Flaxborough Chronicles - Hopjoy Was Here Part 13

"Well, it was three or four nights later; I can't remember exactly. I'd been downstairs for some Thermogene and was dozing off again when I heard water running. It made just the sort of gurgle that the Periams' waste pipe always makes. But I'd seen no one about there for a few days, so I thought perhaps it came from one of the other houses. I didn't think about it again until that day we saw some policemen messing about with the drains."

Of course, Purbright told himself, the bath would have had to be emptied after the day or two needed to dissolve its occupant-or half occupant. He had not got round to giving the point much thought. Yet it would have been simple enough for Hopjoy either to have lain low in the house or to have made a quiet return visit at night for long enough to pull a plug. There was another matter he found much more puzzling.

"Tell me, Miss Cork," he said slowly, "why these apparently insignificant things impressed you so deeply that you thought it your duty to send an anonymous letter." He saw the look of surprise and alarm in the woman's face and held up his hand. "No, don't worry-there's no question of your getting into any sort of trouble. As a matter of fact," he added, "I haven't even seen it."

"But of course you haven't seen it. It wasn't sent to you. And anyway it had nothing to do with what I've been telling you. Had it, mother?" In her perplexity, Miriam made her first acknowledgment of the old woman's silent presence.

Mrs Cork stared stonily at the inspector, then gave a stern little shake of her head.

Purbright frowned. "I don't think I quite understand, Miss Cork. It was you who mentioned the letter in the first place to my sergeant. We a.s.sumed..."

"Oh, no. There's been some mistake. I don't think I want to talk about it. Not about that, I mean. I couldn't." Miss Cork's spa.r.s.ely fleshed features registered a mixture of righteousness and disgust.

"The letter was about something you saw?" Purbright gently persisted.

"Naturally." Her lips closed again primly.

"At the house over the back?"

She nodded. Her expression guided Purbright's next guess.

"There were..." he paused delicately, "...goings on?"

The woman turned and stared icily at the fire, as though willing it to go out.

Either Periam's confession of disloyalty, reflected Purbright, had been a masterly understatement or else Miriam Cork possessed sensitivity remarkable even in a middle-aged spinster. He probed further.

"In a bedroom, I presume?"

Like the slow striking of a match came her reply. "On Mrs Periam's bed." There was a long pause. "Romping like dogs on a grave." Another pause. "In the middle of the afternoon."

"The girl...her name was Doreen: am I right?"

Miss Cork raised her eyes from the obstinately still burning fire and directed them at a big pair of binoculars that kept a Bible text propped against the wall above the mantelpiece. "Doreen Mackenzie," she said, in a voice deliberately drained of tone.

"I see... Well, we needn't dwell on that. Now this letter-I suppose you sent it to her fiance?"

Again Miss Cork offered no immediate reply. Her hand crept once more to the centre of her ordeal by fig roll. "I've had this out in prayer," she announced finally, "and I was told that I had taken the right road. The answer to your question is yes, if you feel it will do you any good. But I don't want to talk about it any more."

The inspector, taking her at her word, departed gracefully and not without satisfaction. Something which had puzzled him considerably was now clear.

The decision to encompa.s.s a man's destruction by convincingly attributing a murder to him required very powerful provocation.

And the sort of revelations Miss Cork seemed capable of penning to a betrayed lover would provide, Purbright now felt sure, just that.

Chapter Sixteen.

Charles Fawby, chief reporter of the Brockleston Shuttle and district correspondent for evening papers at Nottingham, Leicester and Lincoln and of all the national mornings as well, would have been the first to admit that his district was less productive of hard news than most. Its houses never burned down; no gunman had ever sought a share of the small turnover of Brockleston's two branch banks; the hotel registers remained innocent of the aliases of adulterous celebrities; even the beach was lamentably safe.

And yet Brockleston-rooted stories flowered in the Press as persistently as daisies in a city lawn.

Like daisies, they were small. They appeared always at page bottoms. Fawby did not mind that. A guinea for a three-line drollery represented a much more satisfactory return for labour than ten pounds or so for a page lead that might take the best part of a day to work upon and half the evening to telephone to morose, sceptical and hostile copy-takers.

He knew exactly what would tickle a sub-editor's fancy and help meet the insatiable demand for short 'fills'. His remunerative gleanings ranged from sc.r.a.ps of unconscious humour in the officialese of the district council minutes to whimsical remarks by old gentlemen arraigned in the local magistrates' courts for drunkenness. Quips, parochial paradoxes, providential puns on street names, ironic errors, quaint coincidences: all these fed Fawby's paragraphs.

What even this perceptive and adroit young man could never have foreseen, though, was that one of his modest guinea-earners was destined to confound an inspector of police, snap a chain of singularly plausible but false evidence, and reveal a murderer.

