Flaxborough Chronicles - Hopjoy Was Here Part 9

"Don't be silly. You don't strangle pigs." There was no amus.e.m.e.nt in her voice.

"Naturally not. Nevertheless, I'm not your Mr Ra.s.smussen. You are Mrs Croll, though, I take it."

"That's right. Why?"

"Do you think we might go inside? I'd like to talk to you."

The girl subjected him again to doubtful, sulky scrutiny. This time, Ross returned her stare, appraising the lumpish yet indefinably provocative face, a throat fair-fleshed and smooth within the opening of a wine-red linen shirt that outlined narrow shoulders and gently understated the existence of b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

It was Mrs Croll's gaze that turned aside first, but the gesture carried no suggestion of defeat or embarra.s.sment. Nor, as she walked before him round the side of the house, did she seem to divine or care that his sensual preoccupation had been deepened by the anterior viewpoint and by the addition of movement. She was perfectly familiar with the standard of her charms-she could have defined it instantly as '34-23-38'-and her faith in their effect was as simple and absolute as if all these parts bore the tattoed warranty 'as seen on TV'.

Television, Ross discovered when they entered the small, over-furnished parlour, was the source of the music he had heard. As she walked through the doorway, the girl's eyes sought automatically the steel-blue radiance of the screen in the corner. They slotted at once into focus as though held upon invisible antennae springing in parallel from the set, and abdicated responsibility for all else. Thus, as she felt her way to a couch in the room's centre, her body moved round pieces of furniture with the cautious, sensitive independence of the blind.

Ross watched the foot that felt for and pushed aside a stool in her path. Its toes, half revealed by the green suede shoe's shallow cut, squeezed like plump baby mice against their nylon caul. Her instep, he noticed, was gracefully arched but too puffy to display the delicate bone structure that he would claim to have been taught to value by the bagnio-masters of south-eastern Turkey. The ankle was similarly spoiled, yet the failing was its very merit, for it hastened with impatience the upward progress of Ross's scrutiny to a limb he deemed so eloquent of erotic responsiveness that his fingers involuntarily curved in sympathy. Especially compelling was the flexed roundness of muscle, behind and a little above the knee-the thigh's beginning-that gleamed momentarily as the couch arm caught at the girl's skirt.

She arranged herself among the cushions like a florid signature. Ross, for whom she spared no further glance, sat uninvited in a chair a few inches away, his back to the television set.

The girl spoke first, but without turning her head. "Well, what was it you wanted?"

"To talk to you."

"My husband handles all the farm business. Anyway, you're wasting your time if you're selling something; he's satisfied with everything he gets now."

"That I can believe." Ross watched her face. She was smiling faintly.

"Is your husband about?"

"Naturally. You didn't think he worked in an office. He's down on the bottom field. Harrowing."

"It must be."

The girl suppressed a giggle, then frowned. "I don't like sarcastic people. If you'll just tell me what you want..."

"I'm trying to trace a friend of mine."

"Someone round here, you mean?"

"I think he's been here."

"What's his name?" She leaned along the back of the couch and stretched to turn down the volume of the set. She could just reach the k.n.o.b with the tips of her fingers. Ross noted appreciatively the hardening of the nearer b.u.t.tock into the semblance of a lute. "Hopjoy," he said, "Brian Hopjoy."

"Never heard of him." She settled again into the cushions, drawing one leg closely beneath her and allowing the other to trail to the floor. Ross abandoned himself to a familiar sense of wonder at the contrast between a stocking's steely, slippery containment and the petal-white vulnerability of overtopping flesh. He once had thought the Can-Can a vulgar and pseudo-, indeed anti-sensual concession to callow tourists. Now he understood its truth. It was a sermon upon the insubstantiality of what separated the pretentiousness and artificial properties of civilization from venal reality-a division no greater than a garter's width.

Ross leaned forward in his chair. "Mrs Croll..."

Abstractedly she felt for her skirt hem and tugged it down to her knee. Her fingers straightened and travelled on, in the lightest self-caress; then she raised the hand and held it towards him. He grasped her wrist and experienced a sort of contentment in exploring, with one finger-tip, its complex of fragile bones.

"You might not have known him as Hopjoy," Ross said.

