by Colin Watson
“My God! He must be the only one.”
Pumphrey gave a slight shake of his head. “There are sixteen, actually. Occupation-wise, the breakdown is interesting. Five of them are tobacconists, like Periam. I think market gardeners come next. The rest are fairly mixed.”
“Any archbishops?”
Pumphrey considered, frowning. “No,” he said at last. “I rather think not.” He looked up. “I can check if you like. It’s hardly relevant, though, is it?”
“Hardly.” Ross stretched his big, action-loving body, savouring the innocent ecstasy of muscular power at full rack until the shabby hotel chair whimpered and there glittered from the gold links on his upthrust wrists the tiny diamonds prised in 1952 (so Ross could have told, had he wished) from the front teeth of the flamboyant inquisitor and tormentor Spuratkin.
Ross let fall his arms, slumped happily for half a minute, then sat up straight and alert. “We’d better make a start. All we can do at this stage is to follow Hopjoy’s lines more or less at random until we get some sort of a picture. I suggest you begin with a haircut, Harry.”
“George Tozer,” Pumphrey responded with unwonted pertness, “thirty-two Spindle Lane. Correct?”
Ross grinned and rose. “Absolutely correct, old son.” He felt touched, as he did whenever Pumphrey allowed pride in his gift of fact-retention to glimmer through an otherwise sombre personality, and did not grudge acknowledgement. Daringly he added: “Just as well the name’s not Todd, eh?”
Pumphrey looked blank. “Todd?” He unfolded a street map of Flaxborough, found Spindle Lane, and committed to memory the names of the intermediate roads. “Todd?” he repeated, looking up.
“Nothing,” said Ross. “Just a joke. A barber joke.” There was something, he reflected, a little Teutonic about Pumphrey.
A solitary fly patrolled the latticed shaft of sunshine that slanted down upon the hair-sprinkled brown linoleum of Mr Tozer’s saloon. Its intermittent hum emphasized that silence, all but absolute, which is peculiar to barbers’ shops on customless afternoons in summer. The air in the small room, low-ceilinged and set three steps below street level, was warm and sleepy with the scent of bay rum. A fresh slip of toilet tissue curled preparatorily across the neck rest of the shaving chair was as motionless as a marble scroll. The scissors, razors and hand clippers set in methodic array at the back of the big oval wash-basin seemed as unlikely to be put ever again to use as tools sanguinely sealed into a burial chamber in Luxor.
Even the proprietor appeared to have undergone a necropolitan translation. He was sprawled peacefully across three cane-bottomed chairs beneath a row of hat pegs in an alcove, his head cushioned on a pile of tattered magazines and his hands crossed upon the folds of his white coat.
Pumphrey, having peered down through the window upon Mr Tozer’s tonsorial tomb, was a little surprised to find the door unlocked. But at the instant of his entrance, which set jangling a little bell above the door, Mr Tozer rose stiffly and all of a piece, like a sleep walker, and advanced upon him holding out invitingly what a more fanciful caller might have taken to be a shroud.
The barber side-stepped to allow Pumphrey to subside into the chair, whipped the sheet round his neck and stood for a moment melancholically surveying the irregular vestiges of scrub upon the celery-white scalp.
“Haircut, sir?” The inquiry was tinged with disbelief.
“A light trim.”
Mr Tozer smirked dutifully and tucked a roll of cotton wool between Pumphrey’s neck and collar. “Nice weather you’ve brought, sir.”
Pumphrey slipped the platitude beneath his mental spectroscope. ‘Brought’ lit up on the reading scale. He had been recognized and challenged as a newcomer to the town.
“Yes, isn’t it.”
A gentle touch guided his head slightly to one side. Covertly he held his view of Tozer’s face in the mirror. It was a dark and knobbly face, very long so that the chin rested on the shirt front and was flanked by the lapels of the white coat. The ears were as long as bacon rashers and had pendulous, furry lobes. So deeply had the eyes retired within their sockets that they seemed to belong to a hermit crab peering warily from the refuge of Mr Tozer’s skull.
