Hopjoy Was Here f-3

by Colin Watson

  “Oh, but such a nice skeleton!” Purbright had the brief but disconcerting sensation of Doreen’s bosom being nuzzled roguishly against his arm. Then she was walking away and looking back at him over her shoulder as she munched another of Periam’s biscuits.

  Sergeant Malley breathed hard but contentedly between puffs at a pipe in which seemed to be smouldering a compound of old cinema carpet and tar. He sat in the windowless little office in the police station basement where witnesses at forthcoming inquests were induced by the huge sergeant’s calm and kindness to give more or less lucid expression to their recollections of tragedy.

  Malley, whom even inspectors and superintendents treated as host in his own confined quarters—if only because they could not bear to see him trying to uncork eighteen stone from an inadequate chair—listened without surprise to Purbright’s account of his call at the hospital.

  “I could have told you that you’d be wasting your time. Harton’s about as obliging as an empty stamp machine. And those bloody women...” He shook his head.

  “Look, Bill, I’ve no objection to these people playing at guess-what-God’s-up-to if that makes them happy. But I’d still like to find the character who started all this phoney M.I. Fivemanship.”

  Malley wriggled forward a few inches and folded his arms on the desk. “If you’re really interested in that operation, I think I might be able to find you someone who’ll talk. He’s one of the theatre assistants and a pal of Jack Sykes—the bloke in the lab I was telling you about. Do you want me to have a go?”

  “I wish you would. It may not be important, of course; Periam said Hopjoy just hurt his leg slightly and carried no sign, but I suppose he can’t know for certain.”

  “Hurt his leg?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But Harton doesn’t do legs. He’s an innards man.”

  “Oh.” Purbright considered. “Yes, you said something about that before. Then perhaps Hopjoy was just spinning Periam one of his celebrated tales.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I wonder why...Never mind—let me know if you get hold of Mr Sykes’s friend, won’t you.”

  A face, thrust inquisitively into the narrow doorway, creased with nausea on encountering Sergeant Malley’s pipe fumes. “Christ!” said Sergeant Love, adding ’sir” when he discerned the inspector through the haze.

  Purbright joined him in the corridor.

  “I’ve gone right through the people in Pawson’s Lane, sir. And guess what?” Love’s eye glistened with something more than reaction to smoke.

  “No, you tell me, Sid.” The inspector put a paternal arm round his shoulder.

  “I’ve found the woman who wrote that anonymous letter.”

  Purbright stared at him. “What anonymous letter?”

  “The one we got about the do at Periam’s place. You know, sir. The thing that started all this.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “My Dear Sidney, we know all about that letter. It wasn’t written by a neighbour. Hopjoy wrote it himself.”

  Love shook his head. “I’m afraid I’m not with you, sir.”

  “I said Hopjoy wrote it. He wasn’t terribly subtle; a pad of the same paper was among the stuff in his bedroom.”

  Love grudgingly digested the information. “Well, all I can say is that there must have been two, and that the Cork woman’s got lost. It was one of the first things she said. ‘I feel rather bad about sending that letter,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to cause trouble.’ I told her not to worry about it because it hadn’t really made any difference and anyway she hadn’t put her name to it, then she cheered up a bit and said something about it being the least she could have done for the poor boy’s mother. I think,” Love added by way of explanation, “that she’s a bit clobby in the cockpit.”

  “There are two women there; which one are you talking about?”

  “The daughter. There wasn’t a squeak out of Ma. She just hovered.”

  “You asked about the row in the bathroom?”

  “Yes. She said she didn’t hear shouting or anything like that although she’d been watching the window while the light was on.”

  “But if she was awake, surely she must have heard something. There’s not thirty yards between those houses. And even Periam admitted Hopjoy was yelling his head off. He of all people had nothing to gain by making that up: very much the reverse. Anyway, if there was no disturbance why the devil should she have taken it into her head to send off this letter she talks about?”

  Love remained silent for a few seconds. Then, as if trying to compensate for some lapse of his own, he said: “Mind you, she did say she thought she heard a noise like breaking glass later on when she’d gone to bed. That could have been the acid thing, couldn’t it? And she said she got up again and saw somebody moving about in the garden.”

  “I rather think,” Purbright said, “that I should have a word with Miss Cork myself. In the meantime, Sid...”—he drew from his pocket an envelope—“I wonder if you’d mind hawking this lighter around Hopjoy’s acquaintances to see if they can identify it.”

  Contrary to Purbright’s expectations, the Corks received him with something approaching affability. The daughter led him to a parlour with the temperature of an orchid house—a small but fierce fire burned in the scrupulously tidy grate—and went off to make tea. Mrs Cork greeted him with a slow inclination of the head. She sat in a tapestried chair in the window bay. While her daughter was out of the room, she said nothing but stared at him approvingly, nodding from time to time as if she were half afraid that he might, if not thus encouraged, take himself off before the kettle boiled.