"Mightn't I?" Still she stared at the screen; only the tiniest twitch of the hand Ross held contradicted her att.i.tude of absolute indifference to what existed outside it. He slackened his hand and extended it slowly, her forearm slipping through the cupped fingers until his thumb nestled in the soft, warm hollow of the arm's crook. A pulse-his own or hers, he did not know-stirred gently within the area of contact; it seemed a microcosmic prelude to...

"Here, we're wasting time." He withdrew his hand and reached into an inner pocket.

She looked round, startled by his brusqueness. Immediately she saw the photograph, her eyes widened. "Is that your friend?"

"Tell me about him."

She pouted. "Why should I? I don't know who you are. You haven't even got his name right, anyway."

Ross saw the look she gave the photograph of Hopjoy; it was compounded of fondness and a curious detachment, like that of a marksman turning over a shot bird with his foot.

"Names," he said, "don't matter much in our game, Mrs Croll. I don't care what you called the man, nor what he meant to you..."

"And just what are you insinuating?" She had put on a tradesmen's entrance voice. Ross decided that he recognized the dissimulation of the bored middle-cla.s.s wife, hungering for s.e.xual humiliation. "Your antics in your husband's hay-loft are rather beside the point, my dear. I am interested solely in what brought Mr Hopjoy to this farm and in what he learned here. Now perhaps we understand each other."

She had risen at his first words and stood now in what he diagnosed as trembling enjoyment of the insult he had offered. The rigidity of her indignation, he noticed, thrust into satisfying prominence a narrow, muscular belly and slightly flattened b.r.e.a.s.t.s like burglar alarms.

Mrs Croll turned, switched off the television set as if for ever, and faced him again. "There is nothing," she announced coldly, "in the relationship of Mr Trevelyan and I that is any of your d.a.m.n business." She paused. "So d.a.m.n you!"

Ross felt a twinge of pity. The clumsiness and inadequate sonority of the retort, its little grammatical discord, betrayed the girl's uncertainty. He smiled at her. Into the suddenly silent room threaded the thin, clattering whine of a distant tractor.

"Trevelyan, you say?"

"Howard Trevelyan." She p.r.o.nounced the words defiantly and with schoolgirl relish.

"Sit down." He took out his pipe and ruminantly fingered the rim of its bowl. The girl hesitated, then moved farther off and sat on a straight-backed chair in an att.i.tude of prim exasperation.

Not looking at her, Ross said: "You are going to have to trust me, Bernadette. I could tell you my name-it's Ross, as a matter of fact-and the nature of my work, but there really would be no point in doing so. I can neither prove my ident.i.ty nor give you convincing evidence of my profession. If I could, it would cease to be my profession. You don't understand. Naturally. You are not expected to understand. But at least let me a.s.sure you that what might seem to you duplicity and mystification are terribly necessary."

He glanced at her face, which had become more bewildered than angry. "Don't worry, you'll not get hurt. I can see no need for your husband to learn anything you don't wish him to learn concerning, er, Trevelyan"-he lingered sternly over the name as if he personally disapproved of it-"provided you are frank with me."

"Are you a detective, or something?"

He considered, smiling again. "A something-I think we'd better settle for that."

"Are you working with Howard?"

"We have certain objectives in common."

Mrs Croll looked at the door. Then she crossed the room and settled in her habitual place on the sofa. Her face was turned fully towards Ross. She ran her tongue-tip over her lips before she spoke.

"Has anything happened to him?"

Ross shrugged. "We can't trace him just at the moment."

"He's not back in hospital?"

Ross went quickly back over his mental copy of the Hopjoy reports. There had been a spell in hospital. Attacked with iron bar. a.s.sailant thought to be Bulgarian. Never traced; probably smuggled out of Flaxborough dock. For victim, special compensation grant. But all that was some time ago. "No," said Ross, "I think he got over that all right."

"I was terribly worried. That's where he came down..." She nodded towards the window. "Right on top of an old kennel that used to stand there. I thought Ben had killed him..."

"Ben?"

"My husband. He threw Howard out of the bedroom window."

Ross stared at her, trying to bore through to the motives for the lie. Was she simply the willing victim of s.e.xual fantasy? Or had someone coached her in a deliberately discreditable explanation of Hopjoy's injuries?

"Tell me about it."

