Charity Ends At Home f-5

by Colin Watson

  The others looked at him. His mouth shut again. He shook his head, frowned regretfully.

  A little later, a fresh thought animated Hive’s face. He sat straighter in his chair. “You know, the last time I was talking to that fellow, he practically threatened me. No, damn it, he did threaten me. I didn’t like it.”

  Miss Teatime looked anxious. Purbright asked: “What kind of threat did he make?”

  “Well, perhaps not a threat in so many words. But his attitude was extremely unpleasant. Guilty conscience, obviously. I wonder if I were to upset him a bit more...”

  “Now, do be careful, Mortimer.”

  Hive waved away Miss Teatime’s caution. He reached for the telephone that stood in the middle of the tea things.

  “Just a minute.” Half rising, Purbright laid a hand on his arm. “Is there an extension?”

  “That is the extension,” said Miss Teatime. “The switchboard is in the next room but one as you go away from the staircase. There will be no one there at the moment.”

  Purbright spoke to Hive. “Give me a few seconds, though I don’t expect he’ll give anything away over the phone. Try and make an appointment. That will give us time to arrange things.” He hurried to the door.

  In the other office, he lifted the receiver of the little one-line switchboard and heard Hive’s call ringing out. It was answered by a woman. Purbright recognized the voice of Doreen Booker.

  “May I speak to Mr Booker, please?”

  “Who is that?”

  “Hastings is my name.”

  “I’m afraid Mr Booker isn’t back yet.”

  “Are you expecting him shortly?”

  “Well, not really. He’ll be busy at the school until about seven.”

  “He’s there now, is he?”

  “That’s right. But I could get him to...”

  “I’m in a bit of a hurry, actually, Mrs Booker. If you could just give me the school number...”

  Purbright replaced the receiver and waited until he judged the second call to have been put through. On listening again, he heard only the breathing of Mr Hive and a succession of small, distant noises suggestive of a telephone left off its rest. Nothing else happened for quite a long time. Then he heard hasty footsteps, the closing of a door, the rumble of the picked-up phone.

  “Booker here...” The voice was guarded, but laden with annoyance.

  “Don’t ring off. This is extremely important.”

  A pause.

  “Who is that?”

  “Hastings—but don’t ring off. I’ve something urgent to tell you.”

  There was another interval. Purbright could hear faint shouts. They sounded like those of boys. A car engine was being started somewhere. The echoing slam of a distant door.

  “Are you listening?”

  No reply.

  “Dover—I said, are you listening?”

  “All right. What is it?” Booker sounded very close to the telephone mouthpiece; he spoke in a kind of curt, lipless murmur.

  “Don’t you know?” Purbright recognized that Hive was trying to put the right degree of casual menace into his tone, but all too obviously he was no expert.

  “The money? It’s there. I sent a boy.”

  “I don’t mean the money. I’m talking about Folkestone.”

  “I...don’t think I follow you.”

  “Folkestone—I know who he is.”

  “Well.”

  “He’s a man called Palgrove. His wife...”

  “Now look here, Hive; I’m not concerned with this business any more. It’s all forgiven and forgotten. You’ll have the rest of your money just as soon as I pick up your account. Or tell me what it is now, if you like, and I’ll put a cheque in the post tonight.”

  Purbright waited. Hive seemed to be undecided what to say.

  “Will that suit you?” Booker asked.

  “Well, it’s eighty-five guineas, actually. There’s been quite a lot of...”

  “It will be waiting for you when you get back to London tomorrow.”

  Again Hive hesitated. Purbright swore to himself. The man was hopeless, absolutely hope...

  “No.”

  It was Mr Hive’s voice, suddenly firm and challenging.

  “No, I am not going to be paid off like a taxi-driver. I consider that you owe me an explanation.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of, of...yes, all right, then—of this wretched woman’s murder!”

  Purbright gripped the phone close to his ear while he delved urgently with his free hand for paper and pencil. For what seemed a long time after he had found them, there came to him nothing but background sounds from the echoing corridors of the school.

  Then the cold, restrained voice of Booker.

  “This conversation is becoming a little too foolish to be continued over the telephone. I think you’d better come over here. Straight away, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Hello...” said Mr Hive, several times. There was no answer.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Om his return to Miss Teatime’s office, Purbright found Mr Hive in a mood approaching elation.

  “Ah, my dear Inspector! Did you hear that?” A sweeping gesture indicated the phone. “We are to beard him in his den!”

  “I don’t wish to discourage you, Mr Hive, but you must not expect too much from this interview. Booker strikes me as a very circumspect gentleman.”

  “That is exactly what I have been trying to tell him, Mr Purbright,” said Miss Teatime, who was gathering together the cups and saucers. “He is also very resourceful.” She caught the inspector’s eye and gave him a private little head-shake. Purbright saw that it was meant as an appeal for Mr Hive’s protection.

  “One thing must be understood,” Purbright said to Mr Hive. “In your own interests, you must avoid provoking this man too rashly. I shall keep as close to you as I can without arousing his suspicion. If he incriminates himself in my hearing, well and good. But for heaven’s sake don’t drive him into making an attack on you or anything like that.”

  Hive smiled. “My dear chap, this is no time for boasting, but if you think I have never before faced danger you are sadly mistaken. I have collected my fair share of honourable scars, as Lucy here will tell you.”

  “I will tell the inspector nothing of the sort, Mortimer. Neither bedroom nor bar-room wounds qualify for medals in this country, and even those have long since healed in your case. It is only your juvenile exuberance that is undiminished, and I am afraid that it will get you into trouble.”

  “Heavens above, woman! Would you have me grow old?” Hive threw back his shoulders. “I am a soldier of fortune, and justice”—he glanced winningly at Purbright—“is my new captain! Have I not just given up eighty-five guineas for him?”

  Suddenly he looked serious. “Do you suppose the court will recompense me for that? I mean, it is a legitimate fee, you know.”

  “There’s nothing to stop you suing the estate of a convicted felon, so far as I know,” said Purbright.

  Mr Hive looked dubious. “It would be rather like kicking a man when he was down, wouldn’t it? Those unspeakable bloody lawyers would get it, anyway.” He shrugged and took up his coat from the back of the chair.

  As the two men were leaving, Miss Teatime touched Hive’s sleeve. She looked at him earnestly.

  “Now, Mortimer—none of this Rupert of Hentzau nonsense. You promise?”

  Hive closed his eyes and for a moment of self-dedication held his hat against his breast. Then he twirled about and in three long, springing strides reached the door, which Purbright was holding open for him.

  They evolved their plan on the way to the school. Hive was to enter first, on his own. From a shop doorway opposite the school gates, Purbright would be able to keep him under observation while he walked up a short carriageway and through glass doors into the entrance hall. There he was to wait for Booker. In the hall were the doors of two, perhaps three, small interview rooms, and the inspector tho
ught that one or other of these rooms would almost certainly be Booker’s choice for a private talk. The staff room he obviously would avoid, as he would the headmaster’s study; and the various offices and storerooms were likely to be locked. Once Purbright had noted through which door Booker had taken his visitor, he would follow and do what he could to hear what was said.

  Hive’s final eager embellishment of these arrangements was his suggestion that he should pretend to be slightly deaf. “That will make him speak up, you see.”

  Purbright stood well back in his refuge, a space between the two display windows of a greengrocer and florist, and watched Hive step jauntily through the school’s gateway and up to the main entrance. One of the big plate-glass doors swung inwards and turned for an instant into a sheet of orange flame as it sent back the reflection of the evening sun.

  Remaining all the time within sight, Hive first made a tour of inspection. He looked at some pictures on the walls, glanced at all the doors in turn, and spent some time inspecting a display of pottery, docketed with pupils’ names, on a low table. He sat on a chair, nursed his knee, scratched his head, got up again, stretched. He walked slowly in a circle, head down, hands clasped behind; then took a turn in the opposite direction, head up, hands in pockets.

  Where the hell was Booker? Purbright gazed across at as many windows as were within range. The school appeared to have been voided completely. He concentrated on the entrance hall once more.

  Five minutes went by. Mr Hive had settled into a sort of sentry-go in the centre of the floor. Purbright guessed that he was clashing his foot at the turn in an effort to advertise his presence.

  Suddenly he saw him stop and face half-left. Someone had come into the hall from the farther end.

  The inspector watched intently. Hive was being approached, but by whom it was not yet possible to make out. It certainly did not look like Booker...No, it was a boy. Hive leaned and listened. The boy pointed the way he had come. Hive nodded. The boy went away again, swinging one arm round and round and giving a skip every now and then. As soon as the boy disappeared, Hive turned to face in Purbright’s direction and delivered himself of a great pantomimic shrug. Then he began to walk backwards, jerking his thumb like a hitch-hiker.

  Purbright judged from this performance that his guess about one of the interview rooms had been proved awry. Booker had had a different idea.

  The inspector broke cover, crossed the road, and cautiously approached the glass doors. He shouldered one open and slipped inside the hall. Of Hive there now was no sign.

  Keeping close to the wall on his left, he made his way towards the double doors near which he had last seen the gesticulating Hive. From somewhere beyond them came shouting, faint but unmistakeably boisterous, punctuated by sounds of human collision. Boys, thought Purbright. There were still boys in the building.

  Carefully he pushed one of the doors far enough back to enable him to peer up and down the corridor on to which it opened. To his left, the corridor was lined with long glass windows of classrooms. Their partitions, too, were of glass, giving an uninterrupted view to the end of the block. Every room was empty save one in which two aproned women were sweeping the floor.

  The right-hand section of corridor was shorter. It went past another empty classroom and then opened into a lobby. Purbright saw beams set with numbered pegs. The noises were louder now. They came from the other side of the lobby. Purbright walked towards it. He could smell the sweat of young males.

  As he entered the lobby, there tumbled into it through a doorway on the left three boys locked in a puppy-like tussle. They saw him, stopped yelling at one another, and disentangled.

  “I wonder,” the inspector said, “if you could tell me where I am likely to find Mr Booker.”

  The nearest boy tugged at his ravaged clothing and recovered his breath. He looked eager to help. “He might be still in the gym, sir.”

  “Shall I go and see, sir?”

  “Sir—I’ll go, sir!”

  Purbright raised a dissuading hand. “No, I only want to know where he is. I can find him if you’ll tell me which way to go.”

  There began a competitive babel of instruction. It was quelled partly by Purbright himself, partly by the arrival of an older boy whom he assumed to be a prefect. To him, the inspector put his question again.

  “He’s been taking an after-school coaching session, sir, but I think another gentleman is with him at the moment.”

  “That’s all right. It’s a friend of mine. They’re expecting me.”

  “Well, you just go through here, sir, and along that passage. The gym’s at the end of it.”

  Purbright thanked his helpers and crossed the lobby, hoping that helpfulness would not send any of them in pursuit; eavesdropping was distasteful enough without its being witnessed by small boys.

  Fortunately, the passage curved sufficiently for its further half to be out of sight from the lobby. Another feature that Purbright noted with satisfaction was the small observation window in the door of the gymnasium ahead.

  He reached the door and listened. He could hear nothing but the noise from the changing-room behind him. Warily, he peeped through the window. Bringing his eye close to the glass, he angled his head to command a view of one half of the room, then of the other.

  The gymnasium was empty.

  Purbright went in.

  It would not be quite true to say that he felt alarmed. By now, his was the sort of apprehension that is temporarily relieved by each postponement of discovery. But he knew that even in this many-doored building he would reach in the end some place whose entrance and exit were one. That was when mere unease might be turned on the instant to dismay.

  He glanced about him. Wall bars, hanging beams, a vaulting horse docile in one corner, a stack of long benches varnished to the colour of maple syrup, rolled up mats, looped ropes and captive rings, windows high out of harm’s way...

  And—of course—a door.

  This one was in the centre of the opposite wall, recessed between two sets of wall bars. It was painted battleship grey.

  Very gently, Purbright turned its bright brass handle and leaned a little of his weight against it. The door was locked.

  Still leaning, he pressed his ear to the wood.

  Nothing. No voices, certainly.

  He kept listening, puzzled by a silence that had something curiously vibrant about it, as if it had only just succeeded an explosion or a collapse. It was more like a long extended echo, sinister yet of unidentifiable origin. And surely there was a sound there, too..liqueous, lapping...

  Water.

  Purbright seized and twisted the handle and shook the door violently. He shouted, banged with foot and fist, then turned and raced back to the changing-room lobby.

  Five boys, dressed but still lingering, gazed incredulously at the spectacle of a mature adult at full gallop. Purbright halted in the passage entrance only long enough to take two gasps of breath and to wave the boys into close attendance before launching himself upon the return run.

  “Police officer...Want your help...” he called over his shoulder to the bunch of marvelling but game harriers.

  They burst in a body into the gymnasium.

  Purbright pointed up at one of the suspended beams.

  “Any of you know how to get that thing down?”

  “I do, sir!”

  “Let me, sir!”

  The volunteers rushed to unwind ropes from cleats and to pay them out. The beam began to descend. As soon as it was low enough, the inspector shouldered one end from its channel and swung the beam free.

  “Down a bit.”

  When the beam was level with the handle of the grey door, Purbright put up his hand.

  “Right—three of you one side, two with me on the other.”

  Gleefully, the boys took up their positions. Divination of what was about to happen swirled in their heads like the fumes of wine. A battering ram! And to smash down a door—a school door!


  They drew back the beam until it touched the wall bars behind, then braced themselves, half crouching, for the assault.

  “Right!” the inspector shouted.

  The beam met the door just to the right of its handle with the most satisfying crash the boys had ever heard in their lives. The door went back on its hinges like a flail. A spinning fragment of timber soared over their heads and clattered musically down the wall bars.

  Purbright let momentum help him rush forward through the breached doorway. He saw the blue shimmer of submerged tiles and sniffed chlorine.