Larch opened the door, looked into the street, and turned back. “Ah, Mr Hoole,” he sighed, “we have had our fun. But next time I shall bring a witness. And fun may then appear as obstruction and very wrongful.”
Hoole put his finger tips on the counter, and leaned close to the chief inspector.
“May your truncheon take root in your orifice and become a thorn bush,” he said with quiet sincerity.
Sweeping Worple into step beside him, Larch marched grimly back towards the police station. Worple, who had learned by now to keep a ready supply of envelopes in his tunic pocket, tried to explain on the way that he had performed his usual gleaning duty at the scene of explosion number three. But Larch waved down his report with some exasperation and the sergeant had to content himself with adding his latest collection of oddments to the two packets already lying between a tea caddy and a confiscated revolver in the charge-room cupboard.
When he re-entered his office. Larch found his father-in-law awaiting him.
“Now then. Pop,” he said, with what pretence of cordiality he could summon at such short notice.
Councillor Pointer looked angry and unhappy. “There’s been another, hasn’t there?”
Larch sprawled in his chair and rubbed his jaw. “There has,” he said, then, smiling slowly, “the best up to now.”
“Never mind about that. Whoever’s playing these damned tricks has got to be taught. The council will be furious. The whole town’s...”
“...up in arms.” Larch completed the councillor’s favourite assertion.
“Well, so it is. I’m not joking. Can’t you see what an impossible situation it puts me in? A chairman having to explain to his own committee that his own son-in-law hasn’t been able to protect the town from a blasted bomb- throwing lunatic.”
“He doesn’t throw them, Pop.”
“See here. Hector...” Pointer paused and went on in a lower tone: “Have you honestly no idea of who’s responsible?”
Larch did not reply at once. Pointer nodded. “So that’s how it is.”
“That’s how what is?”
“Why did you hesitate just now?”
“I was trying to think what you were suggesting. Hadn’t you better tell me?”
Pointer looked at the floor and began feeling aimlessly in his waistcoat pockets. “It’s occurred to me,” he said slowly, “and to more than one member of the committee that this sort of behaviour sounds remarkably characteristic of your friend Biggadyke.” He looked up. “It does, you know.”
“Why on earth should you think that?”
“Oh, don’t bluster, Hector. You know what the fellow is. Anyone who could have fixed up that horrible contraption in the Ladies at the Mayoress’s At Home last year...”
“That was never proved.”
“We knew, all right. Biggadyke may look half-sloshed most of the time but he’s an ingenious devil. What about that business of the hockey sticks at the High School? Don’t pretend you had any doubt of who arranged that. The fellow has a rotten streak right through. But just because he sponsored your membership of...”
“I don’t think you should say any more about that,” Larch broke in. “This is all rather beside the point, anyway. Stan may have done some silly things in his time but I haven’t the slightest reason to suspect him of this lot. I certainly wouldn’t protect him, if that’s what you’re driving at.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
In the silence that followed. Pointer realized he had gone too far. Larch stared at him in cold fury. When he spoke, the words emerged like slips of snakeskin. “And what specific occasion had you in mind?”
The councillor shrugged uncomfortably. “If you must know, it was that driving case. People talked. As they will, you know. Things were never properly explained. Not the delay in a doctor turning up, at any rate.”
“Go on.”
“Well, it was said you’d given Biggadyke the chance to sober up before he could be examined.”
“He asked for his own doctor. That was his right.”
“His own man was away on holiday.”
“We weren’t to know that.”
“You could have found out in less than the two hours it took you to get somebody else.”
Larch pulled forward a pile of papers and began looking through them. “All that’s been gone over. Forget it.” His eyes still on the sheet of typescript before him, he felt for his fountain pen and unscrewed the cap.
Pointer flushed. “All that black coffee was never ‘gone over’,” he blurted.
Larch’s head jerked up. “What did you say?”
“The coffee you got Biggadyke to drink when you thought no one was looking. A whole flask full that Hilda had made for you.”
“Where the hell did you get that story?”
“Never mind who told me. You ought to know by now that nothing can be kept quiet for long in a town like this.”
“Do you believe it?”
