by Colin Watson
“So you see we are not looking for an ordinary criminal,” Purbright went on. “We seek a man who can pose convincingly as an author, probably as a clergyman, and possibly as other romantic things. It would be interesting to know what he is at the moment.”
“A surgeon,” suggested Love, a quick learner.
“Aye, very likely. Plenty of tuck in his jacket sleeve to show off long, sensitive hands, and a sprinkle of Dettol behind the driving seat.”
“What about a secret agent?”
Purbright looked dubious. “Strictly for mentally retarded shop girls, I would have thought. Our man’s a cut above trading on the Bond syndrome.”
“Clever,” Love said, “the way he covered his tracks by getting those letters back from Mrs Bannister.”
“Quite. And we’ve got precious little from the three he didn’t recover. Not even a print, apparently. I wonder how they corresponded between meetings. Without his having to give his address away, I mean.”
“Through some sort of box number, maybe. Could have been the post office.”
“Box number...” Purbright murmured. For some reason, the thought of twenty-one pounds insinuated itself. Twenty guineas. The professional touch. Guineas. Fee. Client.
“Sid,” he said suddenly, “isn’t there one of those matrimonial agencies somewhere in town?”
The question seemed to take a second or two to register. Then Love straightened in his chair.
“That name...”
“What name?”
“On the cheque. Stench...Staunch.” He snapped his fingers. “That’s it—she runs a marriage bureau thing somewhere in Northgate. Where the Liberal Club used to be.”
Purbright rewarded the sergeant with a beam of affability, then looked at his watch. “I’ll go over now. What do you think I ought to ask for, a catalogue?”
Northgate was one of Flaxborough’s more run-down thoroughfares. Older people could remember when it had been “select”—the preserve of the kind of shopkeepers who saw their customers to the door and sent accounts headed “Bot. of...” At one time as many as four of its tall, double-fronted houses had been graced with the brass plates of doctors. No inn had ever been suffered there, and no chapel either, for Northgate’s residents and men of business held in equal abhorrence the vulgarity of public victualling and Methodism’s shrill abstinence. It was a street in which one could picture the aristocratic chemists having actually made up prescriptions from the great jars of gilded porcelain and the gigantic tincture bottles in their windows. There would have been a traffic in hat boxes and packets of gingerbread and Gentlemen’s Relish on the way home to side doors lettered in enamel No Hawkers: No Circulars.
But all that was long ago. With the shift of the town’s commercial axis to East Street on the other side of the river, first prosperity and then dignity had drained from Northgate like sap from a tree. The doctors had departed and their mansions had become tenements or the offices of car accessory firms. Behind the engrimed bow windows of chemists and saddlers and confectioners, there went on the dark labour of cycle repairers and the renovators of sofas. The premises of what once had been the town’s most magnificent provisions store now housed on one floor a refrigeration plant and some tons of frozen fish fingers and on the others the biggest stockpile of bottled sauce east of Manchester. As for the ban, so long sustained, upon Nonconformists and their bleak, hideous architecture, revenge had been taken by the enlargement with corrugated iron and match-boarding of the former carriage house of old Doctor Sanderson into a mission hall, complete with neon cross and posters that repeated the more offensive remarks of Old Testament prophets.
It was the baleful keening of the mission’s congregation (its apparently permanent session embraced the rarest intervals of silence) that droned through the thin walls to Purbright’s ear as he entered Northgate from Farrier Street. Drawing nearer its source, he wondered why religion—the western kind, anyway—laid such stress upon giving God praise. Never sympathy.
He crossed the road. It was pleasant to be warmed by the late afternoon sunshine and the inspector did not hurry. He did not despise seedy streets. Each had points of interest peculiar to itself. In Northgate there was a herbalist’s, for instance. He stopped at the narrow, dark window, and peered at the little piles of crumbled leaves and crushed root set out on kitchen saucers, each with a hand written reference to the organic effect promised. Especially intriguing was the card against slippery elm. “Makes delicious blancmange and is invaluable to the Family Planner (instructions over the counter).”
Farther along was a tobacconist’s. A row of tiny snuff bottles bore such names as Seven Dials, Senator, Barbara’s Muff, Voltaire and Pillycock. There was a photograph of Edgar Wallace above six dusty, foot-long cigarette holders looped to a display card. “The Latest Novelty,” proclaimed a ticket on a pipe fashioned in the likeness of a can-can dancer’s leg.
He glanced into another window and wondered what possible trade could be represented by the display there of a potted geranium, a hank of clothes line and a carton containing two dozen bottles of syrup of figs. Its air of surrealism was not dispelled by the printed announcement, gummed to the glass: Wardrobes Bought.
“Morning, brother.”
Purbright turned. A thin, black-clad figure perched on a bicycle was wobbling over the road towards him.
