by Colin Watson
Malley turned the letter over, then looked inside the envelope. There was no photograph. He put letter and envelope on the table before the coroner.
“I think somebody’s been pulling your leg, sir.”
Mr Amblesby’s tongue disappeared; so did his look of triumph.
“Eh?”
“Whatever put it into your head”—Malley set about fussily tidying the papers, pen and inkwell in front of Mr Amblesby—“that this had anything to do with Mrs Hallam? You must try not to get things mixed up, sit.” He turned. “Just sign your deposition, Mrs Hallam, then you can get along home.”
The woman wrote her name with great concentration, as if frightened of spoiling something valuable but not her own. Halfway through, she stopped and took off her glove. She wiped her hand on her black, thick coat, then completed the signature.
The sergeant took her to the door. Outside, he spoke to her for some moments. She was silent and quite without curiosity. Malley told her to go home and make herself a cup of tea. He knew she probably would not have thought of it herself.
Malley found Mr Amblesby peevishly pulling the knob of a cupboard.
“Where did you put my coat, sergeant?”
“You haven’t brought a coat, sir. You said you didn’t need one.”
“But it’s raining.”
Malley looked out of the window. It was, indeed, raining—heavily. He collected the two depositions from the table and slid them into a folder file. The page of typewritten grey notepaper was still there. He quickly glanced through it once more.
“Queer sort of letter, sir. When did you get it?”
“Eh?”
Malley resorted to booming pidgin. “This LETTER. Queer. When—did—you—GET—it?”
The old man gave the cupboard door a final shake. “Why don’t you help me find my coat? It’s raining.”
Malley picked up the letter and put it in his pocket.
“Come along, sir. I’ll take you back in the car.”
Chapter Two
Mr Harcourt Chubb, Chief Constable of Flaxborough, made it a rule never to open his mail until at least three hours after it had been delivered. It was not that he was a lazy or an inefficient man. Nor was he a coward. But experience had taught him that problems which were altogether raw and unpalatable at eight o’clock could acquire a manageable blandness by eleven. Some, indeed, seemed actually to evaporate through their envelopes if left undisturbed for a while. Thus, he might ring the station round about noon and say: Now then, what’s all this about a Peeping Tom in Partney Gardens?—and somebody would get busy and eventually telephone back: There’s a Partney Drive and a Partney Avenue but no Partney Gardens, sir. Trouble disposed of. It happened time and time again.
It was with hope of his luck holding in this respect that Mr Chubb telephoned Detective Inspector Purbright while he held before him a typewritten communication on grey notepaper. The time was a quarter to twelve.
“Ah, Mr Purbright...nice to see the rain’s eased off. Now then, what’s all this about some woman expecting to be poisoned or drowned or something?”
There was a short silence.
“I’m afraid I’m not quite with you, sir.”
“Oh, aren’t you?” Mr Chubb sounded surprised. “Well, I’ve had this letter, you see. I thought you might know something about it.”
“No, sir.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“I see. Yes. Well, it might just be a bit of silliness, you know.”
Mr Chubb waited, hoping the inspector would tell him there and then to throw the thing away, but all he got was a patient “Yes, sir?”
The chief constable frowned. He put the letter down and shifted the receiver to his other ear. “Perhaps I’d better read it to you. It’s not signed, you know, and I can’t think off-hand of anyone who normally addresses me as Dear Friend. Never mind, though, it goes on: This is an urgent appeal...”
Purbright listened dutifully. Mr Chubb’s reading style was that of a university professor transcribing the notes of a rival savant: he gave the impression of peering at an almost illegible scrawl and doing his best to render it into English prose.
When he had finished, Mr Chubb waited again for the inspector’s comment.
“I gather you don’t take this letter seriously,” Purbright said.
“Why do you think that?”
“Ah, you do take it seriously, then?”
“Everything must be judged on its merits, Mr Purbright. I mean, here is a letter—unsigned—addressed to me by somebody or other who thinks they’re going to be murdered. Or says they do...” He paused, sensible of having strayed into dubious grammatical by-paths. “Anyway, I suppose you’ll want to see it for yourself?”
“That, if I may say so, is up to you, sir. The mode of address does sound rather personal.”
“I don’t think you need worry on that score, Inspector. The letter’s here if you want to send a man round for it.”
And with that, Mr Chubb rang off. He felt, not for the first time, that his detective inspector might show more ready appreciation of his responsibilities.
Half an hour later, Constable Pooke arrived by bicycle at the Chief’s home.
