“I think so, yes. I shall let your chief know, of course.”
They parted with cool formality.
Chapter Fifteen
Barrington Hoole humed contentedly as he dangled his short, plump legs from the visitor’s chair in the
“A fitting consummation,” he remarked when he had finished.
Kebble rolled up the proof and put it like a telescope to his eye.
“Guess who saw it happen,” he invited, squinting round the room.
“Saw what happen?”
“Stanley’s catastrophe, old chap.”
“I didn’t,” said Hoole. “Worse luck.”
Kebble grinned and brought the paper tube to bear on Leaper, gloomily occupied with scissors and paste at his desk. “He did.”
Hoole turned, then looked back at Kebble. “You’re not being funny?”
The editor shook his head.
“Good Lord!” said Hoole, then, more softly: “But he didn’t give evidence, did he?”
“He’s told nobody but me. He was there all right, though. Nearly trod on the corpse.”
“Shouldn’t he have gone to the police?”
“What, and be third-degreed by Larch?”
Hoole wrinkled his nose. “You’ve a point there.”
“All the same, the lad is going to talk to a policeman. I advised him to.” Kebble had lowered his voice still further.
“You remember that Flaxborough fellow I mentioned? He’s coming in this morning.”
“The local force must be far gone in corruption if outsiders need to be imported to look into our fatalities. Anyway, I thought the whole thing had been cleared up at the inquest.”
Kebble leaned close. “They tell me this Purbright’s an absolute bloodhound. He must be on to something or he’d have left by now.” He added that he had met the inspector and found him an uncommonly decent fellow.
“Obviously an imposter,” propounded Hoole. “All policemen are repressed rapists. Tell me: Did you look at his neck?”
“Not specially. Why?”
“Their necks are characteristic. Bright pink. Hairless. Like columns of luncheon meat straight out of cans.”
The street door swung open. “Here he is now,” muttered Kebble. He got up and hurried round the counter.
Purbright allowed himself to be led to a chair at the back of the office, where Kebble presented Leaper to him in the manner of a farmer dubiously confronting a veterinary surgeon with an ailing sheep. The editor then returned to his conversation with Hoole, having first stolen a glance at Purbright’s neck. “Not a bit like meat,” he announced, resuming his seat. “Perfectly nice chap.”
The inspector had little heart for his interview, which he had undertaken solely out of good nature. Yet as he listened, at first with politely concealed indifference, then with a sharpening sense of this youth’s having unknowingly observed something significant, he realized that he was now more eager to discover the truth than at any time since his arrival in Chalmsbury.
“You say there was a hole in one of the caravan windows. Do you mean the window was smashed?”
“No, the rest of the glass was all right. There was just this hole low down. Nearly round. No jagged edges.”
“Was it light enough for you to see that?”
“Oh, yes. You’d be surprised how bright it is out in the open, even quite late.” Leaper’s tone indicated pity for the inspector’s lack of experience.
“Would you say that the window was the kind that opens? You know, like a transome window, hinged at the top, that you can push outwards?”
“That’s right. It was like that.”
“So it would have been possible to put your hand through the hole in the glass, unfasten that little bar thing with holes along it, and pull the window open?”
Leaper scowled. “I didn’t touch it.”
“I know you didn’t,” said Purbright patiently. “I just want to know if anybody else could have done so.”
“No reason why not.”
“Right. Now you said something about a shelf, or fixed table.”
“Just under the window, yes. There’d been bottles and things on it the first time. Not when I saw it again,