“Just passing through, sir?” The barber’s hand reached far out over Pumphrey and hovered uncertainly over the range of instruments behind the wash-basin. It seemed about to descend upon a bone-handled razor.
Pumphrey watched the razor. “That is so,” he said. The hand moved on and picked up a pair of clippers.
“A short holiday, perhaps. No, but you’re not a fisherman, I reckon.”
“Not exactly,” said Pumphrey. He realized he was quite without means of determining whether Tozer’s feelers were threatening or conciliatory. The Hopjoy dossier had been indeterminate on all points except the fact that investigation and maintenance of contact with this man (to what end was not stated) had involved expense to date of £248 15s. Pumphrey thought quickly about this and found it encouraging. Tozer, on whatever side he was ranged, clearly had his price. He was unlikely to be really dangerous while the bidding was open.
“I thought,” said Pumphrey, “that I might run across a friend of mine. I’ve an idea he came here to live a year or two back.”
“Nice to meet old friends. Oh, to meet old friends is nice.” Mr Tozer, mowing an ice-cold path up Pumphrey’s neck, seemed grateful that an acceptable course of conversation had been signalled. He noisily blew the gathering of black fluff from the clipper blades and readjusted the angle of Pumphrey’s head. “There’s only one thing nicer,” he resumed, “and that’s making new friends. And if there’s one thing nicer than that, why, it’s making friends for your friends. Now me...” he applied to Pumphrey’s neck a cloud of talcum powder from what looked like an old omnibus hooter—“me, I’m what you might call a friend-gatherer. I was born ugly, you see, sir, and I accept it. No use fighting against your own nature. No use expecting other people to love you. Some of us are lovable; some aren’t. It’s like being musical. Put me at the piano and I couldn’t play a note to save my life. Yet I love music; I’ll listen to it for hours. Friendship, now: it’s not for me. I know that. But it’s something I like to know is going on all around. I enjoy it from a distance, like church bells. Funny, that, isn’t it? And so do you know what I do? I foster it, I fertilize it. In any way I can, I help it along. You might say that bringing people together is my little private mission in life. And what, sir”—he turned and blew another fluff crop from the clippers—“did you say the name of this friend of yours is?”
Here, obviously, was a critical point. Tozer’s discharge of windy idealism, tedious and meaningless in itself, had been a calculated prelude to challenge. The name of his friend...the question had been delivered at the tail of a diversionary gust of sentimentality, as a gipsy fiddler might casually drop a vital message with the final flourish of his czardas.
Pumphrey made up his mind. As the barber lightly leaned spread fingers upon his cranium while reaching for a pair of scissors, he gave the only answer that would take the game forward. “Hopjoy,” he murmured.
For a moment Mr Tozer remained quite still. Pumphrey tried to see in the mirror what reaction his face betrayed, but the barber’s fingers had tensed and would allow no upward movement of his customer’s head.
Then Mr Tozer relaxed and wheeled to the side of the chair. He beamed down on Pumphrey and performed a little arabesque of mid-air snipping with the scissors. “Mr Hopjoy!” he repeated, with every appearance of finding the name enormously to his liking. “One of my most regular gentlemen. I know him well. Very well. As a matter of fact, when you came in I was just wondering if he’d turn up this afternoon. It must be several days now since... But fancy you being a friend of Mr Hopjoy!”
Mr Tozer stepped back behind Pumphrey and began making small swoops with the scissors over the unprofitable scalp. He was still smiling. But above the smile, Pumphrey noticed in the mirror, was a frown.
“What I was saying
just now about friendship...” Mr Tozer resumed. “Mr Hopjoy’s a great one for friends. He comes in here perhaps three times a week. To be groomed, if I might put it that way. It’s nice to find a man nowadays who’s particular as to grooming. ‘George’, he’ll say, ‘I’m meeting a friend tonight’ and he’ll wink and I’ll spruce him up like a show dog and off he’ll trot with a joke about the account...oh, you might tell him I’ve been asking kindly after him, by the way, sir...and then later on I fall to thinking of him with his friend, and you know it’s rather nice to get that feeling of having played a part and helped things along and made sure there’d be no harm done.”
“No harm done?” echoed Pumphrey. “But how could harm be done between friends?”
Mr Tozer released a jowl-flapping laugh. “Easiest thing in the world, sir. But I see you’ve not quite taken my meaning, not caught on, so to speak...” The sudden opening of the shop door set off the tiny alarum of its bell. Mr Tozer looked over his shoulder, excused himself, and joined the man who had summoned him with a conspiratorial nod from the doorway.
Pumphrey could distinguish no word of the brief, murmured conversation. When next Tozer came into his field of vision it was to stoop before a narrow cupboard. Pumphrey saw him extract a small square envelope, which he concealed in his hand before walking back to the door. There was another subdued exchange, part of which seemed jocular in character, and the door closed.
The whole transaction, whatever it was, had taken no more than a minute.
The barber, awkwardly pulling up his white coat so as to be able to reach his hip pocket, was again at Pumphrey’s side. “Anything on, sir? Spray...cream...?”
“No, nothing.”
Mr Tozer repossessed himself of the scissors, which he poised over Pumphrey’s face. “The nostrils, now?” he inquired eagerly.
“Certainly not.”
“Ah, you’re very wise, sir; clipping does tend to stimulate. I personally find the best answer to what we might vulgarly call the hairy nose-hole is to fire it a couple of times a year.” His eyes wandered to a jar stacked with wax tapers. “Like a railway embankment, you know.”
Pumphrey shook his head vigorously. He had been staring at the cupboard. Was it the curious traffic in envelopes which had first attracted Hopjoy’s attention? Here, no doubt, was some sort of relay station in the complicated intelligence system he had been trying to delineate. Had his too persistent patronage of Mr Tozer’s shop aroused suspicion and ultimately brought to his lodgings the silent, workmanlike attendance of a liquidation cadre?
“Would Mr Hopjoy’s friends be your friends, by any chance, sir?” Mr Tozer was drawing out the cotton wool roll and assiduously brushing his collar.
“I suppose we might have one or two mutual acquaintances. Why?” Pumphrey spoke softly, refusing to be provoked by the calculatedly irritant quality of the barber’s harping on friendship. He thought he recognized one of the newer East European techniques for drawing admission of political affiliations.
Mr Tozer winked. Or rather he drew down the blind at the end of one of his dark occular tunnels. “Ladies, I was thinking of in particular, sir. The best friends of all.”
What a lewd word was ‘ladies’, Pumphrey reflected. Then it dawned on him that the course of this man’s chatter conformed remarkably closely to another, more familiar anti-counter-espionage tactic. Its aim was the discrediting and incapacitation of the investigator by imputation of immoral motives and even actual involvement in compromising situations.
“I cannot imagine,” he said coldly, “that my social life could be of the slightest concern to you.”
Mr Tozer shrugged and tweaked away the sheet. “Just as you like, sir.” He did not sound offended and his smile lingered as he bent to brush the front of Pumphrey’s coat. “I try to be of service in these matters, that’s all, as I’m sure...”—he stood upright and directed upon Pumphrey a full and friendly gaze—“...your old friend Mr Hopjoy will tell you.”
Chapter Seven
“I really can’t see that you have any need to be worried about Bry. He’s a bit of a rolling stone, you know.”
Gordon Periam certainly did not look anxious. His expression, which Purbright felt was probably habitual, was one of bland earnestness. The smooth face, rounded by a well-fleshed chin a couple of sizes too big, betokened placidity born of a sheltered existence. The mouth was calm, but set in the permanent pout of the protractedly unweaned. Even the little lobeless ears were suggestive, somehow, of infancy.
