Charity Ends At Home f-5

by Colin Watson

  Morgan, Mr Jobling explained to Love, was an employee who had just started a two weeks’ holiday in Italy. “Lucky chap,” said Love, and all agreed.

  That left Miss Jacinda Evanson, counter assistant.

  Love smiled at Miss Evanson as soon as she came into Mr Jobling’s little office. Nice, he said to himself. Dinky. She smiled back before lowering her eyes. Love didn’t know which he liked better—the smile or the intimation of modesty. In respect for the latter, he postponed indefinitely a certain piece of self-indulgence that the sight of a pretty girl usually induced: he did not mentally ping Miss Evanson’s suspender. He did, however, continue to watch with pleasure the delicately featured oval of her face, her little-sister shoulders, and hair like a bouquet of gleaming black dahlias.

  “Oh, rather,” said Miss Evanson. “I remember him all right. I didn’t like him. He was very bossy.”

  Swine, murmured an interior, pugilistic, Love. “And that’s why you remember him, is it?”

  “Well, not only that. I remember him because of the picture, partly.”

  “The picture of the lady?”

  “No, the other one. It wasn’t a proper photograph, you see. Just a picture cut out of a magazine or something. And I said, well that one won’t copy very well, and he said why, and I said, well it’s not a proper photograph, look, you can see it’s what we call a half-tone reproduction and it won’t copy, not really clear. And then he said, well I want it done just the same and thanks for the lecture but will you kindly get on with it Miss. So I said, just as you like then but don’t blame me if they look muzzy.”

  Socko! applauded Love’s inner self. “Do you think you could describe the fellow, Miss Evanson?” ‘Fellow’—that ought to please her.

  “Well, like I said—bossy. And sarcastic. He was dreadfully rude the second time he came in. You know, when one of the pictures had got lost.”

  “Yes, but what did he look like?”

  The girl considered, frowning. “Well...” She gave a shrug. “Nothing much to look at, really. Sort of young middle-aged, not tall, a bit pasty looking...oh, and pop-eyed—I noticed that. His suit could have done with a press, too.”

  “Colour of eyes?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I wasn’t all that bothered.”

  Secretly gladdened, Love wrote down ‘eyes, mud-coloured’.

  He looked up. “Hair?”

  “Didn’t notice that, either. I’m not sure that he had much.” A tiny breeze of amusement was in her voice.

  ‘Hair, thin, mousey,’ wrote the sergeant. He raised the pencil and casually scratched at his own fertile hair line. “Anything else you can remember?”

  She said there wasn’t and half rose from her chair.

  “Just a minute, Miss Evanson...” (hirsute Love, not bossy but masterful) “...there’s just this question of the picture, the one he wanted the twenty copies of. Now do you think you could describe the person it showed?”

  “Oh, but”—she leaned forward in eagerness to stop him writing down something wrong—“it wasn’t a person. It was a dog.”

  The sergeant blinked. “A what?”

  “A dog. A little woolly dog. Begging.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Inspector Purbright sipped tea from a cup of the frailest china, patterned with forget-me-nots. At first taste, he had fancied there was a curious, faintly spirituous smell about it, but this seemed to have worn off.

  “What you have told me,” he said to Mr Hive, sitting opposite, “interests me very much indeed. You are absolutely sure, are you, that the man you now know to be Palgrove did not move from that cottage during the whole time you were watching, from ten-thirty onwards?”

  “Absolutely.”

  After a somewhat edgy start, Hive’s response to Purbright’s questions had grown increasingly confident. He was now openly enjoying himself.

  Miss Teatime, seated like a referee at the third side of the table, found that no intervention was needed beyond the handing of fresh cups of tea. She was so pleased that her two good friends had taken to each other.

  “Didn’t he leave the room at all?” asked Purbright.

  “Only twice. Presumably to see a man about St Paul’s.”

  “To...?”

  “To have a slash, Inspector,” said Miss Teatime, in a kindly aside.

  “You are quite happy, then, Mr Hive, that between half past ten that night and three o’clock the following morning Palgrove could not possibly have paid a visit to his home in Flaxborough.”

  “Not the slightest chance of it.”

  Purbright sighed. “There is something to be said for being put under observation by a conscientious inquiry agent, it seems. Mr Palgrove is a singularly lucky man.”

  “Do you mean he was going to be arrested for poor Mrs Palgrove’s murder?” Miss Teatime looked shocked.

  “That was a possibility.”

  Miss Teatime reached and patted Hive’s arm. “You see, Mortimer? Are you not glad that I dissuaded you from rushing back to London?”

  Mr Hive smiled a little sheepishly. The inspector noticed. “Had you made arrangements to return before today?”

  “I was going yesterday, as a matter of fact. But there have been so many counter-attractions.”