He went to the side door by way of a gate bearing a white enamelled plate with the words ‘No Hawkers’. Pooke knew he was not a hawker and the thought that he could pass where a whole profession, however humble and even noxious, was barred, made the now sunny noon-tide all the more pleasing. He glanced approvingly at the hollyhocks and clematis that screened the front of the square, redbrick villa, and admired the authentic striped effect that meticulous mowing had imparted to the small lawn. There was another lawn at the back, bordered by rose beds and a number of rigidly disciplined fruit trees. Between two of these, Pooke glimpsed the tall, silver-haired figure of Mr Chubb. He was walking slowly in traversing movements over the grass and held before him what appeared to be a mine detector. As Pooke approached, he saw that the instrument was actually a long wooden stave with a shovel angled to its end. The chief constable, a breeder of Yorkshire terriers on a scale that even his fellow fanciers considered to verge on the immoral, was engaged on his daily Operation Cleansweep.
As Pooke waited respectfully for Mr Chubb to complete the last three traverses, he wondered where so many dogs could be corralled off. Their barking could be heard at some indeterminable distance. Within the house? Pooke—no hawker, he—paled at the thought.
However, the chief constable did not invite him in. He led him instead to a greenhouse where he retrieved the letter from its place of safety beneath a potted cactus and handed it to Pooke.
“Inspector Purbright asked if you would like a receipt, sir. In view of the letter being your personal property, sir.”
“That will not be necessary,” Mr Chubb said coldly. “My compliments to Mr Purbright, and will you tell him that I have decided the letter was misdirected. He must do with it as he thinks best.”
His grey gaze slid gently past the constable and settled upon a geranium, an errant shoot of which he reached across to pinch off. Pooke, feeling himself not merely dismissed but rendered non-existent, said “Sir”, all by itself, and departed.
It was not until mid-afternoon that a third letter, identical to those that had reached Mr Amblesby and Mr Chubb, arrived in the hands of its addressee, the editor of the Flaxborough Citizen.
George Lintz had been called the previous day to a conference at the London office of the group of newspapers that had bought the Citizen two years before. After sitting silently through the dismal and unintelligible wrangle that the Chairman described, with considerable neck, as ‘an inspirational get-together’, he had missed the last train back to Flaxborough. He had slept badly in an expensive and hostile hotel. Worst of all, his thoughtless use of the expired half of his day return ticket had been triumphantly challenged by the collector at Flaxborough station, a man who remembered well the vain plea he once had made to Lintz for the ke
eping of his shop-lifting mother-in-law’s name out of the paper.
Not unreasonably, Lintz was in a somewhat sour mood by the time he began to explore the pile of such news copy and correspondence as his editorial staff had felt unable to deal with on its own.
Having reached, read and pondered the ‘Dear Friend’ letter, he went to the door and summoned from an airless cubby-hole across the landing his chief reporter.
“What on earth is this bloody thing supposed to be about?”
The chief reporter, a narrow-faced, regretful-looking man with a probing fingertip permanently in one ear, offered no suggestion.
“What have you done with the photograph?” Lintz made a show of shuffling the papers on his desk top.
“There wasn’t one.”
“But it says here that whoever it is has enclosed a photograph. It’s clear enough. And look, there’s been something pinned to this corner.” Lintz held the letter aloft for two or three seconds, then tossed it down. “God, I don’t know...I’ve only to be out of the office five minutes and people start losing everything. Go and see if it’s got into the reporters’ room.”
“That’s all there was in the envelope. I opened it myself. Nothing but that. Definitely.”
Lintz leaned back, tilting his chair almost to the wall. “Well, it’s not very helpful, then, is it?”
“Definitely not.” The chief reporter now was looking not only sad but bored.
Lintz brought his chair level again with a bang. “Make a copy straight away. Then let me have that back. Don’t write anything yet. If it isn’t one of those bloody hoaxes we ought to get a decent little story out of it.”
“Oh, aye. Definitely.” The chief reporter could as well have been acknowledging the likelihood of string vests being splendid protection against death by lightning.
He returned with a copy forty minutes later.
Lintz put it into the top drawer of his desk and pocketed the original. He locked the desk while the chief reporter was still looking. Then he took his hat from a derelict gas bracket beside the door and went out.
The chief reporter listened to Lintz clatter briskly down the stairs. He again crossed the landing to his own cell and having wedged its broken chair into an angle of the wall he sat in it and went immediately to sleep.