The piece appeared at the foot of the fourth column on page one of the county evening having the largest sale in Flaxborough. It was headed SALT PORK, and ran, in Mr Fawby's admirably pithy prose: 'The season's oddest catch was landed at Brockleston South jetty this morning by a Sheffield angler. It was half a pig, rather the worse for immersion. And the name of the fisherman? Mr Andrew Hogg.'

Purbright stared at the page as though he had spotted his own obituary. Then he rang for Sergeant Love. There was no reply from the C.I.D. room. Purbright remembered that Love was touting a cigarette lighter round the friends of the late Hopjoy.

The late... He realized with a start that the words had sprung quite spontaneously into his mind. Had he, despite the credit he had so readily accorded Hopjoy as an ingenious schemer, known all along that...

He read the paragraph again, and sighed. Coincidence in the matter of such relative rarities as wandering sides of pork was too much to hope for. And Brockleston, of all places...of course, the sea was precisely the sort of dumping ground that would have occurred to a man returning in a hurry to his seaside hotel and anxious to dispose of a murder prop that had served its turn. Even if the carca.s.s were to wash up again, there was scarcely any possibility of its coming to the notice of a police force twelve miles away.

Purbright rose abruptly from his desk and walked to the window. It was seldom that he felt annoyed with himself-or anyone else, for that matter-but now he experienced a strong temptation to punch a hole in the gla.s.s. There was something-some unwarrantable a.s.sumption or piece of credulity on his part-which had turned this whole case the wrong way round almost from the beginning. What the h.e.l.l was it?

Hands in pockets, he prowled to the door, round his desk, again to the window. He thought back over a dozen interviews, peering again at faces and listening to voices in the hope of catching some hint of what had led him so hopelessly astray. The impression grew that a single cardinal error was responsible-his swallowing without question of a whopping lie. He concentrated on recalling the occasion most likely to have produced large lies-his first meeting with Gordon Periam.

And with Mrs Periam. Doreen. Doreen Mackenzie. The erstwhile 'young lady' of Brian Hopjoy, the girl whose sportive tendencies in mid-afternoon had so shocked observant Miss Cork...

Suddenly Purbright turned from the window. He s.n.a.t.c.hed from his desk a large envelope that awaited posting to Periam and tore it open. He sought hastily among its contents for a letter in the spidery handwriting of a condoling aunt, glanced through it, and made for the door.

This time, Miss Cork did not ask her visitor in. She remained standing just inside the porch and looked at Purbright as if she had never seen him before. After only the tersest preamble, he launched from the doorstep the one question he had come to ask.

"Miss Cork, when you told me of writing a letter to Miss Mackenzie's fiance, did you mean Mr Hopjoy?"

She stared as she might at a detergent promoter who had gabbled an idiotic jingle and awaited some prescribed and equally inane response before handing her a pound.

"This is most important, Miss Cork. Was it Mr Hopjoy to whom you wrote that letter?"

"I don't know what you mean. No, of course it wasn't Mr Hopjoy. I wouldn't"-the thin frame stiffened-"soil paper with that man's name. It was Mr Periam she was engaged to. And had been for four years."

"So it was Hopjoy with whom she...whom you saw..."

For a moment the woman's eyes closed. The big nose twitched in confirmation of the unspeakable.

Purbright half turned, ready to leave. "I'm sorry if I've seemed rather stupid about this; I just wanted to make sure there was no misunderstanding."

Miss Cork breathed with the slow self-control of the determinedly delicate. "But I really don't see what there can have been to misunderstand. I told you that...that girl"-a twisted mouthing of the one word tumbled Miss Mackenzie into a broth pot of precocious l.u.s.t-"had been after poor Gordon practically since they were children."

Purbright fingered the letter in his pocket. "As a point of interest, do you happen to know if Doreen Mackenzie ever had a nickname?"

"I know what they called her at the Sunday school. Probably other people called her it, too. Mackie. Sometimes just Mack."

Once all the little elements of truth began, as it seemed, to surrender themselves, Purbright found their marshalling together into a whole and obvious exposition of what really had happened at Beatrice Avenue quite exhilarating.

Sensing the inspector's mood, Sergeant Malley beamed avuncularly as he ushered in his hospital informant, friend of a friend, and as anxious to meet the obligations implied by that compelling relationship as he was, in his own phrase, "to do that supercilious b.a.s.t.a.r.d Harton one in the eye".

Male nurse Peter Tewkes was a curly-haired, florid and robust young man whom impudent good nature had made popular with patients and, in axiomatic consequence, the despair of his superiors. He eyed Purbright approvingly, as if cataloguing him as an ambulent case, no bed pans or blanket baths, maybe beer in locker and good for a fourth at solo after night sister's round. "Fire away, sir," he invited.