  “I trust they will not diminish. I’m going to need you.”

  “No, no—I must leave tomorrow. I shall be desolate, but I really must.”

  “Surely a few more hours will not make all that difference, Mr Hive. You’ve said yourself that your assignment here came to an end before you expected.”

  Mr Hive looked uncomfortable. “I don’t wish to appear obstructive, but my first duty is to my client.”

  “The man who hired you to keep an eye on Palgrove?”

  “His wife and Palgrove. Yes.”

  “But he isn’t your client any longer.”

  “Until he pays up, he is.”

  “Mortimer very foolishly made this man a promise,” interposed Miss Teatime. “He undertook to leave Flaxborough not later than tomorrow.”

  “Do you know why he was anxious for you to go?”

  Not liking to admit that he had been so culpably undetectivelike as to have spared the point no thought, Mr Hive remained silent. Miss Teatime, however, turned a glinting eye to Purbright and said: “But you know, Inspector, do you not?”

  “I think so,” said Purbright, quietly.

  Miss Teatime looked at Mr Hive again. “It clearly is your duty, Mortimer, to tell the inspector this man’s name.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Purbright said. “I know his name. It’s Booker. Kingsley Booker. He is a master at the Grammar School. Indeed, both you and I, Mr Hive, met him there the other night.” He paused. “If you remember.”

  “I remember very well,” said Mr Hive, a trifle huffily. “It was Tuesday—the night I was telling you about...” Suddenly he frowned. “Here—but how do you know about Booker?”

  “I have spoken with his wife.”

  “More than I’ve done.” Hive’s tone had something about it of the regret of a gamekeeper restricted to a diet of boiled fish.

  “Did you ever get your camera back?” Purbright asked.

  “I did. Some idiot had hidden it in a cupboard.”

  “And the car—did you find out who did that?”

  Mr Hive shrugged. “I suppose it’s just a high-spirited sort of town.” He added: “Like Gomorrah.”

  “No, no, Mr Hive. As a good detective, you have already decided that these things were not fortuitous. You have seen them as part of a systematic attempt to keep you away from that cottage at Hambourne Dyke.”

  “Yes, well...”

  “You have also recognized as belonging to the same scheme the way you were manoeuvred that evening—of all evenings—into taking part in that brains trust thing.”

  By a gesture of good-natured resignation, Mr Hive conveyed that his cleverness had, indeed, been found out.

  “And then, when you had persisted despite al
l obstacles in carrying your assignment through, you must have seen your brusque dismissal as a sign of your client’s dismay at the frustration of his plans.”

  “True,” said Mr Hive.

  The inspector paused to take another drink of tea and to consider where the flood of hindsight, released by Palgrove’s elimination, was leading him.

  He looked up at Miss Teatime. “What do you know about Mr Booker?”

  “My impression,” she said after some reflection, “is that he is a pedagogue of the rather more obnoxious kind. Even among professional committee sitters, he is noticeably arrogant, prudish, sententious, intolerant and ambitious. His uncharitableness is of the order that ensures rapid preferment in the sphere of social welfare.”

  “He is an animal lover?”

  “That, too.”

  “But not,” Purbright added, “one inclined to sympathize with the objects of the Flaxborough and Eastern Counties Charities Alliance?”

  Miss Teatime gave no sign of finding the question mischievous. “He has been very difficult,” she said, simply.

  “With what organizations is he officially connected?”

  “The doggy ones, mostly.”

  “The Four Foot Haven, for instance?”

  “He is the vice-chairman.”

  “So he would be a collaborator of Mrs Palgrove?”

  “That is so, Inspector.”

  There slotted into place in Purbright’s mind something that Leonard Palgrove had said—or half-said—on being asked to enumerate his wife’s regular visitors. Oh, and a school teacher called...Hastily he had altered the description to ‘something to do with insurance’. Can’t remember his name. Naturally not. Mistress’s husband. Booker.

  He turned to Mr Hive. “Were you surprised when Mrs Booker failed to arrive at the cottage on Tuesday night?”

  “Very surprised. It was a most elaborately arranged assignation. Really beautifully done. The idea was that she was supposed to be spending the night at Nottingham...but perhaps I told you?”

  “That’s exactly where she did spend the night.”

  “Good lord!”

  “Her husband saw to it that she was on the train with that friend of hers. He took her to the station.”

  Hive looked angrily incredulous. Booker’s offence against professional ethics plainly was something new in his experience.

  “Ah,” said Purbright, “I see you’ve reached the correct inference already. You were employed by Booker for no other purpose than to learn in advance of a specific arrangement by Palgrove and Doreen Booker to spend a night together. Booker knew that he had only to prevent his wife at the last minute from keeping the appointment for Palgrove to be stranded for the night, or for the relevant part of it, with no means of proving that he had not been at home murdering his wife. Better still, from Booker’s point of view, was the strong likelihood that Palgrove would actually try and provide himself with an alibi for the sake of his respectability—an alibi that was bound to be disproved once a murder investigation got under way.

  “Now we can see, Mr Hive, why your perseverance beyond the point at which Booker wanted you to quit was so embarrassing to him.”

  Hive had been listening with a look of judicious agreement. At the last, however, it was succeeded by a frown.

  “You know, what’s rather puzzled me right from the beginning,” he said, “is why Booker picked on Mrs P. I’ve thought a lot about this, but I can’t quite see the logic.”

  “Now, Mortimer,” said Miss Teatime, “you must stop hiding your light under a bushel. False modesty does not deceive a shrewd young police inspector as it might me. Admit that you know perfectly well why Mr Booker behaved as he did. Or am I to guess and will you say if I am right?”

  Mr Hive accepted one of Purbright’s cigarettes. “All right, Lucy. You guess.”

  “I have mentioned already,” began Miss Teatime, “that Mr Booker impresses me as an uncharitable man. That means that he is insensitive and therefore likely to lack consideration for others. I have also said that he is arrogant. With arrogance goes jealousy and a tendency to be vengeful. Someone has stolen his wife—very well, that man must lose his. But as he obviously does not much value her, the account must be balanced by extra payment. What more fitting than conviction for murder—and what more convenient to arrange? The life of some perfectly innocent, if not particularly endearing woman is an irrelevancy in the reckoning of a gentleman such as Mr Booker.”

  Hive glanced at the inspector, who nodded thoughtfully (he was thinking of a certain confiscated radio set).

  “Full marks, Lucy,” said Hive.

  The inspector added his congratulations, which Miss Teatime hastened to say were undeserved as she had merely tried to echo what was in the mind of her good friend Mortimer.

  “I wonder,” said Purbright, “if you’d care to try another piece of mental divination—you do seem rather good at it—and tell me what you suppose was in Mrs Palgrove’s mind when she wrote this.”

  He passed to her one of the ‘Dear Friend’ letters.

  “Before you read it, I should mention that we are quite satisfied as to its authenticity in spite of its not being signed. So long as it was Palgrove who was assumed to have killed his wife, the letter made perfect sense, even if some of the phrasing is a bit queer. But what now? How on earth was she induced to write such a thing?”

  Miss Teatime put on a pair of spectacles. They made her look more benign than ever, until one noticed behind the lenses a certain gleam of eager alertness. Purbright was reminded of a village librarian scanning a passage of Henry Miller.

  When she had finished, Miss Teatime removed her glasses and looked straight at Purbright. She was smiling.

  “Why, Inspector, this is a standard piece of modern public relations technique. In the charity field, of course. I remember that the Canine Rescue League used an almost identical device not very long ago.

  “It is a whimsical method of soliciting donations, you see.” She tapped the paper with her spectacles. “The letter purports to have been penned by a dog—representative, as it were, of all dogs everywhere that are in danger of being put to sleep to satisfy human convenience. A picture of the beast is appended, as a rule, in order to sharpen the appeal to the emotions. Sometimes there is a paw-print at the bottom—very heart-tugging, you must agree.”

  Purbright tried not to look deflated. “Then that letter had nothing to do with Mrs Palgrove’s death? It was just coincidence that a number of people received it on the same day as she was killed?”

  “It is for you to decide that, inspector. For my own part, I should be inclined to be wary of coincidences.”

  Purbright thought a while. Then he said: “We shall probably never know for certain, but it is quite conceivable that it was Booker who devised the letter and prevailed upon Mrs Palgrove to type out copies. These he undertook to post for her. He could have kept them until the right moment arrived, removed the attached photographs—you’ll notice the pin holes, by the way—and then sent them, or some of them, to the people he thought would best serve his purpose. I think it was originally his intention to substitute for the animal photograph a print of a picture of Mrs Palgrove herself. We know that he ordered three such copies from a Nottingham firm, but something went wrong and they were not delivered in time.”

  Miss Teatime was looking at him wonderingly.

  “You are being remarkably frank with us, Inspector.” The observation was really a question.

  “What you mean,” said Purbright, “is that I am being remarkably indiscreet. You may be right, but in saying these things to Mr Hive I prefer to think of myself as confiding in a professional colleague.”

  Hive smiled at his finger ends and forthwith gave them the treat of a wander over his moustache.

  “The point is,” the inspector went on, “that I am faced with a considerable difficulty. It is from Mr Booker that an indiscretion is required, not from me. But how is he going to be persuaded to commit one? What
evidence we have against him is in solution, so to speak: it needs one admission from him round which to crystallize.”

  For several moments, nobody said anything.

  Then Mr Hive cleared his throat. “Suppose...”