by Colin Watson
The chief constable let the point go.
“No, I agree with you that luring is the aspect that we must concentrate on,” said Purbright shamelessly. “The spontaneous departure theory will hardly work for two cases in the same town within so short a time. Can we have another look at your point of view about both ladies having been matrimonially available?”
“Your point, Mr Purbright.”
“I think we shall find that an offer of marriage has figured at some stage in each case. It’s the only bait I can think of that would have worked in the circumstances.”
“So they might now be married?”
“Not unless they used false names. We did make the appropriate inquiries, you know.”
“In that case, I don’t see that these hypothetical proposals of marriage can be of much help to us, Mr Purbright. They are scarcely likely to have been made before witnesses.”
“There could be written references to them. We know that neither of these women went out very much. Miss Reckitt’s landlady said Martha was almost a recluse and Mrs Bannister certainly didn’t share in any social whirls. It would be quite in character for a latter-day courtship to be conducted by correspondence. They’d both tend to be secretive, and a middle aged woman will often derive quite a lot of excitement from letter writing. Look at some of our poison pen customers.”
The chief constable stared gloomily at the middle of the floor as if he found in the carpet pattern a representation of human perversity. Yorkshire terriers—of which, to Purbright’s abiding horror, Mr Chubb had nine—might have a wayward attitude to carpets but they did not post anonymous letters.
“You’ll remember, sir,” Purbright was saying, “that we found nothing in the way of a lead among Miss Reckitt’s things, but we weren’t likely to, anyway. The landlady had the impression that she kept all her letters in her handbag. I’ve more hopes of Mrs Bannister’s place. She had the house to herself, so there was no need for her to worry about prying.”
“You know, Mr Purbright, you’re quite an expert on female psychology. I trust you will never be tempted to turn it to nefarious account.”
The inspector accepted the pleasantry graciously and with some thankfulness. It meant that Mr Chubb had had his fill of information and theorizing for one day—perhaps for the week—and would be content to leave Purbright to get on with things in his own way.
He took his leave, collected Sergeant Love from the small, boot-loud canteen, and picked up from his desk the key labelled by the scrupulous Mr Scorpe, to 4 Cadwell Close.
“It isn’t one of those human remains things, is it?” the sergeant asked as they were driving along St Ann’s Place.
“I sincerely hope not, Sid.”
Purbright was never quite sure whether Love’s questions were prompted by timidity or morbid zest. The sergeant was by no means as young as he looked—if he were, he would be wearing a school cap. And he had that cherubic innocence of expression that usually betokens highly developed licentiousness. But not, Purbright knew, in his case—his face was just his misfortune; he really was without vice. On the other hand, the innocent had the most extraordinary capacity for probing horrors. They could make pets of maggots and alleys of eye-balls.
The search of the house did not take very long. Reports of Mrs Bannister’s neatness had not been exaggerated. Purbright and the sergeant first toured the rooms in turn. The bay windowed front room contained only a three-piece suite in brown leather cloth; a piano with very white keys and three framed photographs on its top; a highly polished but elderly wireless set; and a china cabinet occupied by a thick, gold-lustre coffee service, half a dozen sherry glasses and a pair of pink urns bearing arcadian views. In the living room were dining table and chairs, a fireside chair and a sideboard, older and heavier than the rest of the furniture. Purbright glanced briefly into its cupboards and three drawers. In the bottom drawer he glimpsed papers, books, envelopes.
“We’ll come back to that in a minute, Sid.”
Two of the bedrooms were unfurnished, except for a bare bedstead and a marble washstand in the larger one. The third bedroom was obviously Mrs Bannister’s. The pink satin counterpane over the made bed was uncreased but it bulged slightly near the top at one side. Purbright pulled back the covers. A folded nightdress lay beneath them.
Love opened the door of the mahogany wardrobe. Five dresses hung there, a black coat, two woollen skirts and a tweed costume. On the floor were four pairs of shoes. Purbright pushed back the door by which they had entered the room. He saw the blue dressing gown hanging from it. A moment later Love heard him moving in the bathroom across the landing, then he was back again.
“Toothbrush and toothpaste are still there,” Purbright said. He began looking through the chest of drawers.
“She can’t have taken many of these, either. If any.”
Love felt faintly guilty as he watched the turning over of stockings and blouses and underwear. The things were surprisingly brief and frilly. He somehow had expected long sleeved vests and bloomers in tans and butcher blue.
Then he saw the inspector pause in his search.
Purbright straightened up. He was holding three sheets of note-paper that he had found tucked beneath handkerchiefs. Each was a brief letter beginning: “Lilian, My Dear...” None bore an address. Each was subscribed: “Your Impatient Rex.”
Love looked admiringly at the way in which Purbright handled the letters; he had slipped on a pair of white cotton gloves.
“Thinking of prints, eh?” said Love.
“Dabs, Sid, surely. Do let’s be professional.” He finished reading the first letter and put it gently on the counterpane. The sergeant looked down at the round, clear writing.