"It was very good of you, Mr Tewkes, to come along and help us. I need hardly tell you that we are not seeking this information out of idle curiosity."

Mr Tewkes raised his brow. What better motive, he seemed to ask, could there possibly be?

"You'll remember a patient being admitted under the name of Trevelyan-Howard Trevelyan, I believe."

"I remember him," said Tewkes, "but I don't think that was his real name."

"Nor do I, but never mind. He'd had a fall, hadn't he?"

"So we were told. That fitted his injuries anyway."

"Ah," Purbright said, "now those are what we should like to hear about. Can you oblige, Mr Tewkes?"

Tewkes gave a wide, easy shrug. "Why not? He had a ruptured liver, that's what."

"I see. And that made an operation necessary?"

"Oh, rather. Straight away. It's a rather nasty thing, you know."

"I imagine it is. And the operation itself-is it very drastic?"

"I don't know that I'd call it that, exactly. The idea is simply to mend the thing, as you would a...well, a torn cushion, say. Sew it up." Tewkes paused. "Mind you, I don't mean to suggest the business is particulatly easy or straightforward. The biggest snag...I say, you don't want a lot of technical stuff, do you?"

"Not if you can avoid it."

"Right you are. I'm not awfully strong on jargon, anyway. The point is that livers don't mend themselves like most other bits of insides, so the artificial repairs have to be permanent-that's why they use non-soluble sutures-and they've got to be treated with a good deal of respect ever after."

"I follow. Now I've been told that this man came out of hospital in reasonably frisky condition. Is that likely, in your opinion? Would he have been able to...well, to lift heavy weights, for instance?"

Tewkes grinned. "The only thing he'll be lifting for a bit will be a gla.s.s, and he'd better not make too regular a habit of that, either."

"I don't fancy he will," said Purbright soberly. He remained thinking awhile, then pulled open a drawer of the desk.

"You mentioned just now something you called non-soluble sutures. Would they be made of nylon?"

"I believe they are, as a rule, yes."

"Have a look at that, will you?" The inspector placed before Tewkes the small gla.s.s tube bequeathed by Sergeant Warlock.

Tewkes held the tube to the light and squinted at the fine, yellowish-white strand it contained. "Could be, certainly. Where did you get it?"

Purbright was so pleased with Mr Tewkes that he nearly rewarded him there and then with a true and full answer. Deciding after all that really wouldn't do, he said simply: "It was stuck in a drainpipe."

Tewkes wrinkled up one eye. "Stuck in a..."

Purbright nodded.

"But how b.l.o.o.d.y queer!" Tewkes gazed again at the tube, turning it this way and that in his big hands. He looked up and smiled. "Go on-I'll buy it."

Purbright returned his grin, a little apologetically, and reached for the tube. "Sorry. The price is too high, Mr Tewkes. Far too high."

Chapter Seventeen.

"But the lounge, sergeant...the lounge! He can't be left in the lounge!"

Sergeant Love, who was feeling by no means happy himself, found the distraught manager of the Neptune increasingly hard to bear.

"Now look, Mr Barraclough, I regret this as much as you do-perhaps more, because I feel a bit to blame-but what's done is done. The inspector will be here very soon and he'll make all the decisions. In the meantime everything must be left exactly as it is."

"But it's nearly six o'clock."

"What's that got to do with it?"

Mr Barraclough, in his agitation, nearly retorted: "Opening time, of course," but he just managed a more seemly formula. "Six is the licensed hour for non-residents."

Love was unmoved. "That doesn't matter. I've locked the door. n.o.body's going to get a fright."

He sat down in a chair near the lift. From it he commanded views both of the receptionist-of her upper parts, anyway; for the moment Love found sufficient the mere memory of his earlier glimpse of those portions he had appraised, after his first surprise, as 'snazzy'-and of the main hotel entrance.

Through that entrance at exactly a quarter past six walked Inspector Purbright, Major Ross, Pumphrey, and the county police surgeon. Behind them, an ambulance drew across the forecourt in a half circle and backed somewhere out of Love's line of vision.

The sergeant rose and hurried up to Purbright. His face had lost a good deal of its usual expression of luminous equanimity. Purbright gave him a concerned glance. "Don't look so woebegone, Sid; they don't charge you just for being here."

"I'm ever so sorry, sir, honestly..."

"Nonsense. You had nothing whatever to do with it. If anyone's to blame, it's me. Now then..." Purbright looked about him-"I suppose we'd better view the remains. Where'd you put them?"

"I didn't put them anywhere. They're...he's just sitting there in the lounge."

Purbright took the key Love offered. He paused. "By the way, where's the girl?": "She's up in their room."