“Good afternoon, Mr Leaper.”
The cyclist wore a clerical collar but he was obviously very young. He alighted and acknowledged Purbright’s correction with a half smile and a quick, nervous nod. Although he gave the impression of being eager about something, he ventured no further remark, but stood holding his handlebars and staring at the front tyre.
“Lovely in the sun,” Purbright said, and began to walk on.
“Yes,” said Leaper. “I’ve still some calls to do.”
The inspector watched him bend to his peddling and rapidly disappear up the street. He was sceptical about the calls. The Reverend Leaper’s charge was, in fact, the Eastgate mission, and its communicants were never anywhere else to be called on. “Out for a breather, I suppose,” Purbright concluded.
After a few more minutes’ walk, he reached a part of the pavement that broadened back to where a four storeyed building stood on its own. Tall railings flanked the three steps that led to double doors standing open in the shelter of a stone portico.
This was, or rather once had been, the Flaxborough Radical Club. It was said that Mr Gladstone had cut a rose from the bush that still grew in the little earth enclosure beside the steps.
Just inside the doors was a list of the offices above. Purbright looked vainly for the name Staunch or reference to a matrimonial agency. Then he noticed at the far end of the stone-flagged entrance hall an illuminated sign. It hung over a doorway and bore two words in bright green Gothic lettering on a pink ground.
“Handclasp House”.
Chapter Five
Purbright pushed open the door. He entered a small square room, carpeted from wall to wall in dark grey. A paler, pinkish grey was the colour of the hessian-like material that covered the walls. There hung from the ceiling a plain white globe. Three chairs in mushroom plastic were the only furniture. The place was like an optician’s waiting room—neutral, reticent.
Set diagonally across the far corners of the square were two more doors. A little orange bulb glowed in the centre of each. Purbright approached the door on his right. Like the other, it bore a notice.
When this light is on, MR DONALD STAUNCH is at the service of any gentleman who wishes to know how we can work to help him. Come straight in and make yourself at home.
He crossed to the other door, and read:
When this light is on, the free and friendly advice of MRS SYLVIA STAUNCH is available to our lady callers. Don’t knock: come in and have a chat with her.
Clever, thought Purbright. He could not have devised a better formula himself to avoid the unfortunate ambiguity of merely labelling the doors “Ladies”
and “Gentlemen”.
Perhaps in the circumstances he ought to have a word with Donald first. He opened the right hand door and stepped through.
The contrast to the aseptic waiting room was almost startling.
In the light from a tall standard lamp behind a cushion-strewn oaken settle, the inspector saw what might have been a stage set for an English domestic comedy. Two armchairs separated by a coffee table faced a glazed hearth in which glowed the dummy embers of an electric fire. Upon a sideboard were glasses, decanter, biscuit barrel and miniature dinner gong. An open work-basket was beside one armchair, a rush stool by the other. He saw somewhere a pipe lying in an ashtray, a small scattering of hair curlers, a magazine open at the picture of a nude. The smell of the room seemed to be compounded of flowers and fresh laundry, with just a suggestion of...he sniffed—yes, newly baked bread.
Clever, he said again to himself. Very. Even the versatile “Rex” must have been a little awed by the insight and ingenuity of the Staunches.
“Do sit down, Mr er...”
He turned.
There had entered by a door on the farther side of the fire-place a woman with bluish grey hair, expertly waved and lustered, and the glint around neck and wrists of rather a lot of jewellery. Her eyes were strong and alert.
“Purbright,” he supplied. “Detective Inspector.”
Her smile narrowed for an instant to a pout. It emphasized her precise but heavy application of lipstick. Then the expression of businesslike solicitude was back.
She sat and ventured the small joke that seemed a proper way of getting a measure of the policeman’s attitude.
“I presume you are not here to offer yourself as a client, inspector.”
Purbright smiled back. “Hardly.”
“I thought not. You don’t look married, and that is the surest sign that you have a wife and are well content with her.”
“I shall tell Mrs Purbright that.”
He saw, now that she was seated, that the tailoring of her clothes was excellent. She had slim, rather hard-looking legs.
“You are Mrs Staunch, of course?”
She inclined her head.
“I’d rather expected”—Purbright indicated the door by which he had entered—“that it would be Mr Staunch whom I would find.”
“A small deception of the trade, inspector. I have a husband, but so far as the agency is concerned Donald is a fiction. I interview all my clients myself. It’s just that men seem to find the first step easier if they think they’re going to deal with a man. Once the ice is broken, they’re quite happy to pour out their troubles to me.”
“Your husband takes no part in the work then?”
“In this work? Heavens, no. He has far too much of his own. In any case, I’m afraid Donald doesn’t approve. He has the traditional English middle-class attitude to matrimonial agencies. Terribly infra dig.”
