of being delighted.
She was a woman of incredible girth, but the legs beneath her capacious skirts must have been very short, for she travelled as if on rails, with no vertical movement whatever. Her face, which registered constant ecstasy in the presence of her ‘gentlemen’, was red and round under a black Japanese fringe. It was like the face of a rubber doll, enormously inflated.
Mrs Crispin having taken Purbright (metaphorically, he thanked God) to her gasometer-sized bosom, she detailed her help, Phyllis to escort him to his room and glided kitchen-wards.
Purbright clambered breathlessly up three flights of stairs, marvelling at the ease with which the fine, farm- bred back and thighs of the girl with whom he tried to keep pace conquered the steep and angular ascent.
“Here you are, sir,” she said at last, preceding him into a bedroom lined with varnished match-boarding and containing various tall, dark pieces of furniture that he was too exhausted to bother about identifying but which seemed to be awaiting him like chapel deacons, stiff with disapproval of a new communicant.
Phyllis set his heavy case on the bed with finger and thumb, gave him a quick but deeply dimpled smile, and departed.
Purbright sat and recovered his wind. Then he went to the narrow dormer window and, leaning on its sill, stared down at the little town where things had taken so unaccountably to going bump in the night.
He thought over his gleanings of the past couple of days: the readily offered accounts, guesses and insinuations, the terse police reports, the photographs and lists of times. They all boiled down to very little, perhaps no more than a series of eccentric pranks that had set off a chain reaction of parochial gossip.
Why, then, had Hessledine thought the affair worthy of special inquiries by an officer unconnected with the Chalmsbury Force? He had certainly not ordered them in response to representations by nervous civic dignitaries of whom he had said: “One end’s so like t’other it’s a wonder that when they take their hats off they’re not run in for indecent exposure.”
To only one confidence had he made Purbright partner. There had lately been reported missing from Flaxborough’s Civil Defence training centre a quantity of explosives quite large enough to account for the incidents to date, with a handsome reserve for encores. “There may be no connection,” the Chief Constable had said, “but the coincidence is far from happy.”
He had not laboured the point. There was no need. Purbright was well aware that the leading light in the Tuesday evening demolition and heavy rescue course at Flaxborough was Chief Inspector Larch.
Purbright leaned out of the window and let fall a small and manly droplet of C.I.D. saliva upon the third of the basement steps below. The tiny smack it made was quite audible: sound was carried by the summer air as though it were strung with infinitely fine wires (later in the afternoon one would think to see them, glinting in the heat).
Larch, though...it was absurd. Each Tuesday he left for Flaxborough long before dusk and did not return until the following morning. All three bombs had exploded in public places; it seemed inconceivable that they could have been set in position during daylight.
What object could Larch have, anyway? He certainly gave the impression of being anti-social, but not to a maniacal degree.
A car came slowly along the street and stopped immediately below. It was a large, old-fashioned car. Through its retracted sunshine roof Purbright saw the driver lean forward and switch off the ignition. He got out of the car and entered the house. This, Purbright guessed, was his fellow lodger and doubtless a harbinger of lunch. He carefully made his way downstairs.
Mrs Crispin made introductions with the air of springing a joyous surprise. Then she stood back, beaming expectantly at each in turn. Purbright wondered if he were supposed to embrace this new blood brother, but Payne, accustomed to his landlady’s transports, merely held out a hand and winked.
As soon as they were alone, however, he produced a minor surprise of his own “I must say. Inspector, that you don’t look a bit like a policeman.”
Purbright looked up from his soup analysis. “And who says I am a policeman?”
“Mrs Crispin. She’s very proud to have acquired you.”
“Indeed.”
“You mean no one is supposed to know?”
“It really doesn’t matter. I’m only a little disconcerted to find that one arrives in front of oneself, as it were. The communications system in this town must be excellent.”
“First-rate,” Payne agreed.
“And yet there are some things—quite well known facts, in all probability—that one simply cannot find out.”
Payne raised his brows. “Really? But are you sure you’ve asked the right people? Even the most obliging can’t help if they don’t know the answers. The trouble with Chalmsbury is that no one wishes to seem unobliging. You’ll always be given some sort of information, but the odds are that it will be wildly misleading.”
“I see what you mean,” Purbright said, “but I can’t say that I draw much encouragement from it.”
“Perhaps I can be more helpful. You are, I presume, following some specific line of inquiry here?”
“After a fashion.”
“Police Probe Mystery Blasts?”
Purbright winced. “You really must not draw me into any indiscretions, Mr Payne.”
“Indiscretions are currency in this town, Inspector. One is traded for another. You must be prepared to start somewhere.”
“Is that my cue to ask whether I may trust you?”