It was four o’clock, that pleasant downward slope of the Flaxborough day from which the prospect of an end to work, one hour distant, was clear and comforting. Lintz emerged from the Citizen building into a street almost devoid of traffic. A couple of cars driven by women on their way to collect children from school went slowly past him and turned off into Park Street. An old man wearing a thick, blue fisherman’s jersey sat on the kerb looking as if he might decide at any moment to set about replacing the slipped chain of his bicycle. From the doorway of a grocery store stepped a bald-headed man in a white coat. He gazed up and down the street, spotted Lintz, and briefly raised his hand. Then he concentrated all his attention upon an empty wooden box that lay at one side of his doorway. After a long while he moved it with his foot three inches farther north and stepped back to review it again. He was still thoughtfully regarding the box when Lintz turned the corner into Fen Street.
The police station was thirty yards along, on the lefthand side. It belonged to the same period as the Municipal Buildings and the town’s wash-house (the latter recently demolished as a gesture of the council’s good faith in private, as distinct from public, hygiene). The style was Edwardian gothic; the material, that peculiarly durable stone which looks like petrified diarrhoea.
Lintz sought the entrance, which was halfway down a narrow passage at the side of the building. The small, rather sneaky doorway led to a dim corridor flagged with stone. On the right was a sliding window, a foot square, beneath a painted ‘Inquiries’ sign.
Lintz went straight past the window and to the end of the corridor, where he pushed open a green-painted door and entered a bare hall, also with a stone floor. The hall seemed to serve no purpose other than to collect a mixture of noises from adjoining compartments. He heard the click of billiard balls, the rattle of thick china, the echo of a steel door being slammed, and what seemed to be the distant but lively banter of a team of big men in a small bathroom.
There was an iron spiral staircase in the opposite corner. It sagged and clanked beneath Lintz’s weight as he climbed to the upper floor.
He found Inspector Purbright alone in an office furnished with a desk, a tall, chocolate-coloured filing cabinet, two fairly capacious chairs, and a piece of carpet big enough to underlie not only the desk but one of the chairs as well, if it was drawn close.
Purbright was not sitting close to the desk. He was too tall, too long-legged, to arrange himself otherwise than alongside it. As Lintz looked inquiringly round the door, the inspector turned to view him over his left shoulder.
“Mr Lintz—how nice.” He sounded genuinely pleased. A pen was forthwith capped and laid carefully beside some papers on the desk blotter. In Purbright’s other hand appeared an open cigarette packet. He leaned sideways across the desk, offering it.
“Now, then,” said Lintz, put just a fraction off-balance by the promptness of the inspector’s courtesy. He lit a match as slickly as he could manage. “How’s things?”
Purbright said they were so-so and conveyed by the rise of his eyebrows that the light extended by Lintz was the very thing he had been eagerly awaiting all afternoon.
These formal preliminaries observed, Flaxborough fashion, Lintz hastened to the substance of his call.
“We got a rather queer letter this morning...” He reached into his pocket.
“Did you, now?”
“It may be all balls, but I thought you’d better take a look.”
Purbright accepted the letter, unfolded it and read it through slowly. He put it down on the desk and continued to regard it while he stroked the back of his neck.
“I suppose,” he said at last, “that you get a certain amount of fairly screwy correspondence.” He saw Lintz start, as if offended, and said hurriedly: “What I mean is that I’d always understood that newspaper offices tend to attract the attention of cranks.”
“Yes, but they usually sign their names.”
“Oh—do they? So you think this one is uncharacteristic?”
“It’s something new to me. I shouldn’t have brought it in otherwise.”
“No, you did quite rightly, Mr Lintz. The trouble is that it doesn’t really tell us anything, does it?”
“Not really. But can’t these things be traced? I mean, I don’t think that’s meant as a joke. Whoever it is sounds—you know—serious, scared.”
Purbright suppressed the faint smile brought by his glimpse of Lintz’s ulterior professionalism. Mystery letter sets police puzzle. He shook his head.
“Virtually impossible in the ordinary way,” he said. “On the face of it, this is just a bit of vague persecution mania. There’s been no crime reported with which we could connect it.”
Lintz frowned. The affair was much less promising than he had allowed himself to hope.
“We’ll hang on to it,” Purbright said. “Make what inquiries we can. You never know.”
Lintz shrugged and quickly stood up, running the brim of his hat between finger and thumb until the hat was in the right position to be lifted and put on in one confident movement when he turned towards the door.
“You’ll let me know if...”
“If we turn anything up?” Purbright also was on his feet; he looked genially grateful. “Of course I shall.”
Lintz nodded and turned. Up swept his hat as he stepped to the door.
“Oh, just one little point...”
Lintz looked back. He saw Purbright with the letter again in his hand.
“Photograph,” Purbright said. “You didn’t happen to see a photograph with this did you?”
“There wasn’t one. I asked Prile about that. He’d opened it, actually. He was quite definite.”
“All right, Mr Lintz. Many thanks.”