Lilian, My Dear—I wonder if you can imagine how much our little stroll together meant to me. It is so true all that about “sermons in streams and books in trees and good in everything”. At least, I see it is true when you are with me. Isn’t the country marvellous? What a lot I was missing up there in my big Mayfair flat. Now I do nothing but dream of our little cottage. I am seeing the agent again tomorrow and I hope to have good news from my publisher before the end of the week. It is just this matter of the deposit that is a teeny bit awkward. But do not worry, my true one. We cannot have a Cloud in those clear eyes, can we?! Until Tuesday.
Your Impatient Rex.
“Bloody hell,” muttered Sergeant Love.
Purbright raised his eyes. “Ah, you’ve spotted the misquotation. If Rex is an author he’ll have to do better than that.”
He placed the second letter on the bed.
Lilian, My Dear—I took a trip, or pilgrimage should I say? to the church this morning. How right you are, what a noble edifice and how fitting for vows unto death. I think I must use the scene for my next novel. Thank you for lending me back those earlier letters. I was right, I think, they do contain some phrases that ought to be worked into the book. You see what inspiration you give me!! And here is some good news. My publisher sent me a long telegram this morning begging me not to consider the oiler from that big rival I told you about. He says he will personally send me two thousand pounds (think of that, Lilian!) out of his own private fortune if his other directors do not manage to raise the money before Settling Day, as they call it “on Change” (you remember I told you about that). What a pity publishers are the slaves of the City these days. Art should be far above that sort of thing. Anyway, I tell you all this so you can feel easy about the little “investment in our happiness” that you want to make. You will see that I am right when I say you have a “business head” on those graceful shoulders!! By the way, the agent say that cash
will
be best—these “country swains” are suspicious of cheques! Goodnight, a sweet goodnight, my dear. I will be waiting tomorrow at Our Tree.
Your Impatient Rex.
P.S. The agent also tells me that he thinks our “enemy” will withdraw his bid for the cottage once our deposit is paid. Good-O!
&n
bsp; The third letter was more brief.
Lilian, My Dear—Something has “cropped up”, as they say. That literary luncheon in Town has been brought forward to Wednesday. What a nuisance! but my publisher says it cannot be helped because J. B. Priestley couldn’t manage Friday so you will understand I am sure. Come to Our Tree on Friday at seven and I shouldn’t be surprised if I bring “something special” from a certain merry goldsmith in Old London Town!!
Your Impatient Rex.
“Exit Mrs Bannister,” said Purbright. “Via Our Tree.” He folded the letters and slipped them into an envelope before peeling off the white cotton gloves.
“He certainly writes like an author,” Love said. The inspector gave him a shocked stare.
Downstairs, Purbright emptied the contents of the sideboard drawer upon the dining table. They consisted mainly of household bills and receipts for small amounts, insurance documents, old building society records, recipes snipped from magazines, ageing snapshots and detergent circulars. In a separate envelope was correspondence relating to the sale of the house. There were also two bank statements covering a fairly lengthy time and a cheque book with seven cheques remaining. Mrs Bannister clearly had not made frequent use of her bank’s services. All the better, thought Purbright.
He turned back the counterfoils, one by one. The uppermost, dated a month previously, was marked “Self”, a withdrawal of four hundred pounds.
The “investment in happiness”, obviously.
There followed stubs recording payments to the borough council—rates, presumably—and to such other unexciting bodies as water and electricity boards, an insurance company and a mail order house.
Only one counterfoil related to a transaction that could not be immediately dismissed as orthodox.
Its date was four months old; the amount, twenty guineas; the payee, Sylvia Staunch.
Purbright looked at it for several seconds. He turned to Sergeant Love.
“Have you any notion, Sid, of who Miss or Mrs Sylvia Staunch happens to be?”
Love pondered. He pulled at his smooth, pink, cherubic cheek.
“It rings a bloody bell,” he said at last.
Chapter Three
Flaxborough. What a nice name. Long before the London train pulled in behind the Gothic extravagance of Flaxborough station’s façade—before even it had rumbled across points somewhere north of Derby and settled to a smooth pace on a lonely line towards the ever enlarging, ever brightening skies of eastern England—Miss Lucilla Teatime had decided that Flaxborough was going to be very much to her taste.
She was ready for a change, for a withdrawal from familiar places and the familiar round. That round, she warned herself, had been on the point of catching up with her lately. And if one wanted to preserve one’s independence and interest in life, it didn’t do to be caught up with.
A slight sense of disloyalty—a twinge, merely—had visited her with the decision to leave London for a while. She had spent nearly all her life there and with keen enjoyment. Her physical health remained excellent and she was fairly sure that she was as alert as ever. But she realized that she was not necessarily the best judge of that. There had been one or two occasions in the past year when a lapse of memory or of shrewdness had put her at a temporary disadvantage. In a way, she was thankful for them; they were timely signals of the danger of complacency.
Londoners, Miss Teatime reflected now in the cosy solitude of her first-class compartment, did tend to be complacent. It explained their gullibility. The cleverness one needed to be an active component of that vast turbulent city was so obvious that the possibility of being outsmarted was unthinkable. Hence the success of so many hard-headed provincials in creaming off their fortunes in London before the natives realized that they hadn’t come just for a football match and a look at the pigeons.
No, it would do her no harm to spend a spell away from dear, parochial old London. Her faculties needed a stretch. Something fresh, something challenging was indicated.
She looked out of the window. Huge rectangles of cultivated land, bordered by long, cleft-like drains and low hedges, succeeded one another as far as the misty, blue-grey horizon. The clusters of farm buildings, lying at what seemed miles apart, looked clean and symmetrical and efficient. Not in the least picturesque. Miss Teatime thought of the farms pictured in television commercials for processed foods and smiled at the simple faith of the city dweller.
Not a smock in sight. The place seemed depopulated. Only the occasional scarlet flash of a tractor crawling over the black acres testified to human activity. She gazed to the landscape’s indistinct, lavender-coloured rim. It was smudged with clumps of trees and spiked, here and there, with steeples—mere thorns they seemed against the vastness of the sky.
Miss Teatime picked up the book on the seat beside her. Barrington-Hoole’s Guide to Eastern England. She began to glance through its illustrations and soon came to a scene that corresponded almost exactly with the view through the carriage window. She felt pleased with herself and with the book too, and turned to the chapter on Flaxborough.
It confirmed what she had been told already: that Flaxborough was a market town of some antiquity with a remarkable record of social and political intransigence. The Romans had lost a legion there; the Normans had written it off as an incorrigible and quite undesirable bandit stronghold; while the Vikings—welcomed as kindred spirits and encouraged to settle—had fathered a population whose sturdy bloodymindedness had survived every attempt for eight centuries to subordinate and absorb it.
Flaxborough was blessed, she read, with steady and well-founded prosperity. There was no reason to suppose that this would diminish while the town was surrounded by a thousand square miles of rich farming land. It had docks (its river, as the Vikings had been delighted to discover, was navigable) and food factories and a plastics industry.
Municipal tradition was colourful. Of the two hundred and five mayors who had held office since the extortion of a charter of incorporation from a hard-up sixteenth-century king, twenty-three had been knighted, one canonized (in genuine error, some historians claimed), six had risen to eminence in the New World and four had been hanged in the Old. To the borough’s freemen still nominally belonged the privilege of emptying a chamber pot from the balcony of the Assembly Rooms once a year on the mayor’s birthday, but the requirement of there being marshalled beneath “twelve able-bodied paupers of the parish” had fallen into desuetude. Not so the observance of the ceremony of “pudding tussle”. There were still, apparently, plenty of willing contestants in this curious All Souls’ Day version of a football match, in which a ring of black pudding was booted to disintegration in the Market Place—symbolic, said wishfully thinking antiquarians, of a communal intolerance of maidenheads.
By the time she had absorbed all this and more, equally stimulating information, about the town she had elected to visit, Miss Teatime became aware of a change in the rhythm of the train’s wheels. It had slowed and become disjointed. She looked up. A water tower and a warehouse glided by, followed by a dilapidated engine shed. Trucks crowded up to the window and fell away again with a noise like the clucking of iron poultry. Across the emptiness of a goods yard she glimpsed pantiled roofs, red in the sun as country apples, and beyond them a church tower, honey-sunned and sharply tangible in clear air.
“Saint Laurence’s,” murmured Miss Teatime, happily confident.
She carried her two cases, which were not heavy enough to be troublesome, across the high, arched foot bridge and past the ticket office. She gave her ticket and a warm smile to the man leaning casually by the window. He looked more like a sailor than a railwayman. His calm, appraising stare followed her out of the booking hall. For her age, Lucy Teatime was remarkably trim and handsome. People instinctively approved of her, for there was in her appearance the flattering suggestion that she had taken pains to spare one personally the spectacle of yet another dumpy, disgruntled, defeated old woman.
For her part,
she regarded self preservation (short of courting grotesqueness) to be as much a public duty as a private pleasure. Decrepit bodies were no less offensive than decrepit buildings; tasteless clothes as inexcusable as ugly shop fronts. There ought to be inspectors, she told herself sometimes, with power to demand the production of a lipstick or to serve a bosom restitution order.
Outside the station she looked round for a taxi, then changed her mind. London habit was here an extravagance, almost an eccentricity. One could walk without being mown down, so why not? Anyway, there wasn’t a taxi in sight.
She crossed the station square and began walking up the narrow lane that opened from it and led to where she could see an intersecting stream of cars and buses. This, she remembered from the guide map, would be East Street, at the other end of which was the Roebuck, the hotel she had selected for no better reason than that of liking its name.
East Street was a much busier thoroughfare than she had anticipated. It did not justify her optimism in regard to pedestrian safety. The footpath was about three feet wide, a mere ledge from which one was in constant danger of being extruded into the wheeled torrent. It was only when Miss Teatime found opportunity to look into the faces of her fellow walkers and see there either bland indifference or, just as often, a lively amusement at the expressions of desperately braking drivers, that she took courage from the discovery that the whole thing was really a game—a contemporary version of bear-baiting. She relaxed a little and turned part of her attention to the shops.
