‘We can’t afford to be, love. Show me this picture of yours.’
The two of them were in her ground-floor room, the room next to that which had been rented by Pythias. She went to a table drawer and took out a rolled-up sheet of cartridge paper. The sketch was crude and looked as though it had been done hastily, but it certainly bore out Mrs Buxton’s description of the two strangers.
‘I’d like to hang on to this for a bit,’ said Routh. ‘It may help us. Identification, you know.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she said, ‘and to the letter poor Mr Pythias writ me. I don’t want them sort of unhappy memories of him now.’
Routh’s next assignment — and he was not altogether sorry to have his work laid out for him instead of having to chart a course for himself — was to trace, if he could, the clothes and golf-clubs which Mrs Buxton’s visitors had collected from the lodgings. The inference was that they must have been very quick to get rid of the things before the news broke that the body had been discovered. If he could find out who had bought them, he stood a good chance of getting a description of the vendors.
‘The chances are, though,’ said the Detective-Superintendent, ‘that the things are weighted down and are in the deepest part of the river by now. On the other hand, these people may have sold them to an old-clothes dealer almost as soon as they had collected them from the house. Pythias was a dressy man. That suit which was on the body had been made of good material, so his other clothes may well have been worth a bob or two.’
‘No hat or overcoat was found with the body, was it?’ asked Routh.
‘No. Why?’
‘Wouldn’t he have been wearing both to go out on a chilly winter evening, especially if he was going on holiday?’
‘Yes, I suppose he would.’
‘And what about a suitcase?’
‘Probably stuffed his pyjamas and a toothbrush into his briefcase with the money, if he only intended to stay away a day or two.’
‘We have only Mrs Buxton’s word that he intended to stay away at all,’ said Routh, ‘now that I come to think of it.’
‘Good Lord, you don’t think that old party murdered the man and buried him, do you?’
‘No, but she’s got a husband and a nephew who could have done both.’
‘Forget it and chase up these obvious suspects who walked off with Pythias’s clothes and golfing bag.’
In accordance with this instruction, Routh, taking the sketch of the foreigners with him, went to the only old- clothes dealer in the town.
‘Ever bought anything off this couple or one of them?’ he asked, displaying the crude picture.
‘Not me. When?’
‘Very recently, I think, but it could have been just before or soon after Christmas.’
The dealer in cast-off clothing shook his head.
‘I’d have remembered that tit-fer,’ he said, pointing to the Russian-style cap. Routh thanked him and was not at all surprised by the answer. He had never supposed that, if Pythias’s effects had been sold, the sale would have taken place so near home. His mind was still running on the town of Springdale and it was there that he received positive news that somebody had sold Pythias’s possessions.
He applied first to a dealer in second-hand clothes, watches and bric-a-brac, but all he obtained there was a piece of advice.
‘I reckon you’re trailing stolen property,’ said the dealer. ‘If you wasn’t, it wouldn’t be a police job, would it?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
‘Fair enough. Well, look, anything hot — or even a bit warm, come to that — wouldn’t be offered to a business like mine. I couldn’t afford to touch it, see? It isn’t on the list of stolen property. That don’t bother with old clothes, so what you want, mate, is the stalls in the Toosday market. Here today and gone tomorrow, as you might say. What’s the fancy name for stall-keepers?’
‘Itinerant vendors.’
‘Got it in one! You try of a Toosday in Broad Street. Always been a Toosday market there as long as anybody can remember. Of course it ain’t Petticoat Lane, but some surprisin’ stuff do turn up there from time to time.’
So on Tuesday Routh went again to Springdale to track down the Tuesday market. Here he had what he called will-o’-the-wisp luck. The very first stall-holder he approached did not recognise the picture of the man in the Russian cap and his woman companion, but confessed to having bought clothes, a pair of shoes, a clock, a wrist- watch, a tape-recorder and a suitcase ‘somewhen around last December’. This, thought Routh, sounded very promising, ‘Said he was a student and owed his landlady money,’ explained the stall-holder.
‘I wonder why he parted with the things? Why not have gone to a pawnbroker?’ asked Routh.
‘They’re rare birds these days. Bob may still be your uncle, in a manner of speaking, but the uncle of the old pop shop, well, he’s nearly what you might call an extinct species. Everybody’s on the never-never now, and you can’t pawn them sort of things.’
‘I suppose you haven’t still got any of the stuff I’m looking for?’
‘Gov’nor, with me it’s easy come and quick go. I ain’t got storage space, you see.’
‘None of it left?’
‘Not unless you count a folded-up docket of sorts as I found had slipped down a slit in the lining of his
