Hopjoy Was Here f-3

by Colin Watson

  Ross stared at her, trying to bore through to the motives for the lie. Was she simply the willing victim of sexual fantasy? Or had someone coached her in a deliberately discreditable explanation of Hopjoy’s injuries?

  “Tell me about it.”

  She raised a hand and moved the middle finger lightly round the braided coil of her hair. The bunched strands shone, thought Ross, like the newly baked croissants of the Orgerus Region. Her frown was doubtful. “I don’t think I ought to say any more. I promised Howard...”

  He leaned forward and grasped her shoulder. Tightening the grip, he saw a flicker of gratification in her eyes before the heavy lids drew down in white, lazy assent. The long kiss he gave her was an interrogation subtly wavering on the borders of brutality. Before it was over, she half opened her eyes and moaned through his teeth, like a prisoner entreating merciful execution.

  Ross disengaged with controlled, skilful gradualness. As might a superb driver cast his eye over his engine after a trial burst of speed, he made a brief inward check of the muscular and glandular apparatus of his prowess, He dismissed as imaginary a touch of breathlessness, a fleeting impression of cramp in his right shoulder. No, these were nothing; the old mastery was unimpaired. He prepared to inaugurate the second, the behold-my-need phase. As he gazed earnestly down into her eyes, he set off at irregular but artistic intervals a tiny tic at the corner of his now tightly compressed mouth. He raised one eyebrow in mute request for licence, while simultaneously contracting the other to indicate the irresistibility of his desire. This refined and difficult performance had never failed to win compliance with the subsequent phase of his technique, the tactile assessment and breach of dress fastenings and his hands’ assured colonization of their discoveries.

  But at this point Ross’s calculated progression was disrupted utterly and with no hope of the re-establishment of his control. With a cry like that of a teased and hungry seal seizing a dangled fish, Bernadette suddenly arched and twisted her body, pincered him between iron-like legs, and bore him to the floor, where she proceeded to chew his neck, shoulder and ear with every indication of determination and delight. Within seconds, the rhythm of seduction had been checked, perverted, and monstrously accelerated in reverse. Through the hot clamour of Bernadette’s love-making, Ross seemed to hear, as if from outer space, the thin, mocking laughter of enemies.

  An hour and ten minutes later, Ross was making his way back to the car while Bernadette Croll, her face as animated as a calf’s, watched a pan of potatoes and cabbage frying for her husband’s tea.

  Ross felt like the survivor of an ambush. He glanced wearily at the peewits that glided and side-slipped above his head and plunged to the furrows in an untidy, tumbling descent as if they, like him, had been drained of impetus. Yet he felt neither self-pity nor rancour. What mattered now was to sift from the more embarrassing memories of the past hour the story about Hopjoy that he had been able to extract from his conquest during the few and brief periods of respite from her importunities.

  Hopjoy, as his own reports indicated, had called at the Crolls’ farm in the first instance to make inquiries about some European labourers who were employed there. On that and subsequent visits, it was Mrs Croll whom he had seen. The farmer, Benjamin Croll, spent all daylight hours in his fields except at mealtimes, which were strictly predictable. Mrs Croll had told ‘Howard Trevelyan’ what she knew and what since she had been able, on his instructions, to find out about the three workers, but this amounted to little and seemed innocent. It had been nice, though, to see Howard once or twice in each otherwise killingly boring week and she had been thrilled and proud when he told her—on his third visit—that he was a British counter-espionage agent.

  Ross dwelt a moment on this somewhat surprising circumstance. He did not think the girl was lying when she said the confidence had come from Hopjoy. There must, therefore, have been some very compelling reason for the breaking of so elementary a rule of security. Had Hopjoy hoped thereby to draw his quarry into the open? To offer himself as bait? If so, it meant the situation had become critical.