“Yet in no other country are people so insistent on the importance of being introduced. Isn’t that just your function? To effect introductions?”
Mrs Staunch spread her hands. “Precisely!” Her smile implied that she found Purbright a very sensible fellow indeed. “But you try telling that to an architect!” She deepened her voice on the last word in mock solemnity.
“Architect?”
“Donald. Well, an architectural consultant, actually. Next time you want your cells rebuilding, or whatever, send for Donald. He did a prison block once.”
“It is your help rather than your husband’s for which I should be obliged at the moment, Mrs Staunch.”
She bent forward attentively. “Of course.”
“There are two women—both of them live here in Flaxborough, or have done up to recently—whom we are rather anxious to trace. One is a widow. The other is an unmarried woman. We think that they may have approached your agency, probably within the last six months or so.”
“You mean these women have disappeared?”
“In effect, yes. Certainly some of the relatives are worried and no one has been able to suggest any likely reason why either should have left home.”
Mrs Staunch reached for a note pad that was lying on the coffee table. “You’d better give me their names.”
“Mrs Lilian Bannister—she’s the widow, of course—and the other one’s called Martha Reckitt.” He leaned forward and put two photographs on the table. Mrs Staunch finished writing and picked them up.
She looked at Purbright. “You think about six months ago?”
“In Mrs Bannister’s case, four exactly.”
She frowned. “Why ‘exactly’?”
“That was the date on a cheque for twenty guineas which she made out to you.”
“Is it because of that cheque that you came to see me?”
“Because of the counterfoil, actually. At the moment we don’t know that the cheque reached you.”
“Oh, it did.” Some of Mrs Staunch’s affability seemed to have evaporated. She spoke quietly and with care. “Mrs Bannister paid her registration fee and used the services of my agency for several weeks. I’m fairly sure that the other lady was a client as well—I’ll have a look in my records in a moment. The trouble is...” She paused.
Purbright watched her stroke the edge of one of the pictures reflectively with a long, puce-varnished fingernail.
“Tell me if I’m jumping too far ahead, inspector, but I can see that you believe something has happened to these women. Which leads you—naturally—to suppose some kind of criminal is responsible. Which in turn gives you the idea that they might have met him, or them, through the agency. Am I right?”
“I wouldn’t quite...”
“You might as well be frank, inspector. I certainly intend to be.”
“All right. That’s roughly the argument so far.”
She nodded. “Now let me tell you something of how this sort of agency operates. I want you to see certain difficulties that probably haven’t occurred to you.
“In the first place, it is terribly important for people who come here to feel that the whole thing is strictly confidential. It is this that forces us to adopt certain forms of procedure that you might think—well—childish, melodramatic. My husband thinks it’s awful; he calls it M.I.5 for the lovelorn. What he doesn’t understand is that you have to sort of cage lonely people up before you can do anything for them—it’s safety they really want. And that means secrecy.
“Right. Someone comes along. Mrs Bannister, say. I list as much as she’ll tell me about herself—age, hobbies, tastes, what she admires in a man...”
“Financial means?” Purbright put in.
Mrs Staunch shrugged. “If it seems relevant, yes. Anyway, all these things go down on the office record and she’s allocated a number. That number is her guarantee of remaining anonymous right up to the time when she herself decides to reveal her identity to the person she believes she can be happy with.
“The next step is for me to prepare a selection from the gentlemen’s file of clients who seem likely—in temperament, background, and so on—to match up with Mrs Bannister. This is where you have to be a bit of a psychologist, of course. And one has to bear in mind that it’s opposites that often prove to agree best.
“Once, I have let her have this selection—with numbers, not names, remember—it is up to her to write to any of them and suggest correspondence. All letters come to my office for redirection, or to be collected, just as the clients prefer. So even I don’t know who writes to whom. Sometimes people actually marry without my being any the wiser, though most are only too anxious to share their good news with me. I’ve had some very touching letters.”
Mrs Staunch paused briefly for reflection. Then she accepted the cigarette Purbright offered her and went on.
“Of course, Mrs Bannister would have what you might call a double chance. In addition to being given that list of ‘Possibles’, she would have her number and details circulated to those of my gentlemen clients I considered might be interested in h
er. And if any proved to be so, their letters would reach her through the office here without her being put under any obligation.”
Purbright considered a while. “There seems to be quite a lot of work entailed. For you, I mean.” He forebore from adding: And no small loot, at twenty guineas a shot.
Mrs Stauch lowered her eyes and examined the hem of her skirt. “It’s tremendously worth while. It really is.”
“I think I’m beginning to see the difficulties you mentioned,” Purbright said.
“In relation to this inquiry of yours?”
“Yes. The field’s a good deal wider than I would like. In my uninstructed optimism, I’d thought in terms of single, specific introductions. I hoped for a name and address for my pains.”