The inspector looked away from Periam’s brown eyes, gentle and unblinking, and watched an arrowhead of duck winging out over the flats. The two men were seated on a bench at the side of the sea bank road that ran between the Neptune and the dunes, Purbright having declined the hotel manager’s offer of his own littered and airless cloister in favour of what the policeman had sanguinely termed “a blow along the front”.
In fact, there proved to be no wind at all, while ‘front’ was scarcely an accurate designation for a rampart some two miles from the nearest wave. But at least the smell of the sea was there: a cool yet pungent compound of weed and salted mud, threading through the scents of hot sand and yellowing dune grass.
“And surely,” Periam was saying, “somebody has to be reported missing—officially, you know—before you chaps start looking into things. Who would report Bry missing?” The voice was level, untroubled, like that of an inquirer into natural history.
“Some of the neighbours are a little apprehensive, I believe. And there are one or two rather odd circumstances that we do feel need explaining.” Purbright’s gaze was now upon a steamer smudging almost imperceptibly the grey-green rim of the horizon. “You see, sir, we’ve taken the liberty of looking inside your house.”
“But...but why? I can’t understand this, inspector. Really I can’t.” The slightest frown of reproof clouded Periam’s brow.
Purbright sighed, as if acknowledging the distasteful and inconvenient nature of his investigation. “When,” he asked, “did you last see Mr Hopjoy?”
Periam considered. “It was one night last week; wait a minute...yes, Thursday night.”
“And where was this?”
“Oh, at home.”
“That would be before your marriage.”
“The day before, actually. Doreen and I were married on the Friday.”
“I see. Now tell me about Thursday, will you? You said you saw Mr Hopjoy that evening. Were you not together earlier?”
“No, he hadn’t got up by the time I left the house. I drove over here after breakfast and brought some things—mine and Doreen’s. The room had been booked and I’d arranged to move in the day before the wedding so that everything would be ready. Well, that’s just what I did. Once the stuff had been shifted out of the car I just killed time toddling around and having meals. Then I went to bed. It was quite early: about nine, I should say. I’d just nicely dropped off when the phone rang—there’s one by the bed, you know.
“It was rather a queer call, really, now that I come to think, but I was a bit muzzy, being wakened like that, and I didn’t ask the girl’s name. She just said she was speaking for Bry and would I come over right away. Then she rang off. Well, what could I do? I dressed and drove back to Flaxborough.
“Bry was at home on his own. Naturally, I’d thought there’d be something wrong, but there wasn’t. He just said he wanted to ask me a few things—oh, I can’t even remember them: they weren’t important. Strictly entre nous I got the impression he was a weeny bit tiddly. If it had been anyone else it would have got my rag out, but it’s never any good getting waxy with Bry, it’s like water off a duck’s back. In any case, he’d been very decent about letting us have the car.
“To cut a long story short, I made allowances for his having imbibed not wisely but too well and humoured him. But I certainly lost some beauty sleep that night. Dor must have thought I’d been out on the tiles when I turned up at the registry office. No, you mustn’t take that serious
ly—Dor’s terribly sweet and...and loyal.”
Periam wound up his speech by taking from his pocket a paper bag which he offered to Purbright. The inspector declined graciously and resumed his contemplation of the horizon. He wondered if the production of the sweets had been a reflex comment on the bride.
“What is your general opinion of your neighbours, Mr Periam? In Beatrice Avenue, you know, and round about.”
Periam carefully unwrapped a toffee. “Quite decent old sticks, mostly. I don’t have much to do with them now that Mother’s passed on.”
“Is there anyone amongst them who might have a grudge against you, do you think?”
“I’m sure there’s not. Why?” Periam chewed very slowly and deliberately. The action gave his cheeks a melancholy elongation. Moose, thought Purbright.
“The fact is that we have received an anonymous letter. I don’t see why you shouldn’t know about it. It hints that you and Mr Hopjoy were having a row on that Thursday night, a violent row.”
