Bump in the Night

“Oh, Lord!” Leaper groaned.

He told briefly of what he had seen the previous night. Payne listened with polite interest but he asked no questions.

“I wonder,” said Leaper, “who the bloke was. I only saw his arm.”

“The owner of the caravan, I expect.”

“You wouldn’t happen...”

“No idea. Sorry.”

Parting from Payne outside the Chronicle office, Leaper thanked him clumsily but warmly—and with absolute sincerity—for his company and for the tea. The angular, morose youth had never before encountered an adult human being willing to bear with him for more than five minutes at a time and the experience had stirred him. Payne accepted his gratitude with neither embarrassment nor condescension, said he hoped he might see him again, and walked off towards the jeweller’s shop which he had left, in confident expectation of no custom, in the charge of an amiable but moronic assistant.

Leaper did not enter the office immediately. He had noticed a small crowd on the opposite side of the road, so he crossed and joined it. On a pair of steps Sergeant Worple was precariously working with a hacksaw and pliers in order to remove what was left of Barrington Hoole’s shop sign. Below him, Harry the photographer half knelt on the pavement and squinted through the view-finder of his mammoth camera. His object was to frame the sergeant’s head, whether artistically or wantonly he alone knew, within the battered oval of brass that hung from one slowly yielding hinge.

Worple pretended to be unaware of Harry’s contortions, but he took care not to make any funny faces so long as he felt within range of that lens. At last, the whirring rattle of the old shutter and an assortment of ejaculations from the bystanders told him that he had been ‘taken’. He gave a business-like sniff and completed his task with a wrench that nearly toppled him from the ladder.

Mr Hoole received Worple in a friendly enough fashion when the sergeant carried the eye frame into the shop and set it upon the counter. “I’ll just give you a receipt for this article, sir,” said Worple, searching amongst his envelopes. “We shall have to take it away for a little while.”

“You may keep it for ever, if you wish,” Hoole said pleasantly.

“If decisions rested with me, sir, I’d have it sent to the forensic laboratory. The chief inspector doesn’t go much for science, though. He says all criminals condemn themselves out of their own mouths.”

At the end of five minutes Worple carefully put away his pen and handed Hoole his receipt for ‘one optician’s sign, damaged, formerly situate 23 Watergate Street’. Hoole put the slip into a drawer.

“I suppose,” Worple said, “that the chief asked if you knew anything that might be helpful when he came in this morning?”

“He didn’t, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh!”

“He merely tried, in the clumsiest possible manner, to persuade me to condemn myself out of my own mouth.”

Worple shook his head sadly. “I do wish he wouldn’t take that line, sir. He doesn’t mean to be offensive, but people aren’t to know that.”

“It must be very trying for you, sergeant.”

“I wouldn’t say that exactly, sir. It’s just that I don’t like to see policemen getting a name for being unintelligent. Not all of us are stupid, you know.”

As if to prove this contention, Worple scraped his thumbnail over a portion of the framework and prised off a sticky fragment. “Adhesive tape,” he remarked. “Now the forensic people could probably tell us a lot from that.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. Where it was made. What batch it was in. Name of the chemist it was sent to. When. All that. Yes.” He looked a little longer at the piece of tape, then rolled it into a ball between finger and thumb and flicked it away.

“Should you have done that?” inquired Hoole.

“The chief would never bother with it, sir. He takes a very straightforward attitude.”

“He spurns empiricism?” ventured the optician.

“Mr Larch spurns everything, sir.”

The sergeant put an arm through his load of scrap brass and slung it to his shoulder. He opened the shop door and looked up at the bracket from which the sign had been suspended.

“There’s something I find a bit puzzling,” said Worple. “I had to borrow a pair of steps to fetch this thing down. It must have been, oh, eight or nine feet above the pavement. Now how do you reckon our chap reached it?”

“Reached it?”

“To stick his bomb on it, sir. You saw me indicate a piece of adhesive tape. Adhere means to stick. That’s how it was done, you know.”

“A tall gentleman perhaps?”

Worple shook his head. “An ingenious theory, sir, but I can’t call to mind anyone hereabouts who’s over seven feet tall.”

“True.”