She raised a hand and moved the middle finger lightly round the braided coil of her hair. The bunched strands shone, thought Ross, like the newly baked croissants of the Orgerus Region. Her frown was doubtful. "I don't think I ought to say any more. I promised Howard..."

He leaned forward and grasped her shoulder. Tightening the grip, he saw a flicker of gratification in her eyes before the heavy lids drew down in white, lazy a.s.sent. The long kiss he gave her was an interrogation subtly wavering on the borders of brutality. Before it was over, she half opened her eyes and moaned through his teeth, like a prisoner entreating merciful execution.

Ross disengaged with controlled, skilful gradualness. As might a superb driver cast his eye over his engine after a trial burst of speed, he made a brief inward check of the muscular and glandular apparatus of his prowess, He dismissed as imaginary a touch of breathlessness, a fleeting impression of cramp in his right shoulder. No, these were nothing; the old mastery was unimpaired. He prepared to inaugurate the second, the behold-my-need phase. As he gazed earnestly down into her eyes, he set off at irregular but artistic intervals a tiny tic at the corner of his now tightly compressed mouth. He raised one eyebrow in mute request for licence, while simultaneously contracting the other to indicate the irresistibility of his desire. This refined and difficult performance had never failed to win compliance with the subsequent phase of his technique, the tactile a.s.sessment and breach of dress fastenings and his hands' a.s.sured colonization of their discoveries.

But at this point Ross's calculated progression was disrupted utterly and with no hope of the re-establishment of his control. With a cry like that of a teased and hungry seal seizing a dangled fish, Bernadette suddenly arched and twisted her body, pincered him between iron-like legs, and bore him to the floor, where she proceeded to chew his neck, shoulder and ear with every indication of determination and delight. Within seconds, the rhythm of seduction had been checked, perverted, and monstrously accelerated in reverse. Through the hot clamour of Bernadette's love-making, Ross seemed to hear, as if from outer s.p.a.ce, the thin, mocking laughter of enemies.

An hour and ten minutes later, Ross was making his way back to the car while Bernadette Croll, her face as animated as a calf's, watched a pan of potatoes and cabbage frying for her husband's tea.

Ross felt like the survivor of an ambush. He glanced wearily at the peewits that glided and side-slipped above his head and plunged to the furrows in an untidy, tumbling descent as if they, like him, had been drained of impetus. Yet he felt neither self-pity nor rancour. What mattered now was to sift from the more embarra.s.sing memories of the past hour the story about Hopjoy that he had been able to extract from his conquest during the few and brief periods of respite from her importunities.

Hopjoy, as his own reports indicated, had called at the Crolls' farm in the first instance to make inquiries about some European labourers who were employed there. On that and subsequent visits, it was Mrs Croll whom he had seen. The farmer, Benjamin Croll, spent all daylight hours in his fields except at mealtimes, which were strictly predictable. Mrs Croll had told 'Howard Trevelyan' what she knew and what since she had been able, on his instructions, to find out about the three workers, but this amounted to little and seemed innocent. It had been nice, though, to see Howard once or twice in each otherwise killingly boring week and she had been thrilled and proud when he told her-on his third visit-that he was a British counter-espionage agent.

Ross dwelt a moment on this somewhat surprising circ.u.mstance. He did not think the girl was lying when she said the confidence had come from Hopjoy. There must, therefore, have been some very compelling reason for the breaking of so elementary a rule of security. Had Hopjoy hoped thereby to draw his quarry into the open? To offer himself as bait? If so, it meant the situation had become critical.

Such a likelihood was strengthened by Hopjoy's urgent a.s.sertion to the girl, whom obviously he had decided to accept as an active ally, that his life was in danger. She had responded by hiding him in her bedroom on a number of occasions when the absence of her husband at Flaxborough market might have encouraged the enemy to arrange a convenient accident.

The accident when it did come was of entirely unexpected authorship. Not sharing his wife's knowledge of the situation at the farm, Croll had returned early from a cancelled ram sale and gone straight up to the bedroom to change his clothes. He had brushed introductions aside, and, according to Mrs Croll, 'behaved dreadfully'.

Ross opened the gate into the lane and thoughtfully latched it behind him. Who, in fact, had been Hopjoy's a.s.sailant? Was it really Croll, the misunderstanding husband, who, if his wife's story were to be credited, had regretted his impulsiveness, picked the unconscious man from the roof of the dog kennel and driven him to hospital with a tale of a fall from a stack?