  Such a likelihood was strengthened by Hopjoy’s urgent assertion to the girl, whom obviously he had decided to accept as an active ally, that his life was in danger. She had responded by hiding him in her bedroom on a number of occasions when the absence of her husband at Flaxborough market might have encouraged the enemy to arrange a convenient accident.

  The accident when it did come was of entirely unexpected authorship. Not sharing his wife’s knowledge of the situation at the farm, Croll had returned early from a cancelled ram sale and gone straight up to the bedroom to change his clothes. He had brushed introductions aside, and, according to Mrs Croll, ‘behaved dreadfully’.

  Ross opened the gate into the lane and thoughtfully latched it behind him. Who, in fact, had been Hopjoy’s assailant? Was it really Croll, the misunderstanding husband, who, if his wife’s story were to be credited, had regretted his impulsiveness, picked the unconscious man from the roof of the dog kennel and driven him to hospital with a tale of a fall from a stack?

  Or had Bernadette’s account—so sharply at variance with the F.7 reports—been concocted and rehearsed in fear of reprisals from the organization that had spirited back to the East the practitioner with the iron bar?

  Within fifty yards of the Bentley, in which he saw glimmering the pallid paraboloid of Pumphrey’s skull, Ross paused to listen. The sound of the tractor engine, to which he had kept tuned a wary ear during the whole time he had spent in the farmhouse, was in the air no longer. Its sudden extinction loosed a third and startling possibility into his brain.

  Was it Benjamin Croll himself who had been the real object of Hopjoy’s investigations? Whose agent had struck too clumsily? Who then prepared in person and with deadly thoroughness to finalize Hopjoy’s elimination at the villa in Beatrice Avenue?

  Chapter Twelve

  Mr Alfred Blossom, proprietor of the South Circuit Garage, Flaxborough, received with considerable scepticism his foreman’s report that one of four carboys of battery acid had disappeared from the yard at the side of the servicing bay. “Even our blokes couldn’t lose a thing like that,” he declared. “And who the hell would want to pinch it? You’d better count them again.”

  But not all Mr Blossom’s homely humour, developed over long years of stonewalling the complaints of milched motorists, could alter the fact that where four carboys had stood there were now only three. So he stared awhile at the empty space, bent to retrieve a small object that shone in the shadow of the next caged and straw-pillowed bottle, and put through a telephone call to the police.

  There the matter rested until Inspectdr Purbright’s request for a check on all local garages, wholesale chemists and factories for news of missing sulphuric acid struck a chord in the memory of the clerk who had filed the peculiar little item from South Circuit.

  Purbright found Mr Blossom an affable informant, graced with that air of sincerity and solicitude characteristic of the habitual inflator of invoices.

  “It was the queerest thing,” said Mr Blossom. “I mean, we’ve had stuff disappear before. It goes on all the time, as a matter of fact. Between ourselves, I don’t make much of it. Put it down as wastage—sort of evaporation, you know. But a bloody great thing like that... Dangerous too. And it’s not as if you could flog it.” A good foot shorter than the policeman, he stood with his head tilted sharply upward like a bespectacled mole.

  “Have you any idea of how it could have been taken?”

  “Oh, in a car or on a truck, I suppose. People are always in and out of a place like this. We don’t watch everybody all the time. Some poor barmy sod probably took a fancy to the thing and heaved it into his boot when no one was looking.” He spread his hands and smiled forgiveness.

  “They’re pretty heavy, though, aren’t they?”

  “About a hundredweight apiece. A fairly strong bloke could manage one on his own.”

  “When you talk of people
being in and out, you mean customers, I suppose.”

  “That’s right. They just bring their cars into the yard there or back them into the shop. Some of them might want to help themselves to the air line, or a grease gun. We don’t bother so long as they’re not in the way.”

  “Free and easy.”

  Mr Blossom shrugged. “Why not? You can’t run a garage like a jewellers.”

  “You feel that this thing must have been pinched during the daytime?”

  “I really haven’t thought about it. As I said, I expect some idiot whipped it on the spur of the moment. He wouldn’t do that at night, would he? In the dark, I mean.”

  Purbright walked to the corner of the L-shaped yard, looked round it, and returned. Mr Blossom forestalled comment. “Oh, yes, it’s open to the street. There’s nothing to stop anybody coming this far at any time if they wanted to.”

  “Or if they knew these carboys were kept here and happened to want one.”

  Mr Blossom slightly relaxed his smile to signify regret of the world’s waywardness and blinked. Purbright saw the set of pale blue concentric circles dissolve from the thick, upturned lenses and then spread back, more watery than before.

  “Do you happen to keep a list of your customers, Mr Blossom?”

  “We do, yes.”

  “I wonder if I might take a quick look at it.”

  Mr Blossom turned and led the way across the shop and up an open wooden staircase to his office. He pulled out the drawer of a small box file and graciously stepped aside.

  The names were in alphabetical order. Purbright saw that Hopjoy’s card had a little scarlet disc gummed neatly to the upper left-hand corner. There were a few others similarly decorated. The name Periam was not listed.

  “May I ask what the red circles mean?”

  Mr Blossom peered innocently at the open file. “Oh, it’s just a sort of private mark we use in the accounting system...”

  “Bad payers?”

  “Well...” Mr Blossom spread his hands. “Oh, by the way...” He unlocked and opened the top drawer of his desk and handed Purbright a heavy cigarette lighter. “Found it on the scene of the crime. None of my chaps had lost it.”

  Purbright turned the lighter over in his hand. It looked expensively durable and efficient but bore neither decoration nor brand name. “Might be helpful. Thanks.” He slipped the lighter into his pocket and pencilled a note of receipt.

  “By the way, I notice you’ve done work on a car belonging to a man called Hopjoy, of Beatrice Avenue. Does he always bring it in himself?”

  “The Armstrong, you mean. No, not always. A friend of his drives as well. The servicing’s not done in his name, though.”

  “What’s the friend called?”

  Mr Blossom wrinkled his helpful nose. “Perry, I think...no, Periam. He keeps a cigarette shop.”

  But doesn’t smoke, Purbright added to himself. “All right, Mr Blossom. We’ll let you know if your magnum turns up.”

  Not to be outdone in jocularity, Mr Blossom sang out in rasping baritone: “And if one green bottle should accidentally fall...” and wrung Purbright’s hand like an old friend.

  Back at police headquarters, the inspector found Ross and Pumphrey awaiting him. The Chief Constable, faced with a bewildering variety of requests for information about a one-legged snooker player, a barber, a farmer, and a Scandinavian pig slaughterer, had gravely assured his questioners that “Mr Purbright handles all that sort of thing” and gone home to do some, gardening.

  Purbright listened attentively until his visitors, judging him to have been put squarely in the picture, invited him to deliver reciprocal revelation.

  He rose. “I think, gentlemen, that the best thing will be to call in a couple of our local experts.”

  Pumphrey looked startled. “I don’t know about that, inspector. You realize all this is top secret...” He glanced at Ross.

  Purbright leaned against the door frame. He sighed. “I don’t pretend to be an encyclopaedia, you know. Some of my men have a much wider range; they might save you a lot of time.”

  “That’s all right, Purbright,” Ross said. “I’m sure you can question your chaps in a way that won’t set any rabbits away.”

  When the inspector re-entered the room five minutes later, he was accompanied by Sergeant Love, looking as pink and innocent as if Purbright had just recruited him from a Dresden pastoral, and by a genial mountain whom he introduced as Sergeant Malley, the coroner’s officer. The inspector arranged chairs so that while the two sergeants and the men from London faced each other, symmetry suggestive of opposing quiz teams was avoided. Then he sat down behind his desk, lit a cigarette, and leaned back.

  “George Tozer... Now, then, let’s hear what you know about Mr Tozer.” He blew a cloud of smoke at the ceiling.

  Love and Malley glanced uncertainly at each other in mutual suspicion of having been drawn into some absurd game.

  “But...but you know old George, inspector. The barber. Down in...” Malley scowled and snapped his fingers.

  “Spindle Lane,” supplied Love.

  “That’s it—Spindle Lane. The Rubber King.”

  “You know George, sir,” insisted Love, looking at Purbright with concern.

  “Of course I know him. But these gentlemen don’t. And it’s for their benefit I’m asking these things, not mine.”

  “Oh, I see.” Malley turned his big friendly face to Pumphrey. “He’s a rum old sod, is George. Ugly as vomit. But he’d help anyone, wouldn’t he, Sid?”

  Love grunted confirmation.

  “They reckon it was George who fixed up Lady Beryl with that third husband of hers...”

  “Fourth,” corrected Love.

  “Fourth, was it? Never mind. That book salesman with one ear, I mean. Everyone reckoned Lady Beryl had had it for good when her third chucked in. She’d started drinking hair restorer by then. That’s how she came to know George, I suppose...”

  Pumphrey, who had been nodding and making impatient noises in his throat, thrust in a question. “What are Tozer’s political affiliations?”

  Malley’s eyes widened. He looked round at Love, who did his best to be helpful at such short notice. “Lady Beryl’s Conservative,” he said.

  Malley regarded Pumphrey once more. “That’s right, she is. Although they don’t risk letting her open fêtes any more, of course. Mind you, I’m not saying George Tozer’s a snob—you’re Labour, perhaps, are you, sir?—well, the Labour people have done some good in their way. That’s neither here nor there, though; I’m sure George wouldn’t let your politics stop him doing you a good turn if he can...”

  “He’s a bit of a flanneller, mind,” Love saw fit to warn Ross.

  “Oh, aye,” agreed the coroner’s officer. “Reminds you of the barber’s cat, doesn’t he, Sid? All wind and .,.” He checked himself at the sight of Pumphrey’s frown of exasperation. “Still, I’ll say this for him—there’s many a family in this town would be too big to be fed if it hadn’t been for George’s eightpenny reliables.”

  Ross shifted a little in his chair. “Perhaps we’re not quite on the right tack, sergeant. Can you tell us anything about this man’s associates?”

  There was a short silence while Malley and Love looked at each other and then at Purbright. The inspector, however, was unhelpfully preoccupied with the tip of his cigarette.

  Love scratched his head. “I’ve an idea that he’s in a team of bellringers...”

  “They reckon he’s quite religious,” added Malley, cautiously. “On the side, like...”

  “But I don’t think he’s what you might call associated with anybody specially,” wound up Love. “I mean, why should he be?”

  The hint of defiance in his voice earned a sharp stare from Pumphrey. “The man who seems to have no associations, sergeant, is generally one who has taken good care to conceal them.”

  Ross beamed a take-no-notice smile at Love. “So much for Mr Tozer, I think. Now then, what about...what’s h
is name. Purbright?—the hopalong character...”

  “Crutchey Anderson.”

  Malley chuckled. He winked at Pumphrey. “You want to keep clear of that old villain; by God, you do. Don’t tell me he’s been asking you to teach him how to play snooker. Oh, Christ!”

  Ross quickly intervened. “It was I who came across Anderson, sergeant, not Mr Pumphrey. I’d like to know who he is, that’s all.”

  “Bookie’s runner, that’s what he is. Used to be on the shrimping boats at Chalmsbury until he put one leg into the shrimp copper when he was drunk. It was cooked to the bone before they could pull him clear. But if he thinks he can touch you for a pint, he’ll give you a tale about sharks. It is sharks, isn’t it, Sid?”

  “Mostly. Except when it’s frostbite at Archangel.”

  “Archangel,” Ross repeated, half to himself. He looked across at the inspector. “But tell me, Purbright, surely bookmakers don’t employ runners any more. I presume Flaxborough has betting shops like everywhere else.”