Vicar of Flaxborough.
An Unholy Trinity, eh, sergeant?”
This quite unexpected acknowledgement of his continued
presence left Love gratified but wordless.
The solicitor continued at once with his summary.
“There would appear, nevertheless, to have been some rudimentary
sense of honour among these three. They observed a
rota system, for example, as we may infer from the evidence of
the witness Bollinger. It was she, was it not, who heard
Persimmon say on the telephone that ‘he could not make it
that night’ and that someone ‘would get an extra turn’.
“But that ‘someone’—and we may take it that Mrs Pentatuke
was the woman referred to—did not get her turn, after all. The
female Pearce will testify that it was Edna Hillyard’s good
fortune to be chosen.
“There followed the call to Persimmon, his furious drive—witnessed by...”
Purbright waited a moment, then supplied the name.
Spratt-Cornforth snapped his fingers.
“...Doris Periam. Of course. As we said, the furious drive,
confrontation, attack. And murderous counter-attack by the
man in that fearfully-armed mask. Then the loading of
Persimmon’s body into his own car and its disposal in the river
less than quarter of a mile away. All conjecture, but supported
by a certain amount of circumstantial evidence. We have
known success in cases much more perforated than this one.”
The solicitor opened his eyes and hitched himself forward.
“One wonders,” he said, “whether one might have some coffee.
Nothing fancy. Lubrication is all.”
Purbright addressed Love immediately. “Sergeant, would one
fetch some, please?”
“Is there any hope,” Spratt-Cornforth asked, when Love had
gone, “of a voluntary statement from the defendant? It would
make things easier for us, a lot easier.”
“Oh, I’m sure there is. His counsel is certain to advise him to
rely on a plea of self-defence. For this to be convincing, he will
have to explain what made Persimmon so violently jealous. A
statement well in advance of the trial would help forestall
suspicion of the story having been cooked up at the last minute.”
“Good. Encourage him, Purbright. We are not altogether
happy that the authorship of this crime has been established
beyond doubt. The only person we know to be able actually to
identify the murderer is the Hillyard woman and she obviously
will stick to her loss of memory, genuine or not, in her own
interests.”
“In justice to the girl, I think she co-operated after the killing
only because she was terrified. The fact that she was heavily
doped with barbiturate and locked up proves that they didn’t
trust her.”
“They?”
“Certainly. The two surviving members would collaborate
for the sake of their mutual safety just as the original trio
always had done to protect their respectability.”
“So the availability to Cropper, as a council health official, of
both the keys and—we assume—the drugs, does not much help
to incriminate him on the capital charge as such.”
“No, sir. Not specifically.”
“In that case...”—Spratt-Cornforth examined a typed list—“...I shall be interested to listen to these famous tapes of your
Sergeant Love—numbers, what?—four and six—are we right?”
The door opened and Love entered with a tray. To commemorate
the visitor’s eminence he had brought cups instead
of mugs and provided not only saucers in addition but the
private sugar basin of the chief constable himself.
For the next ten minutes the case was set aside in favour of
what Love considered a brilliant and daringly irreverent disquisition
by Spratt-Cornforth on such matters as the state of
Old Dicky Padstowe’s chambers, Young Somebody Else’s
scrape with the Queen’s Proctor, and the rumoured sitting
stone dead for three hours of the learned judge in Number Two
Court at the Bailey.
Then Purbright signalled the replacement of the tray with the
Sergeant’s recording machine.
They listened.
...fact, but the situation’s so delicate. Quite frankly, I didn’t think he’d understand. Why, sir? Well, good heav...
Love raced the tape forward a little.
“Bird,” murmured Purbright for Spratt-Cornforth’s benefit.
The solicitor nodded.
...enough to tell me about the call that Mr Persimmon did take, sir. I can’t tell you anything about it. I don’t know anything. Look, sir, I’m sorry, but this time I must insist. Insist all you like. I just cannot help you. And this time it is not a case of respecting confidences. The phone rang—at about midnight, as I told you—and Persimmon answered it. He listened, not saying a word himself, and then slammed the phone down and rushed out straight away. We both heard his car start off and that was that. He didn’t...
Love switched off the machine and removed the cassette. He
slipped another one in.
“This one’s Cropper,” said Purbright.
...get up to, sir? I know perfectly well, Mr Purbright, that Miss Hillyard associated—that is the word, I believe—with Bertie Persimmon. Do you know who made the call last Wednesday night that resulted in Persimmon going out? I have no idea. What is your recollection of that call, doctor? None, naturally. I didn’t take it. Persimmon did? Yes. We’d had one or two earlier but they were—well, relatively trivial. Then this one came through about midnight. Did he not say anything that might suggest who the caller was? Not a single word. He scarcely looked at me. Just slammed the receiver down and went straight out. Then I heard his car start up. That was the...
Love pressed the “off” key. He waited.
Spratt-Cornforth remained a while in thought. He shrugged.
“We seem to have missed it. Perhaps we are not at our
brightest this morning.”
“In the first recording,” began Purbright, “he...”
“No, no.” The solicitor had raised his hand. “Let the sergeant
enlighten us. It was his discovery.”
Pink as a raspberry soda, Love looked at Purbright.
“Go on, then, Sid.”
“Well, sir...” Love shuffled ecstatically in his seat. “It’s
fairly simple, really. Just a couple of words. ‘We’ in one
recording. ‘I’ in the other one. Bird said ‘We both heard his
car start off’. Cropper said ‘Then I heard his car start up’. But
once this bloke Persimmon had gone, there could have been only
one left in the room, sir. So I reckoned that when Bird talked
about ‘we’ it was because he was being careful not to break that
old alibi of theirs—the three-pals-together one.”
“Very succinctly put, sergeant,” said Spratt-Cornforth. “We
congratulate you. And of course we take your point. Bird was
imagining the scene and so was fastidious about detail. Cropper,
on the other hand, although equally concerned to thwart
inquiry, was being prompted all the time by actual memory. Oh,
yes, even a jury ought to be able to see the logic of that. What
do you think, Purbright?”
“We must hope that you are right, sir,” the inspector said.
“Has one a date in mind for the committal proceedings?”
“I thought perhaps a week on Thursday, sir. If that is
convenient to you.”
Spratt-Cornforth consulted a pocket diary and nodded. He
looked at his watch.
“An adjournment, gentleman, would now be appropriate.
We have a luncheon appointment with your chief constable.”
For the briefest of moments, Love’s mood of buoyancy
tricked him into the dizzy supposition that he, too, was
embraced within the solicitor’s royal plural.
When the delusion had passed, and as soon as Spratt-Cornforth
had briskly departed, running his rapier-like umbrella up
and down in his gloved fist as if to wipe blood off it, the
sergeant began to collect the cups.
“Thanks for the coffee, Sid,” Purbright said.
“Oh, and don’t forget to put Mr Chubb’s sugar basin back,
will you?”