  Purbright looked about him at a room that he supposed its owners would describe as a treasure chest of memories. Scarcely a single feature of its clustered contents had the look of ever being put to use. Books in a glass-fronted cabinet had been pushed into obscurity to make shelf room for ornate china cruets, an old calendar, dusty oddments of barbola work, and a collection of cards from bygone Christmases. Vases, of which there was a great number, were dry and flowerless, although a spray of paper roses emerged lopsidedly from a biscuit barrel. Within a set of three square decanters were the pale ochre stains of ancient sediment. An alabaster ashtray, bearing a card suit indicator, was lodged with a box of counters, a china boot and a manicure set, inside a cut glass salad bowl.

  Pictures blockaded the room. Their flagships, so to speak, were a heavily framed lithograph depicting a horse thrusting its head through an open cottage window during the family meal (‘An Unbidden Guest’) and an enormous tinted engraving of Windsor Castle with besashed and garlanded picnickers in the foreground. A dozen or so photographs, standing on pieces of furniture or suspended on long cords from the picture rail, projected the sad, sepia stares of dead relations, trussed for their appointments with posterity by studio palm or rustic bridge.

  The room smelled of linoleum and passed-down sewing boxes. There hung also upon the over-heated air the faintly mothballish odour of female old age.

  Miriam Cork prepared the three cups of tea with finicky expertise on a tray balanced on her lap. Pouring tea, the inspector noticed, was an occupation that gave this stringy, straight-backed woman a kind of fulfilment. Her thin mouth was set in concentration. The big nose with a wart on its side seemed to stretch forth in anxious assessment of the strength and fragrance of the brew. Her eyes, pale and uncalm with hypochondria, steadied to measure the mounting amber line; there even shone in them a little pride.

  Purbright began his questions. They invoked the sort of loquacity of which only that woman is capable who receives confidences from God in proportion to her readiness to interest herself in the frailties of mankind.

  Oh, yes, she had known the Periam family ever since Gordon was a little mite. He had been a blessing to his mother, poor soul, whom God in His wisdom had sent widowhood through the agency of a brewer’s van with a loose wheel. Right through the years he had maintained his devotion to her—in spite of
everything a certain brazen Miss Come-and-get-me had been able to do to take him away and have him marry her.

  “He had a girlfriend in those days, had he?” Purbright found the notion intriguing.

  “If that’s what you can call her. She was hanging round him ever since he was at school. But he didn’t let his mother be worried. That girl never stepped over the doorstep until after Mrs Periam was in her coffin. Of course, I knew when the end was coming, and it wasn’t just because I’d heard about the operation. It was a terrible operation, mind; they took all her insides away. No, the day before she passed on I saw my man in the black overcoat walk slowly by the window there. And I said straight away to mother, ‘Mother, Mrs Periam’s going: that man’s been by again’.”

  Mrs Cork, gazing out of the window with rheumy, unseeing eyes, gave a tired nod of corroboration.

  “It was just the same with Uncle Will. And with old Mr Elliott at the corner. Each time I saw the man in the overcoat. I always know when blinds are going to be drawn.”

  Association of ideas prompted Purbright to interrupt with: “That night the sergeant was asking you about, Miss Cork...tell me just what you saw across the way.”

  She switched without the slightest hesitation to the new line of reminiscence. “It was one of my bad nights”—two bony fingers stole gently to explore the neighbourhood of her solar plexus. “The doctors warned me never to take anything with pips for fear they might lodge, and that teatime I’d had just half a fig roll, no more, but it was enough; I was in agony until first light and then the paraffin started working, thank the Lord—I did thank Him, too—right there on the what-have-you and I wasn’t ashamed to. But didn’t Dr Harris give me what for the next day when I told him. ‘Mirrie,’ he said—he always calls me Mirrie—‘what did I tell you about pips? I said if one lodges after what you’ve gone through, it’s a box for you, my girl.’ Well, he was smiling, of course, but you could see how worried he really was; he was quite white round the mouth...”

  “You were sleepless, Miss Cork: I’d gathered that much from Sergeant Love. Now what did you hear and see at Mr Periam’s house?”

  “Well, the bathroom light was on for one thing. Oh, for ages. I thought they’d gone to bed and forgotten it. But then the dining-room light came on. It was quite late—past midnight—but once I get one of those turns it’s no use trying to get to sleep...”

  “Did you see anyone in the dining-room?”

  “No, the curtains were drawn. And of course the bathroom window is that ripply stuff. You can see shapes through it, but not to make them out very clearly. I mean you can tell if anyone’s going to have a bath because the shape’s pink. Then, naturally, you stop looking. But that night there was no need not to look. There was only Mr Hopjoy washing—he never even takes his shirt off for that—and then a bit later Mr Periam doing his exercises.”

  “Exercises?”

  “Yes, he has one of those chest expander things. Mind, he shows for it, too: Mr Hopjoy’s a poor stick beside him.”

  “And that’s all you saw, Miss Cork?”

  “That’s all. I went back for a lie-down a bit later when the pains were getting too much for me. They were just easing off after about an hour when there was that breaking noise. I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like glass—muffled, though. I got up and looked out again. This time the only light I could see was round the side; I think it must have been the garage. Then somebody came out into the garden.”

  “Could you make out who it was?”

  She shook her head. “It was really just a dark shape moving about, a sort of shadow.”

  “What happened after that?”

  The woman looked thoughtfully into her teacup. “Nothing, really... Oh, except that a light did go on for a few seconds in Mrs Periam’s bedroom—what used to be her bedroom, I mean, though Gordon’s kept it exactly as it was, you know. Whoever went in must have pulled the curtains first; they were closed when the light was switched on.”

  “You can’t think of anything else?”

  “Not that night, no.”

  “On another, then.”

  She was silent for a moment. “I might have been imagining.”

  “Never mind. Tell me about it.”

  “Well, it was three or four nights later; I can’t remember exactly. I’d been downstairs for some Thermogene and was dozing off again when I heard water running. It made just the sort of gurgle that the Periams’ waste pipe always makes. But I’d seen no one about there for a few days, so I thought perhaps it came from one of the other houses. I didn’t think about it again until that day we saw some policemen messing about with the drains.”

  Of course, Purbright told himself, the bath would have had to be emptied after the day or two needed to dissolve its occupant—or half occupant. He had not got round to giving the point much thought. Yet it would have been simple enough for Hopjoy either to have lain low in the house or to have made a quiet return visit at night for long enough to pull a plug. There was another matter he found much more puzzling.

  “Tell me, Miss Cork,” he said slowly, “why these apparently insignificant things impressed you so deeply that you thought it your duty to send an anonymous letter.” He saw the look of surprise and alarm in the woman’s face and held up his hand. “No, don’t worry—there’s no question of your getting into any sort of trouble. As a matter of fact,” he added, “I haven’t even seen it.”

  “But of course you haven’t seen it. It wasn’t sent to you. And anyway it had nothing to do with what I’ve been telling you. Had it, mother?” In her perplexity, Miriam made her first acknowledgment of the old woman’s silent presence.

  Mrs Cork stared stonily at the inspector, then gave a stern little shake of her head.

  Purbright frowned. “I don’t think I quite understand, Miss Cork. It was you who mentioned the letter in the first place to my sergeant. We assumed...”

  “Oh, no. There’s been some mistake. I don’t think I want to talk about it. Not about that, I mean. I couldn’t.” Miss Cork’s sparsely fleshed features registered a mixture of righteousness and disgust.

  “The letter was about something you saw?” Purbright gently persisted.

  “Naturally.” Her lips closed again primly.

  “At the house over the back?”

  She nodded. Her expression guided Purbright’s next guess.

  “There were...” he paused delicately, “...goings on?”

  The woman turned and stared icily at the fire, as though willing it to go out.

  Either Periam’s confession of disloyalty, reflected Purbright, had been a masterly understatement or else Miriam Cork possessed sensitivity remarkable even in a middle-aged spinster. He probed further.

  “In a bedroom, I presume?”

  Like the slow striking of a match came her reply. “On Mrs Periam’s bed.” There was a long pause. “Romping like dogs on a grave.” Another pause. “In the middle of the afternoon.”

  “The girl...her name was Doreen: am I right?”

  Miss Cork raised her eyes from the obstinately still burning fire and directed them at a big pair of binoculars that kept a Bible text propped against the wall above the mantelpiece. “Doreen Mackenzie,” she said, in a voice deliberately drained of tone.

  “I see... Well, we needn’t dwell on that. Now this letter—I suppose you sent it to her fiancé?”

  Again Miss Cork offered no immediate reply. Her hand crept once more to the centre of her ordeal by fig roll. “I’ve had this out in prayer,” she announced finally, “and I was told that I had taken the right road. The answer to your question is yes, if you feel it will do you any good. But I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

  The inspector, taking her at her word, departed gracefully and not without satisfaction. Something which had puzzled him considerably was now clear.

  The decision to encompass a man’s destruction by convincingly attributing a murder to him required very powerful provocation.

  A
nd the sort of revelations Miss Cork seemed capable of penning to a betrayed lover would provide, Purbright now felt sure, just that.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Charles Fawby, chief reporter of the Brockleston Shuttle and district correspondent for evening papers at Nottingham, Leicester and Lincoln and of all the national mornings as well, would have been the first to admit that his district was less productive of hard news than most. Its houses never burned down; no gunman had ever sought a share of the small turnover of Brockleston’s two branch banks; the hotel registers remained innocent of the aliases of adulterous celebrities; even the beach was lamentably safe.

  And yet Brockleston-rooted stories flowered in the Press as persistently as daisies in a city lawn.

  Like daisies, they were small. They appeared always at page bottoms. Fawby did not mind that. A guinea for a three-line drollery represented a much more satisfactory return for labour than ten pounds or so for a page lead that might take the best part of a day to work upon and half the evening to telephone to morose, sceptical and hostile copy-takers.