Or had Bernadette's account-so sharply at variance with the F.7 reports-been concocted and rehea.r.s.ed in fear of reprisals from the organization that had spirited back to the East the pract.i.tioner with the iron bar?

Within fifty yards of the Bentley, in which he saw glimmering the pallid paraboloid of Pumphrey's skull, Ross paused to listen. The sound of the tractor engine, to which he had kept tuned a wary ear during the whole time he had spent in the farmhouse, was in the air no longer. Its sudden extinction loosed a third and startling possibility into his brain.

Was it Benjamin Croll himself who had been the real object of Hopjoy's investigations? Whose agent had struck too clumsily? Who then prepared in person and with deadly thoroughness to finalize Hopjoy's elimination at the villa in Beatrice Avenue?

Chapter Twelve.

Mr Alfred Blossom, proprietor of the South Circuit Garage, Flaxborough, received with considerable scepticism his foreman's report that one of four carboys of battery acid had disappeared from the yard at the side of the servicing bay. "Even our blokes couldn't lose a thing like that," he declared. "And who the h.e.l.l would want to pinch it? You'd better count them again."

But not all Mr Blossom's homely humour, developed over long years of stonewalling the complaints of milched motorists, could alter the fact that where four carboys had stood there were now only three. So he stared awhile at the empty s.p.a.ce, bent to retrieve a small object that shone in the shadow of the next caged and straw-pillowed bottle, and put through a telephone call to the police.

There the matter rested until Inspectdr Purbright's request for a check on all local garages, wholesale chemists and factories for news of missing sulphuric acid struck a chord in the memory of the clerk who had filed the peculiar little item from South Circuit.

Purbright found Mr Blossom an affable informant, graced with that air of sincerity and solicitude characteristic of the habitual inflator of invoices.

"It was the queerest thing," said Mr Blossom. "I mean, we've had stuff disappear before. It goes on all the time, as a matter of fact. Between ourselves, I don't make much of it. Put it down as wastage-sort of evaporation, you know. But a b.l.o.o.d.y great thing like that... Dangerous too. And it's not as if you could flog it." A good foot shorter than the policeman, he stood with his head tilted sharply upward like a bespectacled mole.

"Have you any idea of how it could have been taken?"

"Oh, in a car or on a truck, I suppose. People are always in and out of a place like this. We don't watch everybody all the time. Some poor barmy sod probably took a fancy to the thing and heaved it into his boot when no one was looking." He spread his hands and smiled forgiveness.

"They're pretty heavy, though, aren't they?"

"About a hundredweight apiece. A fairly strong bloke could manage one on his own."

"When you talk of people being in and out, you mean customers, I suppose."

"That's right. They just bring their cars into the yard there or back them into the shop. Some of them might want to help themselves to the air line, or a grease gun. We don't bother so long as they're not in the way."

"Free and easy."

Mr Blossom shrugged. "Why not? You can't run a garage like a jewellers."

"You feel that this thing must have been pinched during the daytime?"

"I really haven't thought about it. As I said, I expect some idiot whipped it on the spur of the moment. He wouldn't do that at night, would he? In the dark, I mean."

Purbright walked to the corner of the L-shaped yard, looked round it, and returned. Mr Blossom forestalled comment. "Oh, yes, it's open to the street. There's nothing to stop anybody coming this far at any time if they wanted to."

"Or if they knew these carboys were kept here and happened to want one."

Mr Blossom slightly relaxed his smile to signify regret of the world's waywardness and blinked. Purbright saw the set of pale blue concentric circles dissolve from the thick, upturned lenses and then spread back, more watery than before.

"Do you happen to keep a list of your customers, Mr Blossom?"

"We do, yes."

"I wonder if I might take a quick look at it."

Mr Blossom turned and led the way across the shop and up an open wooden staircase to his office. He pulled out the drawer of a small box file and graciously stepped aside.

The names were in alphabetical order. Purbright saw that Hopjoy's card had a little scarlet disc gummed neatly to the upper left-hand corner. There were a few others similarly decorated. The name Periam was not listed.

"May I ask what the red circles mean?"

Mr Blossom peered innocently at the open file. "Oh, it's just a sort of private mark we use in the accounting system..."

"Bad